I walked through the door flaps and entered the kitchen. Shaun was standing at the dish sink, washing out the soup containers. He had his portable head phones on.
'What's up, Supaman,' I asked him, rolling the black sleeves of my work shirt up to my elbows. I was looking around the kitchen line to find evidence of today's potential specials. Nothing in sight. Shaun continued washing the soup containers.
I turned around and ask Shaun again, a little louder. 'What's the motherfuckin' word, Supaman?'
He turns around and removes an ear phone. 'What's up, Captain motherfuckin' Crunch?' He says it enthusiastically and claps my one hand and half-hugs me. Just for the sake of brevity, picture Macho Man Randy Savage in camo shorts, sporting a thick goatee and oversized thirty dollar ear phones. He's our daytime dishwasher.
'I need you to get me a diet soda,' he says, handing me his own personal 32-oz. plastic yellow cup. He is always drinking diet soda, and he is always asking me to fill it for him from the bar. He's afraid of our owner. 'I hope I don't die from this next one, huh.' He laughs.
Henry told him that diet sodas will clog his colon and kill him through a long, constipated cancerous rotting of the asshole. Henry said if you drink too many diet sodas, the olestra and the high fructose corn syrup will collect in your lower intestine and outlast your stomach enzymes, and then your stomach enzymes give up on breaking things down, and in turn, break down, and then the shit you eat, the regular shit, it will become impossible to shit. Henry says dying inside out, rectum sphincter first, is one of the worst ways to die. Henry also says if you snort Xanax it doesn't last as long as if you just eat the whole bar on an empty stomach, and he's right, but, well, yeah, I digress.
I come back to give Shaun his diet soda, but he and Henry are talking.
'Who do I need to write it to?' Henry was asking Shaun.
'Just the MVA,' said Shaun.
'What does it need to say?'
'Just that I been good, you know, workin' here the last ten months, been good, no problems with no one, you know.'
'Like how you tried to stab me twice?' Henry said with seriousness in his levity.
'Yeah, that, you can put that on the second page, man' he said and put his ear phones back on.
Shaun is ten months fresh off of an inpatient stint at Springfield Psychiatric Hospital, where he received treatment for bipolarity after being picked up off the side of the road in Daytona Beach selling an assortment of things ranging from coat hangers to crack. He told me they used to call him the chef, he could cook it so good.
He did some time at the Westminster incarceration center and after was put on parole. He was living with his mother up until his birthday, when he went to a restaurant and racked up a huge bill, gorging on food and alcohol. Nobody in his family came to visit him, so he left without paying and began walking down Route 32. The police picked him up about ten minutes afterwards.
He told me the monsters sent him that way.
If you ask him a question the wrong way, he will think you are interrogating him. I asked him where he lives one day and he took off his ear phones and stared at me dead into my eyeballs, all the way to the back of my skull.
'Where do YOU live?' he asked me. I told him Woodbine, but he backed up and walked over to Henry, never taking his eyes off of me. Henry laughed and kept cooking.
Another time Shaun told me he killed three hundred alligators in Louisiana.
'That's ten alligators a day,' he said. 'Shoot 'em right in the top of the head.'
'What were you doing in Louisiana for a month?' I asked him.
'Killin' all them gators.'
'What would you do with them after you killed them?'
'Killed what?'
'The three hundred alligators,' I said.
'I don't know,' he said, and put his ear phones back on. 'They're all monsters.'
A different time I told him that he looked like Macho Man Randy Savage. He told me that's bullshit, and that he's the Undertaker.
I now call him the Shaundertaker.
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