Of All the Strange Birds, This One Is the Strangest (Part Two)

The Stoned Cowboy brought his family in last week. I was working a split shift where I was covering lunch and dinner. Since I was working the split shift, the other lunch girl had gone home and the other dinner girl hadn't gotten there yet. I was alone.

When the Stoned Cowboy's red van pulled in I groaned, but I immediately shoved my escalating annoyance away when I saw the doors swing open, when I saw a woman step down from the van, when I saw a child tumble out of the back.

"Stoned Cowboy, Stoned Cowboy, Stoned Cowboy!" I hissed into the kitchen. "And he's brought his family!"

The Stoned Cowboy pushed into the restaurant and stopped dead when he saw me standing behind the counter. "You!" he exclaimed. I froze. "I want you as my waitress!" he said.

"Well," I said, "you're lucky. I'm the only one here. Looks like you're stuck with me."

He turned to his wife. "This," he said, gesturing to me, "is Jessica." He nodded at his wife for my benefit. "This is my wife," he said. "Remember how I was telling you she was away? Well, she's back now."

I nodded and smiled brightly, even though the Stoned Cowboy had never told me his wife was away. I reached for some menus.

The Stoned Cowboy, his wife, and his son filed back to the rear of the restaurant and seated themselves at a booth. The Stoned Cowboy waved away the menu when I tried to set it in front of him. "You know what I want," he said.

A reuben. He wanted a reuben. It would be his fourth of the week, and those are just the ones I witnessed during my shifts. Reubens are wonderful sandwiches--one of my favorites, actually, delicious, gooey, tangy things that always hit the spot--but I wasn't exactly sure if it was a good idea for one person to eat that many reubens in a week's time. I could see all the Stoned Cowboy's veins flooding with Thousand Island dressing, his heart being tangled in sauerkraut.

Well, he wasn't the only one who wanted a reuben. His wife did too. "He can't stop talking about them!" she said.

The son didn't want a reuben. He wanted a Buffalo Chicken Wrap, without tomatoes.

I took down the information and went back to the kitchen. The Boy From Work was manning the grill again because the lunch shift cook was busy making pies in the back. I handed him the order. "Enjoy," I said.

When I took out their drinks, the Stoned Cowboy introduced me to his son. "Peter?" he said. "Peter, this is Jessica."

Peter stared at me. He looked about as excited as if it had just been announced he was going to have three teeth ripped from his head without Novocaine. He was a cute kid, really. He didn't look like either of his parents. He wasn't straggly and gangly like his father, nor was he plain but normal-looking like his mother. He had a wide face, but it was striking. He seemed like the type of kid who would grow up to be attractive. He had pretty, clear eyes, good skin, moppy hair. He was emitting an attitude of casual boredom, like he was thinking about being bored but it was just too much work, so he was only going to be half-bored.

"Say hello, Peter," the Stoned Cowboy said.

"Hi," Peter said.

"Hey, listen," the Stoned Cowboy said. "Tell me how you spell your name, okay?"

"Mine?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "How do you spell Jessica?"

I spelled it for him. He whipped open his cell phone and started pressing buttons. "There," he said. "J-E-S-S-I-C-A. You're in."

I was in? He would've had to hold me down and torture me with spiders and snakes and other foul slithery/crawly things for me to give up my phone number, so I wasn't exactly sure what he was up to.

"Well," he started, "this is for whenever I need to call here. I'll just call you! I'll call Jessica and order a reuben."

I walked back to the kitchen then. I needed to get away. I needed to be with reasonable people. People who were not at all eighteen different shades of strange.

"I think maybe I'll run away with the Stoned Cowboy," I told the BFW. "He's a big fan of mine. He wants me to wait on him all the time, and he just programmed my name into the phone so every time he needs to call here to get a reuben, he'll just scroll down to my name." I paused, raised my eyebrows. "Who does that? Seriously."

The BFW flipped the reuben and looked not at all concerned about my possible running away with the Stoned Cowboy. He did, however, tell me the man was nuts.

Later, after I had brought their meals to them, and after I had given them enough time to savor and check things out, I went back out to the table and asked how the food was. The Stoned Cowboy gave me a sad look.

"I'm not mad, okay?" he said. "Alright? I'm not mad, but this beef is a little bit tougher than it usually is. The beef is usually so tender. I tell everyone how tender it is. I tell the guys at the bank and the gas station that you have the tenderest beef, the best reubens. But this one is just a little bit tough, okay?"

I apologized the best I could, and he nodded along with my words.

"You should tell them that," he insisted. "Tell the cooks that the beef is just a little bit tougher than it usually is."

I said I would, I certainly would tell them that.

"I'm not mad, though," he said. "And definitely not at you. You can't control it. Just tell the cooks, okay?"

I said I would, I certainly would. Then I went back into the kitchen and poured myself a Pepsi. If this was the beginning of my day, I was going to need a few billion shots of caffeine.

A few days later, I arrived at work only to be cornered by one of the cooks. "You will never guess what happened the other day," she said.

"What?" I asked.

"The phone was ringing and no one was able to grab it, so I did," she said. "The guy on the other end said, 'Is this Jessica?'"

"Oh no," I said. Apparently the Stoned Cowboy thought I was always there, that I was a fixture at the diner, that I had a mattress in the back, that I rolled out in the morning, took a shower, donned my black pants and white shirt, and came out to waitress around the time he was getting a hankering for a reuben.

"I told him it wasn't. He wanted to know if you were there. I said you weren't."

"He ordered a reuben?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said. "He ordered a to-go reuben, and I made it for him immediately. He didn't show up for, like, an hour and a half."

So we stood there wondering what kind of world the Stoned Cowboy lived in, what kind of job he held. We figured it probably wasn't one that was interested in strict timetables, in sharp businessmen, in concrete goals. I could see the Stoned Cowboy living on a commune somewhere with his children--he and his wife have several more, together and from previous marriages--and I could see him tending crops, sitting in the middle of a field with a hoe across his knee, a cigarette in his mouth, old Tom Petty pouring from his headphones. I could see him putting a hand on his stomach, realizing it was time for lunch. I could see his mouth watering for a tender cut of beef between slices of grilled rye. I could see him picking up his phone and calling the diner, hearing a girl answer, and I could see him saying, "Hey, Jessica. It's me. I need a couple reubens for the road. Is the beef tender today?"