In the Milky Way, Before Dawn

In my 3rd year in college, I lucked out with a part-time gig as a security officer at a nearby hospital. I worked the midnight to 4am shift. It was perfect. Mostly, I sat at a desk by the front door, and did my home work. I also had some brief adventures, with several nurses. I was fairly buff in those days, and they seemed to want to examine me. But, this story isn't about the hospital. This is just trying to say how I wound up every night at 4:15am at a certain all night diner. I always stopped there on my way back to the dormitory after work.

The diner, a limping artifact of the fifties, was called, the Milky Way. It got its reputation back then as a be-bop joint with a dance floor, juke box, and, its out-of-this-world milk shakes and malts. It was the teen scene. But, that was back then. The place looks like a real dump now, but still had some of its glow, that kept it alive. Like the pitiful tattered charm of Cinderella after midnight, with one shoe. Especially, so late in the night, two hours before the dawn. There was never more than two or three people in the place at that hour. And, most always, the same two or three. And, they were all nut cases. Just like me.

Back in the corner booth sat the usual gothic couple draped in black, and almost blending into the shadowy wall. At first glance, all one could see was two hollow pale white faces staring back. I shrugged a silent nod their way. Like me, they were regulars here in the dead of night. Then there was Trixie, behind the counter. In her seventies now, she recalls the early days of the Milky Way, and the changing scene.
There were the preppies, and the be-boppers first, and then there were the hoods in black slacks and wife beater undershirts, the greasers, and the charmers. Those were the patrons of The Milky Way then. Later, a wave of hippies and folk singers dominated the scene, and after that, the flash flux of new wave and punk. And now, it's a motley crew that comes to the Milky Way. She calls them 'the poor, lost, misfits.'

So there I was, one of the pre-morning misfits, sitting down in a booth, and taking out my notepad. Halo appeared out of nowhere, and slid a cup of coffee in front of me. You could never hear her coming, because she was always barefooted. She had an ankle-length tie dyed gown on, and a plastic flower in her hair. She had come to the Milky Way some fifteen years ago, a disenchanted, wandering teen flower child. And she never left. And I have never, in all the years I have known her, seen her wearing shoes. I thought of her as Trixie's protege. Whenever Trixie lays down her last dish cloth, Halo will become the new Trixie. Mostly now, it's Halo that takes care of most of us misfit customers, anyway. Trixie is getting too athritic now. She is present now in the way that many other iconic fixtures in the diner are present. A symbol of constancy amidst a world of change. A living model of 'going with the flow'.

So, Halo places her palms down on my table and leans forward and tells me in a 'private' voice kind of way, that she is going to read her new poem to everyone tonight. She added that she was waiting for Oliver to get here. Oliver was her biggest fan. I was hoping for Oliver to show up, too. Then he could tell me the next part of the story that he has been telling me for the last six nights. Whether to call it a story, or a messianic delusion, I'm not sure. But last time we talked, he told me that I was all a part of his plan. And so was Trixie and Halo. He wasn't sure about the kids back in the corner, but added that he was trying to work something out.

As Oliver stumbled through the diner door, he was his usual bumbling hulk with a bulging brown breifcase. Physically, a giant of a man, but in pants and coat two sizes too large. An intellectual giant, too. It was he that told me of ancient walls in Egyptian tombs whose cryptic hierogylphics were transparencies, of a sort. They could only be understood by overlaying them on the cryptic hieiroglyphics on the other side of the wall. When you put them together, that's when you understand the secret. And the plan. So, it was this big crumpled mass of brown fabric that sat limply down in the booth. Halo promptly appeared with three ashtrays, and sat them on the table, as Oliver pulled two packs of Gitanes from his coat, and placed them on the table, next to the ashtrays. This same ballet took place every night.

Halo stepped nervously out into the middle of the diner's linoleum floor.
"Tonight I would like to read to you, my new poem. I call it, "Some Night Like This"'. Oliver and I both clapped, and nodded assuredly. And I think I heard the kids back in the corner snapping their fingers.

There was an awkward silence as Halo seemed to be gathering her composure and fidgeting with her pieces of paper. And then, it was as though something came over her. She began reading like a croaking Elizabethan on her death bed.

"My teeth were cold....and cracking
In their sweaters.....their muffled chatter...
Came softly stammered...through blue lips....
Some reliving...of some night...just like this...
just like this....just like this."

When Halo suddenly collapsed to the floor in a dead faint, I thought it was real. I jumped up about the time she suddenly stood up and bowed. I was stunned for a long moment. I think Oliver was too. There was just this big silence, except for some finger snapping from the distant corner. Oliver stood, and walked over to Halo. He hugged her, and took her hand. He led her back to our booth. "Halo, my sweet," he said, leaning forward across the table and clasping her hands in his. "You manifest the despair so well, my love. And now, is the moment of your birth. As I predicted in my notes from three weeks ago, you were destined to be one of the twenty chosen in the final days."

"But...chosen for what?" Halo asked anxiously. Oliver pulled Halo's hands up to his mouth, and kissed them. "To bear the last hope for this life," he said solemnly. "The One."
"The One?" she repeated timidly. He nodded, and turned to me.
"And, you are the father." I nodded. I didn't really have a clue what he was talking about. But, if the plan involved crawling into the sack with Halo, I was all for it.

Oliver is dead now. He overdosed on anti-depressants. Halo and I have a little boy. His name is Juan. On his twelfth birthday we told him, "If you are going to be god, you gotta get your act together." Unfortunately, he went astray. As for Halo and I, we try to be happy, anyway. And we visit Oliver's gravestone every Sunday morning.