Suzy Says

Last report of the Day

I was halfway through watching Hannibal (is there anything more fun than watching a creepy movie with a purring cat curled up on your stomach?) when I got a craving for ice cream. I threw on some clothes (can’t run out in an old t-shirt and sweat pants), and ran to the corner store where I purchased the following essentials:

-a package of Pepperidge Farm Montauk Cookies (Chocolate Chip & Walnuts)

-a tin of Blue Diamond Almonds (Smokehouse, of course)

-a 4-pack of Calistoga Sparkling Mineral Water (Wildberry Flavor)

-a 6-pack of Canada Dry Ginger Ale

-a pint of Haagen Dazs Chocolate Ice Cream

While I was there, this old bag clutching a couple of wine coolers smiled at me with what looked like her four remaining teeth. It was awful. She was wearing a beret, a tight dress that made her look like a linen bag filled with broken sticks, and so much cheap perfume it made my eyes water. I waited way at the back of the store with my sleeve over my nose until she left. Thank God the cash register is near the open door.

As I was paying for my stuff a stringy, dirty specimen wandered by the door screaming, ‘Fucking buses, FUCK YOU!’ Of course, anyone who has had to deal with the San Francisco Municipal Railway has felt like that at one time or another.

“Some perfume, huh?” I said to the guy behind the counter, one of the seemingly endless supply of sons of the owner of the store, all of them great guys.

“Yeah,” he said, without thinking. Then he paused. “You could smell that back there?”

“Man,” I replied, “I could taste it.”

At his feet his dog, Archie, seemed to be trying to hide his ultra-sensitive canine nose under his paws.

As my stuff was being bagged two other guys came up to the cash. They seemed to know each other.

“Big night, huh?” the first guy asked. He’d been perusing the same shelf of cold sodas the whole time I was there and now approached the guy behind me in line- with nothing to show for his time (and I half expected him to say something like, ‘Hell, I don’t have to buy the sodas to enjoy ’em. I just like looking at them all chilled and shiny in the cold case.’)

The second guy, who was about as wide as he was tall (most of that mass a solid gut encased in a strained and stained t-shirt) was holding a gigantic glass screw-top bottle of urine-hued wine (probably from Maison de Getting-Some ce Soir) and a package of soda crackers. He smiled through a beard so thin it looked like some sort of affliction and said, “Got a heavy date tonight, my man!”

In cases like that, an imagination as active as mine can be a disability, and I was glad to finally get home to the cats and purge my mind of the atrocious imagery flashing through it.

We now return to Hannibal, already in progress…