Strange but True (11 page)

Philip shakes his head, grateful he's not being teased, but also embarrassed because he himself cannot paint a picture with words. Whenever he tries, for example, to make the sky bluer by describing it in writing, his poems end up reading like a combined listing from
Webster's Dictionary
and
Roget's Thesaurus
(“The azure, cerulean celestial regions as seen from earth…”). One more reason to believe that Conorton had probably said those things simply out of pity. “So how's it going inside the old Olive Pit today?” Philip asks to change the subject.

Gumaro casts his dark eyes toward the restaurant then back at Philip. “We got hit with an early rush. The boss is doing The Robot for almost one hour now.”

The Robot is what the staff calls it whenever Walter—a self-proclaimed “top graduate” from hotel and restaurant management school—starts waving his arms around like the robot in those
Lost in Space
reruns used to do whenever there was danger. In this case, the danger is that Walter can't handle more than a few tables at a time if he's stuck on the floor alone. “There's no one on the floor to help him?”

Gumaro shakes his head. “He cut them loose because we were dead before. Big mistake.”

Philip figures he should get in there and save him, not that Walter will act the least bit appreciative. He gathers up his poems and puts them in his backpack, then grabs his apron and gets out of the car. As he and Gumaro walk toward the back door of the restaurant, Philip looks beyond those birds still hovering above the Dumpster to where the sky is turning even more gray and cloudy. He thinks, for a moment, of a trip he and Ronnie took to Cape Cod with their grandparents when Philip was only twelve or maybe thirteen years old. When they first drove into town, the sun was shining and people were out on the streets in brightly colored T-shirts and shorts. But an hour after they checked into the hotel, it started to rain, and it kept on raining. Even though their grandparents came up with activities to occupy them (from Chinese checkers to regular checkers to Old Maid to a trip to the Pirates museum and endless shopping excursions), Philip and Ronnie did almost nothing but stare up at the sky for seven days, in hopes of spotting a glimpse of sun so they could go to the beach. It never came. And the small Cape town, which seemed so happy and full of life when they first arrived, took on a bleak, infectious kind of dreariness. The feeling Philip had on that trip seems like a childhood version of the way he feels mourning his brother—as though everything around him is damp and gloomy, as though there is only darkness where there should be light.

“So how is your beautiful wife?” he asks Gumaro.

“Bien.”
He holds open the kitchen door and lets Philip go first. “Working hard. Always working hard. I don't know why you work this stinking job if you don't got to.”

Philip shrugs and steps inside, passing through the maze of oversize pots and strainers hanging on the wall, shelves full of industrial-size containers of olive oil and minced garlic, into the heart of the kitchen. A few weeks before, Philip made the mistake of mentioning that his father was a doctor. Ever since, Gumaro insists on asking Philip why he works at the restaurant instead of living what he calls “the good life.” Philip has already explained to him that he wants to make his own way in the world so that neither of his parents can have a say about how he lives his life. But Gumaro doesn't get it. As Philip scans the rack by the metal clock in search of his time card, he listens to the usual speech about all the other things he could be doing with his time.

“You could be hanging out on the beach in Miami or gambling in Vegas, my friend.
Que es lo que pasa contigo
?”

Philip is about to tell him that he is not interested in the MTV version of the good life when The Robot bursts into the kitchen from the bar, his arms full of empty glasses but waving frantically about nonetheless. He takes one look at Philip and says, “You're late!”

Philip punches his card and glances down at the tiny blue stamp: four-fifty-one. “Actually, I'm nine minutes early. But if you want, I'll come back when I really am late.”

Walter slams down the glasses with such force that they sound as though they might shatter. If anyone else did that, he'd throw a fit. Gumaro moves in from behind and whisks them away with the speed of a magician, mouthing to Philip as he does,
“Que es lo que pasa contigo? Tu es loco trabajas aquí.”

What's the matter with you? You're crazy to work here.

“I don't have time to argue now,” Walter says, wiping his hands against the front of his pleated, overpressed khakis. He is one of those tall, wiry men with a disproportionate gut. And the way he dresses doesn't help, since his pastel shirts are always too tight and his khakis are forever ballooning out in front of him. “Just get your ass on the floor. It's like a fucking insurance salesmen convention descended on us out there.”

Philip thinks about asking Walter if he learned such stellar motivational lingo in whatever Podunk hotel and restaurant management school he earned his toilet paper certificate from, but he's already suffered through one argument today. Don't think about it, he tells himself, pushing his mother's words out of his mind as he ties his apron around his waist and steps onto the floor.

What Walter described as an insurance salesmen convention is really just a mob of sloppy, drunk corporate-types still in their office getups—or mostly in them anyway. The majority of men have peeled off their rumpled jackets and loosened their ties. The women have kept their blazers on, but a few have kicked off their pumps beneath their chairs. Just one look at them, seated at a long, pushed-together table for twenty near the bar, and Philip knows—the way only a waiter can know—that they'll linger here for hours. They'll keep right on drinking and ordering the occasional appetizer, then act shocked when the check comes. After that, it'll take them a good fifteen minutes to divvy up the bill, then cough up five different credit cards and a mountain of rumpled tens, fives, and singles, only to screw him out of a decent tip in the end. Since there is nothing he can do about it, though, Philip takes a breath and heads toward the table.

On the stereo, Dean Martin is singing about the moon hitting someone's eye like a big pizza pie, and Philip overhears one of the women say, “Oh, I love this song. I just love it.”

So did I, the first ten thousand times, he thinks as he makes his way, counterclockwise, around them, taking orders for a dozen drinks and two appetizers. After he enters it all into the computer at the service station and waits for the bartender to start pouring, Philip cleans the ketchup bottles and checks to make sure the rifle-size pepper mills are fully loaded while eavesdropping on their various conversations.

A tall, broad-shouldered woman, who has made the mistake of wearing shoulder pads when she shouldn't, is keeping the people around her enthralled with a deadly dull story about a proposal that she saved on her hard drive, only to find that it wasn't there when she got back from her business trip to Chicago. “I called the help desk, and it took two days for a technician to show up,” she says in a horsey drawl. “They should rename it the slow desk.”

They all burst into laughter, and Philip looks a few seats down to where a bald man is telling his friend, “I faxed Cathy the parameters of the deal first thing Monday morning. She had the nerve to request that I cc her on all correspondence with the main office from now on. I mean, does she need to get laid or what?”

At the seat closest to the bar, a tiny runt of a woman with shiny black hair and severe Cleopatra bangs is saying, “The doctor found a lump on her breast so she's been on a leave of absence for the last month. The thing is, I know this sounds awful, but I am already getting used to not having her around. Don't get me wrong. I don't wish anything bad on her. But maybe when she gets better she'll decide she doesn't want to come back to an office environment. That happens a lot to sick people when they recover. And if it does to her, then well, I'll finally get promoted.”

The last comment is enough to make him stop listening. Since the bartender is taking his sweet time making the drinks, Philip turns and heads into the kitchen to check on the appetizers. They're not up yet, but when he opens the door, Deb Shishimanian is just clocking in. Her spiky highlighted hair is still damp and falling down in front of her eyes. Shish is the moodiest person on the waitstaff, so Philip tries to guess, from the expression on her broad face, which one of her personalities walked through the door tonight. “Hey, baby,” she says, pulling her apron around her wide hips. “How you doing?”

Nice Shish, Philip thinks. “I've been better,” he says.

“Yeah, well, whatever's wrong with you, it can't be worse than my week.”

Sometimes Philip wonders if anyone in this place even remembers the fact that his brother died five months ago. At the time, they sent flowers and a few people from the staff—Gumaro and Shish included—showed up at the wake. But no one has mentioned it since. “What's the matter?” he asks as she sticks her time card back in the rack.

“I caught Beth in ‘Women4Women' the other day.”

“Where?”

“A chat room on AOL. Remember? It's the one where I met her in the first place.”

“Oh, yeah,” Philip says. “That's right. Sorry, I forgot.”

Beth has been Shish's girlfriend for the past year, ever since they met online and Shish invited her to the Olive Garden one night during her shift. Since Shish has a habit of broadcasting her business to the entire staff—never bothering to hold back on the details of her period or her personal life—they all knew she was expecting a mystery guest that night. And when Beth arrived in leather pants and a tank top with tattooed arms and a pierced nose, every single one of the waiters and waitresses made a point of swinging by the table to check her out. Even Gumaro and the other kitchen guys spent a good part of the night staring through the kitchen window, trying to catch a glimpse. Walter was the only one who refused to take part in the fun.

“I had a feeling she was messing around on the Internet again,” Shish is saying now as she shines up her thin lips with a wand of goo she pulled from her apron. “So I logged on under a fake name from the computer in Walter's office.”

“He let you?”

“No. The turkey was at the bank doing payroll. Anyway, I started IMing her, real flirtatiouslike, you know, and she suggested that we meet up. I asked her if she was single, and she wrote back ‘yup.' Just like that: ‘
y
-fucking-
u
-fucking-
p
.' Can you believe it?”

“I never trusted her,” Philip says

The second the words leave his mouth, he realizes it was the wrong thing to say because Shish's broad face takes on an angry sneer. Her stumpy nose crinkles, and her shiny lips turn inward. “What do you mean, you never trusted her? You told me you liked her.”

“I—”

“For your information, Philip, we made up. Beth explained the whole thing. She knew it was me, since I was using a screen name I used when we first started talking. Online, I mean. Anyway, I forgot about it until then.”

Not only has Philip lost track of her story, but somehow, right before his eyes, nice Shish has morphed into evil Shish. And since he doesn't know what else to say, Philip tells her, “I'm sorry.” Then he asks, “But if you made up, why was your week so bad?”

“Chicklet got hit by a car yesterday. She's dead.”

Chicklet is—was—Shish's cat. “I'm sorry,” Philip says again.

But Shish continues looking at him with that angry sneer, her stumpy nose still crinkled, her thin lips turned thinner. “You know, Philip,” she says as the kitchen crew clangs pots and a pan hisses with the sound of something frying, “maybe if you came out of the closet and had a relationship of your own, you'd stop being so judgmental.”

Philip sucks in a breath. He is willing to tolerate Walter's crap, as well as the verbal thrashing from his mother today, but he refuses to put up with abuse from Deb Shishimanian, psycho lesbian waitress. “Just because I don't broadcast every detail of my sex life to the staff of the Olive Garden does not mean I'm in the closet.”

Shish adjusts her apron around her waist, lining up the tops of her pens like it's a holster, clearly unfazed by what he just said. “Oh, please, Philip,” she tells him as she fishes through yet another pocket and produces a claw-shaped clip, which she uses to hold her damp hair away from her eyes. “What sex life do you have? I bet the fucking pope sees more action than you.”

Philip opens his mouth to go back at her when the door flies open and the bartender points to the dining room, where Walter is doing The Robot once again. “Philip, your drinks are up. And someone better save our leader before he self-destructs.”

“Shit,” Shish says and walks out the door into the dining room.

“Que es lo que pasa contigo? Se loco,”
Gumaro calls from over by the dishwasher.

“Where are my two Sampler Italianos?” Philip yells to the guys from Guam manning the grill and the Fryolater.

“They're coming,
maricón,”
one of them yells back.

He turns and goes to the bar, where he grabs a tray. Philip loads it up with all twelve drinks and turns to head for the table. At the same time, Walter storms by, arms waving madly, and smacks right into him. For a brief, slow motion moment, it looks as though Philip will be able save the glasses from toppling. But then a gin and tonic knocks into a Long Island iced tea, which knocks into two chardonnays, and down they all go, crashing to the floor so loudly that the pack of corporate imbeciles all stop talking and stare at Philip, bug-eyed. Only Dean Martin can be heard on the stereo. He's moved on to “Volare.”

What are you people looking at? Philip wants to scream. Haven't you ever seen someone spill a tray of drinks before?