JEREMY ALLEN WHITE, CIS MALE, HE/HIM – There goes KENNETH CRAWFORD clocking into the SUNSET DINER. The TWENTY-NINE year old is a LINE COOK from NEW ORLEANS, LA. I think they are TENACIOUS but I heard that they can also be SELF-DEPRECATING. Hope they have a good shift!
tw: absent parent, illness/stroke, parent death, gambling, religion mention, jail
at the tail end of his freshman year, life flipped upside down when his mother suffered a severe stroke. things we never the same after that. his spot on the baseball team was dropped in favor of hospital visits. new clothes were put off in order to pay the bills. homework fell to the wayside; grades along with it. crawford could only give so much. his father should have given more; should have given anything, but it seemed as if he’d almost taken it as his way out. his first foot out the door.
crawford always had an iffy relationship with the church, but he’d held out up until that fateful night in december. his father had always been a gambler – horses, chips, lotto tickets. that last one finally showed up. 140 million, the papers said. crawford never did hear the exact truth from his not; dad had gathered his things and left before he’d gotten the chance. never looked back. seventeen and crawford was alone. he stopped believing in god after that.
he’d gone by k.p. – short for kenneth patrick– up until the midst of high school. then, as his father pulled back, he did too from that given name, the one that he and his father shared. it became crawford. just crawford.
from the outside, he was the boy that barely made it to graduation. everyone’s guess to fail. they weren’t wrong; his grades had suffered, falling as he begged for more and more hours behind the dish pit at the sunset diner. college was never an option. taking care of his mom became the number one priority.
in time, crawford graduated beyond dish, learning to prep for the kitchen and then finally cook.
just a little over a year ago, his mom suffered a second stroke and sadly passed. it’s been a complicated thing for him to process, sad because he misses her but also... he’d been missing her since he was fifteen.
between past medical and funeral expenses and the cost of living, crawford’s car has fallen in terms of priority. good ol’ gretchen had a habit of breaking down from time to time; never enough to junk her but always enough to threaten it again and then some.
when he’s not at his apartment or the diner, crawford likes to spend his time getting tattooed at pink ink, tossing back drinks at the local dive, and sitting out in the bed of his truck, whether its braving settler’s woods or just hanging back in the motel parking lot.
crawford’s main mode of transportation is gretchen, but he’s also got red: a motorcycle he’d pre-emptively inherited from his mother.
crawford grew up living in a local trailer park. his family had a short stint in a more spacey apartment when he was in elementary school, but that was just a year and half. then his father got caught and charged with a class b theft and a year behind bars. he’s been back in that trailer ever since.
his family was known to have records. both of his grandfathers had had their stints, then his father. even his mother with a few acts of shoplifting, though she’s mostly wasn’t welcome in certain places anymore. didn’t make much a difference now. but crawford was pretty proud that he’d managed to keep his nose clean, though he’d definitely had some close calls with a bar fight or two.
WANTED CONNECTIONS:
best friend(s)
friends
old friends
drinking buddies
ex-girlfriends - (he be tragically heterosexual)
fwb
one-night stand
enemy/do not get along
regular customer
an annoying customer
old coworker
neighbors
there’s plenty more i just cannot think atm
