Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else’s water-lily.

- cryptic fortune-cookie “fortune” procured by Alert Life in the Corn Devotee Brooke


Nooderr Town: Culture's Last Frontier.

From the outside –let’s face it, ladies and germs – Noodle Town looks like one of those places where the owner/cook/waiter absently swats gravid, pulsing roaches the size of Twinkies into the lo mein, which already is replete with his eye crust (‘sreepies’) and ashes from the Parliament he’s trying to keep from the sweat rolling off his little Asian forehead. In the case of Noodle Town, it’s simply not true: I have it on good authority that those are june-bugs, not roaches.

Imagine if you will the breakroom at a skeezy, oh, I dunno, rubber Halloween mask factory. Subtract the vending machines and the soulless undead factory haints and put a bunch of tables and chairs in it with a barely obscured kitchen, and voila – Noodle Town. Not much to look at, but the food - sweet Jesus, I’d throw a bleach-soaked lawn-dart into a schoolyard at recess for their Shrimp and Broccoli. To get food that good, you can imagine that the people who work at Noodle Town are a little less than up-to-speed on a few things, like, oh, the Engrish. Considering that about half of the people I deal with on a daily basis are in the same boat – pardon the pun – that aspect of the Noodle Town experience doesn’t matter to me in the least. As long as they serve that junk up hot, fast and with as much flavor as they always do, I wouldn’t care if they were back there worshipping the devil in Esperanto. Well, unless the process would involve the devotees having to be, at any point, nude. Go to Noodle Town sometime and you will see why this would be concerning to someone who’s eaten there 3.4 billion times.

Anyway, so there I am, hunkering down and getting ready to open my maw to receive a chopstick-heap of chicken and garlic sauce when I notice a small flurry of activity near the front of the establishment where one establishes whether or not one is a “dine in” customer or not and where you pay (cash or check only, please). A woman with far too much eye-makeup is speaking to one of the cooks. By “speaking” I mean “painfully enunciating every syllable like the cook is five and retarded.” Their conversation goes something like this:

Eye-shadowed Brine Hag: So. Did. You. Have. Time. To. Read. The. Book. I. Gave. You. Question Mark.
Bewildered Asian Man: Huuh?
ESBH: The. Bible. I. Gave. You. Question Mark.

At this point, both Keith and I stop nourishing ourselves to watch in mute horror. Not only is she a complete ass, but she dearly loves the Lord and Savior – which would ordinarily be fine, but I’m sure our protagonist had other, more pressing matters to attend, like steaming a duck carcass or something. He’s looking uncomfortable – thinking about how he should have lowered a dear piece of his anatomy into her fried rice, I have no doubt – and yet she presses on, unaware or uncaring that Mr. Asian Cook-Dude is trying to give her clarion signals in the world’s truest and most utilized language: body language.

ESBH: Do. You. Want. To. Come. To. Bible. Study. Question Mark.

At this point, I become concerned that I will have to wait for this woman in the parking lot and take her sweet life in her 1989 Mazda. An American would have been able to deftly maneuver out of the situation by saying that, no, Sundays are for washing one’s hair, or no, I am not religious and not interested, or no, I worship Sobek the crocodile-god with songbird and stray dog sacrifice and have no need for your weird bleeding Jesus-man. Or, at the very least, an extension of that all-important digit, perhaps emphatically thrust out and upward. But our protagonist was losing face, and quickly. Heaven only knows what happened to that Bible; the Chinese do so enjoy rolling their own cigarettes.

ESBH: When. Do. You. Get. Off. Work. Question Mark.
BAM: Uh, never. I am chained to this wok and if I leave I shall suffer death by ten thousand slices. It is part and parcel of my indentured servitude.
ESBH: What. Is. Your. Phone. Number. Question Mark.

She took it down dutifully in a Hello Kitty scratchpad, and if there is justice in the world he gave her, at the very least, a non-functional number. At most, perhaps he gave her the number to an all-day, all-night opium/enema den – but then she’d have more work to do.
She left, and the final straw of the entire experience was her folding her hands and bowing with her eyes slanted and closed, like small children do when mocking the Asian. I could almost hear her: “Ahhh, so! You rike-ah some flied lice?”

As I washed her slaughtered human effluvia out of my trunk, I wondered why I cared so much. Was it my training in anthropology, a field which has seen its share of heartache concerning missionaries and proselytizing? Was it because of my Catholic education, replete as it was with “penance” and “confession”? Or was it her big, poofy bangs and floor-length denim skirt? I, and she, will never know – she, because she’s *ahem* no longer with us, and I, because even as we speak am seeing something shiny and distracting.

Until Wednesday, I remain,

Domonic