One thing Jerry was sure of as he clasped the woman’s hand and tried to peer into the future: he was in someone else’s movie. While over the years he had watched a few episodes of Dr. Who and a few of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he was really out of his element in this sci-fi end-of-the-world storyline. He could imagine everything beginning with a big belch, but he simply couldn’t comprehend what the end of every thing would be like.
Perhaps that was due to his handicap: he was positively unable to inhale any kind of smoke so had very little experience with the wonders of cannabis. In fact, he thought, the only thing he really knew about the stuff was that supposedly it wouldn’t do anything for you the first time you indulged. So if all this really was a vision foisted upon him by spiked chocolate milk, then there must have been a first time — perhaps that party in San Francisco all those years ago when someone gave him a cup of delicious tea, and all the other people at the party, giggling behind their hands, watched him expectantly as he drank it.
If his choice to have his latte “here” rather than “to go” was going to bring the universe — or all creation or all evolution or whatever it was — to an absolute end, he wondered who the unnamed author of the opening of this saga had been. Almost certainly a man. Hence the protagonist was him, Jerry, a guy obsessed with a sexy barista, a guy frustrated not only in getting a date with her but by the original creator’s prohibition on subsequent mention of her.
Now if the person writing the first chapter had been female, perhaps the unmentionable barista would have been the protagonist. And perhaps she would have been obsessed with hunky baritones. Jerry flexed his narrow shoulders and quietly began to run scales. “Do, re, me, fa, sol…”
He wondered if she knew about barihunks.blogspot.com. Don’t laugh. Not until you’ve gone to the site and watched a bare-chested Teddy Tahu Rhodes doing push ups and singing an aria at the same time. Ahhhhhh!
Jerry considered: Which aria would be best to sing to woo the dark-haired barista? Well, obviously, if it worked with Carmen it would work with this Frida person. And if she would be his even for one duet, did it really matter if it the universe came to an end in a day or two?
He took one step away from the lovely lady, and began to sing:
Toreador, en garde. Toreador. Toreador.
