Thursday, January 31, 2008

Petro I-70, Pennsylvania

In this stretch of I-70 before the turnpike there is a Petro full of characters here are 3 (3 groups, 6 people):

In the lobby, adjacent to the entrance for the Asian Massage Parlor there is one of those games that you put quarters in hoping that they will fall where the rakes will push them forward into the other quarters and that those quarters, perched precariously on the edge will fall and you will end up with more quarters than you started out with.
From the Asian Massage Parlor out steps an Asian Masseuse, bored with, apparently, no takers. She perches over the machine and plunks in quarters. Her body arches with stressful anticipation. She coos and perhaps grunts a bit. She wins some. She returns to the Parlor to watch Asian DVDs.

The second: one a boy, perhaps 18 or 19. Attractive in a pale, fleshy Jack White sort of way. He stands behind the Sbarro’s counter wearing a Family Guy T-shirt and smoking (unsure of the legality of this in truckstops in PA). Meanwhile a tall slender middle-aged woman mans the main register about 15 feet away. She wears the sort of jeans that have a seemingly impossible amount of lower torso in them. Jeans you might call “Mom-Jeans.” She has short brown hair and big glasses. She looks at the Sbarro’s boy longingly.

A black woman and a white man, both with frizzy fans of hair extending from their skulls downward toward their shoulders, both wearing leather jackets embroidered with semi trucks. They were a couple, this much was clear, and there was a small boy, white, no African in him, who was their son. (I guess) The bought something and then headed out to their truck at the fuel pumps, the boy running ahead, reaching up to open the door and quickly perching in the drivers seat, gripping the wheel and twisting it back and forth, “driving.”

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