by Jay Fox
“Well, she's just so…”
“What?”
“I don't know.”
“It seems like you don't like her because she's pretty.”
“I'm not that pretty—petty. I just can't picture the two of you together.”
“Well, as I said, I'm not entirely sure what her take on it is. It's not like we're dating exactly.”
“Oh. So that's what this whole Coprolalia thing is about. You're out sewing your wild oats.”
“My what?”
“How many girls have you fucked?” The man next to us turns again. She acknowledges him with an agitated scowl. He turns away very quickly, blows on the creamy substance on his spoon, and swallows.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“How many girls have you fucked? Since we broke up. How many? Let's see how honest you really are.”
“She's the first, Connie.”
“I don't believe you.”
“Why would I lie to you?”
She's quiet for a moment.
“Five.”
“Five what?”
“I've been with five guys since I broke up with you. Now tell me your number.”
“One. Just Vinati.”
“I don't believe you.”
“Why don't you believe me? What can I possibly gain by lying to you?”
“So she's the first?”
“Yes. She's the first.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“Because I don't know how serious the relationship is going to be. I don't even know if there's going to be one. Not to mention it just happened last night.” I stop. “Regardless, you didn't tell me about your first four.”
“And now you're going to hold that against me.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? I'm not holding anything against you.”
“Yes you are. I can see it in your eyes.”
“Connie, I'm just a little confused. I don't understand why you thought it necessary to make such a grand gesture in telling me about one guy when you failed to mention the four before him. Four. That's some selective honesty you have there.”
“Well I didn't know how serious the relationships were going to be.”
We both stop.
“I just wanted to be honest with you because I cherish our friendship.” The malice is now gone from her voice; it's tumultuous now, the words sailing on choppy seas. “But now you want to make me feel guilty; you want to make me feel as though I've wronged you even though you have no right to tell me what I can and cannot do.”
The oglers in the restaurant are less surreptitious now. She's on the verge of those angry tears. I'm still trying to whisper. “I'm not trying to tell you what to do.” I look to either side as though I am about to cross a street. “I just don't want you to tell me that you're being honest because you just failed to mention portions of the truth.”
There's a long pause at the table. The waiter furtively glances towards the two of us with somber eyes; genderless nonagenarians trade vapid glances like breathing ossuaries; younger families try to ignore to us, even if the parents cannot help but think of the one before they met the One who sits on the other side of the table; the bartender makes a joke, which sends two older gentlemen into hysterics. One of them slams his hands upon the bar top with a resonating clap, and then yells something in French.
“You're such a child sometimes,” she finally says.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You know exactly what it means.”
“You know what I think? I think you came here looking to pick a fight with me. You've been relentless since we met up. You keep projecting all of these negative sentiments onto me, and, honestly, I don't even feel like we're participating in the same conversation.”
“Fuck this,” she says. She stands, begins for the door, and then looks back to me. “Call me if you ever decide to grow up.”
She shouts this, but stops abruptly before opening the door. She is awaiting rebuttal. Those who have been trying to ignore the two of us now have their excuse to examine us like tableaux in a natural history museum (“Modern Man with Stubborn Grimace” and “Modern Woman Being Total Cunt”), and await my response. They are unable to ignore the embodiment of unremitting fury (maybe even volcanism would be fitting), which casts its influence over the restaurant as though a candle at the entrance of a tomb. Those seated nearby whisper to themselves. Their eyes alternate between the two of us and sometimes to spouses or others who happen to be enjoying the vocalized mélange of love, hate, and spite. Josephine Baker wraps up a song about her two loves, which leaves the restaurant cast in uneasy silence. The waiter would be smoking a cigarette if it weren't for the ordinance against it. The busboys chuckle to themselves and nudge one another in the ribs.
She exits.
She fucked around behind your back. Probably with some milquetoast pseudo-intellectual, like that little pussy who actually said, 'I consider myself a feminist', at the one party we went to up in Cambridge. Is that the type of guy she wants now? The type that plays the part of the doormat in order to stare up a skirt? Perhaps. But that's not what bothers me. What bothers me is that she considered it empowering. And it was, too. It was empowering for her as a self-absorbed hedonist. She rationalized it, of course. Maybe universalized it, rather. It became a means of empowerment for all women. It's a strange syllogism, but that's always been her type of twisted logic: If it's good for me, it must be good for the cause. It's kind of like supply-side feminism, the same fucked up reasoning that will eventually bring make Thatcherism look like socialism. Fuck her. It was enough to know that she had fucked guys before me. It was enough to know that “That was amazing” and “No one's ever fucked me like that” and all of the moans and “Holy shit”s and “Oh my God”s were responses to sex regardless of the person with whom she found herself in bed or in the bathroom at some shitty bar or at some fucking frat party or God knows where else she decided that someone had said something witty or intelligent enough to let them fondle and kiss and bite and penetrate and verb and verb and verb and verb that body with its bounty of curves and her glistening with sweat in the glow of a computer monitor as she dug her nails into flesh and…agh, that fucking whore!
The waiter soon approaches. “Sir,” he begins in a whisper, “I do believe it would be best for you to promptly leave the premises. Would you like your meal to go, or shall we discard it?”
“Can you cancel it?”
“This is not a buffet, sir. You will pay for everything that you have ordered, not simply what you have decided to eat. Now, would you prefer to pay the full check, or would you rather I call the police?”
“The check will be fine.”
I finish the rest of my wine in a single gulp, pour another glass, and take that one down, too. I wonder how much all of this will cost. The waiter soon provides an answer: $200. And then there's the tip. Do you tip a waiter if he throws you out of the restaurant? A meditation on the subject will have to wait. He's standing over me like a buzzard. I pull out my ATM card, place it in the book, close the book, hand it to him. I finish the wine as I await his return.
“There is a problem with the card [, sir].”
“Excuse me?”
“You do not have enough to pay the entirety of the check (, sir(rah)).”
People are staring at me. Maybe they never stopped. It's just more pronounced now. It's not simply an uncomfortable feeling for me; it's more a form of torture. They quietly criticize everything about me, laugh at my expense, feel no sympathy as the argument, by virtue of my gender, should have been resolved by my surrender. Pride, they believe. Pride. For this reason my ego must stand with a blindfold and a cigarette awaiting the inevitable.
“I only have fifty dollars on me,” I respond.
“How did you intend to pay for the meal, may I ask?”
“Well…she was supposed to pay for it.”
“That option is no longer available.”
“I understand that, but—”
“But what? There is a one hundred and fifty dollar balance; and yet you have no means by which you can provide the necessary funds.”
“I can work it off.”
“You can work it off?”
“Yeah. I'll clean dishes or the bathrooms. I can prep vegetables. I used to work in a kitchen a few years ago.” He does not seem all that moved. “Isn't this what they do in the movies?”
He glares down to me, but no longer with the gelid scorn that I was receiving earlier. He pities me—that much is clear. At the same time, that one hundred and fifty bucks has to come from somewhere, and it certainly isn't going to be from his pocket.
“Let me see if something can be arranged.”
15
The heat on the train platform is oppressive, humid, like the suffocating muff of Anopopei. The denizens have faces adorned with a fine misting of sweat that gleans in the fluorescent lighting. Those who have been waiting the longest have shirts that have become ocellated at the smalls of their backs. A woman waiting for the uptown train is dancing irregularly in order to suppress the need to urinate. A man in Conservative fatigues tries to make a call on his cell phone, fails, and then tries again. He paraphrases Murphy's Law to a cute girl of maybe sixteen. She smiles absently, and moves away. He tries to call again. To my left a woman stands in the grip of panic because she is alone. “Shit,” yells the man on the opposing platform. To my right are a group of boisterous black teenagers. Their voices carry throughout the subway tunnels, and their very presence seems to hold quietude in contempt. It would be kind of amusing if they weren't so proud of their ignorance. They talk about the woman to my left as though she cannot hear them. Of me they say nothing. I am a shade.
A breeze is afforded to us all by an uptown express, which roars and squeals into the station. Even as the brakes scream holocaust, you can make out the nearby black kids—and they are black, too; black to the point of shadows—who all agree that white people smell like lemons or wet dog. I smell myself. The train slowly trudges through the station; it doesn't stop because we are the locals, the people you see with looks of chagrin as you pass by and wonder to yourself, Why the hell is this train slowing down; we don't even stop here.
It's almost ten thirty at this point. I am to meet Tomas and Aberdeen in Williamsburg at a small club at midnight. I do not know the name of the act that we are going to see, nor am I too concerned about the set starting punctually. I know the venue well; I know I can make it into Bushwick, shower, and get back into Williamsburg without missing a single note of the set, as the place is, on a good night, twenty minutes behind schedule. Vinati is working late, and doubts that she will want to come to the show after her shift. The local tunnel becomes illuminated. The headlights will soon appear.
The incidents that followed my initial humiliation were as expected. I was removed into the kitchen, where I was allowed to eat before beginning the seven-and-a-half hours of work demanded of me. The staff was pleasant, but conversation was rather limited. None of them knew more than a few words of English with the exception of the head chef, who was Québécois. Almost all of the other workers were from South or Central America. Diego, the dishwasher whose shift I was to assume with his consent, was the only Puerto Rican on staff. The consensus among his fellow employees was that he was a total hard-ass whose mantra was maricón, which, the staff believed, said more about him than it did about the people with whom he typically interacted. I didn't really get this impression. He was a veritable faucet of gratitude when I spoke to him over the phone. The opportunity to take a catering gig had just come up, and it paid about three times more than the meager wages afforded him as a dishwasher, so he was more than willing to let me fill in for him with my request.
It was established early on that my Spanish was worse than the English of anyone in the kitchen. They would shake their heads when they came to drop off stacks of pans, laugh, and say a few adjectives—in either Spanish or English—to complement the nouns “bitch” or “whore” or “bruja” or a few others that I can't recall. Javier, the twenty-eight year old sous-chef on the cold side of the kitchen, was the nicest of the bunch. He gave me a cigarette about halfway through the shift. As we smoked, he asked where I was from; I asked where he was from. We tripped over words, laughed, and complimented one another's misogyny like soldiers sharing a foxhole. He was beginning a course in English, which he said was way more difficult than Spanish, and planned to eventually enroll at either Hunter or another CUNY school once he had some money saved up. He told me that he wants to own a restaurant in California, which is where most of his family is currently living. He also wants to travel, especially to Europe.
Before all of this, however, I was told to clean the two bathrooms, which gave me ample time to brood. As I was scrubbing the floor around the toilet of the men's room, I thought of a Latin quote that, for whatever reason, has always resonated in my mind. Et in Arcadia Ego. I am even in Arcadia. To me, it wasn't only the voice of Death, as some attest, but the presence of misfortune, ill luck, and perhaps even inevitability. It is the force of corruption manifested into a skeleton adorned in a black rope and holding a scythe as to indicate that we, the living, are as formidable as blades of grass to this imperious force. But that's a fairly banal way of looking at it, accurate as it may be. Personally, I tend to imagine Death as a naked skeleton that simply beats the life out of people with a clock that's been modified to also serve as a mace. The thought brought a morbid smile to my face throughout the day.
Anyone who has washed dishes at a restaurant knows that it is not as bad as it is made out to be in film and television. You rarely have to scrub all that hard because the water pressure of the…well, it's essentially a showerhead, is strong enough to wipe away most of the remnants of food that will not be eliminated by the washing machine. I can't see doing it every day, of course, but at least the time goes by fairly quickly. You are constantly finishing something, which reminds you that progressing toward the end of your shift. There are moments when the amount of dishes seems overwhelming, true, but you know that each dish brings you closer to freedom. I guess most jobs are fairly similar.
I think the one major complaint about the whole enterprise concerns the explosive water pressure of the faucet. Your shirt and shoes inevitably get soaked to the point where you can feel portions of your epidermis begin to detach from the rest of your body. There's also a smell that attaches itself to you, a stench that, however unequivocal, can only be described as conjunction of bleach, sweat, and cooking oil. Mix that with the garlic and the onions permeating from the pores in my hands (I did a little bit of prep work), and you get an explanation as to why the passengers on the downtown train are dispersed so unevenly. Even the guy begging for change refuses to come within a few feet of me. We catch eyes. He nods sympathetically before passing.
There is a klezmer band on the J-M-Z platform at Canal Street. I don't get to hear a complete song because a train actually comes within three of four minutes. The ride into Bushwick is not much different in terms of my being a pariah, but there are far fewer people on the train. My reflection is that of a transient, a nuanced bum, and I know that it’s best to try not to meet anyone's eyes.
Vocalists in various shades of senility sing along with songs that I faintly know. A guy in a once-classy suit with a martini croons along with Dean Martin; a lone mariachi takes on the higher harmony in a song made famous by Trio Los Panchos. The two eventually meet at the same door, as they are both getting off at the Marcy stop. And though there is a discernible amount of contempt between the two, there is also an odd sense of mutual respect. They leave.
The silence is momentary. A West Indian woman greets the train car with a voice that resonates throughout the car. She proceeds to proselytize in a thick accent. It's pretty standard stuff: the world is ending because people don't worship Jesus, Jesus is the embodiment of forgiveness, Jesus will not forgive
you come Judgment Day unless you acquiesce to the teachings of a book in which he is quoted about six or seven times. The doors open. A bus comes to a shrieking halt at the corner of Broadway. The multitude of raindrops gives the impression of one continuous hissing sound. She smiles, says a blessing, and then hands me a pamphlet that outlines a series of tenets that even a Medieval peasant would have considered rudimentary and, well, stupid.
The rest of the ride is uneventful. I am forced to endure people's curiosity. It's frustrating, but understandable. As the train comes to my stop, I reach in my pocket to find that I still have the fifty dollars—actually fifty-three dollars—that I had when I entered the restaurant about eight and a half hours previously. I'm not sure if it was pity or if the waiter simply forgot. Either way, it feels almost like payday.
I am in and out of the bathroom in about fifteen minutes, and, contrary to what I initially assumed, the stench of half-eaten food, detergent, and soiled cookware did not prove to be indelible. My shirt, however, will probably have to go through several wash cycles. My hands are also still accursed by the odor of garlic and onion. It's not quite as bad as that stench of yeast that attaches itself to Subway workers, but I know that someone, at some point, will comment on it.
Jeff pops his head out from his room as I step out of the bathroom, and asks the predictable: “Where the hell have you been?”
“I've had two fucking crazy days.”
“Make that three, man. You woke me up Saturday night.” He looks contemplative. “Sunday morning, actually.”
“Sorry.”
I can't tell if he's furious or just curious. “You don't even remember any of this, do you?”
“Well,” I begin with a smile, “I didn't until you mentioned it.”
“So you're an eidetic drunk?”
“Sure.”
“Do you even know what 'eidetic' means?”
“Yeah. Perfect memory. It came up recently.”
“While you were getting loaded at one of your plebeian bars?”