Seed of a Short Story

This evening—a little bored and depressed, home alone, sick of all the rain and tired of listening to the sump pump under the house running every 45 seconds—I decided to hit the soggy streets and find something to eat. I had a good hamburger on my mind. A bar called The Cottage is rumored to have the best hamburger in town, so I initially drifted in that direction. But then I realized that one of my favorite places—Mid City Grill—was open. During the week they don't open until eleven o'clock at night (and close at five o'clock in the morning), but on weekends they open early—five o'clock in the afternoon.

I had a book with me and took a table where I could read until I ordered and then again until my food came. This was around eight o'clock, so not many people were in the place—a couple of tables of four or so college-aged folks and a table of folks the same age but likely not in college. At this one table to my right was another lone wolf like myself, and he's the seed of the short story.

He wore running or walking shoes (walking, I think, given his apparent age and obvious stiffness), sweat pants and a t-shirt that read on both front and back: "1959 Tour / [some concert hall] / Kingsport, TN / Webb Pierce / Red Foley." His hair—gray and crumpled like used wire—was thin on top but sprawled down over his shoulders in back. In front, a long beard almost identical to the hair, sprawled over his chest. He sat, when I first saw him, with his forehead in one hand and a coffee cup in the other.

On the table in front of him was another coffee cup besides his own, two empty yellow packets of sweetener and six little cream containers with their tops peeled back. A red jacket was draped over the back of a chair, and an umbrella leaned against the table. Either he'd already eaten or he was there only for the coffee.

He raised his hand . . . "Miss?" he said loudly. "Miss?" . . . The waitress who had seated me came over to his table . . . "Want some more coffee?" . . . "The Jimi Hendrix tour back in '68," he said. "What went wrong?" . . . The waitress didn't seem surprised by this . . . "Whose tour?" she said . . . "Jimi Hendrix. What went wrong?" . . . "Drugs?" . . . "What kind of drugs?" . . . "Heroin?" . . . "No. Acid."

She walked away to check on one of her tables, but in a few minutes he had his hand up again. "Miss?" This time he asked her about Chicago. She didn't at first know that he was talking about a band. She said that she'd download some of their stuff and put it on her iPod. He asked her about the band's original guitar player, Terry Kath, and his accidental death by gunshot in 1978 and then tossed out some trivia about Jimi Hendrix's praise of Kath's guitar skills. Once he called the other waitress over and asked her what happened to rock-n-roll on Christmas 1954. "Somebody died?" she said. He went on to talk about the death of Johnny Ace, who died playing Russian roulette that Christmas day. He asked her about her earliest memory of rock-n-roll, and she, being probably in her mid 20s, said it was of the first album she'd bought in the '90s. He said rap and hip-hop were bullshit. The manager ignored this guy when called to—"Joe?"—but the waitresses were patient and sweet. I got the feeling they'd been through this trivia mill a time or two.

He was still sitting there with his coffee when I left and walked back out into the rain.