“That’s Karma, Baby” is excerpted from Toilet.

What is the name of the hex that makes every restaurant experience terrible? Whatever it is, I have it. As far back as I can call up in my memory there’s an endless parade of terrible dining events. Now that I think about it, if there is karma, it is probably that and not a hex. Though a hex is cooler because that isn’t about you and what you did, but about some gypsy and that gypsy being all crazy and just traveling around in some freak carnival hexing indiscriminately. So, you know, you don’t have to be responsible and that makes you a victim, so I prefer a hex, though, yeah, it’s probably karma.

Me and Matt DeSalvo and Carrie Hendrix used to skip school and go to the salad bar at the Burger Country where my sister worked and load up on lots of dressing, beans, and noodles, and stuff. Then we would drive around Portland and throw dressing at rocker chicks who were sitting on bus benches near the mall. We hated rocker chicks because they hated us because we were new wave. For Portland, Oregon, at the time, being new wave was enough to be hated. Though we thought, of course, that we were punk not new wave but really, we were new wave.

Sometimes when my sister wasn’t working at Burger Country and we wanted to throw food, we would go to the store and shoplift some onions or whatever wasn’t being guarded. One time we got a whole package of Oreos—which was great because they flew like Frisbees—and had a very Chinese-vendetta-throwing-star feel to them because of the way you had to chuck them to make ’em fly right. I think the best day of our lives was driving up and down the strip near the mall where the rocker chicks hung out and successfully chucking an Oreo into the spinning back of a cement-mixing truck. We knew that the Oreo was going into the foundation of some building and that it would be there forever. It was a feeling, like, of immortality, and also a secret. We had compromised the quality of a building with an Oreo and only we knew it. Sometime maybe that building would collapse because that Oreo had been put in a crucial strut or suspension, and it would have been our doing.

Despite the dining hex or my karma, tonight I had what was a not-too-terrible dining thing with a friend. Mostly I have learned my lesson and just eat at home, though I am getting into that phase with my friends where they are wondering what the hell is wrong with me that I can never leave my little space, so I leave it just to get them off my back.

So, we went to dinner at Man Ray on 8th Avenue and, really, the food was good and the service was fast, despite the hostess apologizing in advance for how terribly slow it was going to be. Whatever.

I was surprised to get through so successfully and wanted, after, to just get home right away before I would, like, vomit possibly or have an allergic reaction. What I am saying is that something was supposed to happen that was bad and it didn’t.

So I am on my way home and I am waiting at the corner to cross the street and this woman walks her little luggage pull-cart loaded with only one bag down the cripple ramp that good sidewalks have, and it falls over. She is like, maybe thirty so, you know, capable. So I go, “Wow,” and she just stands there looking at me like I said “you are an idiot” and really all I said was “wow.” Bummer, fell over, whatever. So she stands there and looks at me and I am waiting ’cause she looks like something is supposed to happen, but I can’t figure out what, and then she goes, all real angry, “Yeah, wow.”

She tries to right her bag and the little stewardess cart while sending me anger stares and I say, “It’s not like I kicked it over,” and she goes, “You could have been a gentleman and helped me.” And I go, “That’s New York, get used to it.” Like I should help someone who, first of all, has one tiny carry-on and who, second, has an attitude. Fuck that. So she goes, “That’s the problem with the world...no gentlemen.”

It’s not like I wouldn’t or couldn’t help, but I have recently learned this lesson about helping: if they don’t ask for it, be careful about offering it.

Earlier today, on a packed subway train, I tried to make room for an elderly person who looked as if a seat would have been appreciated. So this person looks at me right in the face and goes, “I’m not sitting there. You stink like cigarettes.” Uh huh. Let’s see, I was on a packed train at rush hour, I was trying to be nice, I scooted over the people next to me, I made a human gesture, and I stink like a spent Marlboro? Is it a hex? A different one, but sort of the same? A nothing-good-can-happen hex? So I look at that person and I say, “I didn’t want you to sit here anyway.” I just moved my ass back and opened my book.

Last night I had to go to another restaurant. Two in two days is completely out of the norm for me. I do no more than two in two months if I can, but it was another “appease the forgotten friend” thing. I tried to choose a place that I had had a good experience in previously, as hard as that was. Of course, I didn’t remember until after that the reason it was so good before was because I’d gotten really trashed on top-shelf liquor and someone else had paid the bill.

The prices had gone through the roof since my first visit, and the menu was half the size. I guess I have diner mentality: big menus, low prices are better. Also diners are fast as shit, and that makes them awesome despite the lighting and, of course, the food being rancid.

So we go to this restaurant on 7th Avenue in the low 20s, which happens to be owned by this guy who used to live so close to me that he would look in my window and watch me when I was having sex, not sly-watch either but really hang out the damn window full-on and gape. And even though he got a lot of free weenie show from me and despite my thinking it was going to be good ’cause I remembered it being good (but really I had just been drunk), my friend got raw beef when he ordered a medium-well burger. I mean out-of-the-package ground round. Raw, for real. Cold. And our waiter, who had slept with my dining partner at some point in the past, was all missy about having to serve us. And I just thought...you know...this is a small town, and if you’re a big ol’ whore you gotta deal with the fact that if you have nothing going for you but a long plump dick, you will someday have to serve all those tricks you turned. Well, our waiter wasn’t dealing with that fact yet.

My dinner partner just pondered on that raw beef. Pondered and pondered about was it going to be worth it to even send it back because likely the whore waiter would just spit on it, and of course, because of the karma/hex I suffer it was all just ruined anyway.

But when he (the whore) swung back by, all sassy and ignoring us, I decided to flag him down. Nice, like, not aggressive. Just like “hey, hi...,” though really at eleven dollars for a fucking hamburger I could have had a ranting lunatic seizure fit and that should have been okay.

I just go to the whore waiter, “He’s HIV-positive. If he had accidentally eaten this, it could have killed him.” He kind of took it away real slow and that was that. Also, it was supposed to be a bacon burger and it was missing the goddamned bacon. Whore.

So, what am I going to do? What am I supposed to do? Likely, I will have to wait for that Oreo-compromised building to fall in and crumple a few hundred people. At which point I can be a good Samaritan, leave my life behind, and selflessly go to the aid of the survivors so that the karma/hex will be reversed or removed. One damn Oreo in a cement mixer ten years ago and I am still paying. That is my life. Though now that I think of it, Carrie hasn’t gotten off very easy either. She died of cancer and Matt, well, he is still in Portland, and in a way that is worse than having old people, who always stink of something, tell you that you stink. Isn’t that like a dog poop telling you that you smell like a cat poop? I don’t know.

That is another hex I have. Not ever being able to know anything ’cause everything is just so damn wrong. Maybe it isn’t a hex, but rather that I am just finally punk, and punks have shitty lives.

I wish Carrie were still alive so I could tell her I am finally punk for real, and we could have a good laugh about that and then while laughing, we would discover through a rapid-fire, spinning-camera, movie-montage moment of enlightenment and horror that we were, ourselves, standing in the Oreo building and it would cave in and crush us, just us two, and that would finally be the end of the Oreo hex.

 

© 2005 Tom Woolley - Contributor's Bio

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