Johnny Angel

The sign, enormous and neon and broken, displayed the name of the Diner proudly: EDGAR O'MAHONY'S DINER. And what an atrocious mouthful. It could have just been Mel’s for fuck’s sake. The place snapped back at my derision in bright yellow letters: JUKE, BURGERS, MALTEDS on a sign posted in the window.

I decided then, no matter how good the service, I wouldn't be leaving a tip.

The Crossroads is the deserted centerpoint between the roads to Heaven or Hell or Purgatory or wherever the 4th road leads. For a million miles before the Roads, there is nothing but the Diner. The Diner glinting red as a stop sign and silver as magic bullets in the perpetual high noon is the Last Stop, the last stop just before you get your direction after death.

When I died, I’d already long known about the Diner, and I drove fast to get there, through the Crossroads, not a soul in sight, so to speak. I flicked my cigarette and started for the entrance. Pulling open the door, I was hit with cool air and the grease and honey bouquet of America.

The door shut sighing behind me and the night fell in a blink. It’s day outside, and always night inside. There was no one there to acknowledge my presence at all but the sleigh bell hanging alarmist and two seasons late (or early) from the door handle.

Johnny Angel by Shelley Fabares.

The song rang through the Diner like a warning. The only movement in the place was steam rising from an unknown source through the porthole in the kitchen door. The violence of a silly fucking teenage death ballad like Leader of the Pack ceased to be quaint here. Where it had previously been some nostalgic phenomenon of a time before seat belts, the short lives of young lovers shamed me. Real hearts were broken, real girls lost real boys to the clunkiness of 50s dream machines and even clunkier ideals about honor and manhood. The frustrations of a thousand surviving girlfriends tensed my spine one vertebrae at a time until the feeling became strong enough to be a morning Betty materializing in a back booth.

"Hello?" I spoke to the invisible souls listening.

I sat at the bar and turned over my nondescript ceramic coffee cup that waited the same way at every place setting. Maybe someone would fill 'er up, if I waited long enough. Burning coffee smell. I thought about the phrase 'dime a dozen' and how that's exactly what this place is.

I pulled a menu from between the napkin holder and the usual bottled condiments and flipped through it. I say "flipped" but it was only two, syrup spattered, plastic sheathed pages. The breakfast menu was vast and complicated. It contained things I'd never heard of before like Tiger Cronut and Lobster & Robin’s Egg Fritatta. It filled the first page and continued halfway through the next. Under the last breakfast item was the afterthought of only one other meal of the day.

Lunch:

Burgers and fries (Cheese if you're lucky)

Beverages:

Water (Get it while you can)

Dr. Pepper

Build Your Own Malted:

Chocolate

Strawberry

Vanilla

(Mix and match. Go ahead it doesn't cost extra!)

I started to cry. I don’t know why. Because whoever made this menu loves to feed people and was maybe never good enough to do anything but breakfast. Whoever Edgar O’Mahoney really is, I fall in love with him, just sitting there.

Fluttered into existence by the sound of my own heart, a man sat suddenly next to me. A kid, really. A foolish boy who’s story I knew without asking. The sound of leather against leather, his jacket as he placed his elbows on the Formica. I wiped my tears while he greeted me gentle without mentioning my tears, just handing me a grip of napkins. His fingernails were black crescent moons on the cliffs of complicated scar patterns that can never get clean.

This was Laura’s dead boyfriend, Johnny. Johnny Angel. My angel.

I couldn’t look at him, but I reflexively reached up to touch the pin (his pin) I was certain would be fastened to my sweater. In its absence, I adjusted myself and sat up straight.

"Is that your bike out front?" I asked the air in front of me.

"Yup."

"Do you race?"

"Mostly chicken," he snorted.

A triplet of busboys filed out from the kitchen, clapping and singing. Clapclap, clap. Clapclap, clap. As they clapped, droves of customers bloomed from mist, invoked by their cadance, filling the Diner to capacity with the cheery sounds of a Saturday night. The busboys circled one another and split. They spun down the aisles, theatrically serenading the customers. The restaurant roared, some people clapped along.

The boys came together in front of the register and one took another in a waltz hold, trapping the third between them. They danced some sort of slapstick routine, their skates clacking against the linoleum. They spun out and away from one another, each finding their own patron to coax from their seats. They held them close and twirled them, never missing a beat. From behind the counter, the Waitress shook her head, grinning and drying a glass.

One of the boys reached into his apron, producing the eggs he had been juggling and began again. Another rolled to the booth nearest the door and pulled a quarter from the ear of an old woman, who cackled. The last boy lifted a tray filled with ice waters and began dispensing them to every setting. When he came around to us, I thanked him.

"You got it, Electric Lady," he said, and touched my shoulder as he skated away.

As the triplets disappeared back through the kitchen door, my heart kept getting heavier, dishes piling up in the back from those long on their way to another world. Of course the water Gods could accompany Death in his Diner, and would manifest in the form of the water-bringers, the busboys. The tricksters, the changeable, the uncaring. I was somewhere before this. I was alive somewhere and able to ignore the tragedy of being young. But that place had its own problems, I think. How else could I have ended up here?

"I've never lost a game of chicken," I said to Johnny, my voice vacated of all hope.

"You don't say."

He sounded as dim witted as I thought he might have looked but I was still too terrified to turn and behold him.

The record changes to Endless Sleep by Jody Reynolds. That’s the only thing the Diner plays: Songs To See Your Dead Boyfriend To.

"Are you dead, Johnny?"

"Names not Johnny." I could hear his smirk. "And aren't we all?"

I turned to him, finally, and found his bottomless, navy blue eyes. Aqua velva and dirty tires.

"I've won every game of chicken I've ever played," I challenged.

"Yeah, what about the ones you didn't play?"

"I'll win all of those too."

He smiled a sharp, snaggle smile, a gap the size of the train tracks between uptown and poortown.

"Which one was the best?"

"Which what? Which win?"

"Yeah. Which one was the most satisfying? You know, you think they might just be scrappy enough to show you up but they slide out just before you was gonna have to?"

My blood pumping hushed enough to consider what it might mean to win and lose, simultaneously. The sound of the record changing again soft under our staring contest.

"That's the thing, it's heartbreaking," I said. "It's never satisfying.”

“Oh, no?”

“No. I… guess I’m sick of winning. I’d like it if somebody was strong enough not to look away.”