For Kristian
At one fifteen in the morning, at a 24-hour diner just outside of Deerfield, I sat in a booth watching an old man named Dale through a window.
He was sitting on the steps to the front entrance, on the other side of the window next to my booth. The wrinkles on his face were streaked long, like the trails that planes leave as they fly. He had a big fat head with a baseball cap struggling to contain the whole thing. Rolls of fat busted off the back of his neck as though in revolt against the skull and cap. He wore a brown leather jacket as faded as he was. His slowly shaking hands pulled a pack of cigarillos and a pack of matches from his blue-jean pocket. My eyes felt locked to the side of my straight staring head. I was in the corner of my vision. I did not know why I had to look, or, at least, I do not remember why anymore.
He was not as good as, say, I was, at holding things, I saw in his trembling grasp on the pack, but he was better than anyone my age at striking matches in the dark and cold. His lips moved loosely and perpetually on his otherwise still face — flapping sloppily but never opening — like he was talking to himself with his mouth closed.
When he exhaled the tobacco smoke, his lips, again, popped open in the sudden gape of a black perfect circle, the way exhaust belches in a broken pattern from the muffler of an eighteen wheeler. I felt I could not look away.
He looked as if he should have been dead. It surprised me that he was still alive, somehow, that he was moved through the remainder of his life by things like this diner. I suppose I was, too. In any case, I was glad he was alive, that he was here with us, that, all in all, he chose to endure. I was nineteen years old.
I know his name was Dale because the waitress called him that when he finally walked in.
He did not seem to notice that I had been watching him before, or that I continued to watch him. But now he saw me just as I looked away from him, in the one second before he sat down at the counter.
The waitress, Liana according to her nametag, knew his order already. She had his coffee on the counter before he even came inside.
Liana’s hair was not yet gray, her skin not yet worn, her eyes not yet bagged. She was almost there. Her hair was mostly blond with aged spikes of dark brown. The curls fell over her shoulders in a nineteen-eighty’s kind of way. Probably no one told her that. One of her eyebrows was half missing. It looked like someone had done that to her.
I was in the booth behind Dale’s stool. Just for the fuck of it I’ll tell you what I looked like too. I had on an old gray suede jacket my father had given me for graduation. My face had indiscernible red spots on it — some kind of three-way cross between scars, wrinkles and acne — and was veiled by the goatee facial hair I’ve been trying out all my life. Under the jacket, a gray striped flannel shirt with the third button up from the bottom missing. White winter hat pulled to just above my admittedly hollowed blue eyes, and black jeans. I do not remember the shoes.
Liana called him Dale. She seemed distracted by his conversational efforts. She was too preoccupied, anyway, to notice that I poured whiskey into eight of the thirteen cups of coffee she gave me throughout the night. Maybe I was drunk. Maybe I held Dale like a prisoner in my eyes through that window, tortured him with my hopes about his character without him knowing, all because I was drunk. Could be. I have done a lot for that reason. But it was also that “I’m glad he is alive” feeling, which was possibly at once sympathetic and condescending. I just like to think it was the part of me left sober, real, somehow loving, that watched him. It’s not like he said anything that really surprised me. But now I’m ahead of you. So, Dale came inside. Liana had his coffee on the counter already. He saw me for one second and sat down.
“Still haven’t heard from her,” said Dale, to Liana. The first thing I saw him do quickly all night was grab for his coffee. When he spoke, it sounded like his teeth were in the way. “Really hard da be in that truck when ya haven’t heard from her, thinkin bout the truth ya know, thinkin bout the fact that you’re thinkin bout things so much.”
“I know she’ll writchya back,” said Liana.
“Well, made a hellofalot more bad decisions than good ones, in my life. And she knows that already,” said Dale.
“Maybe, Dale,” said Liana, “but I know you’re a good man just from servin ya yer dreakfast and coffee in the middle a every night.”
She smiled at him knowingly. He did not see her. She looked at my table to see if anyone else saw her smile. I had seen her smile. On her second thought, seeing me seeing her seemed to make her uncomfortable. I was going to look away but she did first. Dale was looking down. Deep breaths moved steadily under his jacket.
I closed my fingers around the fifth beneath the table, gently. I turned away from Liana and Dale, toward that window again, to shield myself with my back as I poured another shot into another coffee. Dale asked Liana if there would be five more minutes before his dreakfast came.
“Dreakfast,” not to be confused with the more common man’s “brunch,” was clearly a phrase Dale had made up and taken pride in as one of the few things he had created, and the waitresses granted him this little pride in his little palace of their diner. She said yes, there would be at least five minutes. He went back outside, to the steps on the other side of my window, and smoked again. He still did not notice me watching.
If not for the window between us, I could have reached over and patted him on the head, could have whispered or breathed and he would have heard it, but the window presented a silence and distance between us. I felt like I was looking deeper into him than last time now, trying to look past a point of revelation. How much could he reveal, anyway, behind his smoke, inside his leather jacket, from behind his wrinkles, under his baseball cap, over his counter, drunk from wherever he was before the diner, high on coffee and cigarillos? Certainly not everything. He could not reveal everything. He came back inside just as Liana placed his dreakfast on the counter.
“Ya don’t needa hear it anyway,” he said. “Ya got bigger problems. Fresher problems.”
“Well shit, Dale,” she said, “these days everybody could have bigger things ta worry about. They say the goddam planet’s fallin apart for chrissake, let alone ol Dale.” She slapped his shoulder lovingly. “We worry about the things that make us worry, n besides, I’m not that worried aboutcya anyway. I’m just listenin ta ya, and I think you’ll be fine.”
“Don’t even know if I sent it ta the right address,” said Dale.
“What? Oh, the letter,” said Liana.
“Yeah, I dunno,” said Dale.
“Ya mean ya don’t think ya sent the letter ta the right place?”
“No, I think I did. I just don’t know I did.”
Liana was walking by him with a pot of coffee, on her way to feed me more chaser. She stopped and turned back to him to respond:
“What if she never got the letter, Dale?”
“I know, I been thinkin bout it all night.”
“No but I mean it different than you think it. I mean, what would ya actually do — if she didn’t get it?”
“Well, I prolly don’t have much time left. That’s why I wrote it to her. So I prolly wouldn’t be able ta stop waitin on her ta write back before I had the chance ta do anything, before the old bucket kicked me. Guess everybody dies waitin for somethin they ain’t gonna get though.”
“But don’t ya think the fact ya wrote the thing is what matters? That ya wrote it, and sent it, and hoped for it, tried ta make somethin a that love ya know ya still got? Not if she reads it or writes back or even gets it. Isn’t the thing that matters the thing that ya already know about it?” said Liana.
Dale came here at this time every night to speak to Liana — I started to see — because no one else responded to him. Most people would not respond to Dale in most places. I would not have, not, at least, until the day after this night. Apparently his daughter would not respond either. Hence the one AM dreakfast tradition with Liana. Would he kill himself if she quit her job or was fired or moved away or was killed, I wondered.
“I dunno,” said Dale. “It’s the decisions. Made so many bad decisions it might be a bad decision for someone like a daughter a mine to respond to a letter from someone like me, or da see me. When people can’t talk ta ya cuz it’ll make em less good that’s when ya know you’re no fucking good,” said Dale, when Liana came by him again with the coffee pot.
“Ya know what I think Dale? I think we all make more bad decisions. But the ones that feel like good ones make us something. They make us something we understand, even if we don’t understand most of it. Like writin and sendin that letter. We wouldn’t be anything at all without our good decisions, and isn’t it nice that we get to be something, even if it’s something,” she stopped. “Something,” she stopped again. “I dunno, damaged?”
From behind, it looked for a second as though Dale had stopped listening halfway through her discourse. He had lowered his head. Then it looked like he was listening more deeply, nodding his head gently as she spoke, unless that was a nod he could not control.
One thirty five AM. Dale considered her question.
“Well, I’d rather be alive than dead, if that’s whatchya mean,” said Dale.
“Yeah, that’s what I mean,” said Liana.
A chef yelled through the kitchen-window, “These are gonna taste like rubber if someone doesn’t getta eat em in the next five minutes Liana! I don’t cook em like rubber you serve em like rubber cuz Dale won’t shut up sometimes. Other people need their food.”
The cook caught my eye for less than a second before he turned away from the window and back to the griddle, which crackled with grease like a constant little applause. Dale was halfway through his meal but had no energy left. It seemed like he was still considering Liana’s theory of a living attitude. It seemed, however, like the cook’s interruption had slightly thrown off his reflection.
Soon I got up to leave. I stood on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette, thinking about digestion. I was drunk. Dale came out soon after me for another cigarillo and to leave. This time he did not sit on the steps. He stood next to me. He smelled as much like whiskey as I did. I did not know what to say.
I had been listening too closely to his conversation with Liana to strike up one of my own as a stranger. He kept looking over at me as if expecting me to say something, anything, about the food, or the night, or the world. Or he looked like he was expecting himself to say something but still did not know what to expect. His knees wobbled lightly in his jeans. Throughout the night I had seen different parts of his body shake but I had not seen him standing yet. Now his whole body quivered. It was cold but his shake did not seem like a shiver — it was too slow, almost deliberate looking.
He walked to his truck with his keys in his hand and dropped them before he could put them in the door-handle. This was quite a task. I watched him again. I did not help. He got down on one knee but still could not reach his keys. Being on one knee seemed harder than standing for him, seemed to create a more impossible reach for the keys. He got down on both knees. He picked up the keys but did not stand yet. He stayed there on the ground, rubbing the key with his left thumb, looking at his chest with his eyes half closed.
It looked like he had not been on his knees in a long time, like he wanted to remember something about it. In slow motion, he stood. Watching him stand up was like watching a bad interpretive dance piece that attempted to interpret everything in the universe. He put the keys in the door, unlocked it, got in and drove, very slowly, to the other end of the parking lot. It looked to me, through his back window, that his head nodded chaotically like a bobble-head as he drove away. I got into my car.
Dale left through the exit on the other side of the parking lot. I left through the one closer to where we had both parked. It never made sense to me that he drove to that far exit. He took a left from that one and I took a right from this one.
He drove toward me and it looked like his truck was shaking with his wild head. There was some kind of collision. Dale was killed. I was injured forever, but lived, and still live, I believe.
