From Visions of Garleyville

 

Worse than…

 

 

“I’m telling you they’re worse than niggers, coming in here like they belonged,” the woman from the Woolworth’s lunch counter told me when I sat down for my usual chilly dog. I worked up the street at Grants, but the food was better here, and the woman so full of local tales I would have missed out with any of the dozen other eateries along that section of Main Avenue, Paterson.

          “It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen them around before,” she went on, sliding my dog in front of me. “Every time I passed Leo’s place I saw them sitting hours on end at the counter. No doubt about their being drugged out of their minds. But when Leo got sick of them, they came in here.”

“At first Mr. Mercer didn’t see them. We figured he’d have a heart attack or go off and retire, seeing those two Halloween characters sitting at his lunch counter, wearing droopy hats and ragged clothes. I swear they could have been trying to sell me dope with their strange talk: far out this, groovy that. And I still haven’t figured out what they meant by my being heavy and whether or not they meant the food.

“Far worse than this was their giggling.

“They sounded like two little children. One said something, the other would go off. Then both would laugh. Over the most ordinary of things. One would look at a katsup bottle and crack the other one up. One might glance over at the shopping aisles, at a spool of thread or a piece of yarn, and off they went as if it was the biggest joke in the world.

“Sure, I wanted to ask them what it was all about, and in my fashion I did.

“`Is there something I missing here, boys?’ I asked.

“That only cracked them up all the more. And they kept saying how weird we were, if you can believe that! But it wasn’t until they started singing that everything went south. I’m not saying it sounded bad – no worse than you hear on television now a days – it was just too loud. Hilda said she could hear it all the way in gift wrapping at the back of the store. Mr. Mercer certainly heard it in his office and came straight out, telling them to shut up.

          “I think he wanted to throw them out then and there, but they scared him a little. He might have called the police – the way he threatened – if he could have come up with something reasonable to say.  But the boys weren’t robbing the place, and the police in this town really couldn’t be bothered with anything unless they got to play with their guns. Anyway, the boys calmed down, whsipering at each other like it was still all one big joke.

          “Maybe Mr. Mercer would have let things go had it been the afternoon instead of lunchtime. But with the boys sitting in the middle of the counter and our regulars struggling to sit as far away from them as possible, we had a huge gap in the seating arrangements that Mr. Mercer couldn’t tolerate. A lot of regulars wouldn’t even sit, and stood just outside the counter area grumbling.

          “Some even spoke loud enough for Mr. Mercer to hear them, asking how he could like those kind of people into a place like this. While these two didn’t smell, they certainly looked as bad as bums. Weren’t there health laws to protect taxpaying citizens? Weren’t there any real men around that could drag these hippies out and hang them from a light pole?

          “And it wasn’t as if these two spent big. They ordered hamburgers and sodas, ate, then sipped melting ice the rest of the time, ordering refills only when the ice ran out. Even then, Mr. Mercer wouldn’t just tell them to do. He ordered me to deliver their sodas half empty and spill some when I reached where they were sitting. I guess he figured they’d get angry and leave, the way ordinary people would. They never noticed. I could have dropped the sodas straight into their laps and they would have laughed. A happier lot I’ve never seen in my entire life. They were worse than niggers. They were niggers who couldn’t take a hint.

          “Finally, Mr. Mercer couldn’t take the tension any more and he called the police. And Lord and behold, they police actually came. It seemed the police hated hippies more than tney hated anything, even niggers, and the police dragged those two boys up off their stools, demanding to see some identification. Did the boys seem afraid? No way. They even found the police funny, looking over at those meaty officers as if the police had made their day.

          “`Sure, sure officer,’ they said, and pushed all sorts of papers into the hands of the police.

          “I would have been mortified. I would have moved out of town. Those two? They came back today. And we can’t get rid of them.”

Email to Al Sullivan


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