Remi was a grotesquely squat man, like his bones had softened over time and he had sunk into himself. His chin fat came up to his bottom lip. He wore a fedora and a rumpled but expensive suit and roamed the few streets of his village at night. He checked in with everyone out at that hour: the streetwalkers, their pimps, the drug dealers, and the workers at the twenty-four hour combination diner and laundromat. He extracted his cut simply by staring at them and holding out his hand.
At the end of his circuit he installed himself at the last booth in the diner. The wait staff always drew straws to determine who would serve him. The unlucky winner had to bring freshly brewed decaffeinated coffee and wait the ten or so minutes it too Remi to point a pudgy finger on the menu and grunt. The waitperson would then bow and remove themselves by walking slowly backwards. Remi was not found of sudden movement.
Once his food arrived, he'd consume it without utensils or even his fingers, but by just placing his face directly in the food. The waitstaff would look on surreptitiously by aghast. One day the elderly cook who worked the griddle came up to them.
"He wasn't always this way," he whispered. "He used to be a proper gentleman. Very kind. Good manners."
"Really? Remi? Him?"
"He became selfish. He liked his greed too much. And then his just slowly started to turn in on himself."
The waitstaff stared agog at the cook.
"Physically though?" asked one of the younger waiters.
"Ehn," said the cook, raising his greasy spatula in the air. He shuffled back to his row of uniform pancakes.
The waitstaff turned back to watching Remi. He belched for a half minute straight. Then picked a piece of omelet from the folds of fat around his neck and ate it.
"Huh," said the waitstaff in unison.
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I think this song might be about rainbows and rain. I'm not sure. My French is creaky and I'm a bit lazy about looking up the lyrics right now. The word 'money' (l'argent) is in it, so that's what I went from.
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