The lunch place

It’s cold and gray, and although it’s lunch time the sun is setting. Welcome to Portland, Maine: The way dusk should be! The lunch place I want to go to is a further ten minutes walk, but I underdressed, and I didn’t bring a lantern to fasten to my coal miner’s helmet, which I also forgot to bring. I’m walking past a lunch place I sometimes go to selling… Portland’s small: Let’s say they’re selling pita pocket sandwiches. Who doesn’t like pita pocket sandwiches? I know! Except for people who don’t like Echo & The Bunnymen, no one, right? I hold the pita pocket place’s door open for a short lady leaving. It’s a weird sentence, but it is what happened.

“You look old!” The short lady says.

“What?!” I had a haircut last week, because the silver streak on the right temple was so visible it looked like I might have colored my hair for the holidays. I did not color my hair for the holidays. If anything the haircut makes me look younger. That’s what I think, anyway. If comments about my age offended me I would stick my foot out and trip the lady hobbit right now.

“You look cold!” She says again.

I retract my foot and step into the pita pocket place when the short lady clears the door. The young woman at the counter is looking at the iPad on the counter like it is a sword stuck in stone. The iPad is magical. She has no idea how the sword got stuck in the stone, and she has no idea how the iPad works. The iPad is the cash register. It occurs to me ten minutes more isn’t that far.

“Do you take debit cards?” I ask her.

“Yes,” she says. “We’ll have to type the number.”

There is an awkward, unexpected silence. Even now, writing about this after the fact, I have no idea why.

“Do you want me to read you the number?” I ask.

She does not. I do the next thing: I order my pita pocket sandwich. It’s more difficult than I imagined, because I haven’t eaten a pita pocket sandwich, let alone thought about ordering one, since the early 1990s. I resolve to listen to “Porcupine,” Echo & The Bunnymen’s third record, when I get home later today, but the young woman at the counter throws up her hands and backs away from the counter.

“Oh! It’s died!” She exclaims. She means the iPad.

I see the iPad’s not plugged in. I’m thinking logistics. If I leave now in twenty minutes, when I’m returning from the lunch place I want to go to with the lunch I want, when I am walking past the pita pocket place I can duck below the front windows so this young woman won’t see me, the twenty-something guy who ordered the pita pocket sandwich and left without taking it or paying for it.

“I’m going to walk over to the bank and get some cash,” I say. “I’ll be right back.” I walk over to the bank and get cash, and I return to the pita pocket place.

“That’ll be $8.50,” the young woman says. No way did pita pocket sandwiches cost $8.50 in the 1990s. I hand her the twenty the ATM dispensed.

The young woman makes a sad face. “Do you have anything smaller?”

“My debit card is smaller than the twenty dollar bill.” I do not say this.

“I’ll have to go into the safe,” she says.

“There’s a safe?” I do not ask this.

I’m thinking about the Monty Python Cheese Shoppe skit. When I was actually younger, younger in years as opposed to whatever my imagination uses to measure my age, I mastered John Cleese’s Funny Walk. I wrote and deleted “for absolutely no reason” from the end of that sentence. I mastered John Cleese’s Funny Walk because it was funny.

“Do you have any cheese?” I ask.

“What?” The young woman asks opening a cash drawer built into the counter.

“Do you have any chips?” I say again.

“Yes,” she says. “But we don’t sell them anymore.” She opens a two-drawer filing cabinet and hands me a bag a potato chips. I check the expiration date before leaving with my pita pocket sandwich and my change, which I assume as always do is correct.