So there I was at the diner, safe within my exhaustion, struggling to form a word from the letters TOZALE, when a man in a brown suit, with a face like a battered hardball, sat down smack beside me.
“What’s good in this here joint?” he said. He spoke slowly, his voice soft and throaty, as if his larynx had been scarred by fire.
“About what you’d expect,” I said as I eased away from him so our elbows wouldn’t knock.
“What you got there, the eggs?”
I looked down at my plate, the yolks of my easy-overs broken, the yellow spread like thick paint over the home fries, and then looked past him at all the empty stools he had chosen to ignore when he set down next to me.
“Yes,” I said, turning back to my paper. “The eggs.”
Unless it is crowded at the counter of a diner, no one sits next to another patron. As the stools are left vacant and then occupied, the crucial spacing of two or three stools is maintained as if the rules were written on the blackboard above the swinging chrome door. People sit at the counter of a diner to stare into their plates, to read their papers undisturbed, to be left alone. I turned slightly, showing my back to the stranger, and leaned close to the paper.
“I used to love my eggs and bangers,” said the stranger, ignoring my body language, “toast sopping with butter. Every morning. But then my cholesterol, it shot higher than Everest, it did. My dentist told me it was time for a change. You might ask why my dentist, but I don’t gots no other doctor. The rest of me I let go to hell, but you gots to take care of the choppers.”
He smiled at me, showing off his bright whites, with a large gap between his two front teeth, before slapping on the counter for Shelly. When I said he looked like a battered hardball, I didn’t mean a sweet major league ball with one single smudge, I meant one of those ruined remainders we used to play with as kids, brown, misshapen, waterlogged balls we kept banging on even as the stitching came undone and the gray stuffing leaked from the seams. His face was flat and round, his ears stuck out like handles, his nose was the Blob, there was even heavy stitching on the line of his jaw. He was so ugly it was hard to look away from him. His face was like an accident on the side of the road.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he called to Shelly at the other side of the counter, “a bowl of oatmeal here. That’s right, with some skim milk and a joe. Thanks. Oatmeal, that’s what I’m reduced to. It’s a sorry sight when a man with teeth like mine is wasting bicuspids on oatmeal, innit? The dentist, she told me. It’s the fiber what cleans out the arteries, she said. That and garlic. I was eating the garlic raw for a while, but for some reason people stopped talking to me, so nows I take the pills. They say garlic does wonders. At least that’s what they say now. Next week they’ll be telling us something different, like the best thing for your heart is smoking stogies and wanking off.”
“Excuse me?”
“Smoking stogies and wanking off. Wouldn’t it be something if for once they tell us that the things what are actually good for you are the things everyone does anyway?”
“Not everybody,” I muttered, my face back in the paper.
“What, you don’t fancy cigars? Let me guess, you’re a lawyer, right?”
“That’s right.”
He slapped the counter. “I got you, didn’t I? First time, too. I got a knack for these things. Used to sell cars. Buicks, Olds. I got so I could pick out who was what just by the way they sashayed into the showroom. Lawyers would come in like they was daring you to try to sell them. And you never saw a lawyer come in and say ‘I’ll take it.’ The lawyer was always sniffing here, sniffing there, and then he’d check six other showrooms to see if he could save a nickel. If I spotted a lawyer walking through them doors, I’d say, ‘Joey, why don’t you take this one.’ And then Joey would waste his afternoon with the lawyer in the three-piece while I would grab the guy with the grease beneath his fingernails who would buy that big red Buick on the spot. Zealot.”
“What?”
“The word, in the Jumble you’re stuck on. TOZALE is zealot.”
“Do you mind?”
“Not at all. The next one, SORIAL, is sailor. I used to do them Jumbles every day. I was like the Michael Jordan of the Jumble. It’s a talent I got for taking things that are all mixed up and putting it in an order that makes sense. That’s how I got into my new line. But I still got friends in the car biz. Hey, you looking for a new car? I could set something up.”
“All I want is to finish reading the paper in peace.”
“Yeah, I notice a lot of guys come to places like this to be left alone, but I never understood that. I want to be alone, I’ll eat my oatmeal standing by the sink in my skivvies. It’s like in the car business. When I was working the shop, no one wanted to be jammed by a salesman right off. They wanted to be able to browse around la-di-da on theys own. But I figure, why come into a sales center if you don’t want to be sold? You let the bastards browse around on theys own, next thing you know they’ll be browsing their way over to the Toyota place across the street.
“Thanks, sweetheart, and more coffee when you can. Javalicious. Hey, could you pass the sugar? This one is all lumped up. Yeah.
“Funny thing about them lawyers in the salesroom, though. When it came down to negotiating a deal, they was like virgins in a sailors’ bar. They would do theys research, sure. They’d come in loaded with papers, figuring they knew everything they needed to know, when really they knew nothing. Because what was important wasn’t all the crap they brought in, it was how much the dealer was paying in the first place, how desperate was the cash-flow situation, what the boss’s girlfriend was whining for that week, all stuff that ain’t in Consumer Reports. Is the slurping bothering you? Good. The oatmeal is better with the milk, makes it like a soup. Anywise, the lawyers would bypass the salesman and sit down with the assistant manager, which is like bypassing the pilot fish to deal directly with the shark. Frigging lawyers. By the time they got finished with the assistant manager and with the F &I guys, they was getting it up the arse, down the throat and in both ears.”
By now my face was out of the paper and I was staring at the man beside me. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled.
“You know what they should teach you first thing in law school?” he said. “They should teach you that maybe you don’t know everything you think you know. They should teach you that if a deal for some reason seems too good to be true, then maybe you should jump off your arse and grab it afore it disappears. Maybe sometimes you should take the damn deal before something bad happens, before something awful happens that will absolutely ruin your day. What the hell do you think of that?”
“What line did you say you were in now?” I asked.
“Nowadays I solve bigger puzzles than the Jumble. Things what don’t add up, I find the sense of the things and make them add up in a way that everybody wins. Even me. Especially me.” He reached into his jacket pocket for a wallet, took out a five, and slapped it on the counter. Calling to Shelly, he said, “Here you go, sweetie. You keep what’s left.”
“You got a card?” I asked.
“Nah, those what need me know where to find me.”
“Can I ask you a favor?”
“Shoot,” he said.
“Next time you want to send me a message, do it by fax.”
He stared at me for a long moment, the geniality leaking out of his face. “Don’t get too smart on me, I’m liable to change my whole opinion of the profession.” Then he let out a belch that shook the plates on the counter before us. “There’s the problem with the oatmeal, right there.”
“What do you want, Skink?”
“A bowl of oatmeal. A cup of joe. A chance to pass a few friendly words. I’m doing you a favor here by giving you an honest piece of advice. Forget your snooping around about this Juan Gonzalez. He ain’t important. What’s important is that you do the right thing. Take the deal. It’s a good deal. It ends everything and keeps everybody happy.”