Concerning Kramers

This actually happened to me in late march of 2010.

This is a story of a buffetsman most foul. The sort that falls simultaneously into the Buffet-Talker and Competitive Buffetist categories. This is not a story of your garden variety Kramer, the Seinfeldis Kramerium, but rather a more subtly horrible creature. One I hope to never encounter a second time.

I went to a Chinese buffet restaurant one day during my lunch break. This may seem odd, as I've already told you that I work at a Chinese restaurant (which also features a buffet between the hours of eleven and three). But I find myself now two years into my tenure there and my taste for Tse's cooking has admittedly dwindled of late. So anyway, this Chinese buffet restaurant- which will remain nameless as long as I remember to keep it so- had its various booths and tables speckled with intermittent guests nomming on a variety of meats dripping in a variety of sauces atop a variety of starch food staples.

I took a seat offered to me by a skinny man I'd heard speaking Cantonese a moment before to an older lady behind the checkout counter. He began to ask “Would I like-?” something, which I interrupted by standing up and saying, “Dr. Pepper.” He presumably took my standing up and walking away not to be the uncouth act of a culinary plebeian, but an indication that I would not be looking at a menu nor indeed ordering from one. We would see when it came time to refill my drink if I was correct in this assumption, or if the service drone had felt an abutting slight against what was left of his dignity.

With my course plotted and destination set (targeting reticles locked, fixed firmly on the buffet table), I snatched an arguably- perhaps theoretically- clean plate from the burgeoning stacks and set about the silent task of securing my food. What should have been a silent task, anyway.

Then, as though Nosferatu: le Vampire were an independently produced docudrama about a frequenter of this food-place, the Kramer cometh. I had never seen this man, nor heard his voice; he was a being from the howling beyond. I got the feeling no one- no living being in recent post-Enlightenment history- had ever seen this man or felt the vibrations of his hellish voice reverberate against their souls just as it shook their eardrums.

“Ooh, thought Kramer would've beaten you to that one!” He hissed just barely above an 'under his breath' volume. I stopped tongs in hand, eggroll suspended in the purgatory space between its heated tray and my plate. It took me a moment to realize he was:

A. Talking to himself.
B. Talking about himself.
And C. Talking to me about talking to himself.

I shook the frost from my joints after making the chilling realizations and completed the transaction of food-to-plate with my cautiously guarded “Public Smile” sloppily affixed to my face. I moved down the line to get some rice, Kramer quickly darted past me outside of any standard line schema and nearly cackled as he did so.

“Hehe... Kramer got the rice, dog!” I feel it necessary to state at this point in the story that this man was both fully grown and smelled something like original Old Spice and dirty laundry. It may also bear stating that this actually happened and as far as I've been able to tell was neither a hallucination nor intrusion of psychic disturbance from a proximal timestream. I sullenly took the serving spoon for the rice after he'd finished with it and he proceeded to sing the Goldfish crackers jingle, apparently in reference to the spicy sauce-coated mushrooms he was greedily ladling into a small bowl he'd somehow gathered when I wasn't looking.

I moved down the line- Kramer now blessedly absent from it and strutting towards his table- when I heard it.

“Winner, and still cham-peen? Kramer.”

I never saw him again. The open dining floor was admittedly quite small and the number of inhabited tables even smaller. Kramer was simply nowhere to be found. Somewhere between when he'd declared himself cham-peen and I'd sat down with my food he'd managed to escape. As far as I could tell he'd just walked out the door with the restaurant's food, dishes and silverware.

-Derek Kinkade

Author's Note

Characters and writing (c) to Ben McMullen. Proper nouns (c) to their owners. The character narrating the story is one of my regulars and the main protagonist of my Zeitgeist series.