Tea Shop Sketch #1 - Biker Bob

I know Bob is about to walk into my tea shop when a beat-up red pickup lurches and skids into the handicapped parking spot in front of the store. Bob, although he walks with a definite stumble, is not handicapped. You can't see it from where I stand behind the counter, but he has a bumper sticker in his rear window that says, If god didn’t want me to eat pussy, he wouldn’t have made it look like a taco. I found it funny, but I think I was one of the few. Bob wears the same blue flannel shirt and stone-washed jeans every time I see him. His handlebar moustache is yellowed at he ends from drooping into a cup of tea – mango vanilla tea to be exact. He never drinks anything else. When Bob walks up to the counter, he winks at me, and shows me the latest message on his gut. He has one of those programmable belts where you can choose your own message to flash across it in blinking red letters. Often it’s a racial slur, or his phone number, today it just said: PUSSY.
“How ya doin’ me darlin’?”
(Bob is not Irish)
“I’m okay, kinda tired…”
“Well guess what I got for your skinny ass,”
“What?”
Bob throws a fruit roll-up above my head, so that I have to jump to catch it. We have a stash of about 20 of them in a drawer under the till, because no one who works here actually likes fruit-roll-ups. None of us have the heart to tell him.
“Thanks, Bob! The usual?”
“Damn straight. No butter on my scone. Butter is for fat-asses and morons… that shit gets in your hearteries and yer fuckin’ done for.”
“Right…”
I bring him his tea, and he drinks it out of the same cup he always does, sitting in the same chair by the furthest window. From this seat he shouts to me across the store whatever thought occurs to him.
“I’m working security for the fuckin’ Queen next month, eh? Right now I’m busy guarding the baby ducks from that oil spill...”
“What oil spill?”
You know, that fuckin’ big one out by that …lake. Hey, did you know I been electrocuted?
“Yeah Bob, you told me… weren’t you working construction when it happened?””Fuck no. I was fucking a model and she got so into it, ya know, that she dropped the vibrator we was playing with into the tub.”
“Oh… I could have sworn it was constructions…aren’t vibrators battery-run?”
“Well what would you know about it, girlie, you’re 13!” (I am 20)
Bob winks at me and chuckles, turning back to his tea, motorcycle boots propped up on a plush couch, mud oozing down the rivets of the fabric.
He slurps his tea extra strong, drinking it out of his own particular black paisley patterned teacup because he says, “it’s the least fruitcakey.”
Bob could be a cartoon character he is so perfectly the same, every time I see him. He is outrageous and predictable, thoroughly disgusting and rude, laughable and lovable.
Soon Bob is joined by his brother Tim. As much as I like Bob, I hate Tim. Tim is a pervert who only tells us we look pretty if we happen to be wearing a tank top or a skirt. Tim comes up behind us when we can’t see him and tries to give us neck rubs, “for making him such good tea…” He leers at our asses or breasts, depending on the way we face him, and makes every girl in the tea-shop feel like her skin is crawling and prickling. When Tim is visually molesting us, Bob looks away.
I haven’t seen Bob in 6 months. I had to file a police report against him when he smashed a rock into the window and told the owner he was going to run her over with his truck. He was banned from the store, and I was almost fired when I said it was a shame.