Denny's
A work of fiction
Inspired by the dosage makes it so, this is the music I was listening to as I wrote this piece. I encourage you to listen to it as you read it.
The girl from Panama told me I fucked her like a lesbian.
The girl from Greece told me I was behaving too heroically, and that it didn’t suit me.
I believe that whatever I do next will surpass what I’ve already done.
We couldn’t afford to get tested at the time, so we went to Denny’s instead, cutting our losses and airing our grievances to stacks of pancakes. “All night” in our case really meant all night, and Denny’s was a kind of godsend in that respect, the only earthly place that operated on our wavelength. Not just any Denny’s would do, either–it had to be the Denny’s with the marigolds out front, the Denny’s right there in the still-beating heart of Independence, Ohio at the intersection of Rockside Road and Quarry Lane, catty corner to the overflow parking lot of the Red Roof Inn where I watched Darius bleed out one time following an argument over an improperly handled gram of cocaine. We had to switch gears following the Darius incident, so we pivoted to methamphetamine, and the whole town of Independence seemed to follow suit. At Denny’s you might see a man with wasps in his beard harvesting lightbulbs from the ceiling fixtures and screaming verses from the Qu’ran in the direction of customers. I might tell him to stop, that he was scaring the girl from Greece who was starting to take her Catholicism really seriously and thought his screaming was a real problem, a real affront to her orthodox sensibilities.
All of this is purely hypothetical.
Things between myself and the girl from Greece would end soon after this particular Denny’s run when she chided me for, in her words, “opening the box of Rice Krispies like a child.”
Nothing I do is like what a child might do, I said. I’d sooner be likened to an ape or a capuchin, even bearing in mind all of the racial baggage that such a likening might carry. No, a child is one of the worst things that a man can be—and I love children, I really do, but when your time is up your time is up, and there might not be anything on this earth as pathetic as an adult still possessed of the tendencies of a child. Did that frighten you just then, when I started talking about how much I love children? Did you feel your shoulders narrow and your jaw start to quiver with anticipated contempt? I want to ask you this because it determines how the rest of this story will go: what will it take for you to be convinced of my ultimate goodness? If you could see how I am with kids, you’d know in an instant. Even the evil dog I lived with during the height of the COVID lockdowns was eventually convinced–the evil dog who was evil in the primordial way that Stephen Miller is evil, in the primordial way that certain corners of Chicago feel evil. The dog was irredeemable and soulless, is what I mean, and he hated my guts and wished after my death right up until the moment my roommate’s newborn nephew made his first visit to our home. I swear it all changed after that, after he watched me cradle the newborn. The primordially evil dog started coming into my room late at night and snuggling up against me, whimpering into my bulk as though I was the only creature on this godforsaken planet who could understand him. We became inseparable after that day, after he saw how gentle and patient and soft-spoken I was with the child. If something as evil and stupid as that dog could change its mind about me–well, maybe there’s hope for you after all.
Approximately ten years after I’ve had the feeling, I’ll be able to put words around it and explain in exacting detail what it was and how it affected my behavior. That was how I put it to the girl from Panama after she told me it was getting harder and harder to understand my motivations for acting out in the ways I’d started acting out. She’d taken a real risk on me when she invited me over to her grandmother’s house for Christmas, a holiday that the Panamanians take seriously despite sharp declines in Catholic sensibilities among the general population.
I will never forgive myself for what I’m about to describe to you, just as I will never comprehend the full scope of my intentions or those of others, just as I will never again be given what might be the greatest bit of post-coital feedback that a man can receive from a woman–that he fucked her like a lesbian. In the far left corner of the yellow-lit living room of the Panamanian girls’ grandparents’ mid-century home there stood a little plastic Christmas tree, no bigger in stature than a mailbox or a birdbath. From each of the tree’s branches there hung a single desiccated rabbit’s foot–the rabbit being a venerated creature in Panamanian mythology. I found this appalling and tasteless, but it was an aspect of their culture, which meant I had no choice but to respect it. All night I’d been acting weird, sucking the juice out of everyone else’s discarded shrimp heads and refusing to sing along with the Panamanian Christmas carols. My vibe was sticky and dark and I felt, as I often do, like some sort of ambling black hole. For once in that blasted year I wasn’t even fucked up, not even remotely fucked up, but it was a full moon and, thanks in large part to a series of astrological readings conducted by the Panamanian girl and her deeply concerned cohort of astrologically inclined friends, I’d come to realize that full moons broke a certain fever in me, awakening a lust for chaos which often culminated in bizarre, impulsive displays of flagrant self-destruction. That evening in particular…you wouldn’t believe me if I told you the things I’m able to see before they happen. The Arroz con Guandu, the centerpiece of every proper Panamanian Christmas feast and the evening’s main event, hadn’t even hit the table yet when I shot up from my chair and, with vacant eyes like the heads of nails, declared to the room that I had a bomb strapped to my chest. I did so in broken Spanish, pounding my breast plate like some sort of deranged Silverback and announcing yo tengo una bomba but butchering the delivery so badly that it must’ve sounded like I said bamba, which, as it was later explained to me by the Panamanian girl who was possessed of a truly saint-like quality–patient, compassionate, and eerily unflappable–is a type of sandal that is very popular in Panama. In hindsight I doubt it was the content of my words that was so disturbing. No, it was the way I must’ve looked as I threw myself back from the table, silverware and plates full of shrimp heads scattering all across the floor, and a cavernous silence fell over the once joyous room, and the poor Panamanian girl’s grandmother shot a dark red gaze through me, and the girl’s nephew, who earlier had told me with a faint whiff of erotic intrigue that he thought I looked like Drake, shattered the silence by lunging across the table and wrestling me to the ground as the rest of the room erupted into sobs and jeers and all the awful sounds that people make when they’re angry and confused and want more than anything for whatever just happened to not have just happened.
It’s not that you aren’t a hero, the girl from Greece told me, straddling the gaping maw of her Grand Slam with a fork in one hand as she clenched the other into a fist.
It’s that everyone–women in particular–can tell that you aren’t quite sold on this version of yourself. There’s too much hesitation and doubt and it makes you seem untrustworthy. And I wouldn’t even describe you as insecure. I think you just need more time to sit with these new beliefs of yours before you start making them a cornerstone of your identity.
I’d learned to cherish moments of reflection like these, regarding them with something like reverence and emptying my mind of all defenses. My other Greek friends, all of whom shared my and the girl’s penchant for methamphetamine, also wielded this uncanny ability to eviscerate me with brutally accurate, deeply acerbic insights into the nature of my character. I sometimes wondered if it wasn’t a sort of inheritance from their philosopher ancestors, this crystalline clarity that my meth-addled Greek friends wielded against the intricacies of human behavior.
She was right about the ill-fitting suit. This new streak of heroism that had overtaken me was downstream of my latest obsession: obscure biographical details about the assassins and would-be assassins of American presidents. Sirhan Sirhan, for instance, RFK’s assassin, was just over five feet tall and had spent the bulk of his adult life training to be a jockey. The head injuries he sustained during decades of falling off of horses made him impervious to psychoanalysis, and two of the three psychiatrists hired by the prosecution to crack him into confessing wound up killing themselves–ostensibly out of profound frustration–before the case even went to trial. Four of the six former husbands of Sara Jane Moore, would-be assassin of long-forgotten president Ford, had been named “Steven”. Charles Guiteau wrote hundreds of haikus about president Garfield before shooting him clean through the heart. He was permitted to read one of them out loud as his final words as he sat upon the electric chair. None of these facts mattered as much as the one bit of trivia that kept me up night upon night: the fact that, despite everything, a Black American man had never taken a shot at a major political figure.
I was a poet in those years, prostituting my inner world and putting people to sleep. The internet had made everyone acutely concerned with questions of authenticity, and I was a poet, which meant that I trafficked in authenticity, and the nights spent gakked out of my mind on methamphetamine at Denny’s with the Greeks unlocked channels of what felt like supreme, unbridled, ecstatic authenticity. Inexplicable synchronicities would erupt all around us, little cosmic winks from beyond the realm of cause and effect–as when we sat up for hours untangling a long-winded conspiracy about Bruno Mars–something involving his ties to Mossad and how the hooks to his most popular songs all contained thinly veiled allusions to the Talmud–and who should walk in–I swear to God, this happened, I swear–who should walk in to the Denny’s but Bruno Fucking Mars himself, flanked by two decidedly Mossad-ish security guards, both of whom ordered two Grand Slams apiece and mowed them down while glaring at us with a hostile knowingness that must’ve taken years off of each of our already tenuous lives.
Denny’s was a portal, a temple, a refuge. Hear the vulturous kitchen chatter of the cadre of Guatemalens aged 19 to 23 whose Olympian wrist technique allowed for the flipping of dozens of eggs at once. See Borys, alone there in the far left corner booth, shouting into one of his many cellphones as his coffee grows cold–Borys the Ukrainian refugee who made a name for himself selling homemade snuff films online. Borys knew how to make absurd amounts of money, and despite often sliding into our booth at Denny’s decked out in designer clothes and gold-plated watches, never once picked up the check.
The most lucrative of Borys’ schemes was elegant and simple and perfectly suited to the era: he would recruit his friends back in the Ukraine to take videos of the carnage on their iPhones, videos of imploded torsos and scattered limbs and the charred remnants of children. After splicing the footage together and setting it to a soundtrack that mostly consisted of unlicensed System of a Down covers, Borys would upload his videos to LiveLeak and Dailymotion where commenters would praise him for, above all else, the authenticity of his work. The best stuff, though—the really crazy shit was locked behind a paywall, with some of his most loyal clients even ordering custom, bespoke videos with soundtracks of their choosing. People pay wicked money for this shit he would say, and after months of hearing about Borys’s videos, of course my curiosity got the better of me. I wasn’t motivated by any sort of sadism or perverse enjoyment of the suffering of others–please. Stop. See, I can feel it happening again–your judgments of me, my character, crystallizing around this one little part of the story, and now once more I’m compelled to pause and remind you: I am a good, honest person. I have strong principles and an unimpeachable moral compass. I believe that war is wrong, that children are sacred, and that no torso of no human ought to implode under any circumstance. My concern with the suffering of others is entirely selfless in origin and devoid of any sort of libidinal undercurrent. Why should you take me at my word? Perhaps because my word is all I have. I am a poet. I am a good person. If you don’t believe the words themselves, listen to the space between them. Look into my eyes as I talk my mother down from another one of her episodes over the phone. Take it up with God, then, if you still aren’t convinced. There’s nothing your doubt can take from me that I haven’t already lost, more times than you could imagine. More times than you could possibly imagine.
I wanted to quit methamphetamine. I wanted to give my words a shot at life. I wanted to climb the ranks of American letters, which, as a colored man, meant that I had to make authentic work. The people who ascended were the people who worked the authenticity machine most effectively. These were your Ocean Vuongs, your Hanif Abdurraqibs, your Kaveh Akbars–niggas right around my age making millions off the strength of being just real enough so as to not offend the borderline-Victorian sensibilities of their largely white audiences–but not so unbridled as to reveal any cracks where evil might seep through–not so real as to leave anyone with any lingering doubts as to the essential goodness and coherence of their characters. If I wanted to be liked and taken seriously as a colored man, as a poet, I had to carry myself with a self-serious heaviness–but not too heavy, see. Just heavy enough, once more, to soothe the lingering guilt of the NPR crowd and make them believe they were beholding the testimony of one of the good Blacks, one of the safe Blacks.
The whole enterprise sickened me. If I wanted to be a whore I’d stand outside the Denny’s and proffer my asshole to the hungry ghosts in the parking lot. Ocean Vuong and them wrote lullabies–which is to say that their work put me right to sleep and felt so safe that it made me squirm. The whole scene made me squirm, but it was what the audience had been trained to want, and who was I to deny them their narcotic of choice? If I wanted to get grants, I had to undergo a kind of humiliation ritual in which I disclosed a neatly packaged narrative of relational trauma and mistreatment at the hands of evil, faceless institutions. I had to fit smoothly into a narrative arc that passed my tender little vulnerable Black body through the ringer of profound victimization and somehow delivered me to a place of absolute self-assuredness and a spotless personal brand. Sometimes I let myself imagine that the whole process would be much simpler if I was gay–and I kinda was, but not gay enough, and certainly not the right kind of gay. If I wanted people to listen to me, I had to quit methamphetamine, ramp up the authenticity, and become more gay. I had to convince them, as I convinced the primordially evil dog, that I was safe.
The problem is this: everything important about you should speak for itself. Whether or not you’re hiding something, whether or not you’re safe–all of this should register instantly. It should be immediately recognizable, even to something as dumb and instinctual as a dog. The harder the effort to perform softness and safety, the more suspicion the person ought to be met with. I was not like these colored men. I was haunted by desperation and rage. At night, I was visited by visions of swollen corpses and humanoid moths assuming the voice of grandmother. By day, I nurtured fantasies of petty revenge and plotted elaborate acts of political violence.
Of course, the end to all my searching appeared to me one night at Denny’s. Of course, it arrived as if by decree of a gentle and benevolent God. Borys was there on his usual tip, brokering snuff films with his friends back home, and I asked him point-blank if he’d ever thought about cutting out the middle man–gathering his own footage here in the fatherland, making something uniquely American, something really authentically American. Using the tips of both of his Vienna sausage pointer fingers, he methodically removed his Gucci sunglasses from his temples and stared blankly at me.
“What you are asking of me here, nigger?”
Borys, having fled a warzone, had infinite license to say essentially whatever came to his deeply fractured mind, and his use of racial epithets was nothing compared to the grisly, detailed Russian torture fantasies with which he often regaled us for hours on end as the sun rose and fell above the Denny’s. Borys too was haunted by desperation and rage, both of which were earned and neither of which were under control.
“I am asking you, Borys, if you’re ready to climb the ranks of American letters.”
Besides the two pairs of Ray-Ban Meta glasses, the biggest investment on Borys’ end would be the IWI Zion-15 assault rifles with the chrome-treated barrels. It took a great deal of effort to not tell Boris that “IWI” was an acronym for “Israeli Weapons Institute”. He despised Israel, and so did I, because at the end of the day, despite all of our vices and the black spots on our souls, Borys and I were fundamentally good people. There you go doubting me again. Fuck it, and fuck you. I give up. I knew Borys was good for the money. His latest efforts had earned him well over $150k on LiveLeak Premium. He had one of the most dedicated followings of anyone I’d ever met. I thought of him as the Ocean Vuong of LiveLeak. He thought of himself as a fearless propagandist for the postmodern era, a man on a mission to spread authentic renderings of human pain to eager audiences of thoughtful, sympathetic, deeply moral people. The two of us were going to commit and record the largest-scale political assasination in American history.
Something sacred ran alongside us, a golden current that hung like static in the air. It was the stillness of a shared mission. It was the transcendent, almighty grace of self-assuredness in the face of primordial evil. The sun bore its red-gold fury in missiles of heat. The heat bore through our eyes and out of our anuses. The sun was inside of us, fucking us raw and making us pay. We were hungry and in withdrawal. The mission demanded absolute sobriety, and we knew it would be rough, but the low simmer of adrenaline offset the worst of it. We loped around the perimeter of the convention center and waited. What remained to be done would cement my legacy as the most important Black American writer since Toni Morrison. It was something so much more vital and urgent than another tender missive on pansexuality from Kaveh Akbar. It was the announcement of a new era in Black authenticity.
Overhead, there might flock a black parade of crows. Overhead, you might hear the cold, inhuman whir of the Turning Point USA helicopter, which was plastered, as most everything else at AMERICAFEST 2026 was, with images of the recently departed Charlie Kirk. You might bear witness to a single black wasp weaving its way through my beard. I might be too blinded by desperation and rage to notice even this. I might look to Borys in an instant, lock in to the ice behind his orange chestnut eyes and tell him that history is the purview of the brave.
All of this is purely hypothetical.
I was reminded of "branch Davidians" a few days back and it haunts like a portending ghost. Waco as world's microcosm. Good hypothetical allegorical story written in Minecraft, enjoyed it plenty 😊
The story would’ve been more funny if it had ended with you/narrator killing Charlie Kirk. But maybe you/they are too good of a person for such a thing. Or maybe not