A Savage Life

Chapter 13

I felt very self-conscious as we stepped through the double doors of the diner. Anybody would if you looked like you had just said, "Screw hygiene, I'll stink if I want." And I felt even more self-conscious as people gawked at me. Some teenage kids snickered at me, old people looked at me as if I was walking around naked, the wait staff glared at me like I was an evil fiend, but mostly, what I received were looks of disgust and snide remarks. I shivered at their sight, and it was not only their judgmental gazes following me as I walked to a table, but fear plaguing my mind. The worst thing that could happen was that somebody was going to say or try something off-the-wall, or say something beyond rude, and Sabine was going to break bad and get us into another fight, and based on the trigger itched soldiers around here, that would be one fight that we wouldn't walk away from.

We sat down in a booth, after ten years of searching, and I got a good look around the place before Sabine opened his mouth. If I could describe this place in one word, that would be, Sixties. I swear, it was a throwback to back then with it's neon booths and neon signs, cartoonish posters, and the lone jukebox in the corner with a couple of employees and customers gathered around it. Waitresses wearing duckling yellow dresses up to their knees with poodles on them, their hair up in a tight bun, and high heeled red stilettos, as well as a cigarette or two in their mouth walked around taking people's orders. The cashiers up ahead had greased back hair, leather jackets, white t-shirts, and super tight blue jeans with holes in the knees. But let's not forget the laser pistols every employee had donned on in obvious places. The waitress's had them in their aprons, and the cashiers in the hem of their pants. This made me have that nasty pit-in-the-stomach feeling that something didn't look quite as it appeared, but like I said before, Sabine took me back to the present and away from my thoughts with his babbling as he said, "Nifty place, eh?"

"Yeah," I replied. "Yeah it does. I was there when this style was going on."

"Ah really, what was it really like back then? Ya know, before all this mess happened?" Sabine asked. His tone of voice suggested I was immortal and had lived through the whole ordeal that happened years after my time, but I will tell him what it was like in the 60s for the sake of a darn good memory.

"The 60's was a good time," I started. "I was only in my 20s, a youngster, and this was the hippest era to live in. People said words like 'Groovy' or 'Raise the Roof.' Girls wore dresses, and we had lava lamps and little doorway beads that hung down on strings and you could walk through. We also had waterbeds and hip places that looked like this. It was a safe-"

"May I take your order?" A waitress interrupted as she puffed a volley of smoke our direction. Her hair was a bottled reddish-blonde, and her lips gave that dark, signature 60s look.

"I'll have a double cheeseburger with a bottle of water and some curly fries." I ordered.

Hey, don't look at me, I seen that advertised on the sign coming in through the door as one of their specials and couldn't resist. Our waitress gave me a look of contempt as she wrote down quickly on her writing pad. She looked up to me, knowing that she was going to reiterate my order back to me, but to my chagrin, said something else.

"A bar of soap for the Roach." she insulted.

I was going to say something nasty to the woman (As she didn't have much room to talk either), but that was before Sabine flipped the table on top of me in anguish, causing me to fall to the ground and be helplessly pinned to the floor with a cry of pain from the table's massive, metallic weight. And then I got to watch in horror as he just slapped the woman across the face like a slave master would to his servant in Honest Abe's time. The woman reeled back in pain, a huge blue and purple whelp forming on the side of her pale face. People stopped what they were doing and turned to us, and they stared us down like a pack of wolves. Time to go.