My Dinner with My Dinner with Andre

If I had a wife who came home from her waitressing job just now, the first thing I would tell her is that I had Sloppyjoes for dinner. No, no, I'd say, not with meat, with those Burger Bits of dehydrated tofu and MSG that Hannaford just stopped selling. But now it turns out that it's cheaper to buy the Fantastic fake sloppy joe mix anyway and add tomato paste, although I'm wary of anyfood containing tomato paste. Anyway, I'd go on, I walked back in after a smoke midway through the movie and thought what a nostalgic smell the Manwich sauce made for. Shades of dinner in the late 1980s rising out from the forced hot air vents. I don't think my mother ever cried when we ate sloppyjoes. This may have been after Dad went to rehab, this remembered milieu, but definitely before he began announcing to the assembled family at the table how severely he had The Squirts. Maybe he and I would harass little Mike, calling Mooooooooiiiiiiiike!! until he cried. Or maybe I wouldn't have finished eating before my father did, so, bored, he would say MLALP (the sound of a monkfish sucking a smaller fish into its grotesque maw) every time I opened my mouth to take a bite. Sweet God I hated him. Then.
P.J. was gone by then, moved out to live with his girlfriend or whatever. He was 18, she 14. It's weird: In the early '90s, we gave up on eating together at all. My nascent vegetarianism didn't help any- I didn't presume to ask Mom to cook me something amenable for me; still less would I cook something for myself. Life cereal and milk for me. Oh, My Dinner with Andre?
Two friends eat dinner and talk for two hours. Mostly the crazier one, Andre, talks. He's what the phrenologists call exhibiting Complex Partial Epileptic-like Signs. That means he has insane beliefs that he didn't learn at church. Wellbred rich New Yorker, a theatric director. The other one was an unemployed playwright who unsuccessfully sought acting jobs. They ate at a really nice restaurant. Oh, the other one, not Andre, was the "Inconceivable!" guy from The Princess Bride.
I liked it. It was all just their conversation, which was mainly selfindulgent stuff on What's Wrong with the World and How to Fix It, or Not. The end was pretty open ended on whether it made any difference at all to either of the friends.
I would've loved it while I was eating dinner with my parents and brother in that second, later time I mentioned, though. It would have greatly inspired me, which is synonymous with aggravating the complex partial epileptic-like signs that I myself was manifesting at the time. Was. I luckily grew out of it. Any more, I don't believe really anything. Least of all the nonsense I'm constantly spewing.
Then I would ask her, How was your day?