“conversations faites a un ivrogne”- f.scott Fitzgerald.

-excuse me?

He looked up. The waitress was bending down towards him. She had a very anxious expression on her face, and she was holding a piece of chocolate cake on a dish against her white-aproned stomach.

“must be a rookie” he thought and said

-yeah? Without any vocal inflexion and only a slight raising of his graying red eyebrows.

-it was you that ordered cake, right?

Now she tried a smile, but he always looked at women’s eyes and never at their mouths, so he noticed that her right eye twitched when she smiled.

‘a tic like that must be tough for a girl this young’ he thought and said, without taking his eyes off her face

- if a piece of cake is a whiskey, then sure.

She stared at him blankly, still smiling (::twitch:: ::twitch…twitch.twitch…)

-oooh and stood up straight. She wagged the index finger of her left hand (the one that wasn’t holding the cake) at him (‘probably something she’s seen the veterans do’ he thought), and did her best coquettish turn on the heel (for his benefit, or her own?), but it was much too slow, and lacked confidence. As she walked busily towards the next occupied booth, he observed her, and found that she effected him. Her somewhat thin hair (‘bleached too many times, dyed too many times’ he thought) which was particularly sparse at the crown of her well-shaped but small head, aroused a pity, and a detached, accidental tenderness in him. At the same time he found himself simultaneously awed and disgusted by the disproportionately large and solid mass of her hips, buttocks and thighs beneath the unprettily bow-tied ribbon of her apron strings.

He was simultaneously awed and disgusted by anything that could arouse a gut-craving in him; he felt the same way about the whiskey that she brought him, in a spotty old-fashioned tumbler, after she had returned the cake to it’s case.