Yesterday on the way home from work, I had to run a few errands. The usual stuff. You know, deliver some Meals on Wheels, Volunteer at a food bank, saved a puppy that had been hit by a car, make an anonymous donation at the bible store, etc.
Okay. That might not all be true. But I did have to get gas, my dry cleaning, and I had to pick up some beer and ice. Conveniently, all of these services are available in one handsome single-story mini-strip center that, oddly enough, contains neither a nail salon nor a tanning parlor.
So as I walk to the counter, there is a woman of Asian descent in front of me. I think she was Vietnamese, but it really makes no difference and is irrelevant to the story, other than that the sounds she made to the fella behind the counter were amusing. At first.
She was wearing a fairly conservative flower-print dress that covered her knees (otherwise I would have burned her at the stake for being a whore or a witch) and no shoes. but since this is the south, that didn’t bother anyone.
She had a five and a one in her hands and she looked at the dude behind the counter, held out the money, and held her hands about this far apart wide and this far apart long. (You have to imagine that she was miming something the size of an 8-track or so).
After about the fifth time of doing Marcelle Marcieux’s “I’m stuck holding this thing of indeterminite shape”, and after counter guy had held up cigarettes, a scratch off and a pack of horny goat weed,he sort of looked past her at me, shrugged slightly and sent this message to me telepathically:
“What the fuck dude. Your ice is gonna melt before I manage to crack this fucking code.”
That’s when I jumped into action.
I started nodding and pointed to my left, where the non-quick pick lottery geniuses calculate pi to the 50th place and think of all their baby daddy baby’s birfdays and fill out potentially winning lottery tickets, and nodded some more indicating to her that I not only understood the Phuk Yoo dialect, but that I was able to convert her word for conch shell into what she really meant; scratch counter and ticket fill out area.
She waddled over there with her husband / grandfather / grandson or whomever the shoeless guy was that was with her that was trying to cut in front of me in line to buy some Milwaukee’s Best tall boys standing next to me nodding.
Is that what she actually wanted?
Of course not. But it got her the fuck out of the way so I could buy my American by-God beer, three bags of ice, a tank of gas and get home to some delicious butter chicken and yellow rice.
God Bless the You Ess of Ay.
What say you?