by Jim Grimsley
He had been breathing carefully, as though walking on a wire where the faintest breath could send him off balance; he understood instinctively, even as early as that, the need to gauge his pleasure carefully, to conserve it in order to draw it out. He closed the magazine and stood. From outside, car horns, the hooting laughter of someone on the street, music from one of the opposite balconies; he recognized the song and it made him smile, “I Need a Man” by Grace Jones.
He stared down at the magazine, frightened some by the feelings it aroused in him. He had played with one of his cousins once, in Pastel, a boy his own size named Joel, the same age as Newell, with the same family looks, but that had been only once, and Joel so resembled Newell that the act was almost like masturbation. All the rest had been only speculation, longing. He could hardly believe what he saw on these pages; images that had been in his head all this time. It was as if he had foreseen this as his future, because he had foreseen this man, or at least someone who would pose like him, wearing nothing, or so little as to be nothing, page after page. Newell opened the magazine to the pictures on the sawhorse, the pictures in the locker room, Rod dressed in leather. The images rushed through him and he took the magazine to the bathroom with him and lay it on the back of the toilet. As powerful as the feeling of arousal was the strangeness of the moment. Newell felt as if he knew the picture-man completely, had always known him, and furthermore wanted to lie down with him and be covered by him and run hands along him and gaze into his face. From picture to picture, from page to page, the pose changed, but the expression was always the same, always fixed on the camera, always impassive, grave, self-assured to the point of arrogance; and what was disturbing was that Newell wanted him to have exactly that look. Since Rod the Rock could have anything he wanted, it was fitting he should express no desire at all, except, maybe, a wish to reveal himself again and again.
When Newell came out of the bathroom and put the magazine away, in the bottom of the wardrobe out of sight, rain was washing the edge of the gallery, sweeping down at a slant out of the sky. He had heard nothing in the bathroom except the sound of his own breathing, but now he heard low, rumbling thunder, the air heavy with moisture even inside the room. He threw open the windows, protected from the rain by the roof of the gallery. What a sound, what a hissing, everywhere. Along the gutters in the street below the water was running a foot deep.
He turned on the lamp in the twilight and sat by the open doors watching the rain for a long time, then reading his books, first leafing through the picture book about the French Quarter, afterward picking up his paperback novel about two men traveling together back in time and the world they find there. He could relax and pay attention to the book for the first time since arriving in New Orleans, maybe because he had a job, or because he had begun the transformation he had foreseen when he was leaving Pastel. He understood his present world, the narrow room, the high windows, the torrent of rain, well enough now that he could surrender to the book, for a few hours anyway, till time to go to bed.
He called Flora the next day, Sunday, to tell her he had found a job. He caught her at home with a headache, puffing her cigarette audibly, sipping coffee, and trying to clear her throat. “Sweet Thing, I am so glad you called me.”
“Yes ma’am. Well, it’s good news, don’t you think?”
“Well, I hope you don’t have to work in food service for very long,” she intimated. “Jesse has been in food service his whole life and look where that’s got him.”
“Yes ma’am.” He understood from this that Jesse was sitting at the kitchen table too, scratching his nose or the inside of his ear, looking completely vacant, as he usually looked in the morning.
“You being careful in that French Quarter?” She pronounced it “korter.”
“Yes ma’am. But I don’t think it’s dangerous.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“Really. I been walking around since I got here, even at night, and I never feel like anybody is following me, or anything.”
“Well,” she took a drag on the cigarette, “you walk around with that kind of careless attitude and somebody will drag you off in an alley one of these days, you watch. And nobody will know what happened to you.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I know what I’m talking about. There’s things that happen in New Orleans that you’d rather not even imagine.” Her words took on a curious authority over the long-distance line. Jesse must have coughed, with the cigarette smoke swirling around him in that trailer kitchen, because Flora snapped, “Go in the living room if you can’t stand my smoke, you tattooed son of a bitch.”
“Are you going to church today, Grandma?”
“No. I didn’t get my dress out the cleaners this week.” They had made this joke before; they both laughed and felt better, and he imagined Jesse sulking in front of the TV with his toes buried in the shag carpet. “It’s a lot of Catholics in New Orleans,” Flora noted.
“I know. There’s a great big church they go to. In a square right here in the French Quarter.”
“I know exactly the one you’re talking about,” she said, and after a moment added, “My phone bill would be sky high with the two of us gabbing about nothing.”
“I’ll get me a phone pretty soon,” Newell promised, “then I won’t have to call collect.” He waited a moment, then asked, “You heard from Mama?”
The mention of his mother put Flora on her guard, no different than any other time. “No. I don’t ever know when she’s going to call.”
“All right. Well, you tell her I said hey. If you talk to her.”
They said good-bye, and there he stood across from the Verti Mart on Sunday morning. Wondering why he had asked about Mama, after such a long time. Wondering what had put her on his mind.
He stopped at the French Market and bought a few apples and a carton of salt, and hurried up the stairs carrying the bag. He sat in his room and bit into the apples and sprinkled salt on the crisp white flesh, savoring the apples and salt. He lost himself in a reverie, eating all the apples he had bought and sitting there, until suddenly there was a knock at the door.
There stood Miss Kimbro, framed by the courtyard behind her, carrying something with a cord. She stepped inside and looked around and shoved the thing at him and said, “This comes with the room. You can cook with it.”
“I can?”
“Plug it in,” she said, and looked around again, as if he might have changed something, as if she were searching for some change he might have made in the room. “It’s a toaster oven.”
“That’s really nice of you,” he said, and she shrugged, and he plugged the oven into a receptacle near the bathroom and set it on top of the wicker clothes hamper.
“Don’t leave it on that hamper, it’ll catch fire.”
He moved the toaster oven to the little table.
“Do you like the room?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“You think you’ll stay here?”
“Oh, yes ma’am.”
He could hardly tell whether she heard him or not. She stepped to the bathroom and looked all around it. She looked down at the toaster oven, turned a knob at the front of it. At once the inside lit a luminous orange. “It works,” she said.
“Thank you.”
By now she was opening the door and stepping outside. She stood with the door partly closed, one eye watching him. “Anyway, I just wanted to bring up the toaster oven, I have to get back to the shop.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Oh yes,” she said, and vanished.
In fact, she waited on the steps leading down to the slate floor of the loggia. She had no idea whether or not he was listening, she simply stood there, in a bit of breeze, with the sun bright and the warm breeze stirring. She had been distracted by the expression on Newell’s face, as if the thought of a toaster oven terrified him, or as if the room terrified him, or the city did. She stepped carefully down the plank stairs. She should ha
ve a carpenter look at these steps. A good, young, strong carpenter to work in the hot sun, repairing these steps. She thought Newell would like that. At the bottom she looked up again, at the closed door. She could almost hear the silence inside. Stepping into the junk shop, she stood before the whirring blades of the oscillating fan, and a breeze swept across her first one way, then another.
The whole afternoon and evening were busy, in fact, and she hardly got a breath of air before ten, when she locked the front door; she stood on the street for a long time, wandered to the corner. Upstairs, beyond the open shutters, the boy’s lamp was burning. He was sitting in the doorway reading. He had but the one lamp, maybe she ought to get him another. Still, she had given him a toaster oven. But it was clear from his reaction that he was not accustomed to being given anything at all.
On Tuesday morning he woke up when the clock said 5:30 A.M. He had hardly ever woken up so early before, and he stumbled to the bath tub and ran hot water. He lay in the tub waking and sleeping, waking and sleeping, till finally he washed and rinsed himself as best he could. He dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, like the other guys he had seen in the restaurant.
He headed for the Circle K with plenty of time. Some people were already seated in the dining room, and a thin waiter in a tight T-shirt slouched over them writing down their order. Curtis was at his desk, looking half asleep, yawning as Newell walked in.
“Oh, hi, it’s you,” Curtis said, and yawned again. He showed Newell the kitchen, introduced him to Felix, the breakfast cook, and Alan, the morning waiter. Umberto, the prep guy, was out back, washing out the garbage can with a hose, visible through an open screen door.
The job was simple. Newell picked up dishes and brought people water. When the tables were empty he cleaned them off. He was the only bus boy for the breakfast shift; someone named Tyrone came in to cover the late part of breakfast and lunch. Newell set to work. At first there was little to do, then suddenly the tables filled. Curtis only returned to help when there were too many dirty tables for Newell to handle.
Often Newell found Curtis watching, though pretty soon Newell was too busy to notice what anybody was doing. Alan tapped Newell on the shoulder and said, “Those people have been asking for water for fifteen minutes. You need to move your behind.” Or came up to Newell and snapped, “If you can’t clean these tables any faster than this I’m not going to tip you. I could do it myself this quick.” Or, while passing to the kitchen, said, “Come back here and help me take out these plates to that party of eight. That woman at that table has an attitude about me.” A woman was in fact scowling at them both from the table, and Newell set her plate in front of her, and she asked for something unfamiliar to him, and he took the message back to Alan and Alan said, “Well, here, take it to her.” It was Tabasco, a bottle of hot sauce that the customer sprayed over her eggs. Half the morning Newell spent running around doing what Alan said to do and the rest listening while Alan offered another harangue about how slowly Newell cleaned the tables.
Help came and things settled down, and sooner than he could have guessed the rush was done. Curtis clapped Newell on the back in the kitchen door. “You lived through it.”
“It was all right,” Newell said.
“Except you’re so slow and clumsy,” Alan added, from the side.
“Shut up, Alan,” Curtis said.
“I will not shut up. He’s slow and he’s clumsy with the plates.”
“He didn’t break anything.”
Alan whirled away with his order pad. Curtis watched him go and said, “You did okay. But you need to wear a tighter T-shirt.”
“A what?”
Curtis laughed nervously. “Your jeans are all right but your T-shirt’s not tight enough. You need to wear a tight one. We have to keep the queens happy.”
In the lull between breakfast and lunch Newell ate his own eggs and bacon, served without a word by Felix, who watched Newell eat the first couple of bites, then grunted and lumbered back to the kitchen. Alan ate his breakfast, too, but he sat at a different table, away from Newell, refusing to look at him or speak to him. But by then there were other waiters, Frank and Stuart, Curtis’s boyfriend, and they were friendlier than Alan, and cuter.
Lunch shift shocked Newell with its intensity, so many dishes on the table, so many empty water glasses, everything to be done at once, and people crammed into the restaurant leaving only the narrowest space through which Newell could slide. He moved as fast as he could and hoped for the best. His whole mind focused itself on the need to note the level of water in a glass across a room, despite cigarette smoke swirling in the air and bodies moving this way and that across his field of vision; he concentrated on the balance required to haul a heavy tray of dishes over the heads of the customers, who were often staring at him as he moved, trying to make eye contact. He was assigned to Alan’s and Stuart’s sections and kept them clean as best he could, kept the customers flowing through, kept the water glasses full, and picked up the used napkins from the floor, but even so, Alan found plenty to criticize—that Newell was setting the tables the wrong way, that he took forever to fill a simple pitcher of water. That he was bumping into the customers as he walked, that he was so slow he couldn’t help to carry out the food.
At the end of the shift Stuart tipped him eight dollars and some change and Alan refused to tip him at all, at first, until Curtis and Stuart took him aside and talked to him for a while, after which he gave Newell four dollars even and said, “You’re lucky I give you that much, as slow as you are. I think you’re in the wrong line of work, honey.”
“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Stuart said, indicating Alan as the “her” in question. “Her stars are all in the wrong place this month.”
“Fuck off, Stuart.”
Stuart smiled and glided away. Newell imitated the glide though not the smile, and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Alan.”
So his first day was over, and all he had to think about till then was finding a tight T-shirt to wear. He tried on the ones he had brought from Pastel, six of them, including the one that had Bruce Springsteen’s picture on the front; that one was tight, and one other green one from high school was also a bit tight.
He put the twelve dollars and some change from his tips with the rest of his money, which grew to nearly fifty dollars again. The fact pleased him, and he thought, I can start saving for the rent right now.
But at work the next day, with Newell in the Springsteen T-shirt, relations with Alan were even worse, and now Stuart was cold to him, too. Every dish Newell touched was the wrong dish, every time he carried out the water glass he went to the wrong side of the restaurant first, or when Alan asked for a simple glass of orange juice Newell needed ten minutes to find it. Up to a point it had made sense, but by the lunch shift Newell was wondering what bothered Alan so much.
“He really liked Travis, the last guy,” Frank told him, when they were eating breakfast together, Frank lowering his voice to float just over his eggs and potatoes. “But Curtis fired Travis for coming in late all the time and not showing up one day, and Alan has been pouting ever since. Because Curtis lets Stuart come in late as much as he wants.”
“That doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“Honey, to a princess like Alan, common sense like that does not matter one little bit.”
“Well, I hope he gets used to me soon.”
“It’s because you’re cuter than he is,” Frank added, as if he had not already offered another explanation, standing with his cup of coffee. The restaurant had gotten quiet, around ten-thirty, just before lunch would start. “And younger.”
Alan, sitting alone at the window, legs crossed like a girl, smoked a slow, drawling cigarette, his elbows sharp and dark against the window. Hair combed straight back, long sharp nose, thin lips, narrow eyes, soft chin. His parts had a look of hanging together only loosely, an uncertain whole. He’s not cute, Newell realized, and, at the same moment, but I am.
; Curtis had that day off, but was at work the next, when Newell wore the tight green T-shirt from high school, and the tight faded jeans with a slight flare at the bottom. Curtis said the T-shirt was better, was more like what he had in mind, and all morning he found reasons to talk to Newell, helping him with tables during the breakfast rush. Newell had to concentrate on his work and hardly thought about Curtis or what he might be up to, but as the morning wore on, Stuart began to harangue Newell pretty much as Alan continued to do, get the water faster, there’s too much ice in the pitcher, this orange juice is soured, didn’t you check it?
For breakfast Felix prepared Newell a nice omelet, a change from the usual eggs. Frank handed Newell the plate, noting, “Well, I guess Felix is in love with you too.”
“What do you mean?”
“He never fixes omelets—you have to beg him.”
For Frank, Felix had made the usual breakfast, scrambled eggs and bacon, potatoes on the side.
“Who else is in love with me?”
Frank laughed. “Are you kidding?”
“No.”
“Well, darling, Curtis is following you around like a puppy. It’s got Stuart all upset. Haven’t you even noticed? You cold bitch.”
From there on through lunch he did notice that Curtis was more or less following him around the restaurant and Stuart was watching the whole thing, slamming dishes around and getting in a fight with Umberto, the prep cook, about the salad. Alan was meanwhile sitting calmly by the window, puffing the usual cigarette, off his feet for a moment, as he called it, but glaring at Newell whenever he passed.
You cold bitch. He liked the ring of the words, though he had simply been oblivious and not really cold. But he liked that he had appeared cold to Frank.
The work was what absorbed him, the novelty of it, which he knew would wear away; but for the moment it was what he needed. Alan and Stuart tipped him, if poorly, and his stock of cash grew, if slowly. Payday was coming. Saturdays and Sundays the restaurant was busy from the time it opened till the time Newell got off, and the customers were all in a jolly mood. The dining rooms became so crowded that every trip he made through the mazes of chairs and tables became a performance, and he became easy at making eye contact with the customers, for the most fleeting of moments, but enough to fulfill the apparent requirement; he twisted and shimmied through the chairs with his pitcher, his tray, his cloths for cleaning, and he forgot whether Curtis was watching him or not, he forgot whether anybody liked him, he did what he was supposed to do and remembered that he was getting paid money for it, and with the money he could pay his rent, and with that accomplished he could stay here, in the city.