Jackie and the Worm
I did not enjoy having to be at work at 5:45 every morning; I despised early mornings, but there were eggs to serve and coffees to spill. One morning, I came flying into the gravel parking lot like a bat out of hell. Three or four trucks were already parked in front of the building. I grabbed my apron and Red Bull and moseyed into the restaurant to brew coffee and tea, fill the rag bucket with fresh water and rags, and grab whatever stock from the back room that I noticed was left low after the previous shift.
As I dumped the used coffee filter into the trashcan and grabbed a fresh one to start another pot, a rapping came on the window closest to the front door.
“Sons of beaches!” I grumbled as I slid the filter tray into place and pressed start. Looking at the clock, I saw it was still a few minutes before six o'clock. I huffed around the edge of the bar towards the door, grabbing napkins and silverware along the way.
“And I bet it was Jackie Jackson, too, that sorry sucker! It's bad enough all y'all get here fifteen minutes before opening, then you wanna beat my windows to boot? That's alright, I've got something in store for you!” I thought to myself as I unlocked the door.
I pulled the first two tables in the middle row together, specifically positioning six chairs in their various places, leaving the two extra chairs in the gap between the new big table and the rest of the single tables in the row.
“Good morning, ye Old Codgers!” I grandly announced, then proceeded to greet them all by name, “Shook, Jackson, Woods... hi, Tom, Plumber, Mr. Moore...”
“I see you're running late, as usual.” Woods said, “probably hung over again.”
I glared at him and headed back behind the bar. I pulled down six coffee cups and dropped a spoon in each of the them with a clang. While I poured coffees and put creamers into a bowl, the codgers passed out the stack of napkins and silverware rolls that I had left for them on the table. I smiled at how well I had them trained. I had a major prank planned for one of them, and at the end of the day, they all will have paid me to do it, in a sense.
I stacked the bowl of creamers on top of the five coffee cups in my left hand, using the spoons protruding from them to keep the bowl from sliding off. With my right hand, I put an assortment of jelly packets into a bowl and set it on top of the sixth cup of coffee on the counter. I quickly used my index finger to grab the handle of the cup, and my thumb to press the bowl against the spoon, holding it in place.
When I made it back to the table, I sat the sixth cup down, catching the bowl of jellies, sliding them to the center of the table, turning the cup's handle to the right in front of Mr. Moore. I sat the cluster of cups from my left hand on the corner of the table and grabbed the creamer bowl so the codgers could started grabbing the cups one at a time to pass around the table. I kept the last cup to go with the bowl of creamers. I liked to hand deliver those two items to Woods each morning, making sure to drop the bowl of creamers just shy of his out-stretched hands, laughing as he jumped from the clatter, and watching as he gathered the packets back into the bowl, sometimes with great effort, as he is old and reaching under a table no longer comes easy to him.
“You sorry heifer!” He would mumble.
That scenario was one of my many daily delights from this bunch of customers, and that day carried on like any other... or so it seemed. I took their orders, which I knew by heart, and filled their coffees, purposely overfull, and cleared their dishes, sometimes before they wanted me to. As the time for them to trickle out one by one grew nearer, my excitement escalated. So, I gathered my supplies: one baby copperhead snake, held overnight in the fridge in a Ziploc bag, one Styrofoam cup, with diet Pepsi inside, but without a lid, and lastly, one roll of clear scotch tape.
Just the previous morning, the codgers had come to discussing different critters such as spiders, roaches and snakes.
“I am just mortified of snakes!” Jackie and his hair-lipped speech impediment let slip.
“Jackie!” I squealed, topping his coffee off, just over the edge, “why would you tell me that? You're just giving me ammo!”
“Yea, yea,” he said, taking a bite of his hard-boiled egg and pickle spear.
(Call it fate, call it serendipity, call it psychotic magnetism, if you'd like, but...) That very evening my boyfriend came in from the yard, having killed a snake the size of an earthworm, and when he told me, a force pulled me so uncontrollably that I do believe he may have seen a little glint of crazy in my eyes. I gathered the snake and went to sleep trying to figure out exactly how to utilize it.
I woke with the most brilliant idea in the morning. You see, Jackie would always drink black coffee with his breakfast, but before he left, he would always ask for a to-go cup of diet Pepsi without a lid. That morning, when I brought it to him, I had taped the snake to the outside of the cup, and positioned it opposite of him, out of his view. The plumber across from him, first had a look of confusion, then realization, before he blinked and darted his eyes away, as not to make Jackie notice it prematurely.
When Jackie picked the cup up and his fingers settle atop the snake, he dropped the cup, jumped up and out of his chair, and screeched in horror. He looked like a tall, but rotund in the middle, Russian folk dancer doing the Kozachok, but only managing a repetition of one.
I nearly collapsed in the floor from laughter. I couldn't breathe. Tears were welling in my eyes.
“I'm gonna kick your b-butt!” He stuttered loudly as he attempted to chase after me. He only made it about five steps before he had to sit back down, winded and shaky from shock.
From then on out, the rest of the codgers teased him over his fear of earthworms and, therefore, his inability to go fishing with the rest of the gang. I thoroughly enjoyed teasing these men, hearing them tease each other, and, yes, even them teasing me. If I should have been fired over any of my pranks, I assure you it should have been this one that I pulled on this man, especially considering his age and heart condition.
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