On Friday night it was raining and I did not want to throw the duster on that I had worn to the overcast funeral at which I served as a pallbearer earlier in the day. I armed myself against the rain with pointy wooden umbrella and the ‘Please Dad’ coat, which is the 40 year old canvas bomber jacket which elicits a groan from my youngest son when I wear it out to dinner, even when going to the diner. He’ll shake his head as I get in his car that cost more than the house we raised him in and groan, ‘Please Dad, I want to eat something better than pizza tonight and you look like a homeless guy.”

In a sane rainy world at midnight the ‘Please Dad’ coat would serve me as a protection from panhandling talisman. But it was not to be. As I arrived at the front walk of Free Food For Fat F…s having missed the half hour clock-in slot by 2 minutes, I decided to speak with a collaborator about a project on my 9 year old shell phone with no back for a few moments more until 11:45.

It was not to be. I had somehow walked through a dimension door into a world where I occupied the top economic rung on the societal ladder!

Two zombies and a zombie caller were on site. I was beseeched by the zombie caller who was dressed at $20K a year better than I, and who had a nice knew car, and spoke very loud and haltingly—in the oratory style of the impatient drug-damaged brain.

“Hey man! Can you spare a dollar?”

I shook my head ‘no’.

Not perceiving subtle body language through the echoing haze that was the scorched wasteland of his sensory array, he amped it up, “Excuse me! Any fuckin’ help here? I need a dollar!”

I eye-fucked him and snarled and he backed off. He then looked off my left shoulder and said, to the horrific image of a voodoo zombie wearing nothing but a sheet, “Hello, a dollar maybe?”

This fool was asking a black as night being so brain dead as to be floating in a trance—eyes wide shut—wrapped in a dirty bed sheet against the rain and sipping absently from a partially drunk cup of cold coffee, for a dollar. The voodoo zombie next to me seemed a creature not only entirely destitute, but of pre-monetary origin. What ass would beg from a person in seemingly third-world quality squalor?

“Who panhandles that?” I thought. This dude is an actual zombie and could be one of Jeanott’s minions from my horror writing.

The zombie caller threw up his hands as if he was looking at two idiots that don’t speak his language—and I suppose he was, and marched indignantly into the store. I find out later that he was spending food stamps and needed a dollar to cover a nonfood item—chap stick I think.

Note: By my humble calculations 25% of all welfare payments, including food stamps, are utilized first to purchase illegal drugs, before they are converted back into the other economy, which may not forever be the mainstream one.

Then, as the Haitian zombie floated by me in his sheet and I closed out my call an African American zombie approached me. He had been standing off out in the pouring rain, hands in the pockets of his drenched windbreaker, staring vacantly at me as if he thought I might be John the Baptist but was not sure if this gutter was the River Jordon. He looked at me in hopefully stunned dread, like a space walker who thinks his tether might have detached from its anchor and is about to plunge into the hostile atmosphere of the planet below.

He stayed there in the dark rain. Latter he will approach me inside and mumble something to me, then apologize, step outside, and hurl white vomit all over the parcel pickup area. Hmm, a penitent vomiting zombie—that is a twist.

Now, in case of the Zombie Apocalypse, I suggest encouraging the Haitian Zombies and any Penitent Hurling Zombies to accompany us as flankers. On the other hand, if a zombie caller shows up and begins loudly making demands in his deadzone drone, stake him out for the zekes! His ‘Hey man!’ call will carry through the post apocalyptic night to draw the zekes off of our trail.

In any potential survival scenario, whether a natural or unnatural disaster, I could not imagine coexisting with the zombie caller for more than the time it takes to convert him into a tool or resource.