Love Me Back

by Merritt Tierce

  One rainy night in April Danny took me into the office—he had to kick another manager out with a look—and bent me over the desk. My head knocked the phone off its cradle. He said I think Lou’s waiting for you in The Private Room. I went into The Private Room and Lou bent me over. Lou went back to his date in the bar, and later she was so drunk she let him fuck her at the host stand. All the customers were gone, but Justin and I watched. Andy Vanderveer took a picture with his camera phone. That was one of my highest-grossing shifts, too—while I was getting fucked by the general manager and his best friend I had probably twenty-five covers running in the bar. I think I made around $700 that night. After Lou fucked his date I carried her out to the car. I’m not a big woman—I weigh about 115 pounds and I’m five-five. I was wearing a cocktail dress and heels, but I picked her up in my arms like a baby and put her in the front seat. Her name was Indica, a breed of marijuana plant.

  When I’d puff it was so much easier to get down. I used to imagine a small tribe of aborigines living inside me, representative en masse of my true identity, and I always knew they thought me reckless whenever I’d end up in some dark place with some feral soul. I liked to smoke them out, to puff and puff until I got them all up in the hills so I could do whatever I was doing and they’d be unaware. For example, the ex-pro who stood seven feet tall and came into the bar in May. His enormous cock was the size of a rolling pin and not nearly as domesticated. He measured me in the restaurant: when I delivered his salad he said Whyntcha sit here fo a minute and pulled me down on his lap. I guess he judged my ass adequate and we met later at the W, where I slammed the shots he bought me, to demonstrate that I was not afraid of whatever debasement awaited. He noted this and nodded to the bartender for another as he said Like a champ, huh? Baby have one more, it’ll help. In the corner of a dark parking lot we lit a blunt for more help. Eventually I felt that haze come between me and the natives, the little people inside, so I was separated from their judgments and they were protected from my actions for a while. He said What’s up. You okay? Ready? I’m’onna give it to you. Inside the truck he fucked me in the ass, and his cock took up so much room in me it seemed logistically impossible that he’d done it. Like if you heard a school bus drove into a pup tent.

  That could have been the last. After that one I wanted to say to my indigenous selves This is fine, here’s good, this is far enough. We’ll camp here for the night and make our ascent in the morning. But I didn’t, and on June eighth at the bar next door Mickey, one of the senior servers, pimped me out. He told me to go outside with his friend James, who didn’t work at The Restaurant and whom I’d never seen before. We got into my car and James told me to suck his dick. What reluctance I felt at the sight of his slack penis flopped over on his thigh. (By that time the natives didn’t linger. They just slipped out the back of me quick and let the fire door slam.) When it got hard he wanted to fuck, so I got in the passenger seat underneath him. There were servers and kitchen guys in the parking lot drinking after work and I’m sure they all saw the car rocking. I was thinking it might be over soon when the passenger door opened and Mickey stood there, watching his friend fuck me. He got right down in my face and poured a Modelo Especial all over my head and neck. He said That’s right you like it you’re such a slut. He’s fucking you good isn’t he. I said Shut the door, Mickey, and wiped beer out of my eyes while James continued to fuck as if he were oblivious. Mickey slapped my cheek and said Shut up shut the fuck up. I said Okay and stared at him impassively. James fucked. Mickey opened the back door of the car so he could reach me better because the seat was reclined. He poured beer on me and hit my face and called me a bitch and hit my face, and I thought about her sleeping in her dad’s living room half an hour away. I wondered which pajamas she was wearing and if he had found her missing favorite stuffed fox yet. After James got out of me and out of the car I quit using drugs and started parking in front of the restaurant so that when my shift was over I wouldn’t have to walk past anyone who might offer me a beer, a drag, or a bump, or tell me they wanted their duck sicked.

  Yesterday Danny walked through the mother station—what we call the area in the back where we make tea and coffee and prep bread baskets—singing Fuckin shiiiiiiiiit, fuckin shiiiiiiiiiit to the tune of the Rocky theme. He went into the employee bathroom, where he shaves every day before service while conferring with one or the other of his inner circle. When he came out he said, as he adjusted his tie, Fuckin suck my balls, bitches. I’m starvin.

  He strides lankily through the main dining room around five p.m. every day, half-dressed in his suit trousers and a Yankees T-shirt. He sees everything. He can tell if you’re chewing gum from all the way across the cavernous dining room, which we keep so dark we have to give the guests flashlights to read the menu. He hates it when you don’t make sure there’s enough room to work around your tables—at the height of dinner service sometimes you have only six inches of space between chair backs, and the path from the kitchen line to the farthest tables becomes labyrinthine if not unnavigable. Danny will walk past your five-top and say Sister-love, would you please scoot this fucker a cunt hair to the right so we don’t dump mac ’n’ cheese all over the fat-ass in seat two?

  Miguel Loera will be sending out the mac ’n’ cheese when dinner service starts, but right now he’s talking to one of the other servers about Chivas, the fútbol team favored and followed by most of our kitchen staff. Miguel runs the kitchen line for Chef. He is a magician, he never fucks up. He calls me Maestra, because I sometimes wear lentes that make me look bookish. I call him Miguelito or Maestro. He always leaves the second button on his chef’s coat unbuttoned, for luck. When I first see him in the afternoon as I walk past the kitchen I’ll catch his eye and pat my heart, where that button rests on his coat, in a gesture of solidarity. Yesterday he asked me if I had a good time with my family for Easter. Did you find eggs? he asked. You kid look for the little huevos? I said, Yes, we looked for little huevos. Did you look for eggs? I asked. No, he said, I no look. Ah, I said, but did someone look for your little huevos? Yes, he said with a grin, someone find my little huevos and they eat them.

  When he calls me to run food he always says Maestra, don’t hate me, you take one mash and one mush to twenty-three please. Or Maestra, ¿sabes que te amo, verdad? I do anything for you; just do this one poquito thing for me please. Sometimes he sneaks me a crab cocktail at the end of the night because he knows I love it, the tender jumbo lump crabmeat lightly dressed with lemon and parsley, a bit of cocktail sauce on the side.

  Often the Mexicans ask me if I am enojada, or ¿Por qué estás triste, Mari? they wonder. ¿Que te molesta, Mariquita? It’s because I’m perpetually lost in thought and wear a sunken, anxious face. I say No, I’m not mad. I’m not sad either. Nothing’s bothering me. Miguel asks me Maestra, what are you thinking about? He doesn’t love you anymore? I say He never loved me, he just fucks me. Miguel tells me that last year the woman he loved was pregnant with twins, his first children. For reasons no sabemos she decided to have an abortion and she left him. He tells me he couldn’t work, he would cry while he was running the line every day, every night he would get so drunk. He kept trying to quit but Danny wouldn’t let him. He says to me And now, Maestra, I’m fine. See? Look at me. I want to die then. But now—what can you do? Stop thinking about it, thinking is no good for you. I say Okay, Maestro, claro. No más thinking.

  He’s right, it’s important to buck up every night and breathe deeply and be happy for the people so they’ll want to believe you when you call the $140 Kobe filet the best beef in the world and promise it will actually melt in their mouths. You have to stay bright to get them on a bottle of Caymus or Cakebread, you can’t be lurking in the back of your melancholy head. Sometimes I think this is why Danny says Suck my balls whenever I walk past him—it’s spoken with the utmost affection and the utmost defiance. When he says Suck it he’s saying It’s a circus, honey-love, so fuck those motherfuckers. And when my retort is Get it
out I’m saying Here we are being hard and relentlessly dazzling in spite of whatever shit. We are saying to each other If you have an affliction, any remorse or anguish, eat it, drink it, snort it, fuck it, use it, suck it, kill it.

  I work five shifts and I pay for your after-school care and your health insurance and I give your dad a third of the money I make. He brings you by the restaurant each Friday, because I have to come in to pick up my tips for the week and it’s closer to him than my apartment. Plus you like it, and I like showing you off. You’re just old enough to know we’ve been through something and young enough to not hold it against me. Your dad drives through the porte cochere around dusk, before many guests have arrived, and you get a kick out of how the valets open your door and call you ma’am. I wait for you in the lobby, enjoying the luxuries of sitting and street clothes. The maître d’ greets you with Good evening, miss, and a peppermint and you run to me.

  One Friday Cal intercepts you, asking you where you’re going so fast, like you’re in trouble. When Cal is giving you all his mischievous attention like that you feel like you’re the one. To my mama, you say, laughing. No you stay with me, Cal says, stay with me until you tell me where you got those blue eyes. From God, you say. That’s right, Cal says, and then to me, You been takin this child to church? No sir, I say, it wasn’t me. Well Miss Mamalisa is it that time? Cal asks you. Ana-lisa, you laugh. That’s what I said, he says, is it time, Mamalisa? Ana-lisa! you say, not laughing. That’s what I said! You got a hearing problem? He looks at me. Have you had her ears checked? I think it’s yours that are malfunctioning, I say to Cal, and I can tell you are happy I am on your side. What do you mean, says Cal, I’m just asking Mamalisa here if it’s Shirley Temple time or not! Mama, make him stop, you say to me, scrambling around Cal to come sit with me. I can’t make him do anything, I say, he does what he wants. I don’t like it when he calls me Mama, you say. She doesn’t like it when you call her Mama, I say to Cal. Okay ladies, Ana, I’m sorry, Marie, I apologize, shall we step into the bar? he says, offering us his arms. Ana, can I call your mama Mama? Is that okay with you? he asks you. Yes, you say, Mama’s Mama.

  We go out to dinner at La Calle Doce with a friend who says you make him think of the song Jolene. You color a sombrero and eat chips and bar garnishes—orange wedges, maraschino cherries, cucumber slices. You color maracas. My friend buys a song from the mariachis for you. Don Gato: You follow the story as if it is the most important news, and when Don Gato comes back to life at the end your relief is immense.

  There is a wishing well in the middle of the dining room, a koi pond lit amber. You ask for a penny and then you sit on the low mosaic tile wall through three entire courses while we talk. After dessert I come to collect you, thinking you have been mesmerized by so many iridescent fish all this time. But your face is troubled. What’s wrong? I say.

  Mama, you say, I don’t know what to wish for.

  You give me the sweaty penny and say You can have my wish.

  Thank you, I say. That’s thoughtful.

  I think, my arm around your waist. I close my eyes for effect and I see The Restaurant. I see the way Casey stands when he takes an order at a table. I hear Asami’s beautiful laugh. I’m so glad that in this one exact moment I’m not waiting tables, not locked into that place across town for the night. But I still feel it going on. It’s always there. I flick the coin into the water and open my eyes. We watch it flutter to the bottom, and then we go home.

  The Dangler

  Shaila has a body to break your mind. You scan it once expecting a flaw, twice not believing there isn’t one, three times for the exhilaration. The way her legs are tan, a real brown sugar tan, her calves all cut up and high, her toes manicured but in that simple nude style, her ass so round, so beautiful. Her slender waist, her perfect all-real breasts floating and pulling the world to her, nipples often showing—just a bit, if she turns—through whatever silk dress she’s wearing. She has long straight dirty blond hair that falls over her face when she checks her phone. She’s gorgeous but in a porchy Alabama way, not the way women in Dallas usually look if they’re trying. Like you look at her and think that must be about how she looked before she went into her big bathroom to get ready.

  I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick. They’re expecting to be turned down so you shouldn’t feel any obligation.

  I’ve seen every woman in Dallas bring her best into the bar but Shaila’s the one who stops time and mouths. She’s easy like a man too which makes them insane. God she’s dirty, they slobber. They’re all after her and she gives them all their turns, letting them outspend each other. Ahmed owns a pizza company that runs catchy snarky ads, he’s a Pakistani New Yorker who knows Danny from the Bronx. He left his wife and four kids for Shaila but now he sits at the corner of the bar all sad and blurred, staring into the middle whiskey distance.

  Frank, one of my regulars, told me she fucks like a spider monkey, whatever that means. He took her to the Bahamas. Danny took her to Vegas and they got so blown out in the hotel room they couldn’t make their dinner time at Pagliacci, when that was a reservation a normal person couldn’t get in a lifetime of trying. She used to be married to the guy who started Glamorous You, a multimillion-dollar mall makeover photography company, so she made out like a king in the divorce and she can just hang out in the bar every night or take off for the Bahamas.

  She drives an orange Ferrari. I heard it’s the only one that color. They call her the Dangler because once she came to the bar when it was that time and she was wearing a black dress the size of an eyelash. I guess she sat on the barstool some way and somebody saw the string. I guess if you have all that money and that body it doesn’t matter what people call you.

  Best pussy of my life, Frank told me, it’s all over after the Dangler.

  There’s this other woman I call the other dangler in my head. I was waiting behind her at the Public Storage to get a spot to store his TV and his records and that green chair because I didn’t have room for them in my new place. I don’t know why I did that for him, I even paid for the storage. Had to borrow a truck and call up my ex because the only truck I could borrow was a stick and I can’t drive a stick.

  Some advice: Don’t call your ex to help you do anything for your current hateful man who’s in Miami for the summer probably making some memories, at least not if the last time you were sitting in that green chair watching that TV the hateful man said, about you, This is the best pussy I can get right now.

  So the woman in front of me was jammed up about something at the Public Storage, while my ex was waiting outside with the truck.

  I can’t do that, she kept saying, you don’t understand. She’ll kill me. I need to handle this while she’s away. I’ve been in the hospital. I’m supposed to be there now I just got to handle this.

  She had seaweedy hair divided into two ponytails, the bands had those pink plastic balls. She was wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and stonewashed denim cargo shorts. She was skinny in an unhealthy way and her toenails were yellow and clawy in some of those black rubber sandals with all the straps, like feet tires. I didn’t ever see her face, just stood behind her while she tried to get something from the Public Storage woman. From her elbow skin I’d guess early forties. But maybe younger factoring in hard living. She had a purse with a Mickey Mouse keychain hanging off it and her keys were clipped to her belt with a Mickey Mouse carabiner. She had a anklet on each ank
le, a Mickey Mouse charm dangled from each one. Finally she yelled at the Public Storage woman.

  Ughhh! You do not understand, she will freaking kill me. I just need to put this in there like she said. She’s waiting for me right outside, why does she have to come in?

  I thought you said she was away, the Public Storage woman said coldly.

  I turned around with my arms crossed in front of me like I just wanted a change of scenery but I was really looking to see if there was somebody out there. I saw my ex, who gave me a high sign like What the fuck is taking so long, and in the parking spot right past him was a bigger truck, a white Chevy Silverado. There was a woman in the driver’s seat, she looked about fifty and she had long white hair that she smoothed back with a hand that had a ring on each finger. She was nodding her head and slapping her knee to some music. The other dangler gave up arguing and said as she went out the door God! People don’t got to be so damned ugly! Her Mickey Mouse carabiner caught on the handle, jerking her back. The bell on the door jangled roughly as she worked the carabiner off the handle. Outside, she climbed into the bed of the truck and the driver started backing out before she’d even sat down on the toolbox, making her lose her balance. She yelled at the driver and banged on the window behind the gun rack. The driver didn’t turn around, just kept nodding her head to the music.

  Frank said the spider monkey thing to me one day when I was running some errands for him. He was a criminal lawyer who did a lot of big white-collar cases and handled all the minor shit for his friends—Danny’s traffic tickets, the bar’s occasional health code violations, the DUI Ahmed got after Shaila dumped him to go to Cabo with Matt, this personal trainer who had stopped drinking alcohol but still came to the bar three nights a week to get coke from Danny. He’d down glass after glass of iced tea, usually in one draw. You’d refill the glass and he’d be doing his little Splenda ritual, shake shake tear pour stir—and when you turned around again the glass would be empty.