The (Fucking) Happy Truck Driver

Jason Pilchards poked, actually not just poked, but bullied the blanched broccoli around his plate. What a fucking useless thing, he thought to himself, musing upon the utter pointlessness of vegetables – particularly ones that had been teased with hot water then placed under a cold shower to calm the excited atoms within its material composition. No! He won’t look at the thing anymore, that green lump of matter which human beings ingested because it allowed them to absorb essential nutrients vital to constitution and thus prolong a miserable existence on this tiny rock called Earth. His mother, the sagging skin bag which contained water, lots of red stuff and some ethanol compounds, two eyes, the stalks of which were hidden inside a solid piece of crust that contained a brain – watched him.

‘Jason…’ she began, as she finished forcing some cooked creature flesh down her food tube. She almost choked – a piece of phlegm shot up the back of her throat and stopped abruptly like an ambulance speeding to an emergency but slamming on the brakes as an old lady in a banged up three wheeled Triumph suddenly pulled out into its path without looking, ‘…finish your peas.’ She picked up a glass of fragrant, damn expensive, red wine, placed it to her lips to guzzle it down; minute pieces of half-chewed and oily food swam into the remainder of the liquid.

It was an expensive restaurant, well, expensive to poor people, but affordable to the rich. Wednesday afternoon, that bloody fourteen year old again with his fucking disgusting mother – Pierre Gonzo Smith, the restaurant owner stared at them with hate seething from beneath his eyelids. They always ate there, same time, same place. He didn’t know anything about these people, all he knew were that they often came in for a snack; who the fuck snacks on creature flesh??? He looked at his watch – still on his break; he stood in a back alleyway, hunched over his cigarette – he hated smoking, he hated his job, he hated himself. A truck was attempting to reverse into the alleyway; the furniture store next door was receiving goods. The drive, his face sweaty, the armpits of his t-shirt damp from perspiration swung the front of the vehicle into on coming traffic.

The broccoli never did anyone any harm – or so it thought. Little did it know that it was responsible for the deaths of over a million people, but that’s another story, something that the reader probably won’t be interested in – I mean, who or what would be interested in an amputated vegetable. Jason stared at it, fascinated by its texture; it’s like tiny world within tiny worlds, repeating; he caught himself saying out his thought out loud.

He looked up and saw a truck reversing into the alleyway. The driver’s face was flustered as onlookers stood on the sidewalk expecting failure. Jason’s eyes scanned the streets – eight people visible, not including the driver. A man inside the car was rubbing his face, his chest rapidly rising up and down, hands clasped so tight around the steering wheel that his knuckles turned white. The truck driver wiped his forehead with the back of his hairy forearm. The rear tire caught the pavement and anchored the truck against the kerb. Jason watched the gorilla of a man wrestle the steering wheel, the engine revved angrily, one loud rev excused the truck from the predicament and the truck slid in between the buildings. A smug and contented smile crept across the driver’s lips, and if it were okay for one to do so in society, he probably would have leapt out from the cab to do a song and dance then take a bow, but he didn’t, he struggled hard to stifle the grin, it looked awkward; he looked like he was having a minor stroke, not enough to raise the concern of gathered audience, but strange enough to make them wonder whether the driver at some point in his youthful life had suffered some kind of heart condition. Jason sneered – he knew exactly what was going on with the driver.

Pierre dropped the cigarette stub and rotated the bottom of his shoe over it, fifteen degrees clockwise, then fifteen degrees anti-clockwise, then stepped back into the kitchen of the restaurant as the truck rattled past with a very a happy occupant inside. That was a pretty good cigarette he thought to himself, now I have to deal with those pig customers.