Slow it down, Plissken. You’re overloading the power plant !

In walked Van, wearing a beret, looking squeaky clean behind the ears, and ready to deliver something or another.

“Why don’t you come out of the shadows? What do you really look like? You’re afraid of something, aren’t you?”

Why did this sound so familiar? Where had I heard this before? I thought for a few minutes and finally twigged to it. He just quoted from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance verbatim. I smiled vaguely and felt the heavy burden of knowing we had an entire meal ahead of us.

I sprang from our seat in the bar when the waiter came and asked if we’re ready to be seated in the main room. I wanted to order, eat, and then make my separate way out the door, to be on with my life in a very short period of time.

“Slow it down, Plissken. You’re overloading the power plant.”

I shot him a dismayed look before saying, “Escape from L.A., right?”

We were seated; he didn’t even look at the menu. I was about to ask if he knew what he was going to order, but he cut me off and replied, “The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.”

I recognized that one, too. Star Trek.

I yawned and looked at him, square in the eyes. I was trying to show him that I was bored already with his quotes.

“I have eyes like those of a dead pig.”

Not only was that Marlon Brando, but it didn’t make any sense. And I got stuck figuring out what movie it was from. Last Tango in Paris? One-Eyed Jacks? I asked him if he always acted like this.

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”

Charles Bukowski. No wonder this idiot was single.

I called my friend, Eric, to help me make sense out of what I just experienced.

“It was actually pretty clever that this guy never spoke to me in his own words. He must have had a spiral notebook of quotes he rehearsed daily, then pulled out the best matches for whatever situation he was in.”

Eric told me I blew it by not speaking in quotes back to him, and then said that speaking in tongues really would have given our date a little more pizzazz.