(from Chesnut Stories)
Around the corner from our dorm was this dingy 24-hour Korean coffee shop that we called the “Sketch Hole.” For example: three AM, the telephone rings, someone says, “Meet you at the Sketch Hole in 20, all right?” The young guy who worked nights—some kind of monster Mongol sumo wrestler—was nothing but smiles with us. I guess stoned students were a welcome respite from the usual late night clientele of crack heads, prostitutes, clubbers and cops.
The place served eggs, coffee, donuts, fried rice, spring rolls, sandwiches, and beer. Past last call, if there were no cops around, there was also “beer to go.” The café was furnished with dirty linoleum-topped tables and hard steel chairs over a brown tiled floor. Between the tables stood plywood boxes with fake plastic ferns and palms. The back quarter of the café, the smoking room, was a glass-sealed freak aquarium. On any given night, old filthy bums would be sprawled and passed out on the tables with sludgy lukewarm coffees resting untouched near their heads. In the winter they slept in the aquarium to avoid the cold and in the summer they slept in the aquarium to avoid the heat. They were always there, grumbling at our loud revelries that kept them awake in the small hours of the morning. They were permanent fixtures like the flickering neon beer signs glowing backwards at us from the windows; like the grease splattered landscape prints hanging on the smoke-yellowed walls; like the plastic palm fronds that swayed in the breeze of the opening and closing door—our comings and goings.
One night about five of us are in there munching on eggs and donuts, drinking beer discreetly past last call. Someone pulls out a joint.
“Do you think we can get away with smoking this in here?”
“Why not?”
We spark up and the glass cage fills thick with the heavy sweet marijuana smoke. An old bum glowers and grumbles at us from across the room as we laugh and pass the joint around. I get up, light and high.
“I gotta take a leak.”
I open the glass door and exit with a trail of thick mist.
From outside, the aquarium looks like a caged cloud. I blink into the fluorescent light, then walk past the counter where the Mongol just nods without looking up from his portable black and white TV. I push open the sticky bathroom door and am hit with the reek of piss and shit. I step up to the urinal, unzip, and relieve myself in a long hot stream.
Ahhh.
It’s only while pissing that I realize I’m not alone. In the stall beside me, someone’s moaning on the urine-caked floor—I can see his crumpled legs under the door.
I finish, shake off, zip up. Washing my hands, I look towards the stall and through the centimeter gap that separates the door from the frame, I see a purple scarred bald head with eyelids twitching to reveal rolled back whites, and thin cracked lips, a needle dangling from his left arm. He doesn’t even notice me. He just groans, his throat gargling, arm propped up on the shit smeared toilet bowl.
I go back to the table. Someone’s finished my beer. My three AM eggs are cold. One bum is asleep. The other is still glowering. You can just smell their accumulated filth over the smoke. I sit down.
“Jesus,” I say, “there was a junky moaning in there with a needle in his arm.”
No one seems phased: everyone glassy eyed, tired and stoned, staring into space.
“That’s nothing,” Dale says after a minute. “The other week I went in there and found a toothless old whore sucking off a guy with tattoos on his face.”
Copyright © 2010 by Daniel Shawn Otis
Hahaha, classic.