“What else?” she repeats.
“Do I need to purchase something else to get paper towels?”
“Five-dollar minum,” she says and points to some imaginary sign.
I want to tell her the word is minimum, but I hold my tongue. There will be time enough for that once we become friends. I look above her at the menu: “How’s the Slammy’s burger?”
She looks at her nails, waiting.
“I’ll have that.”
“Anything else?”
“No. That’ll do it.”
“$5.37.”
I take out my wallet, photo of my girlfriend on display. You’d recognize her. She starred as a wholesome yet sexy young mother on a 1990s sitcom. I won’t say her name, but she’s beautiful and smart and funny and wise and African American. She prefers to be referred to as black, but I can’t bring myself to go against my training like that. I’m working on it. The girl behind the counter doesn’t look at my wallet. I hand her the credit card. She takes it, studies it, then hands it back to me.
“No credit cards,” she says.
Why did she take it? I hand her six dollars. She counts out the change, counts it out again, then puts it on the counter. Why won’t she touch my hand?
“Can I also get some paper towels and a cup of water?”
She sighs as if I have asked her to help me move this weekend and disappears into the back, which I guess is where they keep the water and paper towels. A young African American man in the same carnival suit sticks his head out and looks at me. I smile and nod. He disappears. The girl returns with a bag, two small paper cups of water, and three sheets of paper towel.
“Could I have some more paper towels? There’s a lot of bugs on the windshield.”
She looks at me incredulously for a very long time—I want to say five minutes?—then turns and disappears into the back. I really need her to like me. What can I do to change her mind? Does she know I wrote an entire book about the work of groundbreaking African American filmmaker William Greaves, whose documentary/narrative Symbiopsychotaxiplasm was so ahead of its time, I dubbed Greaves the Vincent van Gogh of American cinema? Although I realize now there is something inherently racist in validating an African American artist by comparing him to a white European male artist. Dead, too. I forgot to think dead and also heterosexual. And there’s one more … cis. Does she even know that I wrote that book, though? Is there any way to bring it up here? I am not a racist. Far from it. She returns with three more paper towels. They must come out of the dispenser in threes.
“Do you know who William Greaves is?” I say, testing the waters.
The young man sticks his head out again, threateningly, as if I’d just propositioned the girl.
“Never mind,” I say. “Thanks for the towels and water.”
I turn to leave. Someone releases a long whistling sigh. Either she or the guy. Maybe there is a third African American in the back who’s in charge of sighing. I don’t look back to see. I am hurt. I am lonely. I want to be loved. The instant I exit Slammy’s, the door locks behind me. The interior lights turn off, leaving the parking lot a dim red. I look back. A neon CLOSED sign in the window. Where did they go? Don’t they need light to pack up? Do they have cars?
IT’S EERIE OUT here. Buzzing bugs. Frogs. I put my food and drink in the car and scrub at the windshield with wet paper towels. The bugs spread like Vaseline. Soon the paper towels are useless. The windshield is worse now than it was before. I make the somewhat frantic decision to use my shirt. The large northwest quadrant insect is hard-shelled and stuck fast. I scrape it with my left doorknob pinkie fingernail, the one I paint red in solidarity with Australia’s Polished Man movement and also to cover a minor but horribly unsightly fingernail abnormality called sailor nail. I suggest you do not look it up. The insect comes off in pieces, its insides black and shiny. The inner portion is still alive somehow, like a just-flayed man, but only barely, and I experience one of those profound moments of communion with the natural world. It’s like we acknowledge each other, this insect and I, across species, across time. I feel like he wants to say something to me. Do I see tears in his eyes? What is this creature? As an amateur entomologist, I am fairly conversant in insect varieties, but of course Florida is, in so many ways, its own thing, unlike anywhere else. Even its insects are eccentric and, I suspect, racist. I squash it in my shirt. He was suffering, as are we all. It was the right thing to do.
Then it occurs to me: Perhaps this was a drone. Not an insect at all. A miniature, crying drone. There are such things, I hear. All around us, CCTV monitoring everything. Monitoring everyone. Am I being targeted or was it just an accidental collision? Why would the government want to watch me? Or is it perhaps some nongovernmental organization? Or an individual? Would a fellow critic be able to secure or even afford such technology? Could it be Armond White? Manohla Dargis? One of my enemies? Someone who wishes me ill, who wants to “scoop” me, as it were. I have often sensed that there are forces acting against me, keeping me down. It could be that I am a thorn in the side of the machine. The entertainment industry is a trillion-dollar-a-year enterprise. This is big business, folks. And in addition to the money made, this business has a vast influence on public opinion, cultural shifts, miseducation, not to mention the entire bread and circuses aspect of it. It does not want to be exposed. I’ve often speculated as to why my career gets stalled again and again. Perhaps it is not chance. I pull the drone from my shirt, examine it, peel away the black “flesh.” Inside, I find a tiny, bony skeleton. What fresh hell is this? I ask myself, paraphrasing the great (yet embarrassingly overrated by certain teenage girls) Dorothy Parker, as I speculate as to what our society’s unholy synthesis of electronics and animal technology has wrought. Armond White is a monster. This has Armond written all over it.
I crush this nightmare drone under my foot to make certain it cannot, even in this compromised state, still record my doings, then place it in my glove box for later inspection. I am not an electronics expert, although I did take a six-week course on Atomic Layer Deposition, a thin-film application technique, because I misread the Learning Annex catalog description and thought it was a pro-ana filmmaking seminar.
I see I have been, in the end, left with a driver’s side circle about the size of a medium pizza to see through. It’ll do. I don’t want to be here anymore. I climb shirtless back into the rental car and pull onto the highway. Surprisingly, the cola isn’t bad. Not as sweet as Coke and with more of a citrus kick. I want to say grapefruit but I’m not sure. Pomelo? I perform a good deal of that lip-smacking, tongue-tapping-the-roof-of-my-mouth action to try to determine the flavor. It seems an essential component of identifying flavors, but my wife didn’t do it, and after twenty years of me doing it, she lost all sense of humor about it. What can I say, it’s how I do it. Everyone in my family tastes things this way. Three different Thanksgivings ended in the car ride home with my wife telling me she wanted a divorce. She eventually changed her mind each time, and the subsequent divorce came at my request. This mostly had to do with meeting the African American woman at a book signing for my biography William Greaves and the African American Cinema of African American Identity. She had been greatly affected by the book and had been surprised to discover I am not African American, so insightful (she said!) were my musings on her race and culture. I make a point of including