Opioid, Indiana

by Brian Allen Carr

  “You should try vaping,” I told her.

  “I have. It sucked.” She dropped her cigarette, stomped it out, emptied her lungs and drew a deep breath of the alley-scented air. She blew breath and it steamed away from her face. “You can’t tell when you’re done smoking in the winter,” she said, and she motioned me to follow her.

  When we went into Broth this time, it was different. Before I felt like an intruder. This time I felt like a guest. Everyone I saw smiled at me, like they knew I was coming, and it felt good. I don’t know. I’m not sure the last time I’d felt that way. I was new, but I was approved, I guess.

  “You like tacos, right?” Chef said. “Jorge is from Puebla,” she motioned to a line cook with a shaved head and a chin piercing. “He makes tortillas in-house. He’s doing mollejas for family meal. Ever had that?”

  “Mollejas or family meal?”

  “Mollejas.”

  “Yeah. Cow glands are banging.”

  “Fuckin’ A,” said Chef.

  Jorge liked that I was from the border, and he wanted me to be served first, and he insisted we eat before anything else happened. We carried plates and pans into the dining room where the empty room sat in anticipation of that night’s service. I had never been in a restaurant that closed between lunch and dinner, so one of the waiters explained it to me when he saw I looked confused.

  “Split service,” he said to me. “We do lunch. We close. We clean. We do dinner. We get off our feet in between. Eat. I have a glass of wine. Chef has two beers.”

  “Three beers,” said Chef. She winked at me.

  We sat at a long table that had been stripped of service items. That’s what I learned to call them, “service items.” Someone passed around a basket of tortillas that Jorge made, and then rice. Then beans. Finally mollejas. I twisted up a taco while Jorge talked to me.

  “I don’t fuck around,” he said. “I poach them in brine. I take them out. Clean them. I grill them over oak. Then I marinate them in adobo. Then I sauté to finish.”

  They were insane good. Smokey and crunchy. “Best I’ve had,” I said.

  Conversation clucked around. Who had done what over the past few days. Who had been laid. Who had been drunk. Chef said, “I wanna get some mushrooms and hike when it warms up. Go down to Brown County, hang with the hippies and trip out. Ever been?” she asked me. She swigged her Pacífico.

  “Tripping?”

  She about choked on her beer. “To Brown County?” she said.

  I had not.

  After we ate, we piled back into the kitchen, and I worked with Homer to get ready for the night. I had washed plenty of dishes at home, but this was an entirely different ordeal. It was industrial. It was hardcore. There were three sinks and a dishwasher that kind of worked like a conveyor belt.

  Small stuff, stuff that went into the dishwasher, would be rinsed off in the center sink and then set on a tray that looked like a wide and short milk crate. The tray was then pushed into what looked like an elevator shaft. Then you’d pull a lever, and the shaft would close and a cycle would run for about two minutes. You’d lift the handle and slide the dishes out and they’d be piping hot and the air would taste like soap and steam.

  With larger dishes, it went like this: you’d set them in the center sink and spray them off. You’d be spraying hunks of chicken and scraps of vegetables. All that would accumulate into a drain that you’d have to fish clean with your hands every so often—grabbing fists full of chewed food, your hand held like a claw.

  Once the big shit was off, you’d plunk the dishes down into the hottest water bath you could fathom in the far left-hand sink. In there, you’d submerge the pans or whatever, and you’d scrub like hell with this thing that looked like steel dreadlocks. The textures were unnerving. The soap scum would bubble and pop. The water would get murky and glisten with grease. Your hands, invisible in the murky dishwasher, falling apart as the steel scragged the pan surfaces.

  When the dish was clean, or as clean as you could get it because it was like some burnt stuff just wouldn’t come off, you’d rinse it again and set it in the far-right sink that was filled with cool bleach water. Then you’d pull it out, towel it off, and put it away so it could just get dirty again.

  But the first thing I had to do, even before all that, was I had to put on an apron. Now, it’s weird, because I had never worn an apron before, but I had seen my mother wear an apron, and her apron and this apron weren’t the same kind of apron. I don’t know. Hers was dainty. This thing was like putting on a pair of Dickies or work boots.

  It was black with purple string to tie it around my belly, and I slid it over my neck and wrapped the ties around me twice and did a shoestring knot in front of me, and I don’t know, I felt good in it. Clean or proud. And then the phone was ringing and I was listening to Homer and Homer was showing me how to test the pH of the bleach water. And then Chef came to me in the prickly light of the kitchen with her mouth clenched in a kind of fake frown. “Good news and bad,” she said. “Maybe. I got a fuck ton of tables,” she said. It was so weird to hear her cuss. On the one hand, she seemed like she shouldn’t. She was this little woman with angular features and eyes green like plastic. On the other hand, her voice seemed to hold cuss words the way seashells hold the sound of oceans. “You wanna stay on the whole night? I’ll pay you off the books. Cash. Ten an hour. We need the help.”

  I wiped my hands on my apron. “Sure. I ain’t got shit else to do,” I said.

  She put her hand on my shoulder. “You’re in my kitchen,” she said. “I demand respect. You call me Chef.” Her gaze drilled through my eyes. “So: I ain’t got shit else to do, Chef,” she told me.

  “I ain’t got shit else to do, Chef,” I said.

  The shift came at me fierce. There was water and food and noise and steam. There was the constant hooting and hollering of the cooks, the constant chirping of the waiters. The click, clack plang of things being chucked, scuttled and lobbed. Hell-hot pans shrieked as they hit the water. The perfume of grease sat in my throat like cheese.

  Chef stood in a service window calling for food. She set up the plates and then she called out for servers. “Table twenty-seven up for service. Fire two chops. Both mid-rare. I need a side of frites. I need two orders of roast suck.” I guess she felt my eyes on her. “That’s succotash, Lil Tex,” she hollered at me. “I’ll teach you tons if you’re around long enough.”

  My main thing was I ran back and forth from the dish station carrying bus tubs of dirty dishes and ferreting back clean stuff to where it went. Homer said that would be best, because I’d learn where everything went, but I’d get lost in the returning of things, and I stood looking back and forth to figure out where stuff went.

  “You stoned?” said Chef.

  “Hell no.”

  “Hell no, Chef,” she barked.

  She pointed out where I was headed to and I’d refocus with purpose. “Yes, Chef.”

  There was a music to the disorder, a dance to the melee. I had to change my apron twice on account of getting so wet, and even then my pants got soaked bad enough that when I went to take a piss my dick had pruned like it was a finger and I’d been swimming all summer.

  But as busy and crazy as service was, the end of the shift was when the real hell hit. The kitchen closed down, and holy fuck it was like the cooks assaulted us with every dish ever made. Vast heaps of hotel pans and sheet trays were stacked at our feet and at one point Homer and I looked up from a deep stew of dirty dishes and dishwater with something like horror in our eyes, but Homer said, “They picked the wrong fuckers to fuck with,” and made a face like a pirate might. His teeth looked like yellow stones. And we were strugglers together doing the dance of a million dishwashers before us, drenching our bodies and busting our fingers. Puckering our hands out and grinding away at the filth.

  And you know what?

&n
bsp; It took forever, but we peeled and pried and produced. We mashed our hands in and out of hot water, scraped away bits of pork caramelized to stainless steel. Shredded burnt cream from saucepans. Rinsed bubbles off everything. And everything. And more.

  We were animals of water and soap. Emperors of spray nozzles. Masters of disasters. Scrubbers of the scum. And we got it all clean except a single cutting board and a pot.

  “We always leave a little something for the morning,” Homer told me. “Dish fairies.”

  After the shift, Chef paid me eighty dollars in mostly ones. “Titty tickets,” she said, and the waiter who knew my uncle gave me a ride home, and he was a talker. We were only about a mile away but he ran his mouth the whole time we drove. He seemed normal at first. He knew my uncle, and he got me the job, and he drove a Toyota that was clean as a new penny inside though it smelled of old smoke, and he listened to Rolling Stones and he smelled like a regular person.

  But as soon as we started moving, he started asking me about school. “There a lot of kids with troubles these days?” he asked.

  “Troubles?”

  “Well,” he said, and he messed with his ponytail, “when I was your age we said retarded but my guess is you kids never use that word.”

  “Some people call it the R-word,” I told him. “Teachers call those kids challenged. Or handicapped.”

  “Yeah, we had different words for it too. Delayed was one. Special.”

  “I was in a group once and the head lady called it blessed. But that was just like her word.”

  “Well they’re as blessed as any, I guess. If any of us are. But there’s more these days than there used to be.”

  “More?”

  “More blessed,” he said. “More challenged.”

  “Maybe.”

  “No, it’s true. Not that it’s anything against your generation.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “It’s for a reason there’s more of them, but you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  I assumed he was right, so I just kind of sat there quietly, and the blue glow from the clock light twinkled on my dish-soap polished fingernails.

  “Ain’t curious?” he asked me.

  I moved an air vent. “Sure,” I told him.

  “It’s on account of artificial intelligence,” he told me. “AI.”

  “You think they’re androids or something?”

  “You know AI?”

  “I’m seventeen and I’ve never had sex. I know AI.”

  “They aren’t AI,” he said. “They’re being used for AI. We don’t know how the human brain works. You see?”

  I most certainly did not.

  “And that term: AI. Artificial intelligence. What does that even mean?”

  “Mean?” I said.

  “Like the meaning of the phrase. Just at face value.”

  “Intelligence,” I said. “That’s artificial,” I told him.

  “Okay, so let’s say you’ve got an artificial diamond. What’s that artificially trying to be?”

  “A diamond.”

  “But if we don’t know how a human mind works, how can we even begin to understand how to create artificial intelligence? It’d be like trying to make an artificial diamond without knowing what a real diamond was. Do you know what a diamond is?”

  “Of course.”

  “Could you make me one?”

  “’Course not?”

  “So how is a computer supposed to create fake intelligence if the people who designed the computer can’t even tell a computer what intelligence is? Intelligence isn’t the right word, and I think it matters what you call something. Like, we almost called this town Schortville.”

  “We might’ve been Schorties.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “What you call a thing changes so many things.”

  “And this has what to do with the blessed kids?”

  “Well, we can’t know how the human mind works until we measure it against a similar but different mind. That’s why there’s so many autistic kids these days and stuff. The government blessed them so we could measure their minds against our own, and that reveals clues about our own intellects. It’s like A/B testing. They are the controls in some experiment to help us be able to tell computers how the mind works so we can get true AI someday. Then people like you and me won’t matter anymore at all. Who needs a meat machine like you or me when you can build robots that do what we do better and never need to sleep?”

  “I guess.”

  The waiter fumbled a cigarette from beneath the dash of his car, put it in his mouth and lit it. “Schorties,” he said. “I like that.”

  “Me too.”

  “Got me thinking,” he said. “You try out on Schort Way? Looking for your uncle?”

  “Where?”

  “There’s some houses out there.”

  But the waiter did something weird then. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, but he held it like this:

  “Your uncle used to hang out some on Schort Way.”

  I stared at the cigarette. Smoke slipped from its cherry. “Do you always hold your cigarettes like that?”

  “Weird as fuck right?” He smiled and smoke poured from between his teeth. “Can’t seem not to. My friends ask me why I don’t just stop, but if I was good at quitting things, I’d just quit smoking. That’s the other thing about robots,” he said. “They do what they’re supposed to and they don’t smoke or do drugs.”

  We pulled up to my apartment complex and the waiter parked. “Good luck,” he told me.

  I walked inside and Peggy was cross-legged on the sofa, her face draped toward her crotch. But she snapped up as soon as I stepped inside and popped to her feet and said, “Where the hell you been?”

  “Working,” I told her.

  “Working?”

  “Doing things for people in exchange for money.”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass. When did you get a job?”

  “Today,” I said. “It was like a trial. Washing dishes.”

  Peggy sat back down and scrolled through her phone. She whispered to herself. She sort of shook her head. “Tomorrow’s Thursday,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Day after’s Friday.”

  “That’s how it works.”

  “Were you like this to your mother?”

  I couldn’t remember. I didn’t think so. “Dunno.”

  “Well Friday is rent due. It’s just about a week your uncle’s been gone. Those two things don’t worry you?”

  “I got a job didn’t I?”

  “They gonna pay you eight hundred dollars before Friday?”

  “You working? You making money? You doing shit?”

  She held up her phone. “I’m looking for your uncle.”

  “Call the cops or something.”

  “Think the cops would upgrade you from here? Take you off to some nicer place?”

  I thought again about the group homes. “Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll look all day.”

  I showered that night, but I didn’t use shampoo. Man, it’s weird, but I got a guilty feeling when I reached for the bottle, and it was all on account of that bullshit story I told myself, but I guess I was so beat that I didn’t want to contribute any more to Sham’s imaginary suffering, and I got this flash of an idea that if I only didn’t use shampoo every so often, the need for shampoo would diminish and maybe Sham would somehow, someday, get to go free.

  I was only sort of clean when I climbed into bed, and I still didn’t have any data, so I shined a light on the back of my hand and there Remote was staring at me with his one giant eye, and I kept thinking about the Bicycling Confederate and Autistic Ross and the waiter, and how Remote had been on their hands. I’d never seen him before anywhere except with my mom, and now he seemed to be every
where I turned in Opioid, Indiana. I couldn’t figure it out. I turned off my flashlight, plugged in my phone and went to sleep.

  Thursday

  I slept hard as hell. I’d never worked like that before. I’d done homework and I’d done lawn work, and I’d had my job sacking groceries, but I’d never done the kind of work that kicked your ass and you got paid for. It was a different kind of feeling. It was claustrophobic.

  Running dishes for Homer, scrubbing pots with him, was painful, but I felt like I couldn’t leave if I wanted to. I was stuck there doing what I was doing. It’s the same when you’re at school. When you’re in your desk. When the teachers are going on and on. But it’s different with school because you don’t want to be there at all, so you just sort of zone out. Go into max-chill mode. Dick with your phone or doodle on paper or look off at other kids and wonder what they had for breakfast. Their mouths hung open. Their faraway eyes. But at Broth, part of me wanted to leave, but something in me also made me want to stay. It was hard work, but I was making money. And if Chef had come up and said, “Leave,” it would’ve broke my heart some. Even though washing dishes was a pain in the ass. Being at school’s not nearly as brutal, but when my principal suspended me, I was a happy-ass struggler.

  There’s this weird internal tension in working. Like when you touch the north poles of two magnets together and feel that push. It’s a good push. But it eats energy. Because to get done what you want to get done—touching the same poles, getting your work finished—it takes something out of you. I slept and had heavy and dirty dreams of work and steam and dishwater. I floated on bubble-capped seas of brown liquid with bits of food bobbing here and there, and I clung to a hunk of bread to keep me afloat in the vast ocean of dishwater. I smelled the stink of slurping drains, the warmth of heaving garbage. And I woke in a way I never had. My eyes crept open and the room was silent and my skeleton felt clean, and my meat felt filthy. My muscles. My tendons. I dunno. They felt gross. But somewhere deep inside, I felt new.