Unfinished.

"What kind?" asked Sam, gripping his coffee mug in both hands. It didn't seem to bother him so terribly much that the guy had always kept a gun in his lunchbox. No sputter, not even a raised eyebrow. Just, "What kind?"
"I don't know, a glock," I said, lying wildly, eager to skip the technical details that I had been too horrified to remember. "Right next to his hot little hostess crapcakes."
"Loaded?" he said. He remained maddeningly unfazed, keeping me from getting to the point.
"Always," I said, damning myself further. Dammit, Sam. Didn't he understand the mayhem inherent in a (loaded?) lunchbox?
"How'd you know he had a gun in it?" he said. He didn't sound skeptical, only sleepy, lounging back and throwing his arm over the back of the booth, around an invisible girl. I spent a moment happily visualizing her as Sofia Loren, before I remembered he was looking at me with mild expectation.
"Oh," I said, "Well, every day he'd be all,"- here I leaned back and patted my stomach, making a noise like a warthog with indigestion- "'Well, it's that time.' And he'd get his hello kitty lunchbox with the stickers on it." Sam snickered at that, and Sofia Loren smiled softly, leaning into the crook of his elbow and touseling his hair with a manicured dragon-lady fingernail. I felt the back of my neck tingle. "And then he'd scowl at me, like, all, 'Dammit, it's my daughter's,' and then he'd take the gun and slam it on the table really hard, and I would jump every time. Then he'd take out all his junk food and line it up."
Sam brayed softly under his breath, a low moose call. "Just junk food?"
"Yeah, just Styrofoam spun sugar bullshit crap, you know? He'd sit it on his desk and look at it, like it's some kind of glorious smorgasbord of delights, rubbing his hands together to see whether he wants to eat the Hohos or the Sno-caps first."
"You know, that's actually really awful," Sam said, his face showing genuine concern, and causing my portrayal of the man as a villain to wilt further, "Was his life that empty? Who looks forward to a Hoho?"
I brushed away his misplaced concern and plowed on with the story. "So one day, he's in the can all morning and I thought 'Well, why not? What's he going to do, shoot me?' I figured he'd probably get fired for that, so he wouldn't."
"Yeah?" said Sam, leaning forward and getting his elbow in Sofia Loren's pie.
"I ate his twinkie." I leaned back in my chair, expecting to be praised as a daredevil, but it fell flat, as Sam was still fixated on the culinary aspects of the tale.
"You can't eat a twinkie," said Sam. "That's disgusting."
"Well, I DID," I said, too loudly. My outburst caused some others in the restaurant to stir, and I soon quieted. "I ate it, and it was really horrible." I whispered this part venomously, further rubbing in my sense of pride.
At this, he looked only puzzled, "But why would you do something like that? That's so risky."
"Yeah, I know," I said, relishing in his long-overdue awe, "I guess it just gave me a thrill."
"Why would a twinkie thrill you in any way? That's so..." he searched for his words here, stirring his cup of coffee and looking not unlike my mother years ago when she found me tempting the neighbor's pitbull by dangling my feet over the fence, just out of reach of her terrifying jaws, "...unseemly. Don't you know what goes into those things?"
My rage doubled in seconds. This time I made sure to keep my voice down. "There is no risk in eating twinkies! There is risk in eating stolen twinkies while being chased by an armed madman!"
"Wait, he chased you?" He actually stirred at this, looking fascinated by the idea of a gunfight incited by inedible vending machine goods.
"Well, no. He didn't catch me, but he sat down and spent about ten minutes looking through his lunchbox afterwards. He lined everything up, and I swear he actually did a double-take when he didn't see his precious yellow plexiglass delight sitting there, nestled in its cellophane covering."
"Did he say anything?" Sam finished his coffee and reached for his bill, leaving his payment on the table and making it clear to me that he was getting antsy. Sofia gathered her purse and smoothed the wrinkles from her imaginary sundress.
"Well, no, but it's a really great story," I said, suddenly self-conscious and wondering if it really was, "So the next day, I-"
He cut me off. "Hey, sorry, Paul. I've gotta run. I've got work tomorrow and I have to be up really early."
Being that I didn't have a job anymore and I never went to sleep before sunrise, it always caught me off guard when others went to sleep at reasonable hours. I couldn't kid myself into thinking that it was fun to stay up until 10 am, shaking and drinking endless cups of coffee, but I couldn't understand not being an insomniac like I was. I looked at him curiously, wondering how it would be possible for him to get enough sleep, considering it was already 9. Then I remembered that not everyone was a sloth like me and most people could survive on less than 13 hours of rest a night. Or morning, as it were.
"Oh, sure," I said, snapping out of it. "I'll catch up with you later. Maybe this weekend?"
"Yeah, I'm not doing anything special," he said, and got up to leave. "See you later."
As he left, I conjured an invisible audience. The people sat rapturously in their seats, sitting in awed silence and staring worshipfully at me as I told my tale. It took me a long time to picture every one of them in the front row. The spotlights only allowed me to see that far, but I could feel the energy from the teeming masses behind them. In the center was a girl with long brown hair, worshipfully admiring my slovenly physique and hoping to catch me at the signing afterwards, to shake my hand and thank me, to stare at me with dewy eyes and revel in my benevolent glow. I would have to ask her back to my place afterwards. Most likely other patrons could see me smiling at my doting, imaginary fans. Every one of my perfectly chosen words and knowing grins said, "Eat it, Spalding Gray." Then I remembered he was dead, and I felt sort of bad. Soon, though, my story overwhelmed even me.
****
It was that time again. The clock on the wall said 2100 hours. At that point, surrounded by pointlessly carpeted walls and grim desks with important-looking monitors, I was beginning to crack up. The green on the walls was beginning to take its toll, and I couldn't even look at grass anymore without feeling nauseated. I closed my eyes and began to drift off almost instantly, only deterred by a nagging fear that I might get caught. This feeling was faintly, almost imperceptibly, tempered with guilt that I had once again managed to get paid for doing absolutely nothing.
As soon as I reached REM sleep, John slammed his gun on the table. I jumped. Or rather, dove under the desk again, because I was fairly certain it was loaded. He always kept the gun in his daughter's Hello Kitty lunchbox, nestled between packing-peanut snacks and packaged cakes from the Great Depression. It was eerie to see a man so filled with delight over twinkies, grocery store cupcakes, and various other crappy confections guaranteed to cause complications within a few weeks of ingesting them regularly. He rubbed his hands over them, considering each piece like a work of fine art. I often wondered why he bothered to inspect each cake, because I once saw him eat an ant that was perched atop a Little Debbie deathtrap. John considered the tiny insect for a long while, then opened his cavernous jaws. Obviously the ant hadn't realized what he was getting himself into when he had climbed onto the white, sugary boulder. When he had swallowed each morsel, he looked at me, smiling. My look of horror was not disguised in the slightest, and he laughed. "You never ate a bug before? Come on, son, they're every which way you look." After that, I took to inspecting each scrap of food that I took into my house, and even thought of buying a microscope to screen my nutrition for smaller organisms.