by Rob Roberge
After she eats a couple of plates of food, she goes to the buffet and grabs maybe ten dinner rolls and puts them in a big canvas bag she carries. One of the security guys sees her. You shake your head, thinking if she would just take the lunch, they might never know, but even paying customers aren’t allowed to stuff their bags with rolls.
The security guard watches the woman and makes some call on his radio. Less than a minute later, the head of security and another guard join him at the door. They point to the woman in your station. The three of them triangulate and treat the whole thing like some risky military operation.
They close in on the woman and they stand her up and zip-tie her wrists behind her back. One takes her bag. You can’t believe what you’re seeing.
You walk over to the head of security and say, quietly, “Is this really necessary?”
“What?”
“Can’t you just ask her to leave and let it go?”
“What’s your job here?”
You say, “What?”
“Is it security?” he says. “I thought you were just a waiter. I didn’t realize you were on my staff.”
The other two guards are roughly taking the woman away. She doesn’t say a word and stares straight ahead, looking like she’s numbed on Thorazine.
The guy says, “Just do your job, waiter. I’ll do mine.”
You shake your head.
He says, “You got a problem?”
“Did you really say that?”
“Give me your employee ID.”
You say, “No.”
“Where’s your manager?”
You look at him for a minute and you hate him. You wish for a second you were the kind of man who solves things by kicking the shit out of other men, but you are not, and besides, he is. Anything you say is just going to make it worse. You need a smoke and you walk past him, through the kitchen, and out the employee entrance, where all the servers and bartenders take smoke breaks. Your friend Janet, who got you this job, joins you.
You tell her what happened and she joins you in complaining about the security guards.
She says, “Bunch of petty wannabe cops. Jesus.”
The security guard comes out the employee door and says to you, “You can’t smoke here.”
Janet goes back inside.
You say, “What is your problem, dude?”
“You can’t smoke here.”
It is true that there has been some paperwork posted in the cafeteria saying servers can’t smoke by the employee door anymore. But none of the bosses care, and they’d rather have you close to the kitchen when you smoke. “That seems to be a matter of some debate,” you say.
“Well, I’m here to tell you there’s no fucking debate.”
You blow smoke toward him.
Without any noticeable irony, he says, “Do you know who I am?”
For a second you look at him. He’s maybe ten years older than you. You think: This is your life. Getting yelled at by some loser. You take another drag of your cigarette and toss it in the street. You’ve had it. You quietly say, “You’re an asshole, and I quit.”
You walk past him and back into the kitchen and he follows you, screaming that he wants your employee ID.
Kendra runs into the kitchen. She has an urgent look on her face and you figure Janet must have told her about you and the guard.
She says your name. “What is going on?”
“I quit,” you say.
“What are you talking about?”
The security guard stands next to you and Kendra. “Give me your employee ID. I’m not asking again.”
Kendra says, “What is going on?”
“What’s going on is he is getting written up and he won’t give me his ID.”
You turn to him. “Fuck off. I quit. Leave me the fuck alone.”
The guard says, “You quit?”
Kendra says, “Give him your ID. It’s just a write-up.”
“If you quit, I have to escort you off the premises.”
Kendra says to the guard, “Let me talk to him.”
You just want to leave. You figure you can talk about the details later with Kendra when she’s off her shift. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
You punch out and walk toward the elevators, while Kendra yells at you that she wants to talk to you and the guard follows you.
“You’re serious?” you say.
“Anyone who quits has to be escorted off Marriott property. That’s the rule.”
You have no fight left. If that’s what he wants to do, whatever. You go to your locker on the eighth floor. You change out of your uniform while the guard watches you. When you’re dressed, you toss your uniform in your locker.
“That goes to uniform cleaners,” he says.
You don’t even look at him as you walk back to the elevator. He follows you all the way to the employee exit. Kendra is there at the employee door and she says, “Just let me handle this.”
You can’t stand this place. “Look,” you say. “There’s nothing to handle.”
Kendra says, “Don’t you ever think about your actions?”
You will later wish you’d said, Don’t you ever think about yours?
She says, “You are such a fucking child!”
You don’t say anything. You walk to the bar across the street and you drink what you made in tip money.
Kendra stops taking your calls.
—
2013: Oddly, you have never been fired from a job. You have probably had more than fifty jobs. And no one ever fired you. You are kind of amazed at this.
—
1988: Two of your close friends are getting married. You ask your father what you can get them since you don’t have much money. They are poor kids—they haven’t registered or anything like that. So you ask your father what would be a decent but cheap gift.
“How old are they?”
“She’s nineteen and he’s twenty-one,” you say.
He shakes his head. “Buy them a matching pair of crowbars to pry their heads out of their asses.”
—
2002: You’re teaching a creative writing class and you’re on break. One of your best students—one of the best you’ve ever had—asks you how old you are. He’s twenty-three years old. A graduate of Yale. You tell him you’re thirty-six. You can see him doing quick math in his head.
He says, “So the first porn you ever saw wasn’t online?”
You say, “No—it was under my father’s bed, like any normal kid. Or in an abandoned shack in the woods.”
A woman in class makes a face. “Gross.”
You shrug. “That’s where our porn was.”
The great student who asked you how old you were joins the army and is killed a year after that. At the time of his death, he had published three of the stories he’d written in your class. Three more, his girlfriend tells you, are in the mail, waiting for word.
—
1984: You are in your friend Carol’s dorm room. The woman in the next dorm room comes in. She’s someone other people make fun of, but you think she’s pretty ridiculously hot. She’s maybe ninety pounds. Siouxsie Sioux black hair going in all directions. She wears garters and torn fishnets and cut T-shirts that show her black bras from the side when she walks—if she’s wearing a bra. There are rumors she’s a junkie. You have never done heroin at this point. Looking back with a little more experience, you will realize she is loaded as she walks into Carol’s open door holding a white phallic vibrator, her pupils like a pinhole camera.
She holds her vibrator up. “It’s broken.” She seems emotional about it. Like it is a pet she has to consider putting down. She holds it out to you while you are looking at her torn T-shirt and garters and fishnets and her raccoon mascara eyes. “Can you fix this?”
Carol shakes her head and laughs. You go to Siouxsie Sioux’s room and you see that it just has a frayed wire that you temporarily fix with half of the sticky part of a Band-Aid, telling he
r you’ll fix it for good tomorrow. You want her.
You give her vibrator back and she thanks you. She pauses. Holds up the vibrator. “I kinda want to be alone now, okay?”
You leave and stand close to her closed door until you hear the vibrator—slow at first, then faster. You want to stay and hear her come, but you go back to your friend’s room. More than thirty years later, you will write a novel where a woman asks the protagonist to fix her favorite vibrator and he will get laid after he fixes it.
—
1987: Jaco Pastorius, often called the world’s greatest bass player, is beaten into a coma outside a Florida nightclub.
Most famous for his years in Weather Report, he’s known as one of the few “rock stars” of jazz. One of the great performers, he coats the stage in baby powder and does James Brown slides and the moonwalk during solo spots. Early in his career, he becomes the most influential electric jazz player in history. In the late seventies, his abuse of alcohol and cocaine increases, as his behavior gets more and more erratic. By the early eighties, his career is almost over, except for short manic bursts during which he can still approach his former greatness.
Friends, even many he’s let down countless times, still try to help. He is in and out of mental institutions and rehab, but he never stays. Eventually he ends up homeless—living on basketball courts in New York City—blaring a boom box with his old music playing, trying to convince people that’s him on the recording.
The beating happens shortly after a trip he made to his home state of Florida. Five days later, his family takes him off life support.
—
1992: You have quit the UMass Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers to transfer to Vermont College’s low-residency program for the summer, so that you can move to Florida to be with Mary. Even though the two of you have broken up, your plan is to move down to Florida and get her to take you back somehow. It confuses people when you tell them you left Massachusetts and transferred to Vermont so that you could move to Florida.
During the first residency at Vermont, you find out that all the MFA students stay in the dorms that the undergraduates stay in during the year, so you have a roommate for the first time in more than a year. Your roommate, lucky for you, is a pretty heavy drinker as well. And your best friend in the MFA program is as big an alcoholic as you.
You are off your brain meds. The residency is ten days long. You fuck either two or three women. Strangely, none of them gets mad at you, but then women seem to have given up on you as anything but a drunken slut who might be fun for a night but not for anything more than that. People expect very little of you.
One night, the youngest woman in the program comes to your dorm room, where you and your roommate and best friend are drinking. You all have filled empty beer bottles with cigarette butts. She looks at one of them.
She says, “This is like a SmokEnders meeting. Where they make you look at how disgusting your habits are.”
Your roommate Joe says, “Oh, we’re far more disgusting than that.” And he’s right.
You end up drinking all night most nights with an out-of-control drunk on the poetry faculty. In the mornings, you have started coughing up greasy chunks of blood. You are twenty-six years old.
When you are forty-five years old, you will publish a story about those ten days and the greasy blood chunks on a literary website and a woman who knew you back then will write in the comments section: “I remember praying you wouldn’t die.”
You remember hoping you would.
—
1985–LATE 1990S: You tell just about anyone you meet that you started at the Berklee School of Music before transferring to Emerson College. Why? Maybe simply because you wanted to go there. You only applied, best you can remember, to Emerson—though your mother swears you were accepted in the music department at the Hartt School in Hartford, Connecticut. You are pretty certain this is not true—but you and your mother have highly divergent versions of the facts of your life. In this case, she may well be right. You could ask your sister, but this one doesn’t feel important enough to bother her.
But for years you claim to have attended, however briefly, Berklee School of Music. It’s possible you could actually have been accepted, if you had applied. Bart, the other guitar player in your high-school band, got in, and he was only a little better than you. You played with some of the people in his dorm—you could have gone there. But you never went there, so why tell people you did?
Your freshman-year roommate overhears you tell his girlfriend this lie and says, “I have no fucking idea why he tells people that.” To this day, you’re not sure yourself. You think of the Jeff Tweedy line, All my lies are always wishes. Maybe, at times, that’s all they are.
—
1990: You get a letter that you’ve been accepted into the UMass Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers. You had no idea that you even applied to the school. You’ve wanted to be a writer since you stopped being able to function well enough to play in bands—no one needs to rely on a writer to not be so fucked up they can’t work that day—but as far as you know, you have never applied to any writing programs. Apparently, though, you did.
You are living in your grandmother’s hoarder house, drinking and throwing away fifty years of her despair and drunken neglect. Mary has moved to Florida to go to art school. You wanted to go with her, but she talked about how you’d manage a long-distance relationship before she ever brought up you going with her.
Grad school. Why not?
A few days after the acceptance letter, you get a letter from the UMass Amherst Graduate School that tells you they don’t really care that the MFA Program for Poets and Writers accepted you because your application check bounced and you have no GRE scores.
You did take the GREs, but you have no idea where that paperwork is. Your score was astoundingly low, something you took a perverse pride in at the time. But you call the Program for Poets and Writers, and they tell you they don’t care about the score on the GREs, they just care about the writing sample. No matter how bad your score, if you can find proof you took the GREs, you’re in.
—
1992: Your friend and mentor François, who for the rest of your life you will half jokingly refer to as “Dad,” has brought you out to a writer’s conference in Utah. He used to be on the board and he tells you he got you a scholarship, but you will learn later that this is not true—he knew you couldn’t afford it and paid your tuition. You never would have let him do it if you’d known, which of course is why he lied.
Before you head to Utah, you need a haircut, but you never get around to it, so you just shave your head the morning you fly out. François tells you this is a chance to meet some editors and agents and to get your writing looked at by people who can help your career, especially this editor Amy, who has published François and who edits at a glossy that pays thousands of dollars for a story. He tells you that you need to get her to read your work. He tells you she’ll probably get drunk and want to fuck you. That’s just what she does at conferences.
The first night, you meet Amy, who’s really attractive in a bossy sort of way. She wears clothes that probably cost more than your car and she always acts like she’s the most important person in the room. The second you meet her, you dream about being her secretary and being told what to do by her all day.
The second-to-last night of the conference, Amy sits next to you at dinner, drinking wine and rubbing your shaved head and telling you that you should grow your hair out and saying what a pretty boy you are but that you’d be so much prettier with hair.
“Done,” you say. “Whatever you say.”
“God,” she says loudly to people at the table. “I just met a writer who says whatever you say to an editor.” She rubs your head again. “You could all take a fucking cue.”
You end up fucking in her enormous suite in some Park City condo.
The next morning, after Amy has left the conference, François says, “So
things seemed to be going well with Amy.”
“Yeah,” you say. “She’s pretty great.”
“Did you give her your work?”
“No.”
“What? That’s why I brought you here.”
“It seemed rude,” you say. “I mean…we were fucking. It seemed pretty tactless to ask her to read my stories.”
“That’s why she’s here. To meet writers. To fuck writers. She fucks young writers and she reads their work. It’s what she does.”
“I’m sorry,” you say.
“You need to write her a letter and get her to read your work.”
“I’m not sure I can do that.” You are thinking, There’s no way I can do that. I can’t even call for a pizza without having an anxiety attack. How can I ask an editor to read my work?
But you do it. You do it because you don’t want to let François down and you promise him you will.
You write Amy and ask if she’ll look at some of your stories and to your amazement she writes back, “Of course. I’d love to see what you have for me.”
You read the letter several times. What you have for me. Your stories are for her—she’s already decided. You see your name in her glossy magazine. You see others in your future: Granta. The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.” You’re on your way.
Amy writes you back a few weeks later: These stories show some promise, but they are stiff and wooden and derivative. You should write more like you fuck.
—
1985: You find out that heroin is illegal in Holland and comes with a stiff jail sentence. Jail scares the hell out of you. You aren’t as risky as some of your friends. You won’t buy in a shooting gallery. You won’t even shoot it when you have it. You find a less dangerous way to get high, via your girlfriend’s dentist. You actually do have severe pain under one of your molars and it turns out to be an abscess. The dentist gives you Dilaudid for the pain. Dilaudid turns out to be as good as heroin. But you figure you can’t go back to the doctor and get pain meds unless there’s some real trouble again. So, you take a rusty screwdriver and you dig at the flesh where the abscess has started to heal. This actually hurts more than the original abscess, but you need the drugs. You can feel your pulse, angry and hot and aching, on the whole right side of your face. You see the dentist and tell him you’re in terrible pain, and he looks and asks you what happened, but you play dumb and say that the infection just got worse. He cleans it out and gives you more pills than before.