MYRTLE BEACH, SC—I met him yesterday at 1 pm at Plantation Pancake House near Myrtle Beach. I got there early and a strawberry blonde Russian woman ordered me to sit.  Faded plastic flowers in pink and purple pastels infect every level surface. The carpet was right out of the Glitter Gulch. My leather jacket squeaked as I slid into a mauve sunlit booth.

He was younger perhaps and probably quite a bit taller. But my date was a dead ringer for David Lynch. Hair. Eyes. That’s why I agreed to it. Oh, and also because he had a boring job and an education at a liberal arts college. I wanted to learn about the history of Myrtle Beach. Not Nascar. I was saving that for my cousin’s visit.

Pleased, he drawled, to meet you. He held out a giant hand. My iphone began ringing:

I like to kill deer I like to kill deer  I like to kill deer

It is a David Lynch ringtone that I’m quite fond of. I gripped my iphone and shrugged. It was someone I didn’t want to talk to. So I let it keep, uh, kill-deer-ringing.

Plantation Pancakes serves lunch. Somehow it also closes at 2pm. So the staff shut off the lights and began vacuuming around us as soon as we sat down. We were the only customers amidst the now shadowy plastic foliage.

I stared at this David Lynch. He stared back. A tiny waitress appeared and yelled up to me.

DO YOU WANT TO ORDER NOW! Over the vacuuming I could barely hear her heady voice.

I cleared my throat. DO YOU HAVE FRUIT!

FRUIT COCKTAIL, MAM!

I ordered decaf coffee. He ordered cherry pie.

Before I knew what was happening this David Lynch was going into the biggest news story of the week. Myrtle Beach was trying to cancel Bike Week. Harley Davidson enthusiasts annual rip through Myrtle Beach. Bikers hammer the bars, strip clubs and restaurants with their expensive mufflers and drunken gropes.

I knew all about it because I was following the term Myrtle Beach with Tweetdeck and following Twitter users CarolinaLive and WCBD. But Mr. Lynch had an inside track that wasn’t anywhere on my socialweb.

David Lynch leaned in to share his vile secret.

It’s not that bike week we need to cancel. It’s the week after. Black bike week. That’s the week we can’t go outside our homes. Or, he caustically joked, find fried chicken anywhere! It ruins a perfectly good summer weekend for us. But when we tried to cancel just the black week the damn NAACP stopped us.

I looked behind me to hide a shiver. Staring at a stone lion the size of a Smartcar beside the entryway I wondered what this man’s real name was again? Did it matter? David Lynch was no blatant racist. This man was clearly a poor imitation at best.

I took a deep breath. I gulped that last of my decaf and stood up. I was shaking.

Look here Racist David Lynch! I’m going to Twitter this whole thing and blog it too!

He looked confused. Then he grinned. Well, he said, that sounds fine. Doesn’t matter to me. So long as you get my name right. It’s not this Lunch fellow. It’s James.