todd of tacoma

My friend G has never seen The Late Show. He has never seen Saturday Night Live or Late Night or even just one episode of the handful of other late night TV shows. Not even clips, he said.

I thought he was lying, of course. Especially one day when he described to me a new hallucination he’d been having of a heavyset middle-aged man wearing all black and a headset and holding a stack of posterboards with written out replies to questions, and observations, and conversation starters, sometimes song lyrics.

It’s like I’m doing bits sometimes but other times it’s me. It’s my way of speaking but not quite, you know? he said.

Did you think it was real? At first, I mean?

Only at first. Then it got too good. The lines line up with what I would say anyway sometimes.

Too good to be true.

Too good to be. It’s too me.

You’re looking over my shoulder. Is he behind me?

Yes.

Did he tell you to say that?

Can you do me a favor? G said. Look.

You want me to look or is he telling you to tell me to look?

Yes, he said.

I looked. What the hell.

Anything? he said.

Not the thing you want me to see, or don’t want me to see.

Okay, good.

Have you told anyone?

Just you.

And he hadn’t even wanted to. Hadn’t planned on it, anyway, but we were walking to our work stations and we were pretty long in silence, to the point where someone would need to say something or else we’d both risk thinking we were dicks to each other all day until the next day, so he finally blurted out, can you slow down so my guy can keep up? That’s when I asked, your guy?

In the cards

There was, incidentally, one other person who knew about A, that’s what he called him, the guy with the cards. A. Although he didn’t actually know what his name was.

I just made it up, G said.

A. Sounds like a dog’s name, I said.

But that’s neither here nor there.

As it happens, as it always happens, the first person G told about A was a total stranger he was attracted to. She had short arms, which is kind of G’s thing, women whose elbows are just kind of knuckles hinging right below their under-bra strap. She had long hair, too, this stranger, with a healthy frizz like she’d been working in a greenhouse, like this penumbral aura of a girl who works hard and kicks ass and has no time for fancy things.

We were making eyes at each other, G said. From across the bar. She was trying to push her drink to the bartender’s side of the bar to show him she was finished, but she couldn’t quite get it there. It was funny, right, and she knew it was funny. That’s why we were making eyes, or it’s what started it.

A shared embarrassment. Just like on TV, I said.

It happens in real life, too. You just don’t think it does because you’ve been sober three years, G said. Drunks make eyes, and I’m a drunk. Anyway, the bartender saw that my drink was empty and he passed right by the girl and, of course, following right behind the bartender was guess who, my lines guy.

Cue card guy.

That’s a great term for it! Anyway, he held up a sign that read, what’s she drinking?

The bartender said, vodka gimlet.

Tell her the next one’s on me, please, I said.

And he was like, I’m not fucking Tinder. Tell her yourself.

I said, that’s a great idea.

G said he was chock-full of confidence then because of the stranger’s eyes on him and because he didn’t have to worry about what to say, so he said his thank you to the bartender who didn’t seem to have to worry about tips and then G repeated his order, two gimlets.

I’ll be down there.

He slowly made his way down there, to the short-armed stranger with the gimlet, with all the confidence of a man who has nothing in mind to say. Because he didn’t. He had faith in the cards.

TV

The stranger’s eyes were now conspicuously not on him, probably so she could make a better show of noticing him once he was sidled up next to her. He respected this and himself looked only at the bartop and the stools beneath it, and the stranger’s legs that didn’t reach the foot rail, and this gave him a tingling in his neck and his sacrum and the other side, and the closer he got to her legs and matching arms, he could feel his eyes bouncing around every corner of the bar like atomic particles, until finally he looked at the TV, the bar’s sole TV, that thing we all know how to look at, the TV above her, and it was playing local news, the news that no one watches. There was a crash on I-5, he learned, that had slowed traffic to one lane. A semi-truck on its side. Cab was charred from fire. Driver in ICU. No casualties so far. Prayers are with the driver and the driver’s family.

Once G was at the stranger’s seat both gimlets came. Like magic, the timing of it all. He was still kind of spinning from his journey when the two locked eyes again. Those eyes! And although it’s customary to quit making eyes or at least dial back the eyes you’re making the moment you’re within salutations range, G did not stop making eyes and neither did the stranger. They just sat there dumb, literally dumb, not a word, inches from each other that you could count on two hands and one foot, and there they were, just four drunk eyes staring hard and probably saying things words can’t. But you have to get words out at some point.

Then the next thing happened, like next things do. G’s frontal lobe started to take an interest in their goings on and it was not too impressed by the drinks with the total stranger to which he’d said nothing, and who was saying nothing in return. And G was then coaxed by his frontal lobe to at least look around the bar again, to pretend to be looking for something or for nothing at all, pretend anything but this silence. In actuality, he was looking for the man with the cards.

The cue card guy.

Whatever.

A kind of panic was setting in, the kind that’s always there but you don’t acknowledge it always, like a shark swims with a lamprey. Since the emergence of the man with the cards, the man with the cards had never once been missing in action or derelict of his duties. That was sinking in.

Then, while G was making yet another full visual sweep of the bar, he caught the stranger’s eyes again. She had stopped making them at him and had gone on to look at other things, too.

They were catching up on the goings-on on TV.

G followed her lead.

Cue

It was the news. Still. With closed captions so you could follow along in any old fracas. There was some discussion about the weather and what the anchors were going to do in it. The weather person had no idea what to do, maybe some pickleball outdoors. The King 5 Sports anchor was going to do whatever his wife told him to do. Must be nice, G thought. The other anchors were laughing.

Then there was a finale. They were going to leave us with more footage of Mister Jekylls, the two-headed kitten. And they were as good as their word. They cut to a kitten crawling around on a towel with two heavy heads. It was orange and orange cream stripes were starting to show and one head looked sweet and tender and the other looked drunk or like it was carrying the despair of two cats and it wouldn’t look at the camera or acknowledge anything within its visual range. It just tried to dive bomb the towel and take a nap.

Do you think they could graft one of those heads onto a headless kitten? the stranger said.

She said! Somebody said!

The significance of this.

G looked around the bar for an answer.

I wonder if they share a middle name, the stranger went on, her voice kind of teasing.

G didn’t know what to say. He finally just locked his eyes on the closed captions on TV and read, read aloud, I don’t know about you guys, but there is something about that kitten that makes me tear up.

Two kitties to love for the price of one, he said.

Oh, I don’t think this one’s for sale, he said.

You mean, this two, he laughed.

These two! he kept laughing.

Have a good night, everyone, he said.

Enjoy that sunshine tomorrow, he said.

Good night! he concluded.

And they cut back to the studio and the camera zoomed out and jibbed up and they cut to another camera panning the studio and there he was: A. Cue cards tucked between his legs and he was taking off his headset and acknowledging the camera with a little smile.

That son of a bitch! G said.

G then went on to explain why he wasn’t able to speak until then.

The stranger with the gimlet took longer and longer sips of her gimlet and squeezed her stomach tight against the bartop and reached her hand out to her outer limits and into, barely into, the bartender’s periphery and signaled for her check.