When Howard Stern Can't Help You Find a Date...

I've been up all night with insomnia and depression. I call in to Howard Stern so he will get me a boyfriend, and find myself talking to Stuttering John.

"You're name is Doby?"

"Yeah. Is this John?"

"Yeah."

"You're a girl? And you can't get your own boyfriend?"

"Yeah," I sadly mutter, bonging my hundredth hit of pot at 6 a.m. on this, another bleak, wet morning. On hold, I can hear Howard with no delay. I sit on a stool in the middle of the room in a stoned trance, watching the dog circle me.

I put on the same clothes I have been wearing way too consecutively. Eventually I hang up, tie my shoes and I'm out the door to breakfast. Howard is blaring in my headphones, cutting in and out as I pass Red Square and make my way west along Houston St.

The refrigerator dog is out front to greet me. He's cool. He belongs to the refrigerator store next to the restaurant. The first time I met him he was jumping on top of the refrigerator boxes they unload every morning. I don't think his owner likes people to pet him, so we have to say hello on the sly.

I almost always get the window seat. These women are scary. They're Polish. I'm pretty goddamn sure I am Polish. They speak like my grandparents. That's the scary part.

I think I know why this seat is always vacant. There's a pipe that juts out of the wall and creates a little obstacle course. You can move the inner chair, but if you try to move the outer chair, you're fucked because it not only entangles itself in the pipe, it also entangles itself with the inner chair. You end up (or at least I do) looking like Jerry Lewis.

The only other drawback to this seat that looks out on Ave. A is that this is the only spot in the place my radio gets shitty reception. I place it in the window. That seems to help. I am sure that everyone knows I'm listening to Howard. It's kinda embarrassing.

There is a giant wooden fork and spoon on one side of the wall, and a clock in a golden frame facing the window at just such a peculiar angle to create glare?no matter what the weather?that makes it impossible to read. Above my head, a backward neon sign reads Alice's. Alice's used to be Margaret's. Margaret was funny; she would get into fights with the junkies and punk rockers. I never got in a fight with her, but she would often give me a hard time, wanting to know what the hell I was writing so frantically.

Once recently I got a stool. This old guy next to me was drinking some weird stuff. It looked like piss and apricot juice. His buddy sitting next to him was drinking it too. Then they broke out some other stuff and made a whole bunch of jokes (I assume, as it was in Russian or Polish or whatever, followed by lots of laughing) as they added water to it, confirming to me that this was probably alcohol. This is the Breakfast Special at Alice's on A.

Saturdays are tough because Howard is not on, so you get to hear everything that goes on in the diner. A couple comes in all fucked up from the Friday night before. All of a sudden the loud Puerto Rican chick in a baseball hat and tennies tells the guy, dressed in all white, with white tennies, that she has a boyfriend. He gets all tweaked out and keeps repeating that over and over. She explains to him that her man is in jail. She dishes out the compliments, saying what a good-looking guy he is and how they can be pals. Everybody in the place simultaneously realizes these two have at least one thing in common, as they start comparing milligram intake.

I sip the dregs of the third and final cup of coffee I meekly begged from the Polish ladies.