A couple of summers ago I was working a Taco Bell drive-thru on an especially sweltering evening—one of those Southeast Texas nights where the air is so stiflingly hot and soaked through with humidity that you have to hold your breath when you first walk outside. No one had come for hours and I was about to pull my till around 2 am when I encountered the ghost of Johnny Cash.
"You don't happen to have chicken dumplings, do you?” came crackling over my speaker. I had not heard the
ding of the drive-thru sensor and was caught with a mouthful of illicit cinnamon twists dipped in nacho cheese. I inhaled suddenly from the surprise, and jagged shards of half-chewed crunchy cinnamon treats flew into my throat. I had to swallow half a bucket-sized cup of Sierra Mist Mojito Splash to stop the violent coughing.
"Hello—I'm sorry sir, what was that?" I croaked after a minute, drooling opaque, cheez-colored slobber onto the mic.
I heard a faint chuckle and the softest purr of an engine as the customer pulled up to my window.
You may call me crazy—and hey, I've been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia as much as the next gal. You may also call me high—and sure, I had ingested enough THC and ketamine that night to make a polar bear hallucinate for three days. But I tell you this, with every truth-filled fiber of my being, that below me that night in a gleaming black towncar at that Taco Bell off the 290/Beltway interchange was, very unmistakably, the ghost of Johnny Cash.
"Hello, hon," said the ghost of Johnny Cash. "I said, you don't have chicken dumplings, do you?"
I shook my head, wiping the drool off my face with the back of my hand. "No, no sir. We have... we just have tacos."
He nodded and asked me to read him the entire menu. I did so, and when I finished he asked me to do it again. He ordered nachos supreme and two chicken chalupas and carefully counted out the $4.35 in dimes and pennies.
"Sir, sir, don’t worry about it," I protested when he pulled out his heavenly change purse.
But he just smiled that crinkled Johnny Cash smile and said, in that beautiful rich rough baritone, "Don't worry about it, sweetheart. I'm Johnny Cash."
I pressed the packets of Fire Sauce firmly into his hand, which felt neither cool nor warm to the touch, and silently, with the smile still on his face, he drove off into the hot pitch black night.
HA HA HA! i clicked to the seventh dimensional fish who'd escaped from my building's elevator shaft. I wheld up the FLYER some thing had slipped under my door crack and waved it around, stirring the tiny air molecules that fed the lava on my floor. I had to strand on a stack of disfigured Barbies to avoid the sulfurous bubbling
