H. Palmer Hall
	The Car Hop at Sonic   It was not so much that I wanted to run away, wanted to be with her, but the waitress at Sonic, balanced on her roller skates and almost   teetering backwards with the weight of the tray, had somehow managed to catch my attention.  We flirted through my open car window and   she said she got off at twelve and wouldn’t I want to get off, too, and so, at twelve, I circled the parking lot, looked at each menu with its speaker   attached and waited for an unbalanced car hop, thinking this is just SO fifties.  When she got in my car, her skates left behind in the glassed in   office, she seemed so much shorter, her legs somewhat chubbier.  Whatcha wanna do? she asked and I quite honestly did not know.  I mean I had had some idea,   some notion of a cheap motel, some noir fantasy of this and that, but the roller skates had been a part of the scene.  Her mouth tasted of bubble gum.  Perhaps   that was it.  Or she no longer seemed quite old enough for the cigarette she lit when she got into the car.  Or maybe it was the flipflops on her feet, the pink   plastic purse, the Ipod or…so many things. Everything seemed so common, nothing like the Grand Hotel or Marlene Dietrich or Grand Liaison…just young and cheap.