Freud would have a field day.

It is a warm, rainy late-spring night, and it is my birthday. My mother decides to hire me a (presumably female) prostitute for the night, and we head north on highway 63 to Mammoth to pick her up at the motel, but decide to stop in at Fred's Fish House for a birthday dinner first.

Fred's isn't in it's usual location. It is where the motel should be, but we are not concerned. The interior of the restaurant is dimly-lit with a certain shriner/lodge feel to it. The seating is high-school cafeteria style. A woman and her young daughter sit across from me. I have never met her before, but she seems familiar with me, and somehow I know she is a former waitress here at the restaurant.

I order a burger, salad and some sausage patties. An unremarkable waitress brings them. They are huge, both in the size of the pieces and in the total amount. From a pitcher, she pours either tea or syrup on the sausage. What's worse, the more I eat of them, the bigger it gets. I ask for a take-home box because I know I can't eat all of it, and I have a "friend" waiting, remember. The waitress goes to the kitchen and doesn't return for a really long time.

"If I'd known it was going to take this long, I'd have just skipped it," I remark to the woman sitting across from me.

"What you have to understand is," she says, "there are a lot of people here and she's doing her best to take care of them all."

Finally she returns with my take-home box. It is very small. I cram as much of my food in it as I can, but there is not enough room. The small child smashes my food flat so it will fit. I can even put the remainder of my mother's large hot dog she had been eating (are you listening, Sigmund?) in with it. I ask for the check.

The waitress tells me my part of the check is thirty-something dollars.

At this point I wake up. It is just after five AM, December 30th. My birthday is about twenty days away, not in late spring. I live north of Mammoth Spring, not south. Fred's Fish House is where it's always been. And I have no use for a prostitute.