Cold Plate Special

by Rob Widdicombe

  I heard the silent whistling and looked up. Sure enough, Teeler was walking by. For the first time I noticed that Teeler kind of looked like Motorcar. He did look like him! Now I hated Teeler’s guts. I might have to do something bad to Teeler. I went to get a cup of joe to shake it off. I made it double strength and chugged it. But it didn’t help at all.

  3

  Carly sang out of key with her headphones on while putting together a marinated pork tenderloin. On the rare night that she cooked, it was always some major meat, of course. She tenderized. She chopped. She basted. She bought fine meats. The pork smelled good as it started to roast, the scent of fresh garlic and basil wafting through the apartment. But sitting there on her couch watching the Red Sox whip the Orioles in HD, my stomach started twisting up. In one split second the fine aroma turned into the stench of rotten sewage.

  “Smells great, doesn’t it?” she yelled out from under her headphones.

  “Yeah. Smells great.”

  “What?”

  “Smells great!”

  By the time the meat was coming out of the oven it was really hitting me. A mixture of nausea and a nervous, uncomfortable bubbling. I wanted to die and then puke.

  Carly had also made asparagus, but she cooked it in the bottom of the meat pan so it was pork-flavored asparagus. Who does that? We made our plates in the kitchen, mine with the smallest portions I could hope to get away with, and took them into the living room.

  “Can we watch something else?” she said.

  “Can’t we just see if they catch up next inning?” I heard her fork hit the plate a little too hard. Now I really didn’t want to eat. My intestines were in full clench. I got down about three bites and I was done.

  “This is great,” I said. “Really delicious.” I took a couple more tiny bites for show and chewed them dramatically. “Mmm…” I set my plate down on the coffee table and put my hand on my stomach.

  She was pissed. I could smell it through the marinade.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said.

  “What?”

  She looked at my plate.

  “I’m not done yet,” I said. “Just taking a break.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean,” she mocked me.

  “I didn’t do anything!” I yelled.

  Carly slammed her plate down on the coffee table.

  “No, Jarvis, you didn’t do anything. You never do anything.”

  “Yes I do! Sorry. Jesus. What do you want to watch? Whatever you want.”

  “Law & Order.”

  “Okay, Law & Order. Fine. Jesus.”

  I flipped the remote to Law & Order, resumed with my plate and tried to take another bite of pork. She watched me force it into my mouth.

  “Don’t even bother,” she said.

  Now I clanked my fork on the plate. What a psycho beeyotch. I mean, it’s not my fault I have an iffy stomach and I like baseball. I uncarefully set the plate back on the coffee table and exhaled through my teeth. I focused on a spot near the stereo. Then I unfocused on it. Law & Order was on TV, but the room felt more like Chaos & Destruction.

  After the show, Carly broke out some chocolate ice cream, which helped the mood and my stomach. We both tried not to clank our spoons, at least. Later on as we were getting ready for bed, she said sorry when she bumped into me by the bathroom, so I guess things were better. Still, we slept as far apart as possible in the bed. No snuggling, no kiss goodnight, no nothing. I didn’t even know what was wrong. Fine, I thought. I didn’t want to have sex anyway. I felt like crap. Carly seemed to fall asleep right away while I lay there with my eyes bald open, picturing a cement truck dumping its suffocating load on Motorcar as he slept in his camp counselor tent.

  Goodnight, Motorcar.

  At work I continued to drone on in amber waves of beige. I guess I was getting used to it. And now that I had my perpetual daydreams of killing Motorcar back, I was really in my comfort zone. It was getting close to 5:30 and I called my main homie Ben. He was also my only old friend left in the area. Seemed like most of the others from our high school crew had gone out into the Great Beyond, far away from suburban Maryland. The only ones who stayed behind were Ben, myself, a few random dudes and some weirdo goths who I never got along with. But at least I didn’t live in my parents’ basement like Ben. And the random dudes. Pretty sure most of them were still kicking it in their parents’ basements, too. Not sure where the goths lived. Caves maybe?

  When I said let’s get a beer after work, Ben knew it meant non-alcoholic beer for me. Or just tons of coffee or iced tea. The near-beers tasted like crap, but if you downed enough of them you could fool yourself into thinking you had a buzz. If you drank like, fourteen. Get a beer after work also meant meeting at Cogbill’s, a sports bar in the old strip mall next to Krispy Kreme. It was the only place we ever went. My name is Jarvis Henders and I am twenty-six years old and I hang out at a shopping center. I said this to myself as I waited for an old lady to clear her Buick out of a prime parking spot I had my eye on.

  “Howdy,” Ben said, walking up as I got out of my piece-of-shit red ’96 Hyundai.

  “Yo. Whuttup.”

  “Yer looking at it.”

  Ben had been going through a cowboy thing, wearing cowboy boots and jeans and a plaid Western shirt. And he was also growing a moustache, but it was still in the wispy stage. He stopped short of wearing a cowboy hat, but I think he had one at his house. I wondered if he wore it at home and made cowboy talk to himself in the mirror. Whoa little doggie and Giddyup thar, pardner, etc.

  We went inside and up to the bar and ordered our respective beers. Cogbill’s was this giant faux-rustic type place with rough wood paneling and these big, comfortable bar stools designed for patrons to sit on their asses for hours and watch sports on the wide-screen TVs hanging from above. The big bowl of complimentary popcorn appeared before us, dry and salty, to make you drink more.

  “How’s work going?” Ben asked.

  “Soooo fuckin’ boring.”

  “I thought you liked it.”

  “I did for the first few weeks.”

  Ben shook his head, slowly and deliberately like a thoughtful cowboy. A campfire philosopher.

  “How about your gig?” I asked him.

  “Same, I guess.” He shrugged. Ben was the assistant manager at a call center for a credit card company. One of the select few still left in the actual United States. His job wasn’t anywhere near as boring as mine. I had Teeler’s silent whistling and the omnipresent beige. Ben oversaw employees who would smoke pot in the parking lot at lunch and come back to their cubicle singing and laughing like eighth graders. There were frequent ice cube fights in the break room until Ben threatened to disconnect the ice machine. He managed slackers who would call in with excuses like: “My girlfriend caught on fire. I’ll be in around two-thirty.” Ben even had two guys break into a fistfight in the cubicles once. Over this redhead who worked in Processing. Seemed like there was always some wacky shit going down in that place.

  “Y’wanna order some cheese sticks?” Ben said.

  “Sure thing, pardner.”

  So we ordered our cheese sticks and we ate them. My fake beer was warm, so I finished it and ordered an iced tea and a cup of coffee.

  “You know what, dude?” Ben said after a while. “I might have to kill my boss.”

  “That guy Maurice?”

  “No, that’s Manuel. But not him. My regional supervisor. Brenda.”

  “What did she do? Is she hot?”

  “No. She looks like a tree. Talks to me like I’m a fourth grader. Totally fucking condescending.”

  “That sucks.”

  Something about his mentioning “fourth grader” made me think of Motorcar. I pictured him walking into the bar. I force him to eat an entire bar stool and then shoot him. In the face.

  “What’s the matter?” Ben asked.


  “What? Nothing.”

  “You look like you’re freaking out.”

  “Yeah, no. I mean, no worries.”

  Ben was the only person I had ever told about Motorcar. We were sixteen and getting drunk on a Saturday night and decided to play What’s Your Biggest Secret. Mine was Motorcar. Ben’s was that he accidentally saw his mom naked one time when he was thirteen and it gave him a boner. It had filled him with such a feeling of catastrophic horror that he made immediate plans to kill himself. Pretty sure we never would have told each other these secrets if we hadn’t been taking challenge shots from his dad’s fifth of Beefeater.

  “If we were living in another time, like in Medieval times? I’d kill Brenda.”

  “Murder wasn’t exactly legal in Medieval times, dude,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, they didn’t have CSI and shit back then.”

  “Just lynch mobs.”

  “Good point.”

  “You know who I’d like to kill?”

  “Who?”

  “Motorcar.”

  “A what?”

  “The guy from summer camp. Remember?”

  “Um…no.”

  “You know—the camp counselor I had?”

  Ben shook his head. With force.

  “Motorcar? I told you about that. Back in high school.”

  Ben squirmed. I could feel the temperature going up in the room. The mental temperature.

  “I know you remember. The counselor at summer camp who—”

  “All right, all right. Sort of, I guess.”

  “Sometimes, I think I could—I’d go and pop that motherfucker.” I pulled the trigger on an imaginary gun and looked at my hand, nodding.

  Ben looked like the proverbial deer-in-the-headlights.

  “Hell yeah,” he said. “You should definitely, um…cap him for sure.”

  “Believe me—I think about it all the time.”

  “Shit, I would. I’d torture him first, though. With razor blades or something. Slowly.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Or you could mail him a pipe bomb and watch from across the street when he opens it. Ka-blam!”

  “Okay, okay.” Ben was getting a little too into it. Motorcar was my person to have kill fantasies about. So I changed the subject to pro football draft picks, a safe topic. What wasn’t safe was the mound of cheese sticks sinking to the bottom of my swamp waters. By the time I got home, I felt like I was pregnant with a cheese baby.

  I watched TV for a while and called Carly. She didn’t answer, so I left a message: “Hey. It’s me. Bye.” I went to bed and tried to beat off, but I couldn’t get a boner. I felt like I was just a temporary visitor in my own body. Like everything in life was on hold and I was really supposed to be somewhere else. Someone else. It felt like there was this giant shit-storm moving in. A bad one, with big purple-black death clouds and poison rain. A real nuclear winter.

  I stared at the ceiling. Then I squeezed my eyes shut and saw the flashing aluminum of my magical bat. I saw Motorcar’s head. I saw a screaming Medieval mob swinging his detached limbs through a bloodthirsty crowd. That’s how they would have done it back then. Back when there was such a thing as justice. Back when revenge was healthy.

  4

  I was sitting in my cubicle working on another Excel spreadsheet, typing dates into cells in a column called Dates. I had been fighting the jumpy swamp nerves all day and they were winning, crawling up my neck disguised as heartburn. It scared the crap out of me when a secretary popped her head in.

  “Jarvis?”

  “Wha—! Oh. Hey.”

  “Mr. Reinhaus wants to see you in his office right away.”

  Something was up. Normally she would have just said: Steve wants to see you.

  “Um…right-o,” I said.

  Steve Reinhaus had this way of being intently focused on something and not really there at the same time. He gave me a hard look when I first stepped into his office. When I sat down he stared out the window like he was contemplating the sublime poetry of the astronauts on their tethered space walks or some shit. He snapped to it, though.

  “Jarvis.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “I have these invoices here from this vendor. Citizen Search.”

  “Invoices?”

  “Been using the program quite a bit, I see.” He looked down at the invoices and then back at me with a dead stare.

  “Yeah, um, it’s a great website. Very effective. Definitely one of the firm’s better resource tools for all aspects of—”

  “Do you realize that you ran up over two thousand dollars running searches on this?

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously, yes.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I thought the searches were free, like, we pay a flat subscription rate, y’know?”

  “No, I don’t know.” He started tapping his finger on his desk, loud. “The searches were free for a two-week trial so you can learn the program, Jarvis. After that, we get charged. A lot.”

  “Oh. Shit.”

  “And you don’t remember this from your training session.” He said it like an accusation rather than a question, using his lawyer tricks on me.

  “Wow. I mean, seriously, Steve—I will pay it all back. Every cent. I’m really sorry.”

  “Yes, you will be paying it all back, Jarvis.” Then he started gazing in the direction of his wall of diplomas, which were geometrically arranged on his oaken walls. A sort of angled pyramid of success, glinting in the sunlight.

  “This is the problem I have now,” he said. “There are a few days you spent two, three, even four hours running searches on people. This was time you were supposed to be working.”

  “But I was working.”

  “Not according to these invoices.”

  “Well, that was lunch, too. My lunch hour in there?”

  “What on earth were you looking up Marilyn Monroe for? Richard Nixon? These people are dead.”

  “Actually, you’d be surprised by just how many people across the country have those same names.”

  “Perry Mason isn’t even a real person—he’s a fictional character.”

  “There’s actually a slew of Perry Masons in the Indianapolis area. A whole clan of them. I’m not sure if they’re related to the real one or not. I mean the fictional one.”

  Reinhaus looked at me like I was an idiot. Then he started to drift off again. I was in deep trouble and the walls of my stomach were straight melting. I could see the shit storm really gathering above and I was completely umbrella-less.

  “You can take the payments right out of my paycheck, Steve. Or I tell you what, I can put the whole amount on my credit card? How about that?”

  “Jarvis.” He wasn’t listening to me at all. “Our clients’ trust is the life blood of this firm.”

  Oh no, I thought. I swallowed. Pretty sure he heard the gulp sound.

  “When you bill the client for paralegal work, and you don’t bother to do that work, when you play video games instead, or engage in some other form of fucking off, do you know what that is?”

  “No, sir.”

  “When you engage in the type of behavior that you’ve been engaging in here, you are not only misrepresenting this firm, but you are in effect stealing from that client.”

  “Right,” I said, but I knew it was all bullshit. Ripping off the clients through over-billing was how the place stayed in business. But it wouldn’t do any good to argue. The guy was a professional arguer.

  “We simply cannot risk our credibility by employing someone who’s an ethical liability.”

  I wanted to puke. His expression was half sympathetic and half damning. Then he shook his head for effect. “Jarvis, you’ve really given me no other choice than to terminate your employment here, effective immediately.”

  I couldn’t think of anything good to say. Just sat there frozen.

  “You’ve got one hour to remove your belongings and yourself from firm property,” he
said. “Leave your working files as they are. We’ll go through those later.”

  Remove myself. Like I was a potted plant. I got up from the chair.

  “And I’ll take you up on your offer to put your Citizen Search charges on your credit card. Please see Janice Moran on your way out and she’ll take your card information. Does that make sense?”

  “I understand.”

  “And if you don’t pay for it now, I’ll take you to court.”

  “I…um…”

  “Is that clear?”

  “Yessir. Clear as…crystal clear.” My voice was shivering.

  Steve was already looking back down at the crap he was working on when I’d come in. Why was I being such a mega-pussy? I even closed his office door quietly on the way out. I totally should have slammed it shut with a cold blaze of righteous fury. Or at least said something sarcastic.

  There were already some empty boxes sitting outside my cubicle. They were really ganging up on me. Was it Teeler? That pervert!

  The only stuff to clean out was a picture of me and Carly snowboarding and a magnifying glass I bought one Saturday on a forced antiquing trip. It was pretty anti-climactic, when they tell you to clean out your things in the next sixty minutes and all you have is a picture and a knick-knack. And some peanut butter cheese crackers. I almost threw the magnifying glass into the trash, but I figured I might as well take it to my next job and never use it there either. Maybe I could use it to get some better focus on why my life was so fucked up. One day I felt awesome and mighty, the next like a giant stupid loser. What was up with that? But this was not the time for analysis. This was the time for panic.

  I looked at the snowboarding picture of me and Carly through the scratchy lens of the magnifying glass. I could see Carly’s eyeballs from behind the blue lenses of her sunglasses. She was looking away from the camera, probably at some ski instructor’s ass. I pulled out my shirt tail to wipe the dust off the picture. I should have come up with something to burn Reinhaus with in there. Something like: Steve, I used to think you were a benevolent master, but you’re really a malevolent bastard. Always, always too late with the best zingers. I had to work on that. Screw being on the zinger receiving end. I was so done with always being the zingee.