Brief Encounters with the Enemy (6 page)

Things were not going as I had hoped. My sole purpose for interrupting my manager at this late hour on this Monday night was to inquire, respectfully, about an increase in my wage. But the conversation had somehow reversed itself, and now here I was standing awkwardly in the doorway of the restaurant office having to defend my very competency at my job. All through my shift I had entertained and distracted myself by imagining the scene in exacting detail: the gentle (or perhaps the assertive) knock on the office door, the disarming smile, the small talk about the weather, and then the casual introduction to the larger issue at hand, the larger issue that I had come to talk about with all reasonableness; the larger issue being eight to ten. That was how I had planned to say it: “I’m looking to move from eight to ten an hour.” Simply put. Or perhaps, I’d thought, I would say, “I’m looking to move
to
 …” Or “I’m looking to move
up
to, up
from
, up
toward
 …” Somewhere I had heard that it’s best to put your goals into clear terms, straightforward terms, and that once those goals had been thus stated, all would follow accordingly. In the rare instance that things did not follow accordingly, the onus was, of course, on you and your own ineptitude. I think I had heard it discussed on television. Or I had read it somewhere. Or my father had told me. The counsel had seemed wise at the time, and I’d been determined to remember it if ever an occasion presented itself.

So I stood in the doorway as my manager reclined in his chair with his fingers to his chin, staring up at the dark skylight, where rain was pattering. It had rained every day for a week. They said it was going to rain every day for another week. Fall was always like this in our city. But this fall was worse than others, they said. Soon it would be winter. “Business is bad, Ike,” the manager had told me briskly, effortlessly, as if he had been rehearsing the scene all night long also and was waiting for me to ask so that he could answer and rid himself of the refrain in his head. Not knowing how to respond, I said nothing, one foot crossed uncomfortably in front of the other in what had been, initially, an attempt at bold informality but, as time passed, quickly began to feel like an effeminate posture that would help only in the case against my confidence and assertiveness. And then my manager broke the awful silence by reminding me that two meals were returned by customers that evening. Why had two separate meals been returned, he wanted to know. The clock on his desk read one
A.M.
I wondered whether, if I had chosen to speak to him earlier that night, he would have been in a different mood, a more
conciliatory mood, and would not have dismissed my request so swiftly. Next to the clock were lists of the various ingredients that needed to be ordered; check marks in small boxes indicated the amounts. We dealt in volume: crates, jugs, sacks. The manager’s pen was uncapped. His shirt was white except for a trail of red dots, presumably tomato sauce, running along one sleeve from elbow to shoulder. Or perhaps the dots were blood.

“A grilled cheese sandwich was returned tonight, Ike,” my manager said. He stated it as if genuinely interested, philosophically speaking. “A grilled cheese sandwich and a plate of linguine. Why were they returned, Ike?”

I did not know why, and my face tightened with false concern. I realized that if I did not say something convincing, and say it fast, I would implicate myself by admitting not only that I had made defective, inedible food but that I had so little awareness of my job that I could not even recall why or when such an error had occurred. “I’ll have to look into that” was all I said, as if I had my own underlings to consult. The clock now read 1:03. The manager’s face was round and kind, with puffy cheeks, and in the office light it looked for some reason even kinder than usual. I should change the subject, I thought. And I should uncross my feet so that I don’t look like a supplicant. I should talk about the rain and ask him when he thinks it will stop. It will make him think that I respect his authority. And then I will come back in a week and ask again for a raise—or in two weeks, maybe, not more than three, at some point in the near future, when everything has been forgotten and no meals have been returned and the rain has stopped and I have come up with a good response for when he tells me that business is bad.

But before I could say anything, my manager swiveled around in his chair, faced his desk, placed his hands lightly on top of the piles of paper there, as if they were a Ouija board and he was reading a signal from the beyond. Then he shuffled the papers around. Very rapidly, he shuffled the papers. “Seven-twenty-three the grilled cheese sandwich was returned,” my manger read. “And eleven-fifty-two the plate of pasta came back.”

Those times seemed so long ago. My manager looked up at me with his kind face, almost angelic. A baby face with puffy cheeks.

Answer him!
But all I could think was that I was in the restaurant at 7:23. I was in the restaurant at 11:52. And here I am at 1:07, still in the restaurant. Tomorrow, I thought, I will be here. And the day after that. And the day after that is my day off. But then I will be back.

“Is it really that complicated, Ike, for you to make a grilled cheese sandwich?” the kind face asked.

Somewhere in my past, something had gone wrong for me. Years prior, at my high school graduation, I had sat docilely in the audience and watched the valedictorian onstage in a lavender cap and gown read a tedious and patronizing speech that I knew for a fact had been patched together from a book of stock lectures. “There are some of us here this evening who will be heading off to college,” he declared, “others who are going into the military, and still others who are entering directly into the workforce.” As if all those choices were equal. His voice, amplified by the microphone, sounded exceptionally
powerful and confident, and I imagined that if he were to remove that ridiculous lavender gown, we would discover that he was naked underneath, and that he had, as I well knew from the locker room, broad shoulders and a broad chest and was not at all embarrassed to be seen naked. While beneath my billowy gown was a small-large frame, short legs but long arms, soft flesh but hard knees and elbows, with no real delineation between torso and limbs or between limbs and extremities: the body of a hamster. I was irritated by the valedictorian’s speech and his three categories of life and his attempts at anecdotal humor that were supposed to seem spontaneous and ingratiate him with the parents but instead sounded contrived and wooden. The parents laughed and were won over. Sitting in the audience with five hundred other students, I had the unsettling awareness that I had already been consigned to a life of mediocrity by the very fact that I had not been the one chosen to stand on the podium. There was a single opportunity at having that happen in one’s life, and I had missed it. Nothing could make up for that now. I would forever be indistinguishable from all the others who had not been chosen. I was just one of five hundred. One of five hundred million. I am the
addressee
, I kept thinking as the valedictorian droned on. I will always be the addressee.

I turned nineteen working at the restaurant, making $4.50 an hour. I turned twenty at $4.75. And twenty-one at $5.75. “This is just a stopping-through place,” a busboy had told me on the day he quit. He was eighteen, blond hair, blue eyes, movie-star handsome with a dimple in his chin. He spoke with the expertise
of someone who had done nothing to earn that expertise. I wanted to ask him for advice anyway. Instead I said, “You got that right, man,” as if I were also an expert on the subject of life’s trajectory. For my twenty-fifth birthday ($7.50), the waitresses got everyone to chip in to surprise me with a cake. “Happy birthday, Ike!” they sang at the end of the night. The twenty-five candles overwhelmed the cake. The flame was wide and significant; I saw the substance of my age. People joked about the restaurant catching fire. The waitresses had wanted to be nice, but I could see only pity. Who wants to celebrate his twenty-fifth birthday at an employees’ table next to a mop closet while wearing a splattered apron and a checkered cook’s uniform? I ate the cake to show my gratitude. My manager came by and slapped me on the back. “Congratulations,” he said. He was the only person there who was older than I. The slap had a proprietary quality.

When I was about eighteen, a guy I knew from the neighborhood had seen me walking down the street and picked me up in his taxi. I was a block from home, but he wanted to drive me around and show off his new job. I sat in the backseat like a passenger, and I stared at the back of his head. “I’m celebrating my twenty-fifth birthday next week,” he told me. “Big party. Come on by.”

“Okay,” I said.

“A quarter of a century,” he said. He was being boastful, but the phrase was jarring. I can tell you this much, I wanted to say. When I’m a quarter of a century, I won’t be driving any taxi.

I had dreams of grandeur. I didn’t know how to get there, but I knew that it would work out.

He drove me around for a while and then he dropped me off right where we’d begun, a block from my house.

“See you at the party,” he told me. But I didn’t go.

I start at five o’clock and I stop at midnight. On weekends I stop at one o’clock. Sundays the restaurant is closed. Thursdays I have off. On busy nights, the dinner rush begins around seven and goes until eleven. There is relative calm in the kitchen at first, and then the sounds begin to take on a discernible urgency—voices, dishes, doors, not unlike light rain before heavy rain—and then there will be an explosion of orders. How is it possible? All these orders? All these orders at once? Oh my God! There are only three cooks and a salad guy, but there are fifty orders, and then there are a hundred orders. The white blur of the manager’s shirt mixes with the black blurs of the waitresses’. Each cook in a pristine apron, soon to become filthy, hunches over a little workstation, cutting, frying, wiping, responsible for his little world. Once in a while, one cook will come to the aid of another who has fallen far behind, as if in battle, and this is always viewed as an act of extreme kindness. Generally, though, it’s every man for himself, and we let one another die facedown in the mud. I move at a steady pace somewhere between frantic and perilous. Once I scalded my entire forearm with boiling water, but I wrapped the wound with cold towels and continued marching onward up the hill. Another time I lacerated the tip of my finger, and only after my shift was over did I go to the hospital for seven stitches. I have learned precision and efficiency over the years. There is no wasted motion in anything I do. I am a
study of that thin line between human and machine. The order comes in, the eyes scan the order, one hand removes two slices of rye bread (for instance) and places the bread on the grill, the other hand is already reaching for the American cheese that is in the square tin on the shelf, while another order comes in and the eyes are scanning that order as the limbs and hands continue to move. Only when the rush begins to abate do I understand that I have been in something akin to a trance, moving constantly but without full consciousness. The sounds in the kitchen will get quieter, a gentle, nonessential clattering. A lullaby of clattering—it’s near midnight, after all. The waitresses stand around idly. The dishwasher smokes a cigarette, even though he’s not supposed to smoke in here. Afterward I walk the ten blocks to my apartment, and if I make it home in time, I watch the end of David Letterman.

A few days after I was turned down for a raise, an anorexic waitress started working at the restaurant. She was pretty but had no breasts or ass. I caught her a few times eating the scraps from customers’ plates. She chewed and swallowed slowly, methodically, as if it took all her concentration. The waitresses said that they heard her sometimes in the bathroom coughing violently, and if they entered after her, they noticed traces of blood in the toilet.

The first time I saw her, she was sitting at the employees’ table before the dinner shift, clipping flowers and placing them in vases. She looked up when I passed by, and I saw that her eyes were bright blue, contrasting with her hair, which was jet black. Her arms were thin and her shoulder blades protruded
at a sharp angle. When our eyes met, she looked down quickly and then looked back up, and when she looked up, I looked away. A couple of days later, she was standing at the time clock trying to figure out how to punch out after her shift. I was just arriving at the restaurant, and my shoes were wet from the rain. “Here,” I said. “Like this. You do it like this.” I put her time card in and jiggled it, because sometimes it has to be jiggled, and the clock crunched out the time: 4:52
P.M.
“What a piece of shit,” she said. “The manager should fix that.” Her voice was deep, considering how fragile she appeared. I saw that she had a red rash on her neck that she was trying to conceal with makeup. The rash seemed to be either creeping up toward her face or down onto her body, as if it might be the thing that had eaten away her breasts and her ass. Her elbow touched my elbow, but I couldn’t tell if it was on purpose. And then my manager came into the break room.

“Busy night ahead of us,” he said, and slapped me on the back.

“The time clock,” the waitress said to him. “It doesn’t work.”

“Oh?” the manager said. He looked embarrassed. “I’ll tell the fix-it guy.”

He was wrong: it was a slow night. Which can be worse, because then one must make oneself busy. Or at least appear busy. A self-imposed punishment for the lack of business, as if the employees were to blame.

I spent my time polishing all the stainless steel in the kitchen, using an old jar of cream that guaranteed immediate results. It lived up to its billing, and I got satisfaction from seeing things gleam. When an order came in, it was burdensome,
and I had to drag myself to the grill to put together whatever it was that had been requested. Tonight, I was certain, was not the night to ask again for a raise. I commended myself on my foresight. Occasionally I would look through the little round porthole of the kitchen door and see the anorexic waitress carrying trays of coffee mugs from one end of the restaurant to the other. How was it possible for her to carry a tray of coffee mugs? How was it possible for her to stand on those skinny legs? But she showed no signs of exertion in anything she did, like one of those small birds that take off with great power, beating their wings angrily. I should ask her out, I thought. We could come back here to eat. Take a long time looking at the menu. Inconvenience other people for a change. At the end we could ask to see the manager, and if he were feeling generous, he could waive the bill.