With titles so long you'd think Panic! at this Disco came up with them

Louie asked me to post more of my story bits from over the years, so here you go. This one's for him, because we're both from tourist towns and we can both relate to this. I'm actually more proud of this story than any other and I'll keep posting what I have if the demand exists.

I guess you could call me a bartender of sorts. I'm the enabler. I make people fat tourists fatter.

I'm a snow-cone vendor in front of Wal-Mart. Dollar-fifty for a medium, two-fifty for a large. We don't have a small. Watermelon is the most popular flavor. On a typical six-hour day I sell about $250 worth of ice and syrup. I wear an apron that has a picture of the Earth in a frozen martini glass and SnoGlobe written across the bottom in electric blue.

When most people think of a Wal-Mart, they think of an electronics department and toys and brand-less clothes and, if it's a Wal-Mart Supercenter, groceries also come to mind. But the Wal-Mart in Panama City Beach has a deal with vendors that peddle wears outside the store. I work for SnoGlobe, a national corporation that operates thirty snow cone stands outside department stores across the country. Roughly eighty percent of their revenue comes from Panama City Beach, Daytona Beach, Galveston, and Beverly Hills.

Snow cones are big business.

There is one other vendor outside of the Panama City Beach Wal-Mart Supercenter: an American flag vendor by the name of Eddie Crow. Eddie sells five-foot display flags, license plates, miniature flags, wall posters, and just about anything that can legally feature the likeness of America's glory. Above his modest stand is a neon red and blue sign that flashes:

BE A PATRIOT

So on that overcast Saturday in June I stood behind my freezer-on-wheels and counted all the Confederate flags I could spot in the parking lot. I was up to seventy-seven when I noticed that Eddie was hobbling his obese self over towards me. It's not that I hated talking to Eddie but I'm pretty sure the guy was trying to re-live his youth through me. And that's just creepy.

"How's is goin', hoss?"

Oh, and he called me hoss all the time. I really liked that. I told him that I had sold around forty-five larges in the past three hours.

"No, I mean ha' are you doin'?"

I guessed that I was doing fine.

"Weh, that's good t'ear. Yah have a good head on yah shoulders, Steve. So many fine youn'people these days lookin' for happiness in all the wrong places. With all the drugs and gangs and that sheeeeit."

I was going to tell him about my theories that drugs are the only fun thing to do in this town and that gangs only exist in cities with sidewalks, but I just agreed with him. Then I asked him how business was going. He took a bite of the corndog gripped between his fat fingers, thought for a second, then pointed the greasy stick at me.

"Oh well, you know. It's got its ups and downs. I only took in $475 yesterday. Last week I think I took in..." Little pieces of sausage and fried batter flew in my direction as he spoke, hurtling towards my apron and landing on Sri Lanka and Montreal and Belize. I imagined Canadians screaming in French terror as giant pieces of Eddie's spittle landed on their fair city. My continence didn't change while I let him drone on about profit margins. I made the occasional ah and oh and shook my head to give the illusion that I actually cared.

"... but I've gotta shooooow you somethin'! Hold on jus’a secon’." He turned around with the grace of a Mack truck on a two-lane bridge and stumbled back to his booth and grabbed some papers. I wondered if he had printed out some touching e-mail forwarded to him by a church friend, or if he had some pornographic photos for me, or maybe it was a picture of a really nice car. It didn't matter. It could have been the secret to eternal happiness and I wouldn't have cared: not because I wasn't interested but because it was Eddie.

"Check this out," he wheezed when he returned to my snow cone stand. There were two graphs: one of the Homeland Security Thread Advisory code over the past six months, and the other represented his revenue over the same amount of time. They were nearly identical.

"Isn't that crazy? Every time the Advisory goes up, my profits go up! And same with goin' down, too. So I got me one of these." He pulled a little stopwatch-looking device out of his pocket. A ticker ran across the front:

THREAT LEVEL: ORANGE

"I tell yah hoss, I'll be on top of business with this thing. Updates every minute and only costs me fifteen bucks a month!"

Suddenly: "What's it take to get some damn service around here?"

It was an obese, greasy man with a handlebar mustache and several tattoos and his hair wrapped in a Confederate flag bandanna. The fat fuck hadn't been standing there for longer than seven seconds but I turned around, greeted him with a smile, and swirled watermelon and strawberry in five large cups for his five fat fuck kids. Eddie hobbled back to his patriotic post and sold fifteen flags to a tour bus full of seniors.

When the sun finally fell beneath the condominiums on the horizon, I packed all of the flavored syrups and cups and spoons back into my aluminum cart, locked it up, and walked back to my busted-ass car.

Midway through the parking lot, a black Oldsmobile caught the corner of my eye. I turned around only to catch a glimpse of some Hummer's headlights. By the time I was re-focused the mysterious car had disappeared into the night.