The tense changes in the second part, but whatevs: ------------ How come pretty much everything you can think of turns out to have an unintended referent in some aspect of popular culture of which you’re half proud and half embarrassed to have been unaware? asks my girlfriend. A man walks through the dining area wearing chain mail. My girlfriend looks at the man while I look at my girlfriend and try to figure out what she just said. I figure I had better start smoking. Where’d you get those? my girlfriend asks. Her gaze, when she finally tears it away from the man, looks as ripped as a medieval bodice. I can practically see his meaty nipple prints all over her naked eyeballs. Her panties are sopping, I just know it. Around the stupid stick now protruding from my gay-ass mouth, I mutter, Got a light? She rolls her big cow eyes, and heaves a ridiculously sexy sigh with her big powerful chest, and while the man continues to clomp, clank, and jingle around the cafe, she lights up my fag. She watches me smoke and occasionally eat until The Food Turns To Ash In My Mouth. Suddenly, she gets all serious and interested in me again. No really, what’s going on in there? I mean, why don’t you just give up the pretense, and start watching TV like the rest of the world? There is a swelling murmur toward the front of the cafe, where the man has pushed dishes and salt shakers, napkin holders and table tents aside, and climbed with his great thighs and waffle-treaded boots right up onto the counter. Attention! he rumbles, with some kind of accent. You will all now submit to me! I am your new liege lord! I am your protector, your superior, and your ideal! Your women will serve me! Your men will quail before me! And nobody in the cafe pays any attention. Man, that cigarette suddenly tastes so good. Except, then--something happens. My girlfriend takes one last look at me, pushes her coffee cup halfway across the linoleum, and stands up with sex and fear in her great brown eyes. The clink and shuffle of the cafe shifts almost imperceptibly into a lower gear as she wends past the booths and tables, stopping in front of the counter. Her insanely feminine face is just about level with his massive shins and calf muscles. The sweat and sinew of him makes her skin look so soft and so pale by comparison. It’s like his presence is brutally fucking her presence in the space between their mutual strangenesses, silently, while we all sit or stand there, everyone else still mostly doing what they were doing but me holding my breath. And she is sucking on his brutality like a calf on a merciful teat. He jumps down off the counter, amazingly lithe for one so bulky. He says something in some language, something that kills me because it is only meant for her ear, her delicate, perfect, gold-garlanded ear. I had given her those earrings, along with a matching heart necklace! And now that monster is shoving his sawdust-colored words right past them into her vulnerable, innocent aural cavities. Then he just walks out, whales on the front door like to bust the little dangling bells right off. And she follows like a leaf aswirl in the invisible wake of a fuming city bus. *** They were gone. A strange peace came over me. And lasted about three seconds. Then my life was shit again. But hey. I’ll always have that three seconds. I looked around. Exactly no one was looking at me. No one, that is, except the cafe itself. Cigarette? it said, and I said, No thanks. I gotta get going. Then I proceeded to sit there for the rest of the day. I kept getting ready to say how much I hated the man. But that’s not it, really, is it? What it really is, most of the time, is that I just resent the necessity of his existence--because if not for him, I definitely wouldn’t have been dejected enough to be looking down far enough to see the hole in the wall near the men’s-room door. And if I hadn’t seen the hole, I wouldn’t have seen what was building and rushing up on the other side of it. So I wouldn’t have had the forewarning to brace myself behind the milkshake machine, even though waitresses in tight skirts and sexy-utilitarian black aprons just about kicked me in the balls because obviously nobody’s supposed to go back there. But when the tsunami hit, they were all washed away, along with all the other customers. As I was underwater, about to explode, desperate for a breath, I saw my girlfriend’s necklace float by in the salty murk. That used to touch her breast! I swore to myself, and I clutched at it, like an infant clutches after absolutely nothing and anything at all.