A king on the bus

I was on a long-distance bus trip from ____ to ____. The bus was packed. I stood up to stretch in the aisle and saw the Imperial Margarine king several rows back. He too was standing up to stretch. The king was wearing a red-velvet crown and a dark T-shirt and slacks. He had two tiny scabs on the side of his nose, near his left eye. He looked like Norman Fell.

“You look just like the Imperial Margarine king,” I said. “Are you him?”

“Yes, I am.”

I asked him if I could take a picture. He nodded yes. But when I tried to use the camera on my phone, all I could see were maps of Bristol, England, and streaming video of soccer hooligans. No camera.

The bus stopped for a short break. The king walked across the street and through an open garage door into an enormous produce store. I waited beside the bus and tried restarting my phone. No improvement. I noticed my daughter standing nearby and asked if she had any idea what was wrong. No, she didn’t. I waited for the king’s return.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[Possible sources: thinking yesterday about Nabokov’s Pale Fire and its king or pseudo-king, and later making a U-turn in front of a huge garage door for a heating and air-conditioning company. I haven’t seen anything to suggest that Norman Fell appeared in an Imperial commercial. But here’s one with Charles Kimbrough.]