He sat on the back steps of The Barn, the banquet hall behind the main restaurant and next to his house. He was listening to his brand new Sony Walkman.
Supertramp’s, Logical Song Played.
Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned?
I know it sounds absurd but please tell me who I am
“Hey what are you listening to?”
Jack looked up and pulled his headphones off. A tall man in a suit and dark sunglasses stood in front of him.
“Supertramp,” he said.
“Cool, Breakfast in America?”
“Yea… What are you listening to?” Jack asked pointing to the wire coming from the man’s ear.
“Ah, nothing. That’s not for music, unfortunately. I work for the Secret Service. The First-Lady is coming here this weekend, you know?” he asked soliciting a nod from Jack.
“Does your family own this place?” he asked.
“Yea, so who talks to you in your ear?” Jack asked him.
“Just my supervisor and other guys I work with.”
“Do they use code words and stuff?”
“Sometimes. You want to know the code name we use for the First Lady?” he asked soliciting another nod – this one with a little more excitement.
“Lotus Petal.” He said with a smile.
“Lotus Petal?! What does that mean? He asked, looking up squinting as he blocked the sun with his hand.
“Hey check this out, have you seen the agents up on the roof?” he asked Jack as he backed up and pointed at the roof of the restaurant, changing the subject.
5
3:20PM, Silver Lake Inn
Glenn pulled into his typical spot in the lot behind the restaurant. The forty-gallon steel slop buckets lined up near the stairs, waiting for the local pig farmer to get them. The pungent stench hung thick in the air in front of the stairs. He opened his van’s door and walked to the high concrete steps leading to the metal door and into the kitchen. He buttoned his white chef’s coat over his “Hey Iran” Mickey Mouse T-shirt.
As he entered there were a couple of dishwashers seated around a large, three-foot-tall steel pot, with wooden crates of green beans stacked beside them. They were picking the ends off of the beans and tossing them in the pot. He walked past the metal rack holding the dirty dishes from brunch and over to the cooks’ area. The yellow legal pad with action items for the night written out and a black sharpie marker sat on the 4’x4’ solid wood chopping block table. He looked up to see if Richard was in the office and saw his bald head through the glass wall in front of him.
The office was raised off the ground and sat above the rest of the kitchen. A raised fishbowl of sorts, in the middle of the kitchen, overlooking the rest. From in there, one could see the line of cooks, straight ahead. To the side sat the dishwasher. A mix between an automatic car wash and a roller coaster. It sent dishes loaded in racks around a forty-foot track of hot water, steam and soap. Large enough to send a person through its' bowels. As far as Glenn knew no one had gone all the way through it but he knew of some that came close.
The whole restaurant and especially the kitchen was set up for constant motion. Waiters moved in their tuxedos like penguins around another track. This one invisible. It came from the dining room, past the dishwasher where they'd drop their cleared plates, to the cooks’ line where they picked up their next meals, past the coffee station, through the pantry and back into the dining room. The doors to the dining room with porthole windows, so one could see who they were going to knock into. The pantry housed the infamous meat slicer that was responsible for taking at least three fingers to date. The five-gallon coffee makers had burned everybody. It was more of a roller derby track than a walking path.
“Hey fuck-face, you’re late again! It’s going to be a busy night, let’s not disappear today, okay?” Richard yelled to him through the glass as he looked up from his desk.
Richard was the head chef and one of the owners. His brother Bill was the other. Bill managed the dining room and the front-of-the-house. Richard, the back-of-the-house – the kitchen.
The only time Glenn went into the front-of-the-house was to get a pitcher of soda for the cooks or a quick shot from Rudy on Duty at the bar. He was coming back into the kitchen when he heard yelling from the basement steps. Being as Richard went home for the evening, he was in charge of the kitchen, so he went down to see what the commotion was. If it sounded like the typical horseplay he would have walked on by but it sounded more serious this time.
Dry goods were stored there and people would need to go down to retrieve a case or can of something, but when there were multiple people down there it usually meant trouble.
He got down the stairs and turned the corner he saw one of the banquet waiters pinning down one of the dishwashers, on top of cases of Sterno fuel. The banquet waiters were always getting into some kind of trouble – they usually had a lot of time on their hands, as parties ate, or did what they did. As Glenn pulled Mark off from behind he saw he was holding a knife. Blood was running down his forearm and beginning to soak into his white shirt sleeve. Glenn reacted without thinking. He swung his right hand down into Mark’s wrist, causing him to release the knife. Before the metal clanked on the concrete basement floor, Glenn had Mark face-down on the ground and his arm pinned behind his back.
Glenn realized where he was and who he had on the concrete and let go. He didn’t bother trying to figure out the details. He knew boys would be boys and everyone had pretty much frozen in shock seeing Glenn pull such a decisive and seemingly professional move. Glenn was kind of in shock, too. The actual training he had in the military was limited. That kind of move took practice he never had.
Glenn took the knives and sent Mark off to see Alberta in the pantry to get patched up. He kind of felt bad for Mark. He remembered seeing him at the after-hours club the night before, around four in the morning and he told him he was working the brunch shift at nine. It was now six o’clock in the evening, and he was working another shift in the banquet hall, with a wounded arm. He wondered if he slept at all or was powered only by lines of crank. A lot of the waiters had a bad habit of doing bad drugs. Usually while at work.
Knife throwing was one of the past-times the kitchen staff took part in to pass the time. At least some of them, when Bill and Richard weren’t there anyway; which was most of the time. The game was to see who could get their knife to stick closest to the bullseye, which was some designated sack or case of dry goods. Something obviously went wrong this time.
Terrance; the dishwasher who knifed Mark, was put on pot-washing duty. That station was nearest to the cooks’ line and was the tougher job. Besides racing to get the pots and pans washed and back in service, you had to keep eyes behind your head and be ready to jump. Another piece of hot steel would come skipping down the line, headed toward your ankles at any moment. Glenn would be able to keep a better eye on him there and he could make sure Mark didn’t come back for revenge.
6
6:50 PM, Silver Lake Inn
The smell of onions cooking wafted through the air. The sound of pots clanging and knives chopping bounced through the kitchen. There were still a few cases of green beans stacked by the dishwasher. Three guys sat on leftover wooden banquet chairs from the 1920s, with beans piled in the aprons over their laps. Picking off the ends between their thumbs and forefingers. Daniel was on his first day back to work at Silver Lake. He worked there when he was a kid, too young to work legally. So they paid him cash to help clean up the grounds, pick up trash and do chores, helping whoever needed it. Later when he turned sixteen he started on the payroll as a dishwasher. That was years before he found himself in Vietnam. Now after a bout of depression and unemployment he was starting as a cook-in-training.
He picked up the full pot of beans the dishwashers filled and headed toward the walk-in cooler when he crossed paths with Glenn, coming from Richard’s office.
Daniel set the p
ot on the floor, quickly wiped his hand on the side of his apron. and reached it out toward Glenn. “Hey, brother how’s it going? I’m Daniel, we haven’t met.”
“Hey – Glenn.” As they shook.
“Yeah man, I know who you are. You’re the kitchen manager, right? I heard you served in Nam – me too.”
“Uh yeah.”
“Bet you saw some shit though, huh?”
“Me, no. I was just cooking over there.”
“Oh yeah? Cooking, huh? I don’t even remember everything I did over there. A real spellbinder, right?” He shook his head side-to-side.
Daniel did remember though. It was a year there before he saw a uniformed soldier to fight, but he killed dozens of enemies. He learned quickly that everyone was the enemy. He thought he would be welcomed by townspeople as a hero, like the soldiers liberating France. But there were no towns and no one wanted them there.
Every nerve in Glenn's body stung when he heard what Daniel said. He froze for a second or two and saw flashes of himself in hand-to-hand combat, slitting someone’s throat. He shook his head to get back in the moment.
“Yeah listen, man, I gotta get some work done. Good to meet ya. We’ll catch up later.”
“Yeah, ok. I just wanted to say, I know you have a big event this weekend. That’s big, man, the First Lady of the United States. Anything I can do to help, you need extra hours put in or anything I’m good to go.”
“Cool thanks, bro.”
The rest of the day Glenn was having flashes of Vietnam, where he was fighting not cooking. He had always told people he didn’t see much action. Did he block it all out until now? Was it so bad that he made himself forget? Why was he remembering now? Daniel approached him several times, more eager to discuss Nam than anyone he had ever met. He was running out of ways of avoiding him.
The phone rang. A waitress called out to Glenn and he picked up the phone by the back window. It seemed like he only listened to someone and didn’t say a word beyond hello. He hung up, grabbed his keys and headed out the back door. Daniel walked over to the window and watched Glenn’s van pull out of the back parking lot. He grabbed a small notebook from his pocket, looked over to the clock and wrote something down.
7
11:00PM, Silver Lake Inn
Glenn was happy to make it to the end of the night without any incidents. He wasn’t sure how many more of his disappearances Richard would take before he was fired. He had a good gig and didn’t want to lose it. He was lucky they liked him. The other guys would cover for him when they could and he was even supposed to take Bill’s kids to see the new release of Escape from Alcatraz, at the theater in a few days. He hoped to God nothing happened while he was with them.
He walked out of the restaurant, climbed into his van, drove down the road to Johnny Banana’s and pulled in the lot. He took a seat on a stool at the bar, dropped a twenty down and signaled for the barmaid. She came up with a Heineken in hand, plopped it down in front him, took the twenty and left a pile of ones. The girl dancing on the bar came toward him.
ZZ Top’s, Jesus Left Chicago played on the sound system.
“Hey happy, how are you doing tonight?” The dancer asked as she squatted down in front of him, swaying her hips to the music. He stared at her pleather boots and let his eyes follow her legs, to her waist and up between her bare breasts, to her face.
“Just trying to figure it all out, Stace - know what I mean?”
“You're not gonna find many answers in here.”
“I found you, didn't I?”
“Ha, you're sweet but if I'm the answer, you must be asking the wrong questions.”
She swung her leg around and was on her knees on the bar and slid backward toward him until his beer stood between her legs and under her ass, facing him. He took a dollar off the bar and stuck it in the center of her waistband.
You might not see him in person, But he'll see you just the same
He had another beer, chased it with a lemon-drop shot and headed home.
As he pulled into his place he noticed a black sedan idling nearby. He shut the driver door and everything went dark, as a sack came down over his head. He was grabbed by both arms and pushed back hard against the van. The door handle jabbed into his back. Someone injected something into his arm. The sedan pulled up and they pushed him into the back seat. They left the complex and Glenn passed out.
Tuesday, August 21, 1979
8
10:00AM, Director, Robert Black’s Office
On the wall hung a six foot by four-foot painting of a black fur covered satanic monster with horns, and the number “666” on his forehead. It was devouring human babies. Bloody torsos falling from its’ jaws. Naked children in the clutches of his claws. Winged, smiling demons arising from the flames behind him.
Director, Robert Black sat at the end of the couch in his office with his feet on the coffee table and a bourbon in his left hand, hovering over the end table. A cigarette burning in his right. In front of him were five televisions, tuned to monitor different “training rooms”.
His secretary came over the speakerphone, “Mr. Gray is on the line, Mr. Black.”
“Thanks, dear,” he said picking up the phone.
“Hey, Lou…Yea everything’s set. The equipment gets installed at the restaurant tomorrow… I don't trust him either but don't worry I have built-in redundancies. Lotus Petal will be plucked in New Jersey. You got it. After that Deacon drops out and we’ll have commitments from the candidates on both sides to expand the program.”
“I hope so. There’s a high demand for the type of product we can create. I can have a steady flow of material coming from the south, but we need to get this problem behind us first.
Robert hung up the phone and focused his attention on the center screen in front of him. In it, an overhead view of a young girl, ten or eleven. She sobbed as a man in a white lab coat led her to the bed. Robert watched as he injected the girl’s arm. She almost immediately relaxed and fell back on the bed.
She lied, lifeless on the bed dressed in a hospital gown. He watched as a lab assistant attached electrodes to her body. Up her legs, on her stomach, her arms, neck and head. The assistant returned to the table across the room. He switched on a recording. Robert’s voice began playing out of the speakers hung in the corners of the room.
“You have no free will. You cannot even move without a command. You are a puppet. A marionette. Dance little marionettes.”
The assistant pushed the buttons on the panel in front of him. The electrodes fired like a musical instrument, playing the girls otherwise paralyzed body. Her legs jumped one then the other. Then her arms, left, right, leg, arm, leg.
“Dance marionette. Dance.”
Her face stayed motionless and emotionless the except for the tears welling up in her unblinking eyes.
“Dance marionette. Dance.”
Her legs jumped, her arms, right, left, right, leg, arm, leg, arm, leg.
“You have no free will. You are a puppet. Dance little marionette, dance.”
The door to his office opened and Robert turned his head to watch Lindsey walk in.
“Ugh, you sick bastard, why do watch all these?” She asked.
“Come on Lindsey. I was just reminiscing of the old days. You remember, right? Through the looking glass.”
“Ha, nice try. It doesn't work with me anymore, remember?”
“Oh, I remember. I remember all the doors we sealed off. And one or two that may be open just a crack.”
“I hate you. You really are an evil man.”
“You still love me. You always will. A kitty doesn't change her stripes you know.”
In almost a trance she walked over, sat down beside him on the couch and laid her head on his chest, purring as she kissed his neck. He put his arm around her and she placed her hand between his legs. He began kissing her and pushed her down on the couch. He ripped her dress from the neckline down,
exposing her bare breasts.
“Dance marionette. Dance.”
9
5:30PM, Silver Lake Inn
Glenn was at the restaurant doing some early prep work for the first-lady’s visit. The Secret Service was already making preparations too. Casing the property, checking the rooftops, inspecting even the freezers. It was hard to get anything done with the distractions and inspections. There was also a company putting in a new stack of microwave ovens, which he thought was strange. They didn’t use the one microwave they had very often and they were installing a unit that looked like it had six of them. The doors to the dining room swung open and Richard walked through on his way home.
“You here all night, Glenn?”
“No. I’m taking your nephews to the movies.”
“Ha, better you than me. I wouldn’t take those little bastards anywhere.”
“Hey what’s up with all the microwaves?”
“Oh, part of the deal for hosting the First-Lady here. I had to get something out of it!”
Richard walked out the back door and the guy installing the microwaves stood up.
“All set. The two on the bottom, leave alone. They don’t work. They said it’s kind of a test model. The doors are sealed shut anyway.”
“OK. Thanks, man,” Glenn said and the guy headed out the back door.
Glenn took another look at the microwaves and gave a tug on the door handles. They didn’t budge. They seemed to be on only for show, to look like doors.
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