Stupid and Contagious

by Caprice Crane

  “Huh?” she says, and sits up.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’m hungover. I may still be drunk, in fact. Speak slowly, and start at the beginning.”

  “It’s not that I’ve failed—really . . . it’s not. I mean, I do the job. I do what I’m supposed to do. Sure, I may have had a few ‘conflicts’ as Marco likes to say.” Who is Marco, and what is she talking about?

  “Uh-huh . . .” I say, trying just to listen and appear to know what we are talking about.

  “I think it’s just . . . you know what it is?”

  “No, I don’t,” I say.

  “I failed to adapt. I entered a world I didn’t know, and I just didn’t adapt.” She sighs. “And for whatever reason, I can’t. People make changes in their life, and they blend and assimilate. They find a way to make it work. That’s where I’ve always taken the wrong turn. By not taking a turn at all.”

  “I’m sorry, what are we talking about?”

  “Work,” she says. “The restaurant. I wasn’t always a waitress, you know.”

  “So we didn’t have sex?”

  “What?” She sits straight upright and looks at me like I’ve got three heads and one of them is wearing a sombrero.

  “I don’t know. I just woke up, and you were here.”

  “Zach let me in on his way out!”

  “Ah. Okay then.”

  “Gross!” She recoils. “You think I’d have sex with you?”

  “Gross?”

  “And you wouldn’t remember it?”

  “I’m still stuck on the gross part,” I say, scratching my neck and squinting.

  “Believe me, if we had sex you’d remember it.”

  “I’d like to think so.”

  “But we won’t,” she says quickly.

  “Fair enough. So back to you. You didn’t adapt.”

  “Exactly,” she says. “And I hate feeling like a failure.”

  “You’re not a failure. You’re just not a very good waitress.”

  “But I could have faked it better.”

  “Well, what happened? Did you get fired?”

  “No,” she says glumly. “But I got a warning.”

  “Okay. So, that’s not the end of the world.”

  “That was before Brett peed in my customer’s soup.”

  I’m sure I’ve heard what she said. Every word. Clear as a bell. Yet it seems essential to add, “Pardon?”

  “Not his actual bowl of soup. It’s not something I want to talk about.”

  “Okay . . .” I say quite happily because I’m still half asleep, and the last thing I want to think about right now is pee soup.

  “I don’t even know why I’m here,” she says.

  At that moment I feel something on my foot. It’s cold and wet, and it freaks me the fuck out.

  “What the hell?” I say. I jump out of my bed and see Strummer at the foot of my bed. “Oh . . . didn’t know he was here, too. I felt something under my covers, which was apparently a nose. Hi, Strummer.”

  “Sorry.” Heaven’s really down. I don’t know what to do, but it seems like it’s on me to cheer her up. So I put on a sweatshirt and jeans and grab my keys.

  “Come on,” I say.

  The Central Park Zoo is one of those places that people who live in New York City don’t take advantage of enough. It’s right here in the middle of Central Park, and it’s got everything you could possibly want from a zoo. Most important, the monkeys. It’s nearly impossible not to enjoy monkeys. I think their sole purpose is to act foolish for our entertainment. Never mind the fact that they are merely imitating us humans, so who are the real fools?

  As we walk up to the admission line I turn around and discreetly put on a pair of dark sunglasses.

  “Give me Strummer and hold on to my arm,” I tell her.

  “Why?” she asks. Of course. Never content to just do as I—or anyone—asks.

  “Just do it,” I say. And she does.

  “No dogs allowed,” says the woman at the window.

  “This is my Seeing Eye dog,” I say. The woman looks as if she’s trying to look at my eyes through my glasses. “I’m blind.”

  “That don’t look like a Seeing Eye dog to me,” she says.

  “Well, being that I can’t see, I don’t know what he looks like,” I say, a little miffed. I turn to Heaven, who can’t believe what I’m doing. She looks like she’s about to burst out laughing. I kick it up a notch and start to act upset. “What’s this woman saying to me? Did they give me a cheap Seeing Eye Dog? What did they give me, a fucking poodle?”

  “Your dog is fine,” Heaven says. “He’s a perfectly acceptable Seeing Eye dog,” she adds. And then she whirls on the woman in the window. “Are you trying to give this man a complex? He’s already blind, for Christ’s sake!” The woman is now very uncomfortable and embarrassed.

  “No, ma’am. I just never seen that breed before. I apologize.” And she starts to fumble as she gets out our tickets.

  “I think you should only charge us for one,” I say. “Since I won’t actually be able to see anything.”

  “Um . . . of course,” the woman says, clearly never having been in this type of situation before. “That will be twelve dollars,” she says. And I pay her. And Heaven, Strummer, and I walk into the zoo.

  “Nicely done,” Heaven says.

  “Well, you weren’t so bad yourself.”

  We do the zoo as much as one can do before getting exhausted. There are only so many animals you can look at. Heaven falls in love with one of the monkeys, and she insists we go back and visit him once more before we leave.

  When we get there, it seems her fickle monkey friend has found another. He snubs Heaven for a four-year-old boy with a banana. The kid wants to share his banana with the monkey, but his mother tells him he can’t. So the kid starts screaming, and then the monkey starts screaming, and we decide it’s time to go.

  Heaven’s mood is decidedly improved, and I’m glad for that. I would have loved to take her to Serendipity for frozen hot chocolate, except now that they used it in that God-awful movie, I feel like I can’t. The next best thing is s’mores at DT-UT, a coffeehouse on the Upper East Side. But we can’t take Strummer in there, and I don’t want to pull the blind thing again—so as a last resort I buy Hershey bars, marshmallows, and graham crackers at the corner deli and head back to my place.

  We’re in my kitchen—which, if you’ve been to New York, you know is small. But more relevant to the situation, my stove is electric, as are many stoves in New York City apartments. My great s’mores idea is a bust.

  Heaven cracks up, and that alone makes it totally worth being the monkey that I feel like.

  “So, what’s the worst thing about your job?” I ask.

  “Besides everything?”

  “Yes, besides that.”

  “The customers. They’re just so rude. Or worse, stupid. And annoying . . .”

  “Example?”

  “Okay,” she says. “Yesterday I had a woman ask me what kind of salad dressings we have. I told her we have sesame soy dressing, spicy lime vinaigrette, and blue cheese. She made a face and asked, ‘Is that all?’ ‘Yes,’ I told her, ‘those are all of our dressings.’ ‘You don’t have any other dressings?’ she says. I mean, what the hell? What does she think? That I’m holding out? I was tempted to say, ‘No, we actually have an entirely different assortment of dressings that I don’t tell people about the first time they ask, because they don’t deserve these great secret dressings. But now that you have proven your worth, I will show you to the VIP room, where the array of salad dressings will dazzle and delight you.’”

  Heaven is funny. I always knew she was funny, but I’m usually so caught up in her being annoying I don’t give her credit where it’s due.

  “I got nothin’,” I say. “I wish I had a silver lining to offer, but customer service has never been my bag. All I can do is empathize.”

  “That’s plenty,” she says. “And speaking of
which, feel free to throw some of that empathy my way right now, because I have to go to work.”

  “Really?” I ask, knowing that she’s clearly not lying. Suddenly I feel like the salad dressing lady, and she has every right to make fun of me for it but doesn’t. And I realize I’m disappointed that our hang time has to come to such an abrupt end.

  “Yes, really,” she says. “Thanks for today. Seriously. You totally cheered me up.”

  “No sweat,” I say. “Hey—” I add before I even know what’s coming out of my mouth. “You wanna leave Strummer here when you go to work?”

  “Really?” See, she just did it, too.

  “Yes, really. I miss having a dog. I haven’t had one for years. Strummer and I can bond a little.”

  “Yeah, that would be great!” she says. “I’m sure he’d love it. Just don’t teach him any bad habits. I’ve finally got him to put the toilet seat down.”

  There’s a dog in my apartment, and I’m listening to sappy Elvis Costello songs. She’s been gone for three hours, and there is still a giant smile on my face. This is all her fault.

  “ A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.”

  —Willy, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

  “Okey dokey, Doggie Daddy.”

  —Alabama, True Romance

  Heaven

  This is so not cool. I just left Brady’s apartment after spending the entire day with him, and now everything seems different. He was actually nice to me, for once, and now I don’t know what to think. Not that I really need to think about it. I mean, I don’t. That’s stupid. He’s a neighbor. And maybe a friend. That’s that.

  I walk into work, and Marco tells me I look happy. It’s not what he says, though . . . it’s how he says it. Like he’s perplexed by it.

  “Do I usually look unhappy?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says. He’s not intending to be insulting, just stating what he assumes to be the obvious. “But now you are smiling. You are much prettier when you smile.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “These fucking assholes!” Brett says as he walks past, waving a knife at us and mimicking a customer. “‘My knife isn’t clean—waaaa!’”

  “I’m not like that, am I?” I ask Marco, motioning to Brett.

  “Nobody is like that. I have fear that he will kill somebody. I just try to stay out of his way,” he says. We watch as Brett dips the knife into a water pitcher, wipes it with a napkin, and brings the same knife right back to the table. I hate to say it, but this is actually common practice. Waiters use the water pitchers to clean dirty silverware all the time and then pour the same water into people’s glasses. This is why I always spring for the bottled water when I’m out. And I advise others to do the same.

  Midway through the night, I start to smell something. I mean something really bad. At first I think someone has devastatingly bad gas, but it doesn’t go away. It’s no secret that I pride myself on my keen sense of smell, but this smell is so wretched that I’d gladly give up my olfactory sense just to avoid experiencing it.

  It’s centered on Table 19, which happens to be the closest table to the bathroom. I wonder if maybe there’s a problem in there.

  “Do you smell that?” I ask the guests at Table 19. “It’s terrible.”

  “I don’t smell anything,” the older man at the table says. But there’s no way he can’t smell it. The woman scowls at me, so I assume that she can smell it and isn’t pleased by it.

  “I’m really sorry about this. I can’t imagine what it is,” I say. “Maybe we’re having a problem with our toilets. I’ll try to have it taken care of.”

  I’m really embarrassed about it, and I know Bruce and Jean Paul would have a fit if they knew that the restaurant smelled like a sewer. So I go to the bathroom to check it out. It’s fine. In fact, the farther I walk away from Table 19 the better it gets.

  I walk back to Table 19 and there it is. The God-awful smell is front and center. I can’t stand it. I can’t wait on this table. Maybe one of them stepped in dog shit and dragged it in here—whatever that dog is eating is lethal. I don’t know how to bring it up, but it seems the only way to do it is just to politely ask.

  “Excuse me,” I say. “I’m sorry . . . I know this is rather awkward, but . . . does anyone think that perhaps they may have stepped in something outside?”

  They look mortified. And now so do I. I don’t know what to do. It’s awful. And the weird thing is—now they are ignoring me. I don’t know what to do.

  “Hello?” I say, and they all look down, not answering me. “Hi,” I say again. Am I losing my mind? I am speaking out loud, right?

  “Excuse me,” I say. “I’m your waitress, remember? I brought you your drinks before?” Still nothing. “Look, someone here has stepped in something,” I say. I’m circling their table, sniffing it out like the bloodhound that I am. Finally, I zero in on the older woman, and I know for a fact that it is her. Well, almost for a fact. I haven’t seen her shoes. I start to kneel down—

  “Get away from me!” she screams and bursts into tears.

  “What is going on here?” Jean Paul says, suddenly appearing out of nowhere.

  “This woman is harassing us,” the man says. Jean Paul starts shaking his head in disappointment.

  “I’m not harassing them,” I say. “I was trying to help! It smells like the outhouse from hell over here, and I was just trying to—”

  “That is quite enough,” the man says. “My wife has a colostomy bag. And apparently it has sprung a leak. It happens. But this woman wouldn’t leave us alone about it.”

  There are no words for how I feel right now. If I could crawl under her colostomy bag and die, I would. I am horrified. I want to run out of there, but my legs feel like jelly.

  “I am terribly sorry, sir,” Jean Paul says. “Your meal will, of course, be on us.”

  “We’re not staying,” he says, throwing his napkin down for effect. He helps his wife up, and their two friends follow, scowling at me on their way out.

  I look around for Bruce, and thank God he doesn’t know this is going on. I see him over at the bar, reading the mail. When he finishes what he’s reading, he looks up at me and points.

  “Me?” I mouth.

  “Yes, you,” he says at the highest volume that I’ve ever heard him use in the restaurant—and that’s saying something. “Get over here.”

  I walk over to him, and Jean Paul follows.

  “Yet another complaint about you,” Bruce says.

  “I didn’t mean to—” I stop. What do I say? How can I possibly justify what just happened? But I really wasn’t trying to be rude or offensive. I was honestly trying to help.

  Then I look at the letter in his hands, and I realize he’s not even talking about what just happened. I mean really, how could he have been? He was reading mail way across the restaurant when it was happening. But this was even worse.

  He was reading my letter.

  FUCK.

  “Oh, that?” I say.

  “This is abominable,” Bruce says.

  “It’s a joke,” I offer meekly.

  “A joke? You think telling someone they got bloody boogers on the tablecloth is a joke?”

  “Well, yeah,” I say. “The whole thing was a joke.”

  “Well, this man didn’t find it very funny, and neither do I,” he says.

  “No, no, no,” I say. “That letter isn’t real,” I try to explain. “I wrote it!”

  “Heaven, we’ve put up with a lot of crap from you, but pointing out something like that to a customer . . . it’s completely out of line.”

  “Are you not hearing me?” I say.

  “Are you not hearing me?” he says back.

  “No, you don’t get it,” I say.

  “No, you don’t get it,” he says. “You’re fired.”

  I don’t even argue. I can’t. There’s no point. I take off my apron and walk out the door.

  I’m only fo
ur or five paces down the street when a pigeon shits on my head. Perfect.

  So that’s it. I’m fired. I knew it was coming, and yet it’s still a little shocking. I’m not really angry about it. I don’t wish ass cancer on Bruce or Jean Paul. But it doesn’t feel good—being fired never does. I have failed—and officially been told so. It’s like a big red stamp came down and plastered FAILED on my forehead. And when I look in the mirror, there it is. Although it saysFAILEDbecause I’m looking in a mirror, and mirrors always reflect images backwards. But I still know what it means. I think the normal things that people feel after being fired are anger, guilt, and shame. Me? I feel like having several drinks.

  I think it’s safe to say that I’m drunk. I’m with Sydney at Dos Caminos and I’ve had several margaritas. I called her when I got fired, and she insisted that we go out drinking.

  “And did I tell you I got shat on? By a pigeon?”

  “Several times,” she says. “And I told you that it is supposedly good luck.”

  “Then let them shit on you. That kind of good luck, I don’t need.”

  What I do need is some fresh air. I finish my drink and walk outside. We walk up Park Avenue and cut over to Third. I spot the Rodeo Bar a couple blocks up and insist we go in. Sydney hates country music of any kind. She doesn’t get alt country or rockabilly or psychobilly. She’s not in touch with her inner redneck. I drag her in anyway.

  There’s a band onstage. A three-piece country/rockabilly band and Sydney can’t stand it.

  She immediately chimes in, “I just don’t get this music. It’s twangy and whiny—”

  “I love twangy. Twang is good,” I say.

  “Twang is not good. And what are they singing about? Every song is like, ‘My girlfriend’s cousin raped the cat.’”

  “Somehow, I missed that lyric.”

  “It’s just the whole mentality. I hate it,” she says as she downs her drink. She’s switched from margaritas to tequila shots. Patrón Silver. No lime, no salt, because only wusses do that. “And why is he all tattooed? The tattoos don’t go with the plaid shirt. It’s dissonant. He’s either the tattoo guy who is wearing the plaid shirt because he’s trying to pretend he likes country because that’s the only kind of music that he’s good at . . . or he’s the country guy who came to New York and felt like he had to fit in, so he got all the tattoos. Either way, they don’t work.”