Spam Musubi

Ah, well now, let me tell you, I’ve met some curious folks in my time, but this here story I’ve laid down—it’s got the kind of peculiar characters and hijinks that could set a barroom to howling with laughter or fists flying, depending on who’s paying attention. I won’t embellish too much, but let’s dress it up in the garb of good ol’ Americana wit…

She glanced over and locked her eyes on the individual at the bar. Their shirt collar was wide enough to double as a mainsail, as wide as a street hole cover, often a feature of women’s holiday wear, and their earrings dragged along the bartop like two pink anchors. Their jeans were Lee, eighties Lee, washed to hell, and their mustache was a pushbroom ending in a baby Dali.

“It’s the mustache! Dead giveaway. I can’t believe I didn’t notice!”

“Quiet.”

“It’s the most feminine mustache I have ever seen!”

“Bob’gerald is what they go by.”

“Two masculine names for they?” she was saying this quietly or trying to. “That’s no-they name!”

“Just Bob, I think? Yes, I was served by them as Bob before.”

“The deadname is in the new name.”

Bob’gerald glared electromagnetic death beams at us, boring mostly into her, but I was in the burn radius, too.

“Are you sure it’s not just one of those two-first-names situations, like Brian Clark? Bob Hope? Ike Turner?”

“It has an apostrophe.”

“How do you know this, actually? Are you two friends?”

“Name tag,” I tapped my chest.

“They wear a name tag! Who wears a–I need another drink. Are there servers in this area? Will he–they–make me another, do you think? Their last one was a scorcher.”

“Let’s wait. Don’t go back there.”

“They better show up soon, my buzz gets bored fast.”

“Pace yourself!”

She popped two ice cubes in her mouth and crunched on them politely to indicate to me she was not about to let something go.

“I wonder where the Gerald came from.”

“Obviously Gerald Ford.”

Her laugh.

“Trans rights activist Gerald Ford!”

Okay, when she laughed, especially when she was drinking, it was this unfortunate cackle that barely fit the woman, petite with large breasts, thin-framed glasses, and hair in a sort of sexy chignon suggesting she forgot her books at the library, and do you mind if we circle back to grab them. Her cackle was befitting a witch.

“It’s from Geraldine, bitches–my nana!”

It came from the bar like the voice of a minor god, and it shut us up, and it shut up the restaurant, too. We could hear shoes squeak in the kitchen–it got so quiet.

“My apologies,” she said, often the first to break silences. “I’ll tell my friend to shut up.”

And now we could hear clogs in a hallway.

“Did the music just turn back on?”

“Was it off?”

“It was off and now it’s on. They control it from the bar! They turned it off to listen, they’re communists!”

“Shhh, no they didn’t!”

The clogs getting ever louder.

I hated to shush her.

“Ol’ Boobjob is a spy.”

“Don’t get me eighty-sixed!”

“Trying to get intel on us. We’ll show them–we’re not that intelligent.”

“I’m serious.

“It’s just, here’s what, Gerald is not a real name anymore. This guy, this gal, they set themselves up to be de facto mocked or at least looked at sideways by the likes of us, for their name alone, nothing else, admit it, just so they can retaliate.”

“They make great cocktails.”

Clogs getting louder and louder, and other clogs joined the procession.

“Depriving us of the right to laugh at our ancestors’ names!”

“Take the name tag off, you don’t work at Kinko’s!”

The clogs stopped clogging. A new server, now ours, arrived suddenly, sweaty and red-faced like a referee struck by a boxer.

“What are we having!”

“Still deciding.”

Another server joined our new server, followed by a sweaty host, too, and all three watched o’er by Bob’gerald at the bar, a phalanx of aggrieved hospitality.

“Oh, shit.”

“I have a booth in that corner over there if you’d like it.”

It sat between the hall to the bathroom and a plastic plant, or some barely alive plant that grows a leaf every two years. But we weren’t being asked to leave.

“Is that the naughty corner?”

“I have a group coming in in about twenty minutes.”

“They reserved this area.”

“If you don’t mind moving.”

“It’s a good area,” she said, “view of the bar. Lucky them, having a group.”

“It’s why it says reserved.”

She was holding a stack of RESERVED signs and had not yet laid one down, not anywhere.

“I think,” she popped in two more ice cubes while she talked, “I think I forgot I have Crone’s and I’m going to diarrhea all over the floor if we don’t leave soon, honey.”

“That’s good, ma’am.”

“Ma’am? Let’s go–we’re clearly not welcome here!”

Her coat materialized when she said this, and I noticed her purse for the first time this afternoon. It was a smallish faux Gucci thing that looked like a briefcase.

She could have been grading papers at the library, papers about Renaissance dress codes and sexuality. Our server winced upon seeing the bag, not only because it was overlarge and a bit tacky but because it was befitting someone who might strike another person with it.

She stood up and did not strike, to the surprise and relief of everyone watching. Relief, until she pointed at the bar and screamed, “That man made me drink sake!”

And that, my friends, is how we became banned from the finest spam musubi joint on the Comstock, for which I still have no idea what that might be.