The parking lot is dark outside the Cafe' Chin Chin take-out. It's a warm evening, the air is clean for a change, and I can see the lights of Hollywood and West L.A. down below me--as I probe my oriental octopus salad. I thrust the wooden chopsticks down into the twisted strands of fried bean thread and shredded lettuce passionately...longingly, and extract a moist clump and carry it carefully up to my mouth, touch it lightly with my tongue, and tuck it in over my lip. Small droplets of the tasty sauce run off my lip and depend on my chin and I wipe them off with the back of my hand.
There's this guy in the store. He was there when I first came in, and he's still in there. I see him come out of his spot in the corner and move his tall, bleached-wood, bar chair across the floor. He doesn't carry it in his hands--he doesn't scoot or drag it--he just sits on it backward, leaning over the back, and limps it across the floor with one foot, step by step like some strange sea creature . . . limping it over to where the lady with the red flower in her hair is sitting at a counter.
The guy looks like some Hollywood kid--dressed entirely in black--and he looks very cool . . . really, I believe he is. His hair is sort of brushed away from his face, but it hangs back down over one eye determinedly. He lights a cigarette casually, offers the woman one (which she doesn't take) and they start talking. He never loses eye contact.
She tried to get in front of me in line a little while ago. I saw her checkbook--she lives on the 700 block of North Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills. I thought, ``she's probably some bossy wife type or something--maybe a girlfriend; hair combed back perfectly straight, stylish khaki shorts, pretentious red flower, knows just what she wants to order. . . .''
He motions to the flower in her hair, reaches out and touches it (gets physical contact) and laughs. She's laughing. Damn is he smooth. Perhaps she isn't married; probably has a boyfriend though. The guy in the take-out smiles all the time and rocks his head back and forth.
I poke deeply at my salad. They're looking at the L.A. Weekly. How does he keep talking to someone he doesn't even know? What in the hell could they be talking about?
I look again and she's leaving. She comes out the glass door, smiling, absorbed in herself--ignores me--and heads toward her car; it looks like a Scirocco. I imagine her going home to her husband with the food and kissing him meanly--to dispel her feelings of lapsing fidelity. The guy is still inside, gloating over a small slip of white paper that he holds victoriously in his hands. He puts away his ink pen in his breast pocket and begins to put away the paper, but shows it to the guy behind the counter; the guy laughs and shakes his head back and forth. I imagine the kid going home to his apartment and stapling it to a wall full of similar pieces of paper. The smiley kid looks out the window toward the parking lot to see her leave; he notices me and looks away--not a bit nonplussed. He picks up his chair, slinks back into his corner, and sits down.
I probe deeply into my salad and finally find a piece of what appears to be the purported octopus.
Life according to Karl Heiss: I live in and around L.A., where I spend my time writing absurdities created by a patented process utilizing plot-enhancers, image-splitters, reality-modulators, and character-analyzers; all fondly, or fearfully, focused upon images culled from my own only mildly absurd life. I'm also the editor of a new litmag, unpretentiously entitled HIPPO, which I would advise everyone to keep an eye out for!
For more stories by Karl Heiss, click here.
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