"Ow-ange Chick-n lonch spech-ill fa-nine-nine($4.99) you tie sampa."
That was a pretty damn good piece of orange chicken, I thought to myself. My stomach twisting and turning anxiously with agreement.
Sold!
"I'll have one of those and a medium Cherry Coke with no ice please."
"If I order my drink with ice these clever Koreans may try to pull a fast one on me and fill that whole damn cup to the brim", I thought to myself. Leaving me with three-maybe-four gulps of foamy Cherry Coke to slurp down and a whole cup of ice for a whopping 1.85!
After waiting nearly five minutes behind somebodies soon to be dead grandfather, wondering how this corpse managed to escape from the confines of his nursing facility and venture to the mall, I was given my order. The elderly gentleman was still counting his change trying to pay the tiny korean girl at the counter.
-Five cents-
-Ten cents-
So on and so fourth.
I retired over to the quiet corner of the food court, a section away from the crowds and a good view of all of the scantily clad baby-mamas of drug dealers. The ones with nine kids tend to be the best kept and sleaziest.
After chowing down my delicious orange chicken, I caught the bus outside and headed to Williams Park with a few detours through some of the cities less desirable communities. Never one to pass up the opportunity to browse a good thrift store I stopped at the Central Ave Goodwill and like a punch to the throat I was attacked from within by something demonic. That delicious orange chicken from the mall wasn't agreeing with me. Maybe the Koreans were harboring some long held resentment over a war that happend decades before my birth and here I was now, the victim of some sort of pay-back through a orange chicken lunch special.
Not now, I kept reminding myself. The bathroom of the Goodwill is not the time nor the place. I caught the next bus to Williams Park, hoping to catch another bus that would deliver me to my doorstep in a hurry.
The next bus wouldn't be for another fourty-five minutes and the last possible option was to use the facilities at Williams Park. One night I wondered in there to find a half naked derelict undressing and piss all over the floors. No thank you. It's the kind of pulic restroom where vagrants go to smoke crack and fuck, it's dark and the lighting is some bright flourescent green color. It looks more like the setting for a Saw movie then a sterile place to take a shit.
The monster in my belly was growing meaner by the second.
I hightailed it in a jiffy to the nearest public restroom I could find, the one in the court yard at Baywalk. These days Baywalk is looking like one of those propped up ghost town sets they would use for old time western films. If the wind blows the place looks like it might fly off and the illusion that a poorly planned family friendly entertainment complex marketed towards the rich may be gone forever.
With only one business open besides the movie theater and virtually no Saturday afternoon foot traffic I decided that this was the ideal spot to exorcise this demon.
The bathroom at Baywalk isn't much better then the one in Williams Park. The floors are wet and covered in sand like the ones you find on a beach. The doors are stripped off of the handles, theres open wires and beer cans. Somebody had themselves a wild time in here the night before.
No sooner as I sat my naked ass down on the toilet seat, the entrance door swung open and some belching tub-o-lard came scuffling in. I imagined him as a unshaven mutanoid that farts at the dinner table or pee's in the family pool. The kind of guy who grabs the ass's of waitresses and stairs like a creep at his daughters friends. Whatever he was I needed him to leave the room asap so I could unload and get the hell out of that stink trap.
Here I was, my stomach burning and my bowels clinching, trying to remain as silent as a church mouse. The man finally left without washing his hands, ofcourse.
Just as I had assumed the coast was clear, some other smug Guy Harvey wearing sailor wanna-be came strolling into the stahl next to me. His hairy feet, unkept dirty toe nails and dollar store flip flops were a disturbing site.
All I wanted was to peacefully take a dump, how is it that the mens restroom at Baywalk can have more foot traffic then the entire rest of this empty complex has had in the last decade of operations? I hate eating infront of people, holding private phone calls infront of people and even worse using the restroom around other people.
Just as I had given up all hope for a moment of privacy, I looked up in prayer and was distracted by a air vent somebody had tagged with the word, "Kanto" on it. I imagined some angry youth who had taken to a life of crime and poverty on the mean streets of downtown St. Petersburg, who decided to lash out at the establishment, his drunken abusive father, George W Bush, former school teachers and the girl who dumped him to fuck some guy who looked like lame rapper OJ Da Juiceman the only way he knew how, by writing his name in pink paint pen on a air vent in the mens restroom at Baywalk. That'll learn'em.
With the room cleared out, I finished my business and booked.
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