signifying nothing

so I was walking by this Thai place one night, and I was with this girl I was seeing at the time, and she’s got a yap on her, let me tell you, she was always going on about something, and never listening too, not that I talk that much anyways, but still, shit, can’t get a damn word in, you know, anyway, we’re out walking and it’s raining out a little, kind of more than a drizzle, just enough to spot your glasses and make it kind of hard to see, you know, so you’ve got to like keep wiping them off on your shirttails, and I’m not cold at all, I’m not shivering or anything, I’ve got a good coat on and my gloves, so she’s yapping away like nobody’s business, and I’m just walking there next her, not being cold at all, and kind of looking around at things, the sad shapes of tenebrous tenements rising up, you know, normal everyday things, the way wet stop signs drip, people all hunched over and wilting like ants sprayed with Raid, and instead of listening to her I’m listening to the slush of car tires sledding through the rain-wet streets and the slap and splash of people’s shoes on the slick sidewalk, and I’m not thinking about much, and I’m not cold at all, and then that’s about when I notice this little Thai place over near Mission on 6^th, and my memory gets kind of nudged, and I’m not cold at all, and I’m walking there next to my motor-mouthed companion, who is like paying me a bit less than a little mind, and I remember this story a kid I used to work with told me about when he’d been there one night, at the Thai place we were currently walking by, and he was with this young girl, I mean under-aged, you know, and this kid’s barely 21 himself, so it’s not that bad, maybe she’s 19 or something, but they’re in there having some cocktails, and of course she’s quite the lightweight when it comes to the sauce, being a young girl who probably hadn’t had more than a few jell-o shots at her fun aunt’s house one christmas, and she’s very small too, probably like 98 pounds or something, but the thing is, well, she’s working as an au pair for this family down on the peninsula, and the family doesn’t quite know exactly where she’s gone out to for the night, if you get my drift, and the kid’s feeding her vodka tonics and kamikaze shots and lemon drops, and she’s getting hammered, and at some point starts lying down in the booth they’re in, even passes out for a bit, and the waitresses there were I think like splashing water on her face to wake her up, anyway, at some point they both realize that it’s too late to catch the last BART train back to wherever it was the family she was working for lived, and this kid is kind of freaked, he’s like, what the hell am I going to do with this really drunk nanny here lying down in the booth next to me in this damn Thai place, and so I guess he rouses her enough to call the father, her boss you know, on her cell phone, and good old daddy like freaks, like totally ballistic, you know, this young girl he is supposed to be responsible for is like all cockeyed and out with some guy in the city late at night with no way to get home, so he tells her to wait there and he’s going to drive in from the suburbs and come pick her up, and the kid is like, ok, that solves that, and I guess the girl is kind of sobering up some at this point, and the Thai place has officially cut both of them off anyway, but is letting them stay there and drink water until this dude arrives in his fucking Range Rover or whatever to pick her ass up and take her hill over dale back to the safe and comfy confines of a gated community, well, it just so happens that this au pair’s boss has quite the temper on him, and he’s a bit of an old country asshole to boot, and he is enraged by what he perceives to be the situation, namely that this older man had gotten his little innocent nanny blotto to try to take advantage of her, and so he comes rolling up all pissed off, and he storms on into the Thai place, scaring hell out of all the staff and other patrons in there, you know, banging in and slamming the door and all the likes, and I remember this kid was telling me that he was kind of sitting there, the kid was, with the girl’s head in his lap, kind of crooning to her, singing that song Red River Valley, kind of softly and rubbing her head a bit, running his hands through her hair, kind of trying to be soothing I guess, and this kid’s singing that old cowboy song, for whatever reason, I don’t know, he was a weird kid, anyway, so this kid’s going on about her fucking brightening his life for a while and telling her to sit by his side if she loves him and not to hasten to bid him adieu and all that shit, you know, a cowboy who loves you so true, god, it must’ve been quite a spectacle, this drunk teenage girl lying down in a booth in this Thai place with this kid singing to her like that, jesus, just think of it, anyway, so this raging suburban dad is like storming through the dining area, and he’s knocking into tables and making quite a commotion, sending napkins flying and drinks spilling, and waiters are trying to chase him down to no avail, this guy is built like a fucking linebacker, and he’s steamrolling his way through the place, throwing waiters to the side like flies, and the kid looks up from his wooing when he hears all of this stomping and hullabaloo, and he’s like, oh shit, you know, I’m fucked, this guy is fucking nuts, because, you know, he’s not dumb, he realizes who this frenzied gentleman most likely is, and so he tries to like sit the girl back up and make nice, but it’s too late, daddy’s went and done scoped himself the situation, you know, got the lay of the land, and, just as the kid’s sitting her up and trying to cover his tracks, the foaming-at-the-mouth fellow comes on up and grabs the poor kid by the collar and starts hollering the hell out of him, screaming things like, what the hell are you doing, do you know how old she is, and other crap like that, and then he picks the kid up and like sweeps off the table with him, and all the empty glasses go careening floorward, and the staff is like freaking and telling them to get outside, to go outside, to leave, to pretty please leave, to go, you know, they do not want that kind of shit going on in their place of business, so the guy like drags the fucking kid out by his arms, and this kid was pretty scrawny, kind of all knees and elbows, you know, not much meat on his bones, and so his arms are like almost getting pulled out of their sockets as the angry burly dude is using him like an infield dragger, and people are screaming, and chairs are getting knocked over, and the kid is like pleading with the fucker to stop, to just quit it, you know, lay off me man, and whatever, I don’t know, this kid was a real whiner, not too tough you know, a lover not a fighter, or whatever, and the guy eventually drags this skin-and-bones kid outside where he proceeds to start strangling him, and the kid is like going hysterical of course, because, you know, he’s being fucking strangled by this, as Alec Baldwin would say, 300 pound homunculus with a face like a clenched fist, and this guy is going berserk, flipping his lid all the way to Alabama, and the kid is now like having trouble getting air, like fucking choking to death, for real, and I don’t know where the hell the girl is at this point, the kid wasn’t too clear on the details after he lost consciousness, but he woke up in an ambulance and was like scared shitless and super fucking confused, of course, so I guess somebody interfered and called 911 or something, or maybe it was the restaurant that did it, but anyway, this kid was like all fucked up for like a week, with all these bruises all over his neck and his arms all sore, and his eyes kind of always looked different after that, sort of red-rimmed and shaky, watery, lost, like he couldn’t really focus on things, like it hurt to see, and I don’t really know what ever happened to that kid, he quit a few weeks later and I never heard from him again, and I wasn’t cold at all that night, and it was raining, and I was walking by that Thai place, and that damn girl I was with at the time was yapping on and on, and she wasn’t listening to me at all, and it was cold out, but I wasn’t cold, I wasn’t cold at all