I look at the cup. I look at him. The cup sits between us, like the last canteen of water in some spaghetti western. I'm angry now, the dripping hiss continues, I'm on in 15 minutes, and all I want is a blasted cup of coffee, which of course is sitting right there, waiting for me to drink it. The kid yawns.
Guests start arriving, filling the plastic chairs.
As I take my spot at the podium, I'm thinking about Thomas Wolfe's famous claim that You Can't Go Home Again. But here I am, home again and not, standing in a spot I remember from when it was only a stand of pines separating a golf course and a car wash. The chairs are filling up, partly, with my parents and their friends, an elderly aunt, all among the faithful in the Baptist church. Soon, all my carefully planned paranoia starts paying off. It continues, my best lines met with a waxy silence, and I feel myself slowly morphing into Rodney Dangerfield.