Zachary's is a zoo as I dodge the elbows and glares from mindless predators of Downtown Berkeley in July. Thick walls of intelligence sip blood-thinning serums of mass as we loom over still-eating couples, willing them to slurp through their sauces and crusts more steadily so that we may ease the stiff of our sore, sore muscles. We are forced to wait and gawk in a holding area until there is a proper table for us to occupy.
I order one Fat Tire and savor it like the lingering change ringing in my savings jar (modeled after one of those posh London telephone booths - all crimson and criss-crossed), which waits at home to be looted for parking meters and plastic jewelry machines. Marty stumbles in and squeezes his disproportionate torso through the brood, adding to our already bulging, eager brigade a new lurker to shine the heat of hurry to our more fortunate counterparts already seated in the dining room of the pizzeria.
The rest of us - Robin, Mathieu, Jillian, Adam and some poor bastard whose name I am unable to recall - swilled and leered and were beginning to match eyes with the patrons of this cramped Bay eatery. I didn't know personally half the crew I was huddled up with. Adam, Marty and the cruel swine whose name I can't recall are as familiar to me as tilling soil or coal mining. But as if by divine appointment, here we stood, along with roughly 30 other road-weary warriors of the 21st Century - hard-working troglodytes who just wanted a piece of the pie, literally in this case. We'd become one in the same, left somewhere starving along the food chain, together, and in desperate repose.
We wanted a fucking table. We reasoned, "Who in their right mind would deny the comfort of those who'd love nothing more than to make you rich? Build a bigger restaurant, fer Chrissakes." What did these people have that we didn't? A trickier tipping maneuver?(The ol' standby of folding the fiver between your middle and ring finger while shaking the hand of the maître d' is no longer palatable, as there are fewer and fewer maître d's and increasingly more snot-nosed, white, middle-class gangstas patrolling our establishments. Thanks, Eminem).
Suddenly our modest sips of beast morphed into threatening, desirous gulps; eyes ablaze with utter hatred and anger at the relative nonsense we seemed to be enduring in this suffocating murk. No one was being called upon to take his or her place among the gorging herd. No one would rise from his or her seats at the conclusion of their feast - everyone digested, sickeningly and for absurd periods of time; dabbing at food-stained mouths with wretched, grease-blotted napkins; fetching gum or toothbrushes from bottomless purses to freshen up their atrocious portal stench; yawning and slouching in pathetic hunch while the rest of us were husking for sustenance in an exceedingly more doomed, cramped corner (limbo, as it were).
Our supposed seating time of 7 PM zoomed past us in a flurry of talking heads, fruitless reservation announcements, sticky pint glass circles on the tables adhering to the sleeves of my "vintage" Western button-up, and my hands trembled from the lack of nutrients and introduction of booze. My brow furled, eyebrows shifted at downward-sloping "V" toward the center of my flaring nose. My lip quivered in some demented Elvis Presley improv bit on the outskirts of Vegas gone totally and fatally awry. The stink of herded humans hung heavy in the halls and I was ready to inflict swift death within seconds to the dawdling consumers STILL STAYING SEATED.
...If it hadn't been me, it would have been someone else...
Even then I noticed that all waiting area banter had ceased and all of us, clutching heavy glasses and drooling hunger spit, rejoiced silently and angrily in a singular bliss. We were a thousand eyes, scoping with shotgun cross-hairs at the jovial bunch, holding high pitchforks and fiery torches, chanting mutely for vittles and victimless victory. Just as I began a surreal, slow-motion lunge over the makeshift barrier separating the paying from this reeking pig pen of rage and hate I was so desperate to vacate, a half-full (always an optimist) glass of some unknown amber liquid whizzed past my ear, sprinkling sticky suds along my cheek until it ended its storied arch directly upon the cackling mouth of a hulking, mustachioed gentleman seated at the table closest to the kitchen. His name was Paul. The counter-attack was almost instant...
[To Be Continued Next Week: The Story of Paul]
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