From Visions of Garleyville
Worse than…
“I’m
telling you they’re worse than niggers, coming in here like they belonged,” the
woman from the Woolworth’s lunch counter told me when I sat down for my usual
chilly dog. I worked up the street at Grants, but the food was better here, and
the woman so full of local tales I would have missed out with any of the dozen
other eateries along that section of
“It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen them around before,” she went
on, sliding my dog in front of me. “Every time I passed Leo’s place I saw them
sitting hours on end at the counter. No doubt about their being drugged out of
their minds. But when Leo got sick of them, they came in here.”
“At
first Mr. Mercer didn’t see them. We figured he’d have a heart attack or go off
and retire, seeing those two Halloween characters sitting at his lunch counter,
wearing droopy hats and ragged clothes. I swear they could have been trying to
sell me dope with their strange talk: far
out this, groovy that. And I still
haven’t figured out what they meant by my being heavy and whether or not they meant the food.
“Far
worse than this was their giggling.
“They
sounded like two little children. One said something, the other would go off.
Then both would laugh. Over the most ordinary of things.
One would look at a katsup bottle and crack the other one up. One might glance
over at the shopping aisles, at a spool of thread or a piece of yarn, and off they went as if it was the biggest joke in the
world.
“Sure,
I wanted to ask them what it was all about, and in my fashion I did.
“`Is
there something I missing here, boys?’ I asked.
“That
only cracked them up all the more. And they kept saying how weird we were, if
you can believe that! But it wasn’t until they started singing that everything
went south. I’m not saying it sounded bad – no worse than you hear on
television now a days – it was just too loud. Hilda
said she could hear it all the way in gift wrapping at the back of the store.
Mr. Mercer certainly heard it in his office and came straight out, telling them
to shut up.
“I think he wanted to throw them out then and there, but
they scared him a little. He might have called the police – the way he
threatened – if he could have come up with something reasonable to say. But the boys weren’t robbing the place, and
the police in this town really couldn’t be bothered with anything unless they
got to play with their guns. Anyway, the boys calmed down, whsipering at each
other like it was still all one big joke.
“Maybe Mr. Mercer would have let things go had it been the
afternoon instead of lunchtime. But with the boys sitting in the middle of the
counter and our regulars struggling to sit as far away from them as possible,
we had a huge gap in the seating arrangements that Mr. Mercer couldn’t
tolerate. A lot of regulars wouldn’t even sit, and stood just outside the
counter area grumbling.
“Some even spoke loud enough for Mr. Mercer to hear them,
asking how he could like those kind of people into a
place like this. While these two didn’t smell, they certainly looked as bad as
bums. Weren’t there health laws to protect taxpaying citizens? Weren’t there
any real men around that could drag these hippies out and hang them from a
light pole?
“And it wasn’t as if these two spent big. They ordered
hamburgers and sodas, ate, then sipped melting ice the
rest of the time, ordering refills only when the ice ran out. Even then, Mr.
Mercer wouldn’t just tell them to do. He ordered me to deliver their sodas half
empty and spill some when I reached where they were sitting. I guess he figured
they’d get angry and leave, the way ordinary people would. They never noticed.
I could have dropped the sodas straight into their laps and they would have
laughed. A happier lot I’ve never seen in my entire life. They were worse than
niggers. They were niggers who couldn’t take a hint.
“Finally, Mr. Mercer couldn’t take the tension any more and
he called the police. And Lord and behold, they police actually came. It seemed
the police hated hippies more than tney hated anything, even niggers, and the
police dragged those two boys up off their stools, demanding
to see some identification. Did the boys seem afraid? No way. They even found
the police funny, looking over at those meaty officers as if the police had
made their day.
“`Sure, sure officer,’ they said, and pushed all sorts of
papers into the hands of the police.
“I would have been mortified. I would have moved out of
town. Those two? They came back today. And we can’t
get rid of them.”