Ready When You Are

Lunch with Ugly Alan is always a B-movie horror film experience. I'm seated across the table from a low-budget Frankenstein's monster, who needs several extra bolts of lightning to become fully animate. Any normal person would require ten hours of heavy green make-up application and a prosthetic nose to look as hideous as he does. Just look at him as he throttles an entire bottle of vinegar onto his plate with gorilla-sized hands. Ugly Alan's body is an awkward assemblage of cut-price parts: graveyard eyes, discount legs, second-hand feet, torso found in the back of a junk shop. And his huge, misshapen head appears glued onto a broken neck, precariously balanced on his shoulders, about to fall off at any moment and roll across the restaurant's linoleum floor in the final, spine-chilling scene. Then the credits would roll as a busboy brings more napkins to mop up the mess and the waitress arrives with my check. Fortunately, Ugly Alan's head somehow manages to remain in place. Practice makes perfect, no doubt. He's been well-rehearsed. 

I am no oil painting myself, of course, not even a creepy oil painting whose eyes follow you around the room in a haunted house. I'm more of a slightly overweight werewolf with male pattern baldness. But at least the other diners don't need to worry about me until the next full moon. It's only waning gibbous right now, so they'll be fine if they want to order coffee and dessert. Sitting here with Frankenstein's ketchup-stained monster, however, I'm concerned those other diners are already gathering their flaming torches and preparing to surround our table. How are they supposed to enjoy their meals when the Devil's incubus dwells amongst them, devouring fried chicken by the bucketful.

They are all much younger than Ugly Alan and I, and most of them seem to be starring in ersatz remakes of popular Rom-Coms, except those two guys by the window doing their buddy-cop comedy bits, and that sullen kid in the corner acting out his own coming-of-age-drama. To think I was once the leading man in such blockbuster scenarios; a regular on the red carpet and a stalwart of every opening night. But now I'm too old and unfashionable, reduced to supporting roles in straight-to-video genre flicks featuring Ugly Alan. Soon I'll be just a voice-over in TV commercials for eldercare and back pain pills. I suppose I could try getting typecast as an inscrutable Cherokee chief in a modern Western, dispensing ancient wisdom to troubled pale faces between puffs on his peace pipe. But I'm sure all these younger diners consider that blackface and I'll be cancelled and my chef's salad sent back to the kitchen in disgrace.

Maybe I should just retire from the silver screen altogether. I'm obviously well past my prime. It's been my plan to move to a quiet place on the coast anyway; the kind of perpetually off-season beach town that doesn't even have a cinema. Just a rickety old amateur dramatics stage in a church hall, where I can play Captain Cat every night in the Seaside Theater Company's production of Under Milkwood, until the moth-eaten curtain finally closes on my career. I'll even ask Ugly Alan to guest star as Evans The Death if he's available


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