As usual Miguel was instantly apologetic but the guy didn’t even get mad, he just sighed and picked up the bottle and went to his car, leaving everything else on the ground. Once he was gone we split the tampons and muffins with the girls and someone said well now what.

I said we could keep playing but the bottle would only exist in our minds. The girls were like Pete are you retarded or something which was getting to be kind of a catch phrase by that point. I pantomimed spinning the bottle and then eagerly watched the empty space between us. Look at him try to act, the girls said. Oh my God remember when he was in that school play.

Oh boy! I said. Looks like the bottle’s stopping... on... you! and I pointed at Miguel. He glared at me, perplexed, said: So your pretend bottle is pointing at me. You want to kiss me on the lips. And I said: No, but sometimes it points at a dude. Sometimes that happens and you have to deal with it. I want it to be realistic.

And everyone got up and wandered back to the bus stop and talked about something else. I ran after them, cried out: Come on you guys I just want you to believe in my imaginary creation! and then fifteen years later I made up this story and put it on the internet.

You know how everybody wants to be a regular somewhere? Where you just stroll on in and say “the usual” and you’re met with something other than blank stares or eye rolls from someone with an exposed midriff? And it’s this wistful nostalgic dream that we all share deep down? Well it’s happened to me and let me tell you, the reality of the situation disappoints as always. Because it's not like: “The usual, sir? Coming right up!”

It’s more like: “Oh let me guess. You want the same boring-ass sandwich you get every day. Wait, let me use my psychic powers to predict the bland, soulless meal you've selected for today. Oh don't worry, I won’t put any peppers or mustard or anything with flavor on it. Heaven forbid you try one of the fucking specials I was up late last night inventing.”

And so now I feel guilty about ordering my usual and make a big show of pondering the specials and once in a while buckle under and go for the shitty “Vince Vaughn” sandwich with cranberry sauce and deviled eggs or whatever.

The good news is that sometimes they’ll reward my loyalty by offering me a free nasty amaretto flavored biscotti or, like last week, they’ll spot me the 78 cents I don't have instead of making me sheepishly return my drink to the cooler or whatever. Except they didn't say “Hey man don’t worry about it,” they said: “You’re in here all the time, just pay us back next time.” And I’m all: Aww, ain’t that nice! It’s nice to be a regular and to have a healthy, happy relationship with a local food provider and WAIT YOU'RE GOING TO MAKE ME PAY BACK THAT MEASLY 78 CENTS?? YOU TWO-BIT MOTHERFUCKING SHIT MONKEY.

So I haven’t gone back there yet. I’m thinking maybe I should never go back? Like it was this whole elaborate scam where I invested a year becoming a regular, slowly earning their trust, and then one fateful day I'm a little short on cash and I slip away scot-free and then move on to the next unsuspecting deli and spend that 78 cents on half a pickle or whatever that buys you these days.

Sometimes a few down and outs will come into this deli in the South Loop where I eat cherry pies. The other Sunday morning, one of them slipped a folded piece of paper onto my tray as we both paused for napkins and plastic silverware. I waited until I got down to my table to open it. Scrawled on the back of a receipt for Gordon’s vodka it said:

Do you like soup?
Yes[ ] No[ ]

Not knowing what to think, I marked it appropriately and tucked it into my back pocket. On my way home I dropped it into a beggar’s cup. “Thanks, G”, he said, or did he say Thanks, Pete? I don’t know and I’m so scared.

I’m starting to think all of this might have something to do with the bum I mocked from way back when. It was all documented in a lost blog entry called “Sphinx,” a story about me drunkenly harassing a panhandler who resembled Peter Falk. I had waved a five-dollar bill in his face and told him the money was his if he answered this riddle: “What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?” The Peter Falk guy didn’t know, and I howled in laughter and stuck the money back in my wallet and walked away screaming COLUMBO DOESN’T KNOW and now seven years later I’m paying for it dearly.

Pretty much the agreement is he throws insults at us while we throw tomatoes at him. I pelt him on his stupid face with another ripe one, drawing the cheers of a half dozen onlookers, one of which whom is a busty wench who wields a big sign that says KISSES and asks me if I would like to kiss her for a dollar. Her smile reveals an odd crease right below her nose – perhaps remnants of a sloppy harelip surgery? I’m on my third drink and don’t care.

But the only thing in my wallet is a twenty. I shrug. “Would milady instead fancy a sip of my piña colada with very little Spanish fly in it?”

She rolls her eyes and leaves me for a family of three across the way. The family consists of a father, a mother, and a son, and just by looking at them I see it all. The father is a Packers-worshipper with a Ditka mustache who hates Obama, rush-hour traffic, and his fucking micro-managing boss. The mother is a hoarder who spends too much time and money at Target. The underachieving son juggles all of those endless pre-reqs at the local community college with euchre nights and Starcraft 2.

The father motions the wench over, asks how much, nods, hands her a dollar, and requests that she kiss his blushing son. His son says noooo, he doesn’t want to cheat on Danielle, his online girlfriend from New Zealand. Danielle is an FBI agent who goes by the screen name BellaSwan93. The father insists, widening his eyes, and the son, pretending to be more reluctant than he really is, relents.

The wench gives the son his first ever real actual physical kiss. The father and mother look at each other lovingly and hold hands. I glance at my phone and see only one bar.

I keep walking deeper and deeper into the faire.

A trio of drunk midgets get in my way, chasing each other, cutting through the traffic of people. ’Scuse me, pardon me, coming through, they all say in sequence.

I keep walking.

Someone who looks a lot like Chris Kattan sits on a log and eats a sandwich using only his feet. The woman next to him models chainmail lingerie. The Kattan doppelganger swallows a bite, looks up at the sky, sighs, says to the woman next to him: “You know, on beautiful summer days like this, when the sun sings Talking Heads songs and the tree branches smile at me, I’m glad my mom did all that LSD while she was pregnant.”

I continue on.

A little girl, she can’t be older than five, pleads with me to enter her tarot card reading tent. I look inside.

“Where’s your mom?” I ask her.

“Mommy is dead. Step into my office.” She grabs me by the forearm, leads me to a stool, and then takes a seat behind a little plastic desk for pre-schoolers. Then she pulls out a deck of Sesame Street-themed playing cards and starts shuffling them very slowly.

I smirk a little. “Oh. Well now. Are you going to tell me my future, little girl?”

“Shh. Be quiet.”

Ten minutes later she’s done shuffling. She lays down the first card and it’s Oscar the Grouch.

“Not good,” she says, shaking her head.

“What. What is it—“

She lays down the second card, and her face turns white. It’s Big Bird.

“Oh, God…” she says.

“What is it? What does that mean??”

She stands up and points at the tent’s exit. “Get out of here,” she says. “Run!”

I’m tripping over trash cans on my way out of there, sloppily pushing one foot past the other. My heart pounding in my head, I can still hear the little girl in the distance yelling: RUN!

I look at my cell phone. No bars. No signal. This place, all twenty-five acres, it’s a dead zone. It’s a trap. I run past lonely biker dudes and heavyset women and blue-haired grannies. This place is crawling with them, and then some. I can barely breathe. I don’t know where to look. Everyone, from society’s rejects to out-of-work vaudevillians to bored housewives looking to escape the malaise of the Midwest, everyone seems to be here all at once. These people are everywhere and I am in the middle of nowhere at the Bristol Renaissance Faire, running from I do not know what. Help me.

A fiftysomething Asian man, naked, slightly drunk, stands atop a fireplace mantel, stiff-backed, his arms spread flat against the bricks, his chin tucked into his chest. His shoulders are up by his ears, trembling. He’s looking down. He seems unsure of himself. He squints through the spotlight directed onto him. The spotlight floats over to the other side of the room, where toddlers take turns clubbing a piñata stuffed with printed excerpts of his blog and stacks of headshots that he no longer resembles. The toddlers repeat the same thing over and over, in a singsongy chant.

CHILDREN: Your taboo topicality sprinkled with occasional pathos is a tiresome and tawdry schtick! Your taboo topicality sprinkled with occasional pathos is a tiresome and tawdry schtick! Your—

ASIAN MAN: Nooooooo!

The Asian man weeps loudly. He stares at both of his hands in puzzlement, as if he does not recognize them. The children run up to him by the fireplace, grinning unsympathetically.

CHILD #1: Run-on sentences fool no one!

CHILD #2: Hack!

CHILD #3: This dream sequence sucks!

CHILD #2: Asian!

Jessica Alba swoops in on a rope ladder, yodeling like Tarzan on swinging a vine, kicking the children out of the way. She hops onto the floor, stretching her arms out with a celebratory ta-da! She’s wearing a fluffy white bath towel. She takes a moment to gather herself, then bites her bottom lip seductively.

JESSICA: Where are you Petey?

Jessica winks, then grabs her lower jaw right below her ear and tears her face off, revealing herself to be the late great writer, David Foster Wallace. He is wearing a bandana. He’s obviously still in the fluffy white bath towel.

DFW (whispering): You will never be known in American literary circles as ‘the blogger’s blogger’ or sometimes simply ‘the Blogger.’

The children return, but in greater numbers, and they point and cackle. The Asian man scans the room, acknowledging the children with nods, then looks back down at his hands again. His hands slowly ball into fists. The Asian man smiles. He knows what to do now. He’s hoping the device he had bought off of that infomercial weeks ago actually works. He claps his hands, and DFW/Alba and the children run off quietly. He jumps off the mantel, and while in mid-air, he claps twice, loudly, and the lights in the room go out.

CURTAIN.

Out of nowhere, he bought me a sake bomb at the sushi place yesterday. This was right after my friends dared me to reproduce that scene from Cool Hand Luke, only instead of consuming 50 hard-boiled eggs it was 50 pieces of nigiri sushi.

It must have been one hell of a spectacle, with all of the frat house-like chanting and screaming and high-fiving going on after I effortlessly swallowed the last piece and stuck my empty tongue out. Too bad I didn’t have my Karate Kid bandana on me. Anyway, that’s when Leonard introduced himself to us. He sort of waddled from across the room and said, “You arr seem rike a gregalious gloup. Ret me buy you a sake bomb.”

Leonard’s also Japanese, which is why he mixes a lot of his r’s and l’s up. When we were talking politics he was all, “How do you feel about Obama and his historic erection?”

How I found out about his aspirations to be a rapper was when I noticed “Yo!kozuna” tattooed across his inner forearm. “It’s my lap name,” he told me. So of course, I revealed to him that I was also an Asian rapper, and of course, we battle freestyled each other while dorky white boys around us beatboxed.

Yo!kozuna:

Yo, you eat sushi
rike your name is Suzy
Samurai like Berushi
shoot an Uzi for that Gucci
kill you softry like a Fugee
and then smoke a doobie

Pistol Pete:

Back when Mark Walhberg was Marky Mark
This is how we used to make the party start
We used to mix Hen’ with Bacardi Dark
And when it, kicks in you can hardly...[interrupted by boos]

And then I’d exaggerate a double take. “Say – aren’t you Jillian Harris, a jilted fan-favorite on the Jason Mesnick season of The Bachelor who went on to star as The Bachelorette?”

“That’s meee,” she’d say, shrugging and making a cute face that would consist of her eyes getting larger and the bottom row of her teeth being exposed. Her silly way of trying to appear approachable.

We’d chat for a few minutes more while waiting in line at the register. I’d notice Corey Haim on a cover of People and joke, “Damn it! I keep writing ‘Corey Haim is still alive’ on all of my checks.” Jillian would laugh loudly at this – she’d laugh in a way that Ed never made her laugh – thus earning me her phone number and sparking a tumultuous affair that would lead to me dramatically showing up to her and Ed’s televised wedding on some Caribbean island, interrupting with a cry of NOOOOO!!! while they were in the middle of their vows.

I’d follow with a heroically-delivered poem, and then slowly walk up to her, placing that issue of People with the Corey Haim cover onto her hand. Then I’d walk away. Jillian of course would yell WAIT and run towards me to everyone’s astonishment and then we’d embrace and make out with lots of tongue action. ABC’s ratings would be through the fucking roof. The entire blogosphere would have a seizure on that shit, son. Jillian and I would eventually do the whole talk show circuit thing, even convincing Oprah to come back for another season just so that she could interview America’s new Favorite Couple.

But what instead happened at Walgreens is I followed her into the makeup aisle, feeling like a total creep for examining a cheap case of rouge powder while eyeing her carefully through a mirror and furtively texting my friends, “omg she is 5 feet away. wearing nice looking pea coat with shiny boots. her hair smells nice.”

I was in the middle of psyching myself up for my grand introduction when she turned the corner and walked into the “Feminine Needs” aisle. Now, makeup I can handle. Tampons, I cannot. They just make me feel light-headed. You know how some people hold their breath when they drive past a cemetery so they won’t die? I hold my breath when I walk through the tampon section of a store so I won’t sprout a vagina.

So I’m in the tampon section, holding my breath, literally holding my breath, when about two minutes pass and I can’t take it anymore so I go outside for some oxygen and then just end up leaving Walgreens altogether. Yeah I have, on occasion, watched The Bachelorette. Shut up, nothing else was on.

You can tell that Tommy Wiseau is a lonely, pathetic man. Despite a heavy Eastern European accent he insists on being American-born, as if acknowledging the real place of his birth will conjure memories he’d rather not revisit. But you can probably accurately extrapolate much about his formative years through the film that he has directed/written/starred in/produced. At some point in his life, he:

• Was euphemistically called ugly
• Got his heart smashed into little pieces by a cruel woman whose name is either “Lisa” or sounds likes “Lisa” or starts with the letter “L”; this stupid woman didn’t realize that he would have been a great financial provider for her, and so she thus lost a great man
• Longingly stared out of his bedroom window at a close-knit group of guys who were sauntering down the street, laughing, throwing the ol’ pigskin around
• Was sipping at the water fountain in high school and noticed the star quarterback, Mark, greet a couple other popular jocks with a series of complicated handshakes
• Missed his prom night but was too ashamed to tell his parents that he couldn’t find a date so he rented a tux anyway and just drove around all night; most likely he’d nervously asked a pretty blonde gal named Lisa if she would do the honor of being his prom date and she narrowed her eyes and replied, “Ummm... do I know you?”
• Spent an entire month reminding everyone he knew about his upcoming birthday, and assumed that people were acting indifferent because they were planning an epic surprise birthday party, which of course never ended up occurring
• Wished his nagging mother would just die already, perhaps from breast cancer.

It’s easy to imagine a thousand plausible turning points in Wiseau’s life, most of them involving some sort of very public humiliation – perhaps one day during college he ran across campus, dodging raindrops, holding a stack of books, until he slipped into an explosive pile of mud and heard cries of “FREAK!” from a pack of shirtless frat boys parked in a giant monster truck with KC lights – resulting in a very public meltdown that consisted of him shaking a fist in the air, screaming “GAHHHHHHH” and “I SHOW YOU, I SHOW YOU ALL,” resulting in him many years later creating a movie that would exorcise the demons of his past, a movie so phenomenally and unintentionally awful that it, dubbed The Worst Movie Ever Created, would develop a rabid cult following, selling out midnight show venues across America, a movie that would inevitably draw comparisons to “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” in terms of audience participation, where enthusiasts recite lines and throw plastic silverware at the screen. This movie would be Wiseau’s vindication, a solipsistic statement of being, and, at the very least, a vehicle for displaying his ox-like lovemaking skills. This movie would be called “The Room”.

“Ah meant to make it zat bad – it eez a black comedy,” Wiseau insists, but how can he not be fully aware that people are laughing at him and not with him? Everyone in the room laughs their asses off at “The Room,” especially me, but a small part of myself is a bit disturbed by wondering what environment could have possibly shaped the man that made this god-awful movie. Just a small part, though.

“Yes, I tellings you thats. Evils spirits can enters.”

“But we’re not even Chinese.”

“Oh shuts up. Rules don’t applies to just the Chineses.”

“There are over six billion people on this planet. And 5.9 billion of them are going to enter and leave their front doors today. Several times, probably. And you expect me to believe that 5.9 billion people are going to be bothered by evil spirits?”

“Chuc mung nam moi.”

“Oh don’t you do that, Mom. Don’t you dare do that. Don’t hide behind the Vietnamese language.”

“Sits down, Peter, and eat mung beans. For lucks.”

“Mom! I don’t believe in this stuff, Mom. I’m going home. I have things to do.”

“You go, you dies.”

“Let me leave, or... or I’m going to sweep the kitchen floor with this broom I see here, is what I’m going to do!”

“NO! PLEASE, MY SON! AIYYA! IF YOU SWEEPS THE KITCHEN FLOORS YOU WILL SWEEPS AWAYS GOOD LUCKS FOR THE ENTIRE YEARS!”

“Muahahaha! How you like me now bitch!”

Turns out, he didn’t really call me “ugly” after all. He had actually said the word “stud fee,” I think, and I’m assuming he’s talking about horses or whatever, but it turns out he’s Amish, and he’s explaining to me that because of the rampant inbreeding in their community, they’ll occasionally send someone to trek out into the city in search of strong, virile men who are willing to introduce new DNA into their village in return for a stud fee of $15,000. I lean my ear closer to this guy’s beard so I can listen to him paint more details of this: the women, usually in their late teens, are completely covered with a wool blanket that offers a strategically-placed hole, and three of the village’s elders, including the woman’s father, must be present to witness the act. I ask this guy if Asians are considered “strong” and “virile” and he says yes, for spare change and my CTA bus pass, yes. I mean I think that’s what he’s telling me. I really can’t fucking hear most of what he’s saying. He’s so hard to understand you have no idea.

On a barely-related side note, I’ve got a buddy named Amish, but he’s Indian and his name is pronounced A-MEESH.

But then I would realize that confetti was only being dropped in the next time zone, and that here in Chicago, the possible end of the world would come for me in an hour.

Growing up, I was so afraid of the end of the world that every New Years celebration that went and passed was a miracle.

Years later, on the eve of Y2K, I smartened up a little. I figured out that if the end of world were to happen, the Australians would get it first. So I would watch for Armageddon to begin every year by watching the Sydney fireworks on CNN.

“Don’t worry about the world ending today,” I used to tell my little sister. “Because it’s already tomorrow in Australia.”