I was eating breakfast at Beth's Cafe with my good friend Laurel. It was four in the fookin morning, and I had been chain smoking for no good reason since earlier that year. The smoking section was filled with a pleasant smoky haze, a haze which was definitely showing the oxygen in the room who was boss. Soon enough, the waitress brought Laurel's pancakes, and moments later, my 24-egg omelette was wheeled in on a cart by two of the charming wait staff. It flopped off the edges of the oversized plate, and the waitress folded the edges up and over, up and over, until the omelette was a tower of egg atop the plate. There were great heaping gobs of cheese running down the sides of the cart, and a veritable garden market of vegetables was struggling to survive inside the suffocating fleshy mass of the omelette. The staff tried lifting the plate up, but couldn't manage it, and so several more members of the charming wait staff were summoned, along with some kind of pulley system which apparently saw heavy use, as it was totally encrusted with cheese, egg, and the remnants of green peppers and olives which had tried to escape into the real world, only to find that the smoky ambience of Beth's Cafe was no substitute for direct sunlight and a little TLC.

"Do you think that's wise?" Laurel asked our waitress. "I mean, will the table support a full 24-egg omelette?"

"It should," the waitress replied. "If it can handle the 67-egg meat lover's special omelette, it can handle this wimpy 24-egg concoction."

Sure enough, the table buckled only slightly in the middle when the crane finished lowering the plate onto the table. Laurel had to slide over in order to see me.

"Can I get you anything else?" the waitress asked.

"Well," I replied slowly, "I'm obviously going to need an english muffin with this." Pause. "And how about some sausage." Pause. "Oh yeah, and can I get a side of French toast?"

"You want the big plate?" she asked.

"No," I replied. "I think the 12 slice plate will suffice."

The old Murray Head classic "One Night In Bangkok" came on the jukebox, with its delicious chorus about good looking angels and better looking demons, and I couldn't help rapping along with Murray: "I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine." Then Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler" came on, and most of the room began singing along: "You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em... know when to walk away, and know when to run..." It was bonding of a most peculiar sort. After that, the Beatles' "Help!" came on, and the gang in the non-smoking section leapt up and performed a little dumb show version of the classic movie of the same name. Laurel and I laughed ourselves silly at the antics of those wacky moptops from Britain, so much so that orange juice shot out Laurel's nose, and several of the veins in my neck burst wide open.

As we began to eat, Laurel said, "I haven't seen you around lately. Where you been?" Laurel and I are good friends, have been for some time, ever since college, when we took inordinate amounts of drugs together on a regular basis. Like, veritable shitloads of drugs. Copious amounts. Scads and scads and scads. We took so many drugs that our bodies became walking illicit pharmacies. You name an illegal drug, we very likely took it, in vast amounts. Vast vast vast amounts. Good God but did we take some drugs together. I mean, Christ that was a lot of drugs we took in college. It's safe to say we majored in "drugs." We were the star students in the Drugs Department, and we earned our Bachelors of Fine Drugs degrees with flying colors. We majored in drugs, we minored in drugs, our part-time jobs were taking drugs. We had drugs for breakfast, and then a light snack of drugs in the morning, followed by a brunch or lunch comprised of drugs and some other drugs too, and then by dinner time, we were simply ravenous for drugs. Then it was time to figure out something to do for the evening, and it was usually drugs. Then, in order to get to sleep, we took some more drugs. If we couldn't sleep, that meant it was a sign from above that we should stay up all night and do more drugs. We went to classes on drugs, paraded around the city on drugs, went to the supermarket on drugs and bought whole carts full of things we simply didn't need - and why? you ask. Because we were on drugs! comes my ready reply. We sucked down more drugs while we were in college than have been taken in the history of drugs on this planet, and we were always, always hungry for more. I had the word "drugs" tattooed on my ass; Laurel had the word "drugs" branded onto the small of her back. In short, you could say drugs were a real hobby with us.

But lately, my drug-taking had fallen by the wayside, for I had found a new vocation. It was a vocation that I simply could not describe to Laurel, for fear of endangering her life. There was simply no way to tell her that I had become...

a super hero!

"Oh, you know," I replied, munching on a forkful of gooey egg matter. "I've been around. Here and there."

Laurel was always a sharp cookie, though, and tonight was no exception. She noticed the way I failed to make eye contact with her, preferring instead to stare directly into the center of the omelette, as though I could somehow experience omelette satori if I concentrated hard enough.

"Don't give me that fookin horseshit," Laurel replied. Her long black hair, unbeknownst to her, was dipping accidentally into the maple syrup on her plate, but I decided not to tell her, for I am sensitive to the use of coarse language. And also, she was being a bitch. "You've been up to something. Must be something pretty interesting, if that guilty look on your face is any indication. What is it, Scotto? Let me guess. You found some new drug to take, and it's so interesting, you don't want to share it with your good friend Laurel. Is that it?" She began to pout, her lower lip trembling, and then there was a fire in her eyes, something like heavy duty anger but also resembling what happens if you light a cigarette too close to your face and sear off your eyebrows. Which I have only done twice.

We sat in silence for several minutes, she pouting and chewing on tasty pancake morsels, me brooding and shoveling heaping forkful after heaping forkful of omelette into my mouth, shoveling and chewing, shoveling and chewing, letting that omelette slither down my throat and dive into my already swelling stomach.

Suddenly, I began to notice a strange tingling sensation rise up my spine. Oh no, I thought. My Scotto Sense is tingling! That could only mean one thing (usually it can mean two things, but I had already taken my underwear out of the washing machine earlier that day).

My eyes began to flit back and forth about the room, taking in the vast assortment of freaks, weirdos, losers, crazies, and nutballs that hung out at Beth's Cafe in the middle of the night. I mean, to be honest, I don't know where these bozos come from, but they're just plain weird, what with the clothes they wear and the things they say and the crazy music they listen to. But I digress. I could tell immediately the danger was not here. No... something far more insidious was going on, and I would have to leave the friendly if slightly overpriced confines of Beth's Cafe in order to find out more...

"Uh, Laurel," I said, "I have to split."  I threw down some cash to cover my omelette and a healthy 2.1% tip as is my usual custom. "Maybe we can get together this week or something. Watch The Simpsons, maybe, or suck down a tank of nitrous oxide?"

"And just what the fuck am I supposed to do with this monstrous omelette of yours?" she replied.

"You should get it to go," I replied as I dashed toward the front door.

---

I sprinted up the hill toward my house, and as I did, my Scotto Sense intensified. The danger was here, inside the house. I tore off my clothes as I reached the house, and then promptly put them back on as I realized my super hero costume was not handily underneath my clothes, as I previously believed, but was still in the dryer with the rest of my underwear. I would have to enter the house in the guise of my secret identity, Scotto, instead of in the guise of my most excellent super hero identity,

CAPTAIN SCOTTO!

And sure enough, as I entered the house, the menace became clear, for there standing in the living room, was my evil arch nemesis Dr. Ugly, in his ugly red spandex suit with that ugly red hood and that ugly red cape and that big ugly "U" on his chest which must have stood for "underwhelming" or "undulating" or perhaps "unconscionable" or something, holding a stack of my favorite CDs, stolen from my most excellent CD collection. Why, the fool had had the audacity to snag all seven of my K-Tel Superhits of 1978, August 28, 7:42 PM CDs, as well as my Best of Ambient Acid Super Trippy Jazz House Mondo Tasty Weird Noise Bass Music by Bill Laswell CD and my Freddie Mercury Sings The Blues - After Inhaling Helium From A Big Ol' Balloon! CD.

"Dr. Ugly!" I exclaimed. "You'll never get away with this!"

"That's where you're wrong!" my arch nemesis replied. "I already have gotten away with it!" And with that, he fired one of his patented Bursts of Extreme UGLY from his fingertips directly at my precious, precious face.

I dodged nimbly, leaping backwards into a flip and then straight into the triple axle. By the time I was finished bowing to the judges across the alley,

DR. UGLY WAS GONE!

"I'll get you, Dr. Ugly, if it's the last thing I do!" I cried. "Your kind of evil, pernicious villainy will not go unpunished! I will find you and tear out your pathetic little heart with my teeth and then I'll throw it onto the ground and step on it a dozen, nay, a baker's dozen times! I'll chase you from one end of this Earth to the other end and then to all the ends in between, and finally, after exhausting every possible end, I'll chase from you from all the beginnings and middles as well! I'll-"

-and then I stopped. For at that moment, a semi truck from Beth's Cafe pulled up, carrying the leftovers from my omelette. I could see Laurel hopping out the side of the cab, and all the boys from the kitchen at Beth's climbing out the back of the trailer with sections of floppy, heaving egg on their shoulders. Laurel started up the walk, and I bit down on my rage. Apparently, my rage was in roughly the same position as my tongue, for the blood immediately began to flow.

"I'll get you, Dr Ugly," I whispered. "I will if it's the last inane thing I do in this vastly overrated world."

"Hey there," Laurel said as she came in the front door. "Listen, I thought it'd be a shame to waste the rest of these fine early morning hours. Wanna chew some sheets of acid?"

I paused a moment, then said,

"Sure!"