IT'S 7 PM IN JULY. YOU'RE HUNGRY. You stop in for dinner at a new restaurant called World of Stars. It used to be a discount furniture store, only now the old space is washed clean with lots of salmon colors, assertive and new millennium with big-bole palms, barracuda aquariums, and wall niches lodged with mannequins of Hollywood testosterone. What stands out above the chic though is the wait staff, each contained in their own magnificent housing of flesh. The owner, Sandy Dodd, says he hired them because they remind him of his two children who died in a car accident many years ago. "Also," he says, "They project success."

You have no choice but to look on as a newly pimpled child while these extras from a 60's beach movie stalk the dining room like golden lions, their radiant foreheads thrusting enough in posture, drifting from atop flaming Aryan-towers, striding forward with enough momentous grace--blond and broad, perspireless and gleaming--to shrivel you right there in the chair to a pharaonic pygmy mummy.

You pucker inwardly. You shiver before the altar of a dead priest race. You pale with the disastrous knowledge of your own fragility--you porous, blue-veined, membrane-winged, insect-devouring thing.

Oh, God, my angles are obtuse, you say to yourself.

One of the foreheads comes up to your table and asks what you want, then another. You don't meet their eyes at first, but you are compelled to for they arrive so magnetized and youthful, sucking in sun like huge leaves, their ego-chlorophyll able to translate the sprinkler light of July into success. You understand this and order dinner, have a drink or two, and nik-nik, nik-nik, nik-nik like Jack Nicholson. The next day you bring friends into the restaurant for lunch and you begin to laugh loudly, and you don't stop laughing till you leave. You also make a point of leaving a very small tip.

During the coming winter you find yourself grasping in a pitiful way for a hot sidewalk, a caterpillar of lotion, a slip-and-slide thrill of July. You park yourself above the earth, free of cloud cover. You stare out the window and pinch your face to a faded apple. Once the snow plows have cleared a path, you venture out in your car. Half way to the grocery store you hit the brakes in response to another vehicle suddenly lurching forward from a cross street. The resulting skid and crash into a light pole breaks your femur and nose.

When you awaken in the hospital with a taste of street in your mouth, one of the first things you think about is Sandy Dodd. The thought is almost enough to make you get religion, but not quite. Instead, feeling rather surreal on bio and pain drugs, you appear to yourself as a roaring sun devoid of spots. You strike a pose from atop a sea cliff at dawn. Face down on a hot sidewalk, your forehead burns.

   First published in Quarterly West