You Ain't Nothin'

Marie was working at the hotel tiki bar again. Her first night was the first night of an Elvis festival and no one had expected the turnout. I sat at the bar and drank cheap beer as a line formed behind me out of the bar, down the hall way, and outside. People wanted food for the show and apparently, you could only order food in the bar. Everyone in the line bitched about the lack of staff and it should have been foreseen but it wasn't.

The line behind me bored away and I understood how forest animals feel when a new highway tears through their homes and silence. Elvis, Elvis, cheeseburgers, bitch bitch bitch. Everyone was rude under their breath and most bothersome was that no one was rude to anyone's face. No one knew I was the bartenders husband and they told me all they thought and I sipped at my beer and Marie worked hard to make up for the mismanagement. 

The hotel kitchen was out of chicken fingers. Everyone wanted chicken fingers. They were out of fries. Fries came with everything. The line backed up so much that people ordered their drinks and would need another by the time they ordered their food. It should have been foreseen but it wasn't.

A year earlier I had watched the hotel owner watch a man die and show complete indifference and tonight it was the same. In some corner of my mind I wondered and worried about him.

The Ventures played loud on the jukebox and that made the whole chaos better.

Food orders came up from the kitchen and in a frenzy Marie tried to keep up, taking orders and calling done orders out and sometimes no one came for them and I thought about just eating them but I wasn't hungry and I was getting fat.

Elvis impersonators were everywhere. In line. Mingling. In the hall. Behind me. Next to me. All of their women were sad and the same. Not depressed, but overweight and dead eyed and when I could hear them, speaking slowly. I thought it must take a certain type of woman to love an Elvis. I was glad I wasn't an Elvis and I couldn't understand what made someone want to be an Elvis. Who am I to judge the pursuit of happiness, I thought. Who am I anyway?

I kept drinking.