Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen - Dyan Sheldon [63]
Side by side, we bent over Stu. I was trying to make sure that his fine and noble heart was still beating, but Ella started slapping his face.
“Stu!” she called. Slapslapslap. “Stu, wake up. We’re going for a drink.”
I was really intrigued. I’d never seen this Four-star General side of Ella before.
“Where did you learn to do that?” I asked.
“Movies,” said Ella.
Stu opened his eyes, staring at us in an almost catatonic silence for a few seconds, much as a man might stare at angels.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “Where are you taking me?”
“You remember us,” said Ella. “It’s Ella and Lola. We’re your friends.” We hauled him to his feet. “We’re taking you for a drink.”
It felt as though we’d been walking through the hostile, darkling night for hours before we stumbled upon a place of refuge, safe from the ravages of the storm and the possibility of cold-blooded murder.
We found a café.
That is, it said it was a café. But if you, like I, think of a café as being small but elegant, French and atmospheric – the kind of place where one might as well write a poem as order an espresso – then the Purity Café was a diner. From the looks of it, it had probably been a diner for about fifty years.
I wiped a circle of dirt and steam from the window and peered inside. I could see booths, a Formica counter, a chrome-and-glass fridge, and, strung above the griddle, dulled red foil letters that spelled out MERRY MAS.
I stepped back so Ella could see. “What do you think?”
Preparatory to taking him in among the people, Ella was wiping the vomit from Stu’s shirt with a tissue and didn’t bother to look.
“So long as there aren’t armed men inside holding everyone hostage, I think it’s great,” said Ella. “I just want to sit down.”
She was definitely surprising me, I have to admit it. The Ella I met when I first moved to Deadwood would have been in tears by now, running from corner to corner looking for a public phone that was working so she could call home collect.
“Come on,” said Stu, lurching to the door. “I really need a drink.”
The wall that ran along the booths was covered with mirrors. As we stepped into the steamy warmth of the Purity Café, I could see three figures staring back at us over the clutch of condiments that graced each table. Two teenage girls in bedraggled party gear and a drunken twenty-nine-year-old man with string and shredded paper clinging to him and vomit all over his boots. We looked like people routinely picked up by the cops.
The other customers of the Purity Café, glancing up from their drinks and food, saw what I saw. You could practically hear them praying that we wouldn’t sit near them.
“Get him into a booth,” ordered Ella as the waitress bore down on us. “Quick, before she sees his feet.”
We dragged Stu to the nearest booth. I got in first and pulled him after me.
As soon as he hit the fake leather seat, Stu started talking.
“Everybody wants something from me,” he informed us again. “Even people I don’t know. Everybody thinks they own me.”
The waitress stopped by our table, pad in hand. If this were Deadwood, the sight of us would have put her into cardiac arrest by now, but this wasn’t Deadwood, it was New York. She had the jaded, seen-it-all air of the waitress in a depressing play. She looked at Stu.
“What’ll it be?”
“You think I have any real friends?” Stu asked her. “None of my friends give two cents about me. If I lost everything tomorrow, I’d never see any of them again.”
Her eyes fell on his sodden silk shirt with the bits of vomit Ella hadn’t been able to get off and the tentacles of paper and string.
“You’re in luck then,” the waitress told him. “’Cause it looks like you have lost everything.”
“We’ll just have coffee,” said Ella politely.
“Not me,” said Stu. “I’ll have a boilermaker and a deluxe hamburger platter, with a large side of onion rings.”
Ella and I exchanged a look of panic. We didn’t have enough money for a deluxe hamburger platter and a large side of onion rings.
“This isn’t a bar,” said the waitress. “How do you want your