Bill DeMarco Does Not Exchange Pleasantries With The Cups of Coffee (cont’d.)

“You guys are fucking faggots,” I say, my trapezius muscles tightening into thick knots.

The response is immediate. “Faggotsss?” answers the lead singer with an accentuated lisp. “Did you call us faggotssss?” The girl bassist laughs. “You are a faggot,” she says to him. “Yeah you’re a big fuckin’ faggot,” says the guitar player who grabs the lead singer by his hair and French kisses him. “Get a room you fucking faggots,” says the girl bassist as she roughly pushes them. They stumble backwards but continue to make out, pawing at each other’s clothes.

Scorned! My rank provocation has become a license for whimsy. I should be defiant in the face of such insolence but Casagrande’s instructions dissolve my self-respect. And I’ve got a dental bill to pay for. “Hey guys if you could just sign a tote bag, it’d be really cool.”

“Dude, fuck off,” comes the response from the lead singer who has finished kissing his guitar player.

A cold impulse freezes my nerves. Reason halts. The same Olympian faculties that had discerned with savvy countless bags of coffee and taxonomized the flavor of same finds itself powerless to resist a reptilian twitch that drives my hand downward to cradle a weathered white loafer, slip it off my foot, and fling it with all my might at the moist sneering arrogance that slouches before me.

I miss. It hits the girl bassist right literally on the nose. She yelps as tears flash-flood her face. At this moment I have a number of sensations simultaneously, among them my shittiness, my rage, my terror, and the overwhelming one that if these fuckfaces had just signed some fucking totebags we wouldn’t be in this predicament.

Actually that I wouldn’t be in this predicament.

Then people start attacking me. . . .

If you think Bill gets his ass worked, text or e-mail “Continuation A”

If you think Bill narrowly escapes getting his ass worked, text or e-mail “Continuation B”

If you think everybody comes to their senses, makes apologies all around, and goes as a group to the theater bar and buys $9 Coronas, text or e-mail “Continuation C”