Boulevard

by Jim Grimsley

  At the end of the shifts on the weekend, even Stuart and Alan had to give him pretty big tips, they had made so much money off the tables themselves, and Curtis supervised the payout, not only for Newell but for Tyrone. Nearly forty dollars for each day, twenty from each waiter, more money than Newell had counted on. He could buy some decent sheets and a stack of clean, new towels.

  On Tuesday he overslept by a few minutes and arrived at work a few minutes late, only to find the place in an uproar. Alan had caught Umberto looking in Curtis’s desk drawers without permission, presumably for the cash bag from last night, as if it would still be there. Everybody was shrieking at everybody, and the dozen or so customers sat struck with mild astonishment. Newell went to the office, stuck his card into the punch slot of the time clock. Alan said, “Well, Umberto, if you’re so innocent, what were you doing in there?”

  “I was looking for a book of matches.”

  “We have matches right at the register.”

  “I wasn’t at the register.”

  “Well, ten steps would have taken you right there. You were not looking for any matches.”

  “Everybody knows Curtis takes the deposit to the bank at night.”

  “Sometimes he doesn’t.”

  Umberto waved his hand at Alan and headed back to the kitchen, and Alan followed him there to argue more. Alan came out in a few minutes and spotted Newell with an empty tray, heading to the tables where the customers were paying their bills and fleeing. “And don’t think I didn’t notice you were late.”

  “I forgot to turn on the alarm,” Newell said.

  “Convenient to be so forgetful. When the rest of us have to do double work.”

  “It was only ten minutes, Alan,” he said, but this time he looked Alan in the eye. Alan wavered and looked away. Newell cleared the empty tables, his stomach already in a knot, and the week was only an hour old.

  When Curtis came in and Alan rushed to tell him the story, Curtis called Umberto to the office in front of Alan and handed Umberto a book of matches. “Here,” Curtis said.

  “That’s it?”

  “Alan, what do you think you’re doing?”

  “He was going through your desk. You don’t let people go through your desk.”

  “There’s nothing in my desk,” Curtis said, “I don’t keep anything in it. I don’t even lock it.”

  “You don’t let people go through your desk.” Alan waved one hand in the air and stalked away. “What kind of boss are you?”

  At the end of the shift, Curtis handed Newell a pay envelope and gave him a receipt to sign. Inside was a check for one hundred and fourteen dollars and thirteen cents. “I can cash it for you if you sign it over to me,” Curtis said, and Newell waited, and Curtis looked at him, and then turned the check over and said, “Sign it across here. Sign your name.”

  Later he went to Mac’s, as he had come to think of the adult bookstore, and hung out there for a while. This time he changed three dollars for quarters with the woman at the cash register, a platinum blond he had never seen before. “Where’s Mac?” he asked.

  “This is his night to prowl with the alley cats.” She gave him a grin, her lips caked with pink lipstick. “He’ll be back tomorrow. You a friend of his?”

  “No. I just speak to him when I come in.”

  Newell walked behind the curtain for the first time. The booths were a maze of partitions, heading off two ways, though not quite in straight paths. He wandered in the dark spaces, trying to read the postings for each movie in the blue-tinged light. He could not bring himself to enter any of the movies except the one called, “Roger,” which was apparently a man by himself, and that seemed like a good way to start, to Newell, but he found there were already three people in the booth when he opened the door. In that tiny space there was hardly room for another, nice as they were to invite him.

  When he headed to the store again, he took a wrong turn and found himself at a door to the courtyard. He had known the old house had a courtyard but was seeing it for the first time, ivy climbing one wall, a picnic table at the center. A man stood in the courtyard, big-shouldered, heavy-jawed. He looked like Rod the Rock, and Newell found himself staring. The man wore a dark jacket, a shirt open at the collar; he glanced at Newell, smiled, nodded his head. So handsome. Newell’s heart was pounding. Someone called out, “Jack.” A woman’s voice, and the man moved toward the sound. It pleased Newell to have heard the man’s name. Jack. Nodding to Newell again, Jack disappeared, and Newell waited there a moment, in case the guy should reappear.

  Newell wandered among the magazines for a while, but since Mac was off tonight, he figured he would go away and come back again later in the week. Walking home, he was grateful for the quiet, the row of old street-lamps, the crooked pavements, the wall of buildings massed at the street. Once he left the bookstore, that doorway blended into the wall, as did all the other doorways, hiding all the other rooms like that one, where anything might happen.

  On Bourbon Street he stopped and bought a tight, white T-shirt with the words “Vieux Carre” printed across it, and the outline of an ornate gallery, intricate ironwork, in shiny blue applique. He bought a size small and figured he couldn’t get any tighter than that, so he paid seven dollars for the T-shirt and felt pleased that he would have something new to wear tomorrow.

  The next day, in the T-shirt, he felt as though he were putting on a show in the restaurant, slipping between the tables, with men watching him from all sides, and some of them flirting, trying to talk to him. Later, Curtis called Newell to his office and said, “You’re really getting into this, babycake.”

  “I like it all right,” Newell said, but he felt suddenly uncomfortable, knowing Stuart was somewhere in the dining rooms, watching all this.

  “How long have you lived in town?”

  “I just got here a couple of weeks ago, right before I came in here the first time.”

  “That’s too sweet.” Curtis’s tone offended Newell, something about it he could not place, but he showed nothing except that he was listening. “Anyway, you seem like you’re settling in all right.”

  Stuart appeared suddenly in the doorway, across from Newell, close enough to touch, and smiled in a brittle way. “You two look so comfortable together.”

  Curtis turned to face the wall, lifting a pencil. “Stuart, did you want to talk about something?”

  “No, Curtis, I just wanted to find out how much you two have to talk about, you know?”

  They were staring at each other now. Curtis had started to blush, and Stuart was about to start an argument. Newell figured it was a good time to leave, and so he did, with Alan waiting for him at the server’s station, complaining that there was not even a pitcher’s worth of ice in the bin, Newell needed to bring in some ice, where had he been anyway, the little nitwit?

  Stuart and Frank tipped out and left the restaurant, Stuart lingering for a while to hover over Curtis, while Newell was still eating his lunch. He felt the comfort of his day’s tip money in his pocket. Stuart kissed Curtis good-bye on the lips and left the restaurant, and Curtis hardly waited for Stuart to get out of sight before he sat down with Newell himself. He was watching Newell. Something hangdog in his air. “You doing all right, Newell?”

  “Sure.”

  “Things are working out pretty good for you, here.”

  “Yeah. I like it.”

  “Stuart likes you.”

  Newell gave him a look.

  “No, I mean it. He’s fine about you. Look.” He pulled his chair closer to Newell. “You could probably be a waiter, don’t you think? Those guys pull down the real tips.”

  Newell felt something pressing on his midsection, a strange pressure that he had never felt before, a bit hard to breathe while Curtis was sitting so close, talking so low. “I’m fine with being a bus boy.”

  “But you’d like to make the real money.”

  He let that go. Curtis was still watching him. After a while Newell wiped his mo
uth with the napkin and laid it across his plate. “I like to make money, that’s a fact.”

  “Well, then,” Curtis said, but he was looking down at his plate. “I’ll have to see what I can do about it.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  “Why don’t you sit for a while? Talk to me.”

  “I have something I have to do,” Newell said.

  “You sure?” Curtis asked, and there was something suddenly cool in his aspect.

  “Yes. I have a friend coming over to my house.”

  Curtis nodded.

  “See you.”

  Curtis nodded again, staring down at the table.

  Umberto had been watching the whole time, and partway through the scene brought Felix to the kitchen door to witness too.

  Newell walked out of the restaurant with a sinking feeling, already dreading the next morning. On Thursday, Curtis sent Newell home after breakfast, because things were slow, he said. Curtis was off the next day, but Stuart was working, and it was clear that Stuart had heard something. He was cold and unfriendly to Newell all day, and that coupled with Alan’s continual harangues made the hours nearly impossible to endure. The next day was Saturday, and Curtis was working though it was usually his day off, and he treated Newell distantly. But there was so much business in the restaurant, nobody had time to say very much to anybody. At the end of the day Alan left with the restaurant still full, Curtis interviewing people in the office, the rumor going around that Curtis was hiring another waiter.

  When Curtis went out of his way to say good-bye to Newell in the coldest tones possible, in front of Stuart, Newell left the restaurant fearing the worst. In fact, it was as bad as he expected, because the next morning, a Sunday, a new bus boy was on duty when Newell came to work, and Curtis called Newell to the office and fired him very first thing. Almost a week’s pay for the days he had worked since the last payday, plus an extra fifty for getting fired, as best Newell could understand it.

  “What did I do?” Newell asked.

  Curtis shrugged, looked down at his desk.

  “You were too disruptive,” Alan said, passing the door. “Nobody could get along with you.”

  “Was this because I wouldn’t go out with you?” Newell asked.

  Curtis never answered at all, going back to his books, and Newell asked, “Well, what am I supposed to do now?”

  “Leave, honey,” Alan said. “It’s just that simple.”

  In a daze he headed back to his room. He went upstairs immediately and counted out two hundred fifty dollars from what he had. This was the rent; he put it aside. He had enough to keep him alive till he got another job. He had a couple of cans of soup and some crackers left from when he had been unemployed. Curtis could have fired him after breakfast, he could have waited that long. Could you really be fired because you didn’t respond when your boss flirted with you? Newell ate a can of soup slowly to make it last longer, counted his money again, discouraged that the folded bills and precise stacks of coins added up to such a tiny sum. The hot soup calmed his belly, and he felt less anxious and tried to lie across the bed, but when he did, with the afternoon sun slanting across his belly through the slats of the blinds, when he drifted toward sleep, he felt his belly rumbling as if hungry and turned over on his side and counted his money again, worried that it would not be enough. He had meant to stay in the room but, with thoughts like these churning, he sprang up from the bed and splashed water on his face, folded the money into his pocket and went out walking along Bourbon Street. But whenever he saw a sign for help wanted, he first surged toward the door of the business and then away from it. Sunday, it wouldn’t do any good to ask, most places the managers didn’t even work on Sundays. His heart pounded, and he talked himself out of each opportunity, and walked away, and finally drifted toward the bars again.

  He went into a bar and ordered one of the cocktails that had worked so well to dull his thinking before. He moved from bar to bar. Late in the evening, in the Bourbon Pub among a lot of men dressed like cowboys in flannel shirts, cowboy boots, and belts with ornate silver buckles, Newell felt a wave of nausea pass through him and sank to the barstool and hung his head down. There was a drink in his hand, somewhere distant, and he concentrated on that, because he knew if he failed to sustain the thought of it in his head he would drop the glass, and that would be unpardonable, to drop the drink glass, with the whole bar watching. The bar was spinning and the music was making him dizzy, but he thought he was okay sitting there, he thought the nausea was going away and he was acting pretty normal, he thought he blended in pretty well, until someone leaned into his face and asked, “Honey, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, or tried to say, and some sound did come out of his mouth, but he was mostly focused on the kindness of the face in front of him, a flabby, pale, man’s face, with big eyes made bigger by makeup, a line along the eyelid and mascara, but he was a man, needing to shave. Newell took a deep breath and said again, slowly, “I’m fine.”

  “You’re about to fall off that stool, honey.”

  Newell nodded, and he could suddenly feel himself moving, though he had not noted this before.

  “Do you want to go home?”

  Newell tried to focus on the man again. “Yes. I’d like that.”

  “Do you know where you live? Do you think you can get home by yourself?”

  “I live over the junk store,” he answered, and he felt very clear that he did indeed live over the junk store, but he could no longer tell where that was. He looked around vaguely.

  The man fretted, his face pale and fleshy with its narrow range of expressions. He took Newell by the arm, and Newell moved with him as if he had become fluid. Outside he gulped the fresh air and felt suddenly sick and leaned against the side of a building for a few moments, while the man watched him anxiously.

  Louise had come outside to sit on the steps to the back gallery, looking up at the hazy summer sky. For hours she had been trying to sleep, but finally she left the bed, restless. She dressed and walked outside to the courtyard. The street sweepers would drive their trucks through the Quarter soon, with the jets of water and the spinning brushes, and she liked to be awake for that sometimes. She had no thought that Newell was anywhere but at the top of the stairs, in that little room at the end of the gallery, but soon he came staggering down the passage, accompanied by a pot-bellied, soft-faced man with a bald spot on the top of his head. Something like makeup had smeared around his eyes in the heat. He mostly carried Newell to the stairs, and Newell looked around and said, in a slurred voice, “This is it.” When Louise stood and looked at him, he nodded to her. “Good evening, Miss Kimbro. I come home drunk.”

  “I see that you have,” she said, and Newell passed up the stairs and into his room, leaving her alone with this stranger.

  “It wasn’t me who got him drunk like this,” explained the pudgy man, and she had to look away from him, she found him so unattractive with his sallow, fleshy face. “But when I found him he was all slumped down on the stool, so I thought I would help him home.”

  “He’s getting used to the Quarter, I see.” Louise had the feeling this was the right thing to say, though she didn’t know why, and it embarrassed her so that she turned and abruptly walked back to the loggia, taking out her keys. “Oh, well, good night.”

  “Good night,” answered the man, and waited till she had gone inside before he ambled, appearing almost aimless, down the passageway to the street.

  In the morning Newell woke to a pounding head like nothing he had ever imagined, a feeling that his stomach was slowly wringing itself inside out, and as soon as he dared sit up, the flashes of agony in his head and the topsy-turvy state of his stomach sent him reeling to the bathroom, where he hung against the toilet and heaved bitter-tasting, yellow bile into the toilet bowl. After a while he rinsed his mouth and brushed his teeth and rinsed his mouth again, and he wanted to take a bath but his head throbbed with sharp bursts of pain. He had broken
out in a sweat and hung on the sink looking at himself in the mirror, his hair matted in clumps of curls, his eyes ringed with shade, skin so pale it was almost blue. He drank a cup of water and waited to see whether his stomach would accept it, ran a tub of water and slid into it, sweating, into the hot water with his head throbbing.

  He found his clothes from the night before and went through all the pockets. Laying out the money, counting all the bills and change, and adding what he’d left in the wallet, he had less than one hundred dollars. He’d spent the rest last night. How was that possible? Had he lost a bill somewhere? His heart sank at the thought, and he searched the pockets again, and came up with another dime and a nickel, and added them to his careful piles. Sitting there dumbfounded, he stared at the money as if willing it to grow.

  A soft knocking sounded on his door. He tightened the towel around his waist and opened the door a bit, and saw a man standing on the gallery, no one Newell had ever met, he thought at first, with his head pounding from having stood so suddenly, but, with a renewed feeling of dull, nauseous weight in his stomach, he noted something familiar about the stranger, and said, “Hello.”

  “Hello. Do you remember me?”

  A fat man, shorter than Newell. Round, sloping shoulders under a stretch shirt that swelled over his sagging stomach. Newell shook his head. The man smiled and explained, “I brought you home last night.”