Love Me Back

by Merritt Tierce

  Lately they’ve been coming down harder on me. There’s something wrong with Pablo’s eyes; he has kind of a flat face, like you see in the pictures of fetal alcohol syndrome victims, and his pupils are strange. The top half of each is a cloudy blue, and the bottom half is an opaque dark, so when he stares at me and says Tellen, tellen Danny que necesita pagar, tellen Danny he pay, okay? Ten. Diez. I feel disarmed by his aberrant, unreadable gaze. He tells me in Spanish, then in English; then he holds up how many fingers to make sure I get it.

  My friend Calvin says they’re going to start cutting it worse for him, that even though he’s their boss they won’t tolerate it. We agree that he makes too much money to do it like this, that if he wants it he should just pay for it. Either give me the cash or get right with them straightaway.

  Suck it is his favorite, but not by much—we joke that he has Tourette’s syndrome, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true. He might be looking over the seating chart for the night, trying to puzzle out how he can possibly fit another six-top in at seven thirty, and run through a litany like Suck it shit fuck cock ’n’ balls shit fuck fuck fuck fuck suck it. He might hang up the phone after sweetly giving a stranger detailed directions and declare Filthy cunt whore suck my cock may I help you?

  Every night he makes snap public-relations decisions with a ferocity that is unquestionable and an accuracy that is never less than dead-on. He is a fast-talking Italian fox from the Bronx who can get his way with anyone, can make any Mur feel like a VIP, and thus has been the general manager of a multimillion-dollar-grossing fine-dining steakhouse since he was twenty-four.

  (Mur is a term that denotes any individual “we don’t know.” A Mur is just a regular customer, no one deserving of special treatment. This fairly benign significance is the standard, though it might also be used more pejoratively, to indicate that the individual is a nobody, a chump, a tool—all of which in turn signify primarily an absence of wealth. Example: Honey-love, see those Murs hangin out in the fuckin doorway over there? Would you please take them in to twenty fucking seven. I once inquired about the etymology of Mur, and Danny said that he and his buddy, who is the general manager at our sister restaurant Il Castello, used to know a guy named Murray when they were kids growing up in the Bronx. Murray was a social misfit, soft or naive in some unforgivable way that inspired them to refer to any such person as a Murray, and later simply a Mur.)

  But Danny is blowing his crystalline mind four square inches of shittily cut cocaine at a time, night after night. The urgency in his voice when he calls up the restaurant on his days off to ask me to get it for him—well, last night all he said was Four. Now.

  Danny’s appetite is the spirit of the place: the excesses of an entire microculture are concentrated in his one body. We are accustomed to businessmen arriving with clients whom they want to impress, we are accustomed to those businessmen spending our weekly incomes on several bottles of fine wine alone, we are accustomed to a per-person average that can linger fatly around $300. We are accustomed to Danny’s binges, his unbelievable gluttony. He routinely fucks women in the restaurant—once there was a pink lacy thong on the floor by the trash can in the office on a Sunday, and he came up to The Restaurant with a friend, even though it was his day off. They were already out of control with their high and they were there for me to get them some more. Danny told the friend my name and he said Ooooh! and looked at me as if he cherished me, because Danny must have told him earlier who was going to help them along. While they were crashing around the office, laughing and pushing and glowing and shrieking, Danny told me and the wine manager how he had fucked this one girl by the trash can last night (above the thong on the floor, he reenacted his thrusting), and how he then fucked her friend in the same place. I guess that one wasn’t wearing underwear, or kept it on.

  There is a kind of partying undertaken by people of my age and station on birthdays, or on other momentous occasions such as the losing of a job. The kind of partying that leaves one wrecked for days, sometimes close to death. The kind of partying that concludes with the unconscious body of the individual being arranged by any remaining friends in such a way that it can be trusted not to aspirate vomit. This is the kind of partying that lingers so badly it causes one to leave off for another year or so. This is also the kind of partying that Danny rips through several times a week.

  He was in the hospital last month. No one could remember a day when Danny didn’t come in—in seven years he’s never been out sick. He’s been in all fucked up, for sure, but he maintains better than most people who aren’t fucked up, so a hush came over us when they said he was in the hospital. They said it was something with his stomach, that he’d had unbearable pains and his dad convinced his friend Roman to drag him to the emergency room, where they gave him great quantities of morphine. He was out only the one day; the next day he was back, drinking flavored water instead of the four or five Cokes he habitually downs during the shift. On the third day he had returned to his usual pace. I saw him in the back talking to Pablo.

  Our ladder-back chairs have a decorative hole in the top rung, and late one afternoon I came around the corner of the bar and saw he’d stuck his cock through the hole there. Just to shock me or anyone else who walked by. Somehow he knows which girls can handle this and which can’t.

  Other guys imitate him sometimes. Once Casey told me that he let his dick hang out underneath his apron all night, and because he’s about six-three, when he was standing at his tables his junk would rest on the tabletop, hidden behind the apron. Then last Sunday I was in the office before the shift started, talking to Rich, the maître d’. Kansas John walked in to ask me if he could pay me to do his alcohol seller-server recertification for him. I said yes, so he was writing down his information for me, and behind his back Rich unzipped his pants and pulled it out. He wadded it up in his hand and waited for Kansas John to turn around. But before Kansas turned around, Anna walked in the door of the office. I don’t know how Rich did it fast enough, but he covered it with his hands as if he just had his hands in his lap.

  Danny and his roommate like to have the same women. Lou Ambrogetti is the Cuban-Italian chef at Il Castello. He is short, bronze, and beautiful, and though he’s only thirty-four, the stubble atop his round head is pigeon-colored. His full lips hold still underneath a gaze that’s pruriently curious, and a tattooed sun circumscribes his navel. One Saturday night I sucked him off at the bottom of the back stairs behind Cosimo, the nightclub affiliated with our restaurant. I was there only because one of the owners, Mr. Salvatore Lissandri, brought me over from the steakhouse in his Aston Martin; it was Sal himself who’d given me a job at The Restaurant.

  Lissandri philandered. But first—he came into the Dream Café, one of the two restaurants I was working in that year, a few mornings a week for breakfast. We fought over him, whoever else was on the breakfast shift and I, because he always tipped $15, which worked out to be one hundred sixty percent of his $9 tab. He ate steel-cut organic oatmeal with no brown sugar and soy milk on the side, followed by four egg whites scrambled with spinach and tomatoes. He drank water only, with a straw. He didn’t say much to us and always had the paper with him. A native New Yorker and Mets fan, he stared at the sports section while he did business on his mobile phone all during his breakfast.

  When Jamie started waiting on him he put the phone down. She was new, a yoga instructor from Woodstock, in town to save money by living with her folks so she could take a trip to India to develop her practice. Sal liked her—we all did, she radiated bliss and vigor. He flirted with her and told her she ought to come over to his restaurant, he’d set her up in the bar over there. She turned him down because she didn’t want to work nights.

  One Sunday Sal came in with his sometime companion, Laura, at the peak of brunch service. The Dream Café was not a well-run restaurant and as the strongest server I often took six or seven tables at once. From ten a.m. till about one in the afternoon I’d feel like I was continuously
on the precarious edge of a sheer food-service cliff. What heroics I performed to get people their fucking brunch. Sal and Laura sat down on the patio that morning—I had never seen him in on the weekend, or even during the volume part of any weekday. I already had a half dozen booths in the lanai going, but as I flew past them he said Can you take care of us here? I said Absolutely. I rang in his food and miraculously it was on the table five minutes later. That day he left me $20, a raise.

  The following Tuesday I woke up and knew he’d be coming in. (My daughter and I have this slight ability to sense things—mostly insignificant things. Once I decided in the shower to wear this purple shirt—I visualized it and she heard me somehow. She came to me in the bathroom and said she wanted to pick out my shirt. I looked into her eyes, which are the pure glittering blue of a sky far removed from any inhabited place, and thought about my purple shirt. She went to my closet and I followed. She reached up above her head and grabbed its sleeve.)

  That morning I woke up in my shithole apartment in the warren of Latino complexes near Park Lane and Greenville Avenue. Black mold on one wall and in six months I had never cooked a meal there because it would have seemed de facto contaminated. I woke up and knew Sal would be coming in, so with my Dream Café T-shirt I put on some makeup and my grandmother’s lapis bead necklace. I didn’t usually bother with makeup at six a.m., but I wanted a different life. I wanted to ask him soon, before the memory of my Sunday service dissipated.

  When I dropped the check I said I have a question for you.

  Okay, he said, and sat back. I said I was wondering if you had any openings in your restaurant. He said Sure, I’ll hire you. Come in on Friday, I’ll tell Danny to get you going.

  Easy as that.

  So after I had been there a month I guess he decided he wanted to try me out, and on a Saturday night he put his hand on my elbow and said I heard you were gonna buy me a drink at Cosimo. I said Oh? He said Come with me. I told the closing manager that Sal wanted me to go with him, and I was abruptly granted amnesty from sidework, which didn’t exactly do much for my standing with the rest of the waitstaff. I got into Sal’s car and he told me I had to take off my vest and tie before we went in, so I left them on the white leather seat, along with my phone. At the club he schmoozed Dallas’s most expensive, meticulously produced women, periodically coming back over to bump against me in my dirty dark gray button-down work shirt. When the lights went up at last call, he was gone, my phone and uniform with him. I don’t know if he ditched me because he found something better—likely—or because he saw me with Lou—also likely. That was several weeks before I ended up at his palatial Highland Park house.

  While he was stroking the glamorous ones I was meeting Lou. He opened his fly in the middle of the dance floor and let his penis hang out underneath his shirt, which concealed it, though not completely. It was an interview. It was a question about me, which I answered by grabbing it. The music thrummed so loudly he had to say in my ear What are you doing later? I said What are you doing now?

  We went out the back door and down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs he held his beer in one hand and took mine with the other. I went down on him and got him off before two minutes had passed. We went back upstairs and he told me his phone number, which I remembered and borrowed a phone to call when I found myself stranded at two a.m.

  I took a cab to his and Danny’s condo. Inside we did lines and fucked. Ambrogetti is the only guy I know who can fuck on coke. Everybody else it makes limp. The worst is, they’re horny and limp. They want you to work hard on it but it never responds. I stayed up all night with Lou and Danny and two other guys who took turns with me.

  And so on. In about three months’ time I had sex with approximately thirty different men who worked for or patronized my steakhouse, the bar next door, Il Castello, and Cosimo. Three managers, one owner, two sous-chefs, one busser, one bartender, a dozen servers and as many customers, the latter group including Danny’s father and a preponderance of surgeons and athletes. They began to say about me She don’t play and She’s for real. Once I was turning in my cashout, getting ready to leave for the night, and a server I hadn’t yet been with asked me if he could buy me a beer next door. I said Do you want to fuck? He chuckled, taken aback, and said No, I just want to buy you a beer. You know, hang out and talk and stuff, that’s all. I said Oh. No, that’s okay. Thanks, though. In the days afterward I heard this story repeated while people were folding napkins or polishing silverware, and it became a totemic tale about me that people distributed to new servers.

  Calvin was my confessor—every afternoon I’d tell him about the new ones and spare no detail, be it of ugliness or danger. He would call me out, question my judgment, show me a worry I wanted to feel for myself. I didn’t hide from Calvin how much I pretended. Pretended to like it, pretended to want it, pretended to have orgasms. He didn’t understand and I couldn’t explain. It had something to do with love and something to do with grief. It was just this: I’d be down on the floor sometimes, picking up fallen chunks of crab cake near some diamond broker’s shoe, with my apron and my crumber and my Yes, sir, certainly, right away, and I’d feel impaled by the sight and feel of the half-eaten crabmeat because it wasn’t her sparkly laugh and it wasn’t that place on her shoulder, right up against her neck, that smells like sunlight. I am not a mother, I’d think as I walked to the trash can. You can fuck a lot of people, Calvin would say to me, and still enjoy yourself. Make it about you, about pleasure. At least make it safe. But it wasn’t about pleasure; it was about how some kinds of pain make fine antidotes to others. So when they gave me their numbers and they were old and I’d seen them with hookers, I said yes.

  And so on. There was the night with Casey and Florida John. They got me high and then played Call of Duty while taking turns with me. I stayed in the bedroom on the bed. I would do a line and then a bong hit and one of them would fuck me. Then that one would go back out to the living room to play and I would do another line and another bong hit while I waited for the other one. I don’t know how many times this repeated.

  There was the night with Casey and Howard, and the night with Greg and Howard, and the night with Greg and Casey. There was the night I sat next to Greg on the sidewalk outside his apartment while he talked to his girlfriend on the phone. What are you wearing? he asked her. Then we went inside and I got down on the floor in a sandwich between him and Gray. I faced Greg because I didn’t want to look at Gray, who was small and dour. Gray ground on me while Greg fucked me. Greg came fast and then Gray pushed into me but there was no rhythm or confidence in his motions and he couldn’t climax. Greg laughed. Come on, Gray, you can do it, man! Let’s take a break, I said to Gray. I went into the living room to find drugs or a drink. Someone who looked like a full-size, better, happier version of Gray was sitting on the couch. Who are you? I asked. I’m Gray’s brother Blake, he said. He didn’t say anything about whatever he had heard from the other room. Hey will you help me get on that thing? he asked me, pointing to an inversion table in the corner of the room. If I can have the rest of that, I said, holding my hand out for his drink. He gave it to me and I drank it. It was a screwdriver. We went to the inversion table and got him strapped in. I wasn’t much help. Then he closed his eyes and flipped it and he was hanging upside down in front of me. He was wearing sweatpants. I knelt in front of him and grabbed the waistbands of his sweatpants and his boxers and pulled them away from his body and up over his cock. Whoa! he said. What are you doing? I don’t know, I said, I’ve never done this before. Then I sucked on him and he said Okay, you can do that. His pelvis was directly level with my mouth. When I felt him getting close I put my hands on either side of the table and rocked it back and forth. It was a lot easier on my neck that way. Behind the table I saw Gray come into the room and stand there watching us. When Blake started to orgasm I saw Gray leave.

  The next time Gray and I were on the same shift was a few days later. He came up to me by the lockers and said
Hey I’m sorry about the other night, that I didn’t—you know. He said it like it must have offended me. I was embarrassed for him, that he had been thinking about it. It’s fine, I said. No big deal.

  There was the Cajun sous-chef I spent two or three nights with, who told me his fiancée had hung herself. He pointed to one of the rafters in his loft. Later we had an intern from the local culinary school—I think she was only eighteen. They started her on the dessert line with the Cajun sous-chef training her, and I watched him macking on her hard and I watched her buy it. She got pregnant and they fired the Cajun sous-chef and hired a new sous-chef who was part Inuit. His name was Reggie but everyone called him Eskimo. He even had Eskimo embroidered on his chef’s coat. One night I went to the Westin downtown with Eskimo. It was his suggestion and I’m not sure why he didn’t want to go back to his house, but I didn’t want to go back to my house either. He didn’t have money for the hotel room though so I paid for it. I took a long shower hoping he would fall asleep while I was in the bathroom but he didn’t. He was really heavy and graceless. When the culinary intern, who had continued to work at The Restaurant after the Cajun sous-chef was fired, had her baby they hired a Salvadoran woman to do desserts. I watched Eskimo train her, putting his hands on hers to show her how to pipe the whipped cream onto the cheesecake. She had a daughter the same age as mine, and she always said How’s your niña? when she saw me. Eskimo got her pregnant—no lie. They didn’t fire him. Maybe they were afraid if they fired him it would just happen again with the next sous-chef. The Salvadoran woman had the baby and married Eskimo, and when she left The Restaurant to stay home with her baby they hired a man for the dessert line. Everyone told him to be careful not to get pregnant back there.