My first stop was the restroom, in back. Waiting there was a man not dissimilar in physical appearance to a latter-day Burroughs. He was thin and his skin was taught and crusting in places. Several sores on his hands and lips and his yellow stare, as well as the way he kept twitching, added to the general sense that his business in there would be too long to make it worth my while to wait. I got on line instead and spent my five minute wait-time in the usual funk of despair that deciding what the best course of action re: ordering food would be. After dealing with the confused look of the woman who tried twice to hand me a dozen ketchups when all i wanted was one, I looked for a seat. Downstairs the air had been rebreathed so many times i felt faint and so returned to the front where someone had vacated a table in the interim. I ate and held my paperback open with one hand, which never fails to develop into a painful hand-cramp. On my left sat a couple of Asian women and it struck me again that in this city one can never take anyone’s origins or linguistic abilities for granted. I expected them to not speak a word of Enlish, as do most tourists circa Union Square at 3pm on a weekday, but they spoke perfect SoCal. In front of me was a young woman, in her twenties, eating, talking on the phone and rocking her large baby carriage back and forth. When she was not on the phone she alternated cooing at her baby and trying to coax it into drinking from its bottle. We got up to leave at the same time and i followed her to the wastebasket to dump my platter, and then to the door. The first of the two doors opened outwards so i akwardly tried holding the door open for her with one arm as she wrestled with the carriage. She didn’t thank me but instead kept talking to her baby, so i figured i’d let her struggle with the second door on her own. She swung the carriage around so as to be able to back out the door, and looking down at her baby, i discovered she had been talking to and trying to feed a large plastic doll.

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