This did not go where I thought it would...
It was dark, I suppose an early dark as it is winter, but the fact that there was little external light is more important to the story than that I knew why. In fact, I think we could responsibly say that is true of all the story to continue. It is more important that the facts are the facts than that I know why the facts are.
So it was dark, and I was sitting in a Chick-Fil-A with too much greasy fried chicken on the plastic and paper tray in front of me and not enough to occupy my hands. My mind was active, I had been reading and it made me want to write. This is a fact, whenever I read, if the author is good enough, it makes me want to write. Sometimes I write in the author's style, sometimes I try to write in anything but the author's style because I cannot bear to see my own work suffer in comparison. But sometimes I re-write the author's story because my own hubris tells me that I can write it better. But that is not why I was looking with such disgust at my own $12 worth of fried chicken.
The chicken was hot, too hot to let the grease settle on my fingers for long. So I had the box open and had opened the sauce. I was waiting and thinking and looking around the restaurant. It was nearly empty with only a few people in the room. A man and his son were sitting a row away and engrossed in conversation over separate cell phones. They could have been talking to each other the way they were watching each other as they talked, and the muted space prevented me from hearing either. But they did not speak in tandem, their mouths moved out of sequence, any dialogue could have been given to them and I imagined they were reciting movie quotes because I don't have that good of an imagination and thinking that strangers are quoting popular movies strikes me as funny. I should write for TV.
There was another customer though, now that I let my hearing wander, it was a family, but the mother was speaking. She was ordering the disposable meal like it was to be etched on their tombstones. Not any dairy for the girl, does it already come with fries, are there any religious tendencies the chickens exhibited that I should be aware of? Jebus lady, just order the number 3 and get on with your life. That is what people do in a fast food restaurant, you order the number 3 and you are disappointed with what you get. That is why you are here. No one orders the number 1 because that is what 'everyone' orders and no one is 'everyone' in real life. Number 2 is the same as number 1 just with cheese and/or bacon. Number 3 is where it is at. Just order the number 3 and I can get back to this stain of grease on my fingers that is preventing me from opening my book and seeing if I can be as good a writer as the one in front of me.
Maybe she did, the voice died and just the regular hum of the lights and machinery in the background distracted me from the package in front of me. There were re-constituted potatoes as well, so there had to be ketchup. That I could do without worrying about the grease or worrying about the heat or about the author. Ketchup applied directly to the paper and then soaked into the waffle of the potato. This has to be the most unnatural thing I have eaten in a week. And with my diet that is saying something. But they are still warm and the chicken is still too hot to eat. So they are my start.
As I am beginning I look over at the man and his son and I keep inadvertently making eye contact with the son. He is a teenager, sometime between 13 and 25 but I can't tell more, they all look the same to me now that I have reached the 'get off my lawn' stage. He is in public with his father after dark, so that puts him below 16 but he is his father's height so not too young. But I am looking at him too much. I should be focusing on this chicken that has to be cooling. The laws of thermodynamics proclaim that this chicken should be cool by now but apparently this isn't that sort of place. And my eyes keep drifting, there is no reason except it is motion and I don't have anything else to look at.
A couple walks across my sight line. Not the family, the voice I heard cannot match up to the woman walking with her mate to the back of the restaurant. I didn't hear them, but then I had been worrying with the ketchup package and could have been distracted. They are both young, dusky skinned with jet black hair. His is short and the sides have some shaving, but not enough to be offensive, just 'hep' as the kids say. He has a 7 o'clock shadow, or perhaps a 7am the next morning shadow, not enough to call a beard but enough to prove he can grow one. It might be on purpose, Indiana Jones did it and see where it got him.
She is thin like a piece of the railing that is separating the rows of seating. No part of her body is larger than her head, she could still be in the womb and born as a normal child, her body isn't too large to pass through into life again. Her hair is long, to her waist and as straight as the rest of her body. She is smiling at her man in a way that tells me he is her man. He may be her first man as far as I know, but they are settling into a booth at the back and I can't really see more of their interaction.
I can touch the chicken now. It is cooled enough that I can pick it up without burning and I dip it into the sauce without a second of hesitation. It tastes good to me until I realize it is supposed to be fried chicken. I never think about fast food being the same substance as actual food. Fried chicken stopped being made when my grandmother died. My grandmother who worked and cooked every day until the tumor in her head caused her to fall onto the bricks and into the dry dust of the front yard. By the time she saw a doctor it was too late for treatments. She didn't see the end of that year and I remember being so scared to see her. That hospital room was so final and she was the closest person I had ever had to watch die. It was not fair of course, cancer never is, but it shouldn't have been her. I shouldn't have been so scared that I wanted to bolt and let her die without me there.
And now this chicken is tasteless, it is ash in my mouth. I try to bury it under more of the sauce but of course there is only so much. Apparently sauce in fast food terms is like printer toner. It is worth more per ounce than gold and to get enough to satisfy your needs you have to become an indentured servant to the company. I expect managers make their extra salaries by having access to the sauce vault. Secretly running black market sauce operations across the country, perhaps in minis secretly taking the HOV lanes and claiming the sauce as co-pilot. It is a silly train of thought and I catch myself staring at that boy again as I try not to taste the chicken and savor the sauce.
The family has come and sat down to my right and one booth behind. I can see them out of the corner of my eye but not clearly enough to register features. I don't want to turn and look, because it will be obvious I am turning to look and I have no real reason to do so. I am idly curios which is stupid as I have chicken in front of me that is of temperature to eat and I should do so rather than become the slack-jaw yokel sitting in the fast food restaurant where normal families come to dine. And they are normal. As they sit I can catch enough of the configuration. Father, short hair button up shirt; mother sweat top with writing and hair messed up so much it has to be a style; older son with hoodie and an 'I'm too cool to be with my parents' attitude; younger daughter in pink and white.
Their conversation is so banal that even trying to listen to it I cannot concentrate. My mind wanders back to the chicken and I realize that I have been sitting staring and not eating long enough that someone will probably notice and know that I am paying attention to everything around me and not what I am supposed to be doing. I hear conversation about a test from the kids and a complaint about teaching from the mother. I guarantee that the bumper sticker on the back of their SUV will either say "My son is an honor student" or will have the stick figures of the family across the back. They never have "My son and daughter" or even "my daughter", they never say "by honor student, I mean he makes decent grades and will probably work in a cubicle rather than in fast food". Maybe I should make those and see how well they sell. And the chalk outlines always strike me as morbid. It is like fixing the bet at Death Race 2000. When the road-ragers begin taking people out they will know which cars are worth the most points. "That one has two kids, a dog and a cat. That's bonus points!"
And there is a sudden silence. Even the machines seem muted as the sauce-hoarding manager makes a pass by to offer to throw away trash or refill drinks. I realize as he approaches that I have been sitting here for 10 minutes with the food in front of me and I have only eaten one of the chicken strips. He is going to know that I am eaves dropping on the every-family behind me and that I am silently judging the couple in the back with their perfectly black hair and far too sunny outlooks on the fate of their relationship. He will notice that I keep looking back at the father and son choreographing their conversation on competing phones. So when he comes to my table I shove a full strip into my mouth and casually cover the box with a napkin so he cannot see in. He smiles and asks a question but as I have my mouth full I clearly can't answer so I just nod and smile around the chicken to let him know he can keep going. Go back and gloat that I have already used one of my two sauce packets and I am just starting my meal. I will have to finish these strips that taste like the dust of my grandmother's front yard with no sauce to wash them down with. I hope your mini gets a brick through the back window and all of your pirated sauce is stolen and given to a homeless shelter.
Swallowing takes steps. I have to work the chicken around in my mouth so I don't try to swallow it all at once. I have to be discreet, because it is bad manners to do, well anything that I have done all evening in this fluorescent lighted spot in the middle of a dark landscape. I think it is prematurely dark, but I don't remember the time and I can't look at my phone while I am trying to swallow chunks of chicken without swallowing other chunks of chicken that both occupy my mouth at the same time. I would love to make a Schrodinger's Chicken joke here, but it isn't accurate, it would be more a Heisenberg Uncertainty joke but everyone confuses them and thinks that Heisenberg was on Star Trek. He could have been of course, he died in 1976, but then the Heisenberg compensator was not on the original series, but on Next Generation and he was long dead by then. In any event, fewer people would think it was funny than got the joke so it was probably a moot point in general. And I couldn't tell it to anyone without swallowing this dry chicken that was tasting more and more like oak leaves and dry coastal grass ground into the driveway dust.
The couple in the back had their food as well. They were not looking at it, they only briefly toyed with the packages as they talked to each other. Smiling and looking deep into each others' eyes I can only imagine that they themselves didn't even know what they were saying. It didn't matter. In this restaurant, the forces that were going to tear them apart and leave them hating each other were still a good six months away and they were still in love enough that they couldn't see it coming or care about their food going cold. She probably gave him the sauce for her food so that he would have enough. He probably complimented her on her figure and didn't wonder who held her hair when she threw up after a meal. But maybe I am projecting. None of the bulimics I ever knew had long hair, it got in the way too much. I wish I could do that some times. Just purge my body of food and let the emotion follow it out, but there was little doubt this chicken was going to stay down.
The family is talking again, a trip planned to visit something I missed in the conversation and I turn my head as if to catch back up on it before I realize what I am doing. Quickly I snap back around, none of them looked at me but I can see the mother's sweatshirt is the kid's football team logo. I am embarrassed and mortified. I have to focus on this chicken. It will get cold otherwise, and without enough sauce, they are going to be horrible cold. I have used most of the second packet already and I still have over half of the strips left. It isn't until now that I realize that I wasn't thinking when I asked for the sauce. I just said the first flavor that popped into my head, but I realize as I am forcing in another bite that it isn't my favorite. I should have asked for the other. I could go back, but I have already used most of my allotted amount. Would they charge me for more? Would there be a public shaming? Would the manager go up to each of the other groups in this restaurant and tell them how I was being nosy and had to ask for more sauce?
But the sauce was gone and these strips of chicken that I cannot claim as 'fried' are still here. I still have ketchup. The packets for it are not precious, they lay casually about the front next to the napkins and I took too many of them. Perhaps I subconsciously validated the sauce hoarding policy with how I flagrantly took too many ketchup packets. Perhaps it was rebellion, I could still be a rebel. I have long hair, I have a real beard not a scruffy wannabe like the kid who can't be old enough to know Indiana Jones before he jumped in the refrigerator. If I could find a bandanna somewhere I could be a rebel. But even then I would have to get through these strips before I could form my protest. Clean plate rules and all that.
So I try it. Ketchup is a standard condiment, Chicken is a standard food they should go together. But they don't. Not really. It isn't disgusting but it is obviously wrong. It isn't as bad as the Chicken Spaghetti I made in college. How was I supposed to know that chicken spaghetti was not the same as regular meat spaghetti just made with chicken? You just substitute for what you have right? A can of sauce from the cheap isle in the grocery store, some noodles and a little grilled chicken and you are good to go, right? No, just like with ketchup it is not a match. It removes some of the ashes, it lets me taste childhood for a minute longer. Like this son spending a night with his father at the restaurant. Soon he will be old enough to drive and will not be back at this place again. He will be moving on and it will be years and years before he is sitting alone in a restaurant and remembering what it was like to have a simple meal with someone who loves him unconditionally.
I cram the chicken into my mouth fast as I can. I chew and swallow as if it is now my job and I get paid by the piece. I want to make quota without overtime and let those bastards pay me in sauce for how quickly I can choke down this strip of food that is so much like fried chicken but so far removed. I don't taste it any longer. I don't taste the ketchup, I just taste the inside of my mouth and my saliva and my teeth as I chew and swallow. It is getting cold, for all the fire that this chicken had at one time it is getting cold. It is almost gone and I will never hear my grandmother complain about me getting too fat again. I won't have her hide her husband's drinking or struggle to remember the names of her children. I will never have this again and it will not be too soon because that is what chicken does. It fades away and leaves and it doesn't matter if you put sauce or ketchup or superglue on it, it will not stay and you will find yourself remembering what it tasted like at the oddest times. You will be sitting with your brand new lover staring into her dark eyes and you will know that the chicken is losing it's flavor. Or you will be the husband watching his children behave in a restaurant and think that as crappy as their grades are they are still yours and you will love them forever, but that day is coming when you will not be able to remember what fried chicken really tasted like. You will forget the voice and the gentle smiles. You will forget the anger and the swats from broken tree limbs or trampled flowers. You will only remember the taste of the dust, hot in the summer sun under the trees in her front yard and remember her falling. You won't be able to picture anything but the hospital monitor making it's lazy beeps in a white and blue room with people crying and you wearing ratted out shorts and a shirt with too many holes. Standing in that doorway like an intruder into a grief you are not meant to share.
And it won't matter. The chicken is gone. This meal is done. I wipe as much of the grease away as I can. The last few ice cubes in my drink will wash the taste away and I can go back out into that dark night and forget that I was ever here. These people will go on with their lives and I won't think about them again after this night. I will not register a blip, just another man at a table who didn't know that chicken does not go with ketchup.