To be honest I perhaps should have come out even earlier, but I'd been forced to stay in the cloakroom longer than I'd desired because I'd struggled to find it to be filled with the the types of things I'd been coveting, and I didn't want everyone to know that I'd failed to find what I was seeking, especially after I'd made such a huge deal about the fact that what I was seeking was going to be easy to find.
'Only coats? Bullshit!' I began, when doubts had been aired 'cloakrooms are the oft forgotten wonder chests of restaurants, filled with trap doors to wine cellars so full of wine that they could make even a wino pee his pants, and ceilings so unnecessarily high that all sorts of amazing things would be stored on the high shelves, enough to make short people nail blocks of wood to the underside of their feet for a mere glimpse, and hidden doorways to VIP rooms so grand that they HAVE to be secret or else every celebrity in town would want in, and NO establishment can keep the volume of hidden recording devices that would be required to collect all the information required to blackmail THAT many celebrities to pretend they like your food, which is the the LIFE-BLOOD of the restaurant trade! Yep cloakrooms, and if you think I'm wrong, then you are a moron and a fool!' I'd leveled at my friend, when he'd questioned why I wanted him to purposely jam a fork into his thigh by the bathroom doors to create a scene and provide me cover.
'But this is a Mexican restaurant in a building originally built for an ill-conceived fish tank themed seafood restaurant, they don't even sell wine!' He'd replied. Apparently trying to get out of his relatively minor part of the scheme.
'A fish tank themed seafood restaurant sounds like a fine idea, even a fun idea' I'd retorted.
'The kids were told "you're in a fish-tank" now let's eat some fish", they thought they were going to get fucking EATen!' He said, catching himself from breaking into a yell.
'Maybe that's a good lesson for the kids, did you think of that? That maybe kids need to learn that not every time they think they are going to be eaten will they actually be fucking eaten, so maybe just stop your crying and toughen up, I mean cannibalization was eradicated from these parts once they broke up that cult that had forgotten to buy seeds for their community garden, but kept watering, raking and hoeing in vain for three years before the leader went insane and ate his number three, so toughen the fuck up kids. Besides, if this restaurant made people feel like they were about to be eaten, that's even more of a reason they needed a private VIP section, who wants to eat somewhere where they feel the food may be them? "Oh wow, this is delicious, what is it, oh fuck it isn't me is it? Did you drug me and carve some of my ass cheek off then wake me up, take me to a nice restaurant, have it cooked and then feed it to me! If you did I'll carve a fucking hole from your ass cheek you dick!" Yeah right, that's how celebrities want to eat? You dumb piece of shit Kev'.
That shut him up. I'd obviously convinced him, and over to the bathroom door he'd gone. Then he'd paused. Then he'd looked like he was about to do it. Then he'd paused again. Next he'd retreated into the bathroom. In there he took ages. I never asked him what he was doing. I have a couple of ideas that I sketched out in my 'What I Think People Were Doing When I Couldn't See Them' visual journal, and I wrote a few ideas down in my 'IF You Crossed Me Then I Think it MAY Have Been In One Of The Following Ways'
List Diary, and I later reenacted out some of the most plausible options in what turned out to be one of my messiest days at my 'Performance Art' Practice Group (I'd also brought everyone what turned out to be crumbly cake). But let's face it the options are endless. The chances that I nailed it down are pretty unlikely (Unless he was looking at himself naked in the mirror while imagining to himself the parts of animals he most wished would grow on his own body suddenly sprouting from his skin, which is of course what most of us do in restaurant bathrooms). Then he came out. Paused again. Next he took a glass of beer off a strangers table and chugged it. Then got into a verbal altercation with the man he'd stolen it from. Let it escalate to the point of a push and shove off. Then suddenly slammed the man to the ground, grabbed a butter knife, and yelled 'buy you a new beer, here's your fucking beer', and then buried the knife into his leg.
What an asshole. How can a butter knife to your leg be equivalent to a beer for someone else? He's just lost a beer and now you're chucking confusion onto his pain? Plus, as I now yelled out across the room 'I said a fork you moron' causing everyone to look up at me. 'Look dickhead, now everyone's staring at me, this is the OPPOSITE of what I was going for! Can't you do anything right you dick!' I added. What a dick.
But then he got lucky. A gush of blood began to spray from the wound. An artery or something must have popped. And while people dove for cover I was able to sneak into the cloakroom unseen.
And as I opened the door, and crept into the dark, musky compound of possibilities, a huge smile radiated off my face. The smile of possibility!
But little could I possibly know at that time, just what disasters awaited me. Big and immediate disasters. The kind everyone would want to hear me tell about in a big and lavish way, and now. I'm talking really BIG and immediately NOW! A wish I will of course honor.
To be cont*....
*Short for continued, you know to save time and space.
