Spango Dips

As I hunchback my way through the door, the heavy-set girl usually behind the counter, who takes and dispenses orders wordlessly, is, in fact, in front of the counter, and actually exchanging words with a very tall, expensively-accessorized black man sitting at the table by the water cooler. They’re practically whispering, presumably out of politeness, so my usual efforts to eavesdrop are thwarted, but if his facial expression reveals anything, it’s that things could be better. But this doesn’t look like the usual clerk v. customer fracas, on the clerk side of which I have personally been so many times and therefore know how to read the faces of the involved; I can’t quite put a finger on it, but the emotional temperature of the scene seems instead to resemble The Remains of the Day. His face is twisted into a rictus; it’s not what you generally see when someone’s lodging a complaint. Complaints, also, are usually not lodged while the customer sits and the clerk stands. He’s not frustrated; he looks instead somehow destroyed. Her expression seems to convey the same sentiment, but that’s kinda how her face always looks.

I think I was sad going in, in fact I’m sure I was, but there’s something really vibrantly sad about this odd episode that I think would’ve struck me no matter my initial mood.

She ambles lazily back to the counter and scratches my ticket in total smothering silence as I order the food I only half-want. I sit, then, which I don’t normally do while waiting for take out, cross-legged, drumming on my arctically cold bottle of Mexican soda, nervously stealing glimpses of the destroyed black man who sits now at a diagonal from me, in an otherwise happily crowded room, with head in hands. Total fucking despair radiates from this man. I have never seen a man like this, a tall black man dressed for success-in-bed, radiate despair. It’s so surreal it makes me doubt my eyes, and it’s also hypnotizing. I cannot take my eyes off this man. I’m imagining him seeing me and in seconds I’ve got the dialogue that would ensue all worked out in my head.

TALL DESTROYED BLACK MAN: What the fuck are you lookin’ at?
ME: I’m looking at you.
TDBM: What the fuck for?
ME: You look sad. It’s amazing. It’s amazing to see someone who looks like you, look that sad.
TDBM (standing): Oh, it’s on now. I’ma make you look sad, punk.
ME: You’re seriously gonna fight me for looking at you, in the middle of a crowded restaurant, while the sun is still out?

But he doesn’t see me.

Then the heavy-set girl calls a number that I think for a second is mine. It isn’t. It’s the number of a woman behind me. I know this because a second after I realize definitively that the number isn’t mine, I hear a woman behind me say “that’s us,” and then I hear a kiss. A kiss, for “that’s us.” It is the softest jackhammer.

Dear Saturday Night Live,

You are almost certainly my favorite show of all time. I have been watching you since the second grade, never missing more than two or three episodes in a row before finding a way to return to a habitual weekly dosage. If planning to go out on a Saturday night when a new episode is set to air, you can be certain I’ll set my VCR timer first, or at least download the episode the following day. Your annual fifteen-week vacation from my pop-culture life is probably the single worst thing about my experience of summer. To say that I am your biggest fan might not be an overstatement.

Where the vast majority of my friends and family have demonstrated, at best, a fairweather allegiance to you, I have demonstrated the most resolute and virtuous fealty. Let’s face it: not all of the years have been good. Verily, I have weathered every nightmare you thought to conjure, including the lamentable stint of Colin Quinn in the Update chair, what seemed like a decade of Molly Shannon, and a single episode hosted by Deion Sanders ca. 1995 that took years off my life. Undaunted, I have hung in there, always certain of the next renaissance, defying the vagaries of critical and popular opinion, abhorring MadTV, baring my fangs at any who dare to suggest that your time has passed, or that your utter supremacy in the domain of TV-cool is at all a matter of opinion.

And with my feet firm in the bedrock of fond boyhood memories, my eyes aglow in the luminescent genius of Robert Smigel, and my heart already in the hands of Kristen Wiig, I stand by you now as proudly as ever.

Now listen carefully. If you ever run Deep House Dish again, you and I are fucking done.