California as a Final Resting Place [One Year Later (I would love to disappear and grow a beard)]

“Brett Watson, come on down!”

I stopped at that same Waffle House on my trip back to the Heartland of Sin and Degradation. I sat in the same booth and most likely drank coffee from the same cup I did a year ago. And while I don’t usually make eye contact with the waitresses because I don’t want them to confuse anything I do or say with me hitting on them, I looked up when I heard this girl say, “Don’t I know you?”

It was little Hattie Norfield, the girl who had gotten the mess beaten out of her by J. Lo some twelve months before. Her face had healed up nicely, and she looked pretty again. I told her, “I think you’re the prettiest girl to ever work in a Waffle House.” And she said, “Is that really an accomplishment?”

She asked me where I was going, and when I told her she wanted to know if I was interested in robbing the Waffle House and driving west into the sunset. I told her I don’t like driving west in the evening because it’s so hard on the eyes, and she said we could wait until it got dark, that would be fine.

We did wait until it got dark, but we didn’t rob the place. I told her it went against my philosophy, which said that it was okay to abuse people passive aggressively, and that it was okay to be sneaky and subversive, but that I couldn’t advocate inflicting personal physical or psychological harm on someone. She said she understood. She left without properly quitting, and we stopped at her trailer so she could pack up some clothes. Ahead of us, California laid stretched out waiting for us to tickle its greedy little belly with our talent and beauty. Hattie told me that she had some reconstructive surgery and that it was mostly covered by insurance, except for the nose job she had, and the eye lift, and the breast augmentation. I nodded and said okay, and I told her that I would never date a woman with fake breasts, and she said, “I would never date a man with a false sense of reality.”

The one thing we had stolen was a lot of frozen hash browns from the Waffle House, and we bought an ice chest, figuring we could thaw them as we needed them. Even though we couldn’t smother, cover, or chunk them, they would still be sustenance. But what ended up happening to them was much more interesting.

We probably spent a month driving around Los Angeles, sleeping in the car and doing interviews and casting calls with an ice chest full of soggy hash browns. It was only after the browns had been stinking for two days that I had an idea: We were going to see “The Price is Right.” It was January, and even though it’s not that cold in California in the winter, I still wore a big jacket and I stuffed the pockets with hash browns. And when Brett Watson was coming on down, I tossed a handful of potatoes at his face. It disoriented him so much that he tripped and fell, rolling all the way down to the front. Even Bob Barker, who in his old age is getting more and more prone to making smart-alleck comments, was speechless. In short, Brett punched me in the face, and I was arrested. Hattie stayed in the studio audience. She told them she didn’t know who I was.

I never saw her again after that. I never saw the car either, come to think of it. I had only the clothes on my back and a big jacket with soggy potato residue in the pockets. But my dream came true. I was on TV. I made an impact in pop culture. You should know that I made VH1’ “Best Week Ever,” and I’m sure that in the years to come I’ll make all the “wackiest TV moments” shows. I’m immortalized. The only thing that could have made it better would have been Bob Barker beating the crap out of me. That’s the only thing.

I wandered the streets of L.A. for a short time after that, planning on growing a beard and letting my hair get long. Then I would hitchhike or ride a bus home and everyone would wonder where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing. I’ve always wanted to disappear for a few months and resurface with a beard. That would be the height of mystery. People would not only want to know where I had been, but they would secretly wonder why I had let myself go – they wouldn’t want to ask about it, though. The beard would be the unspoken, unanswered question. They would assume it was because I just didn’t have time, but they wouldn’t really know. They would always wonder.

But the beard didn’t work out so well because it itched like a thousand bugs crawling just underneath my skin. I couldn’t trim it up nicely either, so I looked like Grizzly Adams. And when I was laying on a cardboard box trying to get some sleep and I thought of the metaphor of the one thousand bugs, that ended the beard for me because I have a phobia of bug swarms. Long story short, I spent my last twelve bucks in a barber shop getting groomed by a black gentleman named Bert who told me a lot of stories about all the famous people he had groomed: Joe Lewis, Frank Sinatra, Martin Luther King’s first cousin, and somebody that was a part of Sammy Davis Jr.’s road crew.

So that was it for the beard, the potatoes, Hattie, and my time on TV. What Hattie doesn’t know, probably until this day, is that I saw my car parked outside of J.J’s Tattoo Hut one sunny afternoon, and, using the spare key I kept in my wallet, I got in it and drove off. I ran my debit card way over paying for gas on the way home, but I made it. I made it, and as far as I know, all Hattie got out of California was the largest tattoo ever in history.

The End.