Call Me E.

Call Me E.
all stories and essays by Sean Rein

Bad Day at the Buffet
It was about 6 p.m. when my wife suggested that we have dinner at the local buffet. At that point, fake mashed potatoes and institution brown gravy sounded like just the thing to clear my head.

This was a national chain and I do not wish to give you the name of the establishment for reasons that you will know soon enough.

It is located in a somewhat posh area of St. Paul. The business across the parking lot is a grocery store with carpeting and bag people to haul your overpriced groceries out to your car. It is geared towards the more well-to-do inhabitants of the neighborhood.

That is why I was surprised by what greeted me at the aforementioned buffet once I got inside.

For starters, there was an entire posse of helmeted special needs people. Some of them were tethered together, assumedly to prevent them from getting separated. It worked wonders because three of them somehow got their rope tangled up in a table and were calmly saying "help" repeatedly in unison.

The table next to the waterhead heap was a family of dirty poor folk. All five members of this family (father, mother, 2 sons, and 1 daughter) were ugly, sported the "mullet" hair cut, and wore the filthiest clothes I've ever seen. It looked like their shift just ended in the garbage-sorting facility and they decided to "eat at a fancy place" before heading home to their hovel for the evening.

Two tables away sat two "aging rock star"-looking guys—two original members of Journey, 20 hard years later. They sported long, blow-combed graying hair and wore sunglasses while they ate their fried chicken and Jell-O salad.

All of these people would normally amuse me except I was drunk.

I had spent the afternoon getting to the bottom of a bottle of Wild Turkey with my editor. We were busy hashing out the next year of my contract. I wanted $100,000 and a company car. I got a raspberry danish and a dog-eared copy of X-Men issue #171. It was a raise.

My state of drunkenness could have gone two ways after a four-hour marathon of booze and negotiation. I could have kept drinking and vomited in a few hours or do it the way my Norwegian friends would and eat some greasy food before I settle in for an evening of maintenance boozing.

I picked the way of the Norse and went to the buffet.

After picking a table far away from all of the bad vibes, I headed for the food lines.

I met him at the salad bar. He was old and had a peg leg. I'm not kidding, he had a goddamned peg leg with scrimshaw carved in it and everything. He was also wearing a big, floppy hat, had an eye patch, and was talking to the three-bean salad.

At one point, he threatened to carve a Blood Eagle into the salad and I could hold my tongue no longer.

"Hey, Peg-legged Pete. The Vikings carved Blood Eagles into their victims. You are clearly a Buccaneer and should threaten this cursed salad by sending him down to Davie Jones' locker."

That's when I saw the knife tucked into his pants. By the handle, it looked like a United States Marine Corps issue KaBar Fighting Knife. This man was about to pull out a 7-inch knife and come at me.

I wasn't about to let that happen so I quickly hit him on the head with my clear glass salad plate that didn't have any food on it yet.

The plate shattered on impact with his cranium and he fell chin first into the salad bar before collapsing in a heap on the floor.

Before I could do anything, an employee behind me said "Get an ambulance, this man just fell." He winked at me and whispered "That man is a menace and should be castrated. I'll cover for you if you leave now."

I grabbed a chicken leg and the wife and I calmly walked to the door.

If any of you know my criminal past, I was not about to stick around and get thrown in jail for six more months.

I put the car in drive, squealed the tires, and sped out of the parking lot just as the ambulance was pulling in.

I stopped it and told the driver that it was a horrible scene inside. He should call for back up before going into that hell. I said to him, "When we left, they were getting ready to sacrifice a retard!"

He got on the CB, and I got the hell out of there.

I ended up dining on chicken pot pies and cheap rum that night. Just happy to be away from that evil place.