Noah Cicero: The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. II

I follow Gina to the cooler where the salad mix is located.

We stand there alone.

She throws the salad mix onto the glass plates and I throw the cheese on.

Dishwashers aren’t supposed to help servers make salads, but since it is Gina I do.

Gina knows this.

She is taking advantage of my crush.

I know this.

This is not said out loud.

I do not care that she is taking advantage of my crush. Worse things have happened. I like being around her and she is letting me. She even invited me to be around her. And I like being alone with her, which is even better.

While preparing the salad, Gina asks, “How old are you?”

I don’t want to answer.

I’m old.

Not really.

She is twenty-two and I’m twenty-six.

That is a big difference.

Maybe not, but in my head it is.

“I’m twenty-six.”

I hate myself for being twenty-six.

She says, “Do you go to school?”

“No.”

I stand there in silence.

I don’t know what to say.

I’m so afraid, weird, and dysfunctional.

She doesn’t know this.

She doesn’t know me.

I never talk about myself.

That is my fault.

I go around saying things, but never saying anything about myself. I assume it is because I’m so boring and I know that and don’t want anyone else to think I’m boring.

Gina is finished with the salads.

We leave the cooler and she goes back to serving tables and I go back to the dish-tank.

This is my life.

God, I hate myself.

Chang and I are sitting at the Waffle House.

It is around 2:30

AM

.

We are sitting at the counter reading in silence.

Time passes easily at the Waffle House.

It is a good place to sit when you can’t sleep. You eat some food, read some, listen to truckers talk, and let the shit of the universe stay outside the Waffle House.

My favorite server at the Waffle House is Isabella. Isabella is a disaster of a human being. She grew up on the Eastside of Youngstown. Which is a small third-world country located inside of America.

I have a small crush on Isabella. Not as prominent as the crush on Gina, but a crush nonetheless.

Isabella motions for me to go outside and smoke a cigarette with her. She looks emotional so I prepare myself to listen to sentences of misery, hardship, and endless toil that will only end with the cessation of her beating heart.

We are standing outside.

The weather is nice.

There are stars and the moon shines at half crescent.

It is a good moon, a nice bright moon that shines on our bewildered faces, lighting up our wrinkles placed there by years of industrial suffering done in the name of possessing food.

“I left my boyfriend,” Isabella says.

“You did?”

I say this trying to sound concerned, like I care. I don’t care though; her boyfriend has nothing to do with me. I met him once and he was overweight and had nothing interesting to say.

“Yeah, I did. I just couldn’t handle taking care of him anymore. It was starting to get on my nerves. He started getting fat from not working. And all the fucking time he says he’s going to get a job and never does. All he does is play video games and smoke weed.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah, I know. I’ve talked to everybody and everybody says I should leave him. I don’t know though. I’ve been with him for years.”

She has spoken to everybody; that’s typical. People who tell everybody their problems get on my nerves. People view their breakups as theatrical musicals in this country. They need a fucking audience to do anything of significance.

“Do you want to hang out then?” I say.

“Yeah, that sounds good.”

“I think we would go well together. We both are like free spirits and shit.” That is such a load of bullshit. We wouldn’t go well together.

“Yeah, we should try it,” Isabella says.

“When is your next day off?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Mine is tomorrow too. We should hang out.”

“All right, it’s a date.”

We go inside.

I’m very happy about this.

I sit down next to Chang. He says, “What happened?”

“We have a date tomorrow.”

“Are you sure about this?”

“I’m so alone,” I say.

“So am I.”

“We’re fucked.”

“Yes.”

“Somebody has to be nice to me someday.”

Chang pauses for a second and looks deep into his mind, trying desperately to recall an incident when someone was nice to him. He says, “Vasily, if she doesn’t come over, we’ll go to the bar and get drunk. How does that sound?”

I look down at my coffee, and say, “Okay.”

I’m sitting alone after getting back from the Waffle House.

I can’t sleep because of the coffee.

When I can’t sleep I watch YouTube videos.

YouTube is better than television.

Television is self-murder.

The television tells you what sounds nice. YouTube tells you what sounds horrible.

I type the phrase “Peak Oil” into the search bar.

A long list of movies appears. I click the first one.

The movie starts.

Thousands of dead bodies are strewn everywhere!

Starving children are murdering dogs with kitchen knives!

Elderly women are sucking dick for saltines!

Thousands are in line to buy water!

Nuclear bombs explode, vaporizing humanity!

The suburbs are ghost towns, their pools full of muck, their decks rotting!

Automobiles are rusted along the side of the road, parked where they ran out of gas!

Poor suburban children are sitting around a fire wearing mittens!

Women cry in the streets!

Men hit each other with clubs!

Asthmatics are coughing to death in their living rooms!

Humans buried in mass graves!

Malaria is killing millions!

Starving families are chewing on bark for nutrition!

Wal-Mart is going bankrupt!

People are eating their pet hamsters!

The pyramid eye of the Illuminati hangs over all of it laughing hysterically!

Total carnage!

Rampant death!

Pestilence!

Evil forces lurk everywhere!

All of humanity dies and nothing is left but their garbage!

I like movies like that.

Peak oil movies are good for that.

Now I search for ‘Global Warming.’

A long list pops up. I click on one I haven’t seen before.

The movie comes on.

A tidal wave engulfs Manhattan!

Thousands of poets, novelists, painters, movie producers, actors, models, musicians, office workers, and Puerto Rican maids are engulfed in a tidal wave of water. You can hear the screams of dying painters and poets for miles!

Florida is consumed. The elderly and the beautiful are drowned!

Polar bear paws smack the water, and you see them drown!

Penguins are crying in agony!

An ice age begins!

Snow cloaks America!

Millions of dead bodies are covered in ice and snow, frozen solid!

There is no food!

People murder each other for Kit Kats!

It is so cold all the pipes freeze in America at the same exact second and they all break!

All the plumbers have frozen to death and no one is alive to fix the pipes!

The fingers of a small child are black with frostbite, and an old man carrying a Boy Scout knife cuts him up and eats him for what little nutrition he has to offer!

Women and children wearing mittens!

Humans have cut down all the trees for firewood, creating deforestation, which causes mudslides!

Mudslides kill millions!

The pyramid eye of the Illuminati hangs over all of it laughing hysterically!

Total carnage!

Rampant death!

Pestilence!

Evil forces lurk everywhere!