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Cheetos, Karaoke, & Beautiful Teeth

Matt LeShay

    The top of the bar is old. Scarred with carved initials and cigarette burns. It’s horseshoe shaped so all the patrons face inward. Look at the bartender. Get her attention to order beers. The bartender doesn’t care. She’ll bring your beer when she’s ready. This defeats the idea of the bar’s configuration.
    But this is a friendly bar. They play karaoke on Friday nights. The customers pay a dollar to sing and entertain each other. At the bottom of the horseshoe, right dab smack in the middle, Elton John is sitting with a lovely young lady named Sonja. Sonja is from Madawaska, Maine (not many people know this town. It’s in Aroostook County). Sonja has beautiful teeth. Elton has bought them for her. Not the cheap take-out kind, no sir, these teeth are the implanted type. Sonja said they cost Elton over sixty-thousand pounds sterling. Sonja is very proud of her teeth.
    On one end of the bar’s horseshoe legs, catty-cornered from Elton and Sonja, sitting in the extreme corner, is Tommie Chong. He looks stoned but it’s probably all an act. He is an actor, you know. He’s sitting next to an elderly Japanese guy with thick rimless glasses. The Japanese guy looks like Tojo but you can tell he’s not. His left forearm bears an old Marine Corps tattoo. Tojo wouldn’t have had that. SEMPER FI! He’s eating Cheetos in a most amazing way. He orders a ninety-nine cent bag and carefully opens both ends. He then takes out his pocket knife and slices down one side longwise and folds the cellophane open, producing kind of a sanitary place mat with a mound of Cheetos on it. The Japanese guy hunches over this pile and eats them, one at a time using only his right hand. The amazing thing is the speed at which he eats these. His hand is a blur as he consumes Cheeto nuggets individually. Tommie Chong is intrigued by this and keeps saying, “Wowww, man!” The Japanese guy pays no attention to Tommie, he is on a mission. He’s like a lizard snapping up a bug. One minute the bug is there, the next it’s gone. You don’t even see the lizard’s tongue but you know what happened to the bug. When the Japanese guy finishes a bag, he orders another. It takes him as long to eat a sack of Cheetos as it takes Tommie to drink a mug of beer. Tommie is slightly disturbed between the Japanese Cheeto eater and Sonja with her new beautiful teeth.
    Just then, Elton approaches the people in charge of the karaoke machine and gives them one dollar (U.S.). They ask him what he’d like to sing. Elton tells them it doesn’t matter because he’s a professional entertainer and can sing anything. They play the 1960’s hit, Ballad of the Green Beret, and Elton nails it. The bar patrons go wild. Sonja broadly smiles and the Japanese guy finishes the last Cheeto in his third bag.
    Tommie can’t handle it any longer. He stands up, produces a New Jersey pin roll and with the bar’s full attention, lights and inhales the entire joint slightly burning his thumb and forefinger on the leftover miniscule roach. Tommie holds the mighty toke a full ninety seconds. The bar is ghostly still. They too, unknowingly, are holding their breaths. When Tommie finally exhales, no smoke comes from his lungs. He has captured the entire hit.
    Well, you can imagine the pandemonium that erupts. Elton John deeply bows to Tommie and refuses to sing anymore karaoke songs. The Japanese guy gives Tommie four Cheetos. Sonja takes a black magic marker from her purse and blots out one of her front teeth but keeps smiling the rest of the night. Champions are born, not made in this friendly bar.

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