“Hey, Mr. Dennis! Hey, Mr. Dennis.”
I slowed down at the sound of the familiar voice and looked back. Mario and Vernon stumbled around the corner with Mario trying to keep Vernon upright.
“I see you guys have had some liquid refreshment tonight,” I remarked, as they climbed onto my golf cart.
“Oh, yeah. We’re drunk,” Mario said, “if that’s what you’re trying to say. What about you? What are you doing out at this time of night?”
“I had to go to a wedding up the coast and the party broke up late.”
“Will you take Vernon home after you drop me off?” Mario asked. “He’s too drunk to walk.”
At Vernon’s apartment I helped him out of the golf cart and struggled to get him up to his room. Vernon is fat, with the basic body shape of an egg with legs and arms so it wasn’t an easy job.
“Thanks, Mr. Dennis,” he said, once we got inside. “Don’t hit your head on the clock.”
He pointed to a huge, round cast-iron griddle the size of an extra large pizza hanging from a hammock hook.
“Clock? It looks like a cooking griddle to me,” I said. “One of the big ones used for cooking tacos.”
“That’s because it used to be a griddle. Now, it’s a clock. It’s a griddle-clock.”
“I don’t understand how it works,” I said, as I examined it. “I don’t see any numbers or hands on it.”
“That’s because it’s a talking griddle-clock.”
He picked up a huge wooden mallet leaning against the wall and whacked the griddle as hard as he could.
“Boi-i-i-ng!”
From the other side of the wall a voice screamed, “Stop that, you idiot! It’s two-thirty in the morning!”
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