THE CREEP WHO KILLED THE POWER: and excerpt from upcoming pseudofiction INDRID COLD IS DEAD
Leesburg, VA
The month of January in Washingtonland (I’ve always preferred this moniker to the more commonly used “DMV”) has about as much charisma as a head of wet lettuce. Nobody coming, nobody going . . . Federal government workers and students alike do their little snowfall tarantella, tongues anointed with glossolalia, praying for another full day of doin’ nothin’ . . . You could cut the collective sloth in the air with a plastic spork.
So I decided to dip out to the closest ecto-Beltway cluster of civilization that I could, a town that straddles the region’s perimeter: Leesburg, Virginia.
Leesburg is a scrunched-up little place that looks cute and quaint and cheap, but it is not. The burgers in Leesburg are still eighteen American dollars and the local beers are all named after Italo Calvino short stories and the films of Jean-Luc Godard. In short, it’s infested with the same hyper-scholastic fervor that keeps the good people of the District of Columbia from being able to enjoy themselves.
“I’ll have a coffee and a menu,” I said to the big blonde waitress at the Leesburg Diner, an endearingly anachronistic little magnet for froot loops like myself.
Within seconds of my plopping down in a booth, the power went out, killing the lights, the music, the cash register, and presumably all the kitchen equipment.
“Well, that ain’t good,” the waitress said, dropping off my coffee and a menu that was a vast as the universe itself. A quick flip through it suggested it offered ten thousand variations of yellow and brown food.
“I’ll be sixty in twelve years,” I said to her, “and I’ve never seen a menu even half this big.”
She shrugged pitifully and said, “Well, I might not be able to serve you,” and then went around the restaurant addressing the heavy unrest that was building up. “We’ll wait a few minutes and see if it comes back on.”
A fat man in slacks and a bath robe angrily slammed his fists down. “How the hell am I supposed to eat if I can’t even see what I’m eating?”
“You’ll figure it, hon,” the waitress calmly replied. “Blind people do it all the time.”
The light from outside trickled in through the blinds, but it was not a sunny day, so the diner was creepily crepuscular.
“Anybody else think it’s weird that the power went out as soon as that guy sat down?” said some ghoul in a Harley Davidson vest.
I wondered what unlucky soul in which he was referring.
The waitress shushed him and said, “Oh, he don’t have nothin’ to do with it.”
This egged the Harley guy on further. “I wonder what suspicious devices he might be concealing under that goofy hat,” he said pointing at the top of my head. “Nobody wears a hat of such enormous dimensions unless they have something to conceal.”
“Something big!” said a skinny guy in goggles. “And going tic-toc-tic-toc!”
“Easy, fellas,” I grumbled back at them, avoiding eye contact.
“I bet he’s got it pulled down like that hide his third eye—or maybe his antennas,” said a woman who looked a little touched by the angels. Someone else started quoting scripture. A dog barked from somewhere in the back of the house. What was up with this place?
“Yeah, maybe all the above!” hollered the Harley guy, now ten feet closer to me.
“Everybody hush!” the waitress snarled. “Y’all are giving me a headache.”
A West African gentleman in track suit walked in and the waitress got all buggy with the prospect of having to explain why there were no lights on and the stove didn’t work, et cetera, until she realized he had a big manilla envelope in his hand.
“Can you sign for this?” he said, dully.
“Oh! Of course, hon. That I can do,” she said. “I thought you were a customer, ha-ha-ha.”
She signed and the guy gave her the envelope and turned around and walked out. The waitress eyed the thing dubiously.
“I hope that ain’t the electric bill,” I said, prompting of chortles and snickers around the restaurant.
“No, no, I paid the electric bill on Monday!”
“That’s what they all say,” said somebody from a nearby booth.
“The whole damn block is without power,” said the bath robe guy, his fat face illuminated by his cellphone which he was gazing into. “It ain’t just this place. Hell, I don’t think there’s any juice in the whole town… My wife’s two blocks down getting her hair done and she said everything’s off everywhere.”
One by one everyone in the diner swiveled their gaze from the fat man looking at his phone to me. The waitress slinked off to back of the house, leaving me alone with an audible membrane of Dada-esque murmurs, featuring a cast of exclusively four-syllable words. These people, I could tell, wanted to toss me like a frisbee into the nearest me volcano.
I left a five-dollar bill on the table and said thanks to the gumball machine and exited the joint.
The sidewalk was packed with people looking around at each other and fucking around on their phones and chirping about the subject on hand. “Why no power? yuk-yuk-yuk,” was the collective mantra.
The traffic light was completely off. A chubby cop had stationed directly beneath and was semaphoring with great effort at what little traffic there was.
I walked in the direction of my car, which was a few blocks away. People were everywhere. The chatter intensified…
“This guy pulls into town…” said someone into their phone.
“… and like as soon as he parks, poof! no power nowhere,” said another.
“You know who just walked right past me,” said another.
“Yeah, white Audi, DC tags…”
“ . . . has this occult look about him.”
“I’m tellin’ ya, it happened as soon as this creep rolled into town…”
Menacing glances everywhere. The whole town had turned into a living breathing Ralph Steadman painting… Dozens of pinched, bitter faces, getting more sinister by the second, and steadily encroaching. It reminded me of a bad acid trip years ago on a lonesome Florida beach deep at night. That awful sand, with its myriad of sneering little faces. Pure unmitigated evil as far as the eye could see…
The cop under the traffic light stopped gesticulating like a chimp and stared right at me. I could not discern his expression beneath his aviators and his mustache, but I could tell it was not an affable one.
Suddenly my nostrils were besieged by the smell of Nag Champa incense… A Himalayan shop sat snookered between a café and a hookah bar. I ducked into it real quick. Lit candles were all over the place, illuminating trinkets and incense and rugs, everything teal and purple and pink. Some sort of weird flute jazz trickled out of unseen speakers.
“Helloooo, can I help you?” said a pretty brunette in a moo moo.
“You don’t by chance possess the ability to transport me safely to another time and place, do you?”
“Come again?”
I paused to rethink my question and then said, “You don’t by chance sell smoke grenades, do you?”
“Smoke grenades? Is that a type of incense?”
“Yes. Kind of. Actually, skip all that. Let me get six bushels of Nag Champa and one of those Dhaka Topi hats.”
I handed the girl my debit card and winced for ten straight seconds. Then I took off my Sterkowski leather “Brando” hat, hid it in my jacket, put the Dhaka Topi hat on top of my head, and then applied a tragically fake mustache that I always kept in my wallet. I thanked the girl and went outside into the crowd…
“Attention, comrades! I just saw that slinked-out gringo in the sissy headgear go scampering into City Hall. Let’s go smoke him out and then boot his creepy ass all the way back to Dee Cee!”
Cheers and hoots and tons of clapping everywhere. I dumped off all the Nag Champa on a trio of bugged-eyed teeny boppers armed with rolling pins and muddlers and they lit the whole thing with great enthusiasm and marched off toward City Hall, with the whole crowd in tow.
The prospect of peace on Earth shrunk deeper into its scrotum that day . . . I ended up inching out of the whole terrible scene, tip-toeing backwards like a French general, all the way to the safety of the Audi. I cranked the thing up with bad intentions and shot out of town, as one does when faced with the prospect of getting strung up like a buck and skinned alive by a bloodthirsty mob.
