The lifelessness in Earle Saint’s eyes told the story of a man whose inner tiki torch had burned out a long time ago. The heat was there in the form of ashes, but the flame was long gone. Working for a software company operated by elitist screamers tended to do that to a man’s soul. “Work harder!” they said. “Lose weight!” they said. “You’re too fat and lazy!” summed up the bosses’ earworm rhetoric. The effects of their words were broadcast to the world via dark circles, a receding hairline, aging lines, and a saggy frown on Earle’s face.
Where does a man with blasting head voices go to take his bosses’ unsolicited weight loss advice? To McDonald’s, of course, but not for a cheeseburger or McNuggets. The only menu item Earle could stomach at this point was a cup of black coffee. No cream. No sugar. Nothing that would make it taste better than the shit sandwich he had to eat every day at that tech company. Just a standard cup of black coffee from a place famous for ball pits and constantly smiling clown mascots.
When Earle placed his order at the counter and paid for it with some pocket change, the clerk gave him his receipt with the order number on it. And he thought to himself, What’s stopping them from getting my fucking coffee right now? He shrugged his slumped shoulders and dragged his sorry keister to the nearest table, a small exercise, but one that left him even more tired than his office job.
He plopped down on the seat, took his glasses off, and held his battered face in his hands. The white dress shirt several sizes too big for him still managed to keep him claustrophobic in this public space, as did his green slacks. He just wanted to shower and change into a bathrobe. But the act of getting on with his day couldn’t be achieved without a steaming hot cup of black coffee, caffeine thundering through his veins. But the longer he waited, the more he tapped his foot long before the caffeine kicked in.
Earle wanted so badly to go postal at this moment. The demon had been building up inside him for years. His overworked mind still raced with thoughts of his father telling him he wasn’t good enough before spanking him with a belt. His dying brain cells conjured images of his mother telling him he wasn’t a real man for being unable to lose weight and lift heavy objects. His ashen head jelly flashed memories of him being beaten and kicked by jocks twice his size, but half his girth. All the pain and heartache culminated in a lifetime of work at a job he couldn’t wait to retire from, if he would at all.
And then a child’s scream jolted him awake like a black coffee shot to the heart. Earle had completely forgotten that he was in McDonald’s and school was out for the day, hence running children in the restaurant while their parents read the newspaper or fingered through their smart phones. Earle would have envied the happiness of these children if they weren’t so fucking annoying to him. They ran around like they were playing tag, weaving between tables without caring if they stepped on Earle’s foot. But the screams. Those screams that were like an acid trip without actually doing drugs. Schizophrenia in the real world.
“HEY!” Earle screamed in retaliation, getting everyone’s undivided attention. “Keep your voices down, you little bastards! I can’t take that noise!”
One of the previously screaming children burst into tears and ran into his formerly inattentive mother’s arms. She hugged him and gently said, “It’s okay, Devon. He didn’t mean that. He’s just being a Mr. Poopy Pants.” That got a laugh out of the rest of the children, but a tighter jaw clamp from Earle Saint himself. The children started chanting “Poopy-Pants!” at Earle, probably thinking his gut would bust with any more stress.
“Stop calling me Poopy-Pants, you little assholes!” The parents joined in on the action as well. “I mean it! Knock it the fuck off! You know what?! Some days, I wish I could buy a shotgun and blow your heads off!” This earned a collective gasp from the McDonald’s crowd and immediately shut them up. Earle’s face almost sagged with guilt for a moment. Almost. But not really. A victory was a victory.
But then the “Mr. Poopy Pants” chants started again and Earle’s eyeballs bulged out of his skull. The train tunnel veins in his body became visible through his corporate slave uniform. Foam was slopping out of his tightly clamped teeth. His fists were clenched so tightly that his fingernails nearly broke against the weight of his ham-hawks. And then the literary descriptions resembled real life as Earle Saint transformed into a seven-foot tall powerhouse monster with fur everywhere, razorblade fangs, and a roar that would make the gods themselves cower in fear.
Forty-five years of child abuse, fatphobia, anti-male sexism, and attempted murder came pouring out of this monstrous form like hot lava. Children and their parents alike scrambled underneath the tables as they trembled and screamed in horror. Earle would cause them to scatter like cockroaches whenever he’d uproot a table or chair and toss it haphazardly around, almost getting the McDonald’s workers killed. They too took cover wherever they could find it, which in their case was the kitchen, where the boiling of the fry machine oil couldn’t compare to the solar Armageddon that was burning within Earle’s demonic form.
“I! WANT! COFFEE!” he shouted while chucking uprooted furniture around and smashing the walls upon themselves. Probably thinking it would calm him down, one of the female workers brought him a whole machine filled with boiling hot coffee. Once Earle snatched it from her hands, she darted back into the kitchen and screamed her head off.
He ripped the top off the machine like it was an ordinary bottle cap and chugged the entire contents like he was a caffeinated Supreme Court justice who loved beer too much. The scalding hotness soothed his bloody throat and bathed his bladder in liquid heaven. And for the first time since the Reagan administration, Earle Saint gave a tiny smile, which soon formed into a bigger one. And a bigger one, showing off all of his meat grinder teeth.
The kids and parents slowly crawled out of their horrified crouching positions and shakily made their way for the door thinking this McMassacre was finally over. But then the frown returned. The hideous saggy frown that weighed him down more than his human form belly. Forty-five years of hatred didn’t go away just because he drank an entire machine full of black coffee. A warm heart and a warm feel-good story were very different from a warm caffeinated drink. Earle tossed the machine aside like it was a stuffed toy from his murdered childhood, which he still missed to this day.
Another scream came, but it was quickly snuffed out upon the machine’s impact. Terror turned to sorrow. Rage became homicide. Death was inevitable with this much destruction happening all at once. Unfortunately, it happened to the kid named Devon, whose head was bashed beyond recognition from the impact of the machine, his mother crying over his slaughtered corpse.
Earle Saint knew his rage would get him into trouble one day. He just didn’t think it would involve taking another’s life by accident. He regretted not going to therapy. He hated that he couldn’t get a better job. He despised his owns selfishness. It all showed when his monstrous body shrank into a smaller version of his human self, with the anger of an entire audience looking down upon him like the microscopic criminal he was.
One of the kids, who looked like she could be Devon’s sister, slowly dragged herself towards the shrunken Earle, wiped the tears from her own eyes, and said, “You’re not Mr. Poopy Pants. You’re a dumpster fire!”
The audience gasped while the mother pulled the sister away in shock. Earle’s only sensible response at this point was…”Same thing.” He had no idea what was going to happen to him in the aftermath of this heinous day. Jail time? Another attempted murder on him? Suicide? But what he lacked in answers, he made up for in caffeinated heaven, which would be the only kind of heaven suitable for someone of his sins. “Can I please go to hell now?”
He asked and he received. The mother angrily strode up to him and squashed him underneath her high heels, spreading his bloody shame all over the floor. He never had the chance to heal himself. He never had the chance to atone for his worst moments. His entire life had been a chronicle of negative shit. But it was too late to save him. He got his coffee and that was all he could take to the afterlife with him. At least they made it how he liked it.
