Steal Stuff From Work

♦

Jasper

THE UNBOUND VERSION

Steal Stuff From Work

It was the busiest night of the year. Friday night, graduation weekend at the University of Washington. One cook and two waiters had called in sick. From the back of the kitchen, I saw the extant waitstaff come in from the front dining room looking white, glazed with fear, with twice their normal number of tables refilling themselves unstoppably, customers lined up out the door, having waited for an hour to be seated, each party a family dressed tastefully and obviously forcing a celebratory air. You would take their drink orders and come upon them again ten minutes and fifteen tables later struggling to remember them as they looked up with imploring eyes. They recognized you, they knew your name, you were their only chance at surviving this restaurant with celebratory air still intact. But you had no idea who they were despite having previously engaged them in hypnotized small talk during which you guessed who had graduated and congratulated them and asked their major while your mind crawled with appetizers, checks, remembered forgotten errands such as Dijon mustard or a peppermill or even a cocktail napkin a particular and labor-intensive customer might have requested for a spilled drop of martini or perhaps just to test you, to prove that you really were willing to jump through the smallest imaginable hoop even in the stormiest of weather on this special special night.  

Where were their orders? 

The waitstaff would come into the kitchen looking white, transmitting the tension of angry customers toward certain imperative unbegun steaks, salmon, or veal medallions. The overworked cooks glared back with paring knives in their eyes. 

The waitstaff would come in looking white, except, that is, for Cy. Cy gleamed like a messiah, and all you saw in his eyes was cash. Short, stocky, with big glasses, an owl in a tuxedo shirt, he played the kitchen staff like a piano. He was a pro, issuing staccato orders, reminders, retractions — irritating in his punctiliousness but refreshing in his unaffected, audible brevity — an expert air traffic controller in a thunderstorm. And oh yes his orders would all come through perfect and on time and with only minimal injuries perpetrated by enraged cooks — the filet that had fallen on the floor served up as pretty as a photo on the cover of Restaurant magazine, or garlic alfredo infected with invisible traces of saliva, mucus, pus, blood, semen, or who knows what revolting bodily fluid. Or Cy would inform the cooks who the richest pricks in the crowd were and the cooks might experiment with the dinners, work out their vengeance that way. And by the end of the night when the crew had regrouped barside, Cy would buy, a puffing suspendered bow-tied penguin emperor, in a blur of generosity dispensing upon the cooks less than they were worth but more than they had ever been given.

And if Cy had broken 0 in tips, admitting to perhaps 0 of it for tax purposes, this currency converted to charisma, and then maybe even I, Sir Kemp the dishwasher, might be invited to join in a round of shots underwritten by Cy, who also overtipped his bartender, keeping vital the gratuity economy on which he was financially and emotionally dependent. And, believe me, he didn’t have to buy me a shot. Working the cooks to get his orders served up unerringly and swiftly was how he brought down his cash. But in the end, where I worked, it didn’t matter to the customers how well or quickly I washed their plates. Cy rode the cooks for the dishes, the cooks rode me for clean plates, I rode the bussers for the dirty plates, and I might ever interact with Cy only if I waited too long to run a rack of water glasses through the machine and then he would be in my face for the moment. But I was not anxious to get attention. I worked like a wench, truth be told, and became the star dishwasher for nights like these. Shifts like these, obviously, were not popular among dishwashers. Only for the waiters and the owner did a crescendo of commerce bring a corresponding surge in wage. 

But I could get away with a lot, and, if I turned the dishes around, and if, when they saw me working, they saw me working like a wench, and if I kept the servers in water glasses still so hot from the dishwasher they might crack if you poured ice in them, and if I kept at least two saucepans of every size hanging where the cooks could grab them without looking, and if I unloaded the bustubs so the bussers might grab them back, then, even if I made use of every horizontal surface to stack procrastinated saucers, tupperware, parfait glasses, baking sheets, they left me alone with the whole back of the restaurant and its storage areas at my disposal, with me knowing that by the end of the night — a night like this might finally end by two a.m. if the closers didn’t drink too much (but they would) — when the floor was mopped, the register drawer in the safe, and half the inventory gone, nobody would be in any kind of condition to count how many steaks and how many swordfish. The math would work itself backward, reverse-engineering the expected totals. Yes, in a buzz of activity nobody would notice anything I did, and if I moved fast enough to keep abreast of the buzz, if I truly worked like only a wench would work, well, I might just extend to myself the exemplary and generous customer service the restaurant as a matter of policy offered, and similarly extend the concept of gratuities to myself, and extend the concept of working on commission to myself. I might go home with any number of tips, bonuses, or incentives: rewards for a job well done.

Distraction is key to prestidigitation. Don’t avoid attention, control it. I whistled while I worked. 

My earliest memories are of my grandmother’s farmhouse in Iowa. Three floors of treasure. A coin collection, a gilded porcelain chamber pot, a wooden trunk of photo albums and ancient newspaper clippings, a feather bed, and, in a red canister filled with generations of toys, a children’s book called Gillespie and the Guards. Since my last name was Gillespie, I took the book for an heirloom, some important family document.

The Gillespie in the book was a peasant kid in feudal times. He got a temp job in the King’s castle. Every day he would be seen leaving work pushing a wheelbarrow filled with something worthless. Straw, sand, gravel. At the palace gate, the guards always searched the contents of the wheelbarrow to make sure Gillespie wasn’t trying to rip off the King but they never found anything. 

Turns out Gillespie was stealing wheelbarrows. 

I used to wonder what Gillespie wanted with all those wheelbarrows. 

But now I understand. 

The food and kitchen supplies I took were no better than wheelbarrows. There was no way to get money for them that I knew of. But stealing them was a game I could not quit.  

I only ever wanted to be a writer. I’ve had jobs every day of my life since I was eight. My spirit had just about been hammered flat. Working took its toll on me, until the day I started taking my toll on it. I had become so exhausted and demoralized that by the end of the day I was no longer taking any of myself home from work. So I started taking some of my work home with me. 

I guess I’m something of a criminal.  

I steal stuff from work.  

I’ve never been caught, and always moved from one job to the next with a good reference. And I’m principled. I never steal from coworkers or customers, only from the job itself. My patterns outwit inventory, my operations on the edges of what is known or plausible.  

I am committed to breaking even.  

And understand that I’m not the only one. 

The rush had passed. While most of the restaurant’s work was ending, mine was just beginning. The evening’s flashflood of business was draining into my area, floating stacks of bustubs from the dining room and pots and pans from the kitchen, the dreaded clam chowder tureen with its rubbery, unscrubbable inner skin. The seven-foot cook Iain ducked out from under the ventilator hood, threw his apron in the laundry bag, and headed back to the break area, an unlit cigarette already in his fingers. The cooks were a fun bunch of miscreants. Two of them lived in prison, contracted to the restaurant every evening for two dollars an hour, half of which was claimed by their work-release program. Derek the chef impressed his crew by rolling up the white sleeve of his double-breasted chef’s uniform and immersing his entire hand in steaming lobster bisque, demonstrating no pain. In the eyes of the cooks this mettle impressed any skeptics who may have doubted he was managerial material, and his disregard for the most basic protocols of hygiene only reinforced their respect. Drunks, prisoners, illegals and me. Today’s game involved playing catch with knives. Cy paused to admire their antics.  

“Seattle Globetrotters. Take it on the road, make some real money.”  

“Cyrus, catch!” Derek faked tossing a cleaver. Cy blinked but did not flinch. He moved on, barely smiling. 

“Somebody oughta chop that boy a new mouth.” 

“Slice and dice.” 

“Serve him up. Pan-sear him.” 

“Asshole sauté.” 

“Fried leech.” 

“Throw a little garlic butter and capers on there, get rid of that sour monkey taste.” 

I heard the tinkle of ice: the chef had just been delivered his aperitif; the owner had left the building. The kitchen radio abruptly increased in volume, echoing through the metal racks of canned goods, the soup warmers, the burners. Derek asked me to grab him a steak from the walk-in cooler. Past the thick metal door and into the frosty enclosure where billows of refrigerated air swirled between shelves of perishables, I selected one steak for Derek and another for my breakfast. Outside the walk-in door, between the block tables used for prep work, in the big kitchen garbage can on wheels, were not one but two garbage bags, the second hidden beneath the first, twisted closed. It would have looked as though I were throwing something away but nobody looked. I delivered the meat to the kitchen and took out the trash—one bag for the dumpster, one filled with frozen meat and a bottle of sherry for my refrigerator. Garbage is a great hiding place.

With that, it was time to take my break, the abrupt supper before the real work began. Ordinarily I might have my choice of entrees prepared by a sympathetic cook. I was the best dishwasher, and even though I was a bit of a college boy they fed me well and I let them know I appreciated their work. But tonight I might as well ask one of the survivors of the Titanic to swim down and fetch my keys from the bottom of the pool as ask one of the cooks to cook for me. Pushed to the side of the shiny metal kitchen window was a ghetto of five-star entrees, twenty- to thirty-dollar dishes sent back by customers or ordered incorrectly by dazed and flustered waitstaff. Some of them had been under the heatlamps for awhile, plates too hot to touch, and perhaps Cy had absently shoveled half of one in his mouth with one hand while with the other he flipped through his tickets, remaining on top of the game, his mind culling the first five things to do and assimilating them into one long and complicated action he would then execute with an unhurried but insistent precision. He wasn’t the most handsome waiter nor the tallest, but the handsome and tall ones might end up giving him any number of their overloaded tables, opting under duress for the less profitable path. 

I selected an abandoned chicken saltimbocca, apparently unmolested albeit somewhat congealed. In the breakroom there was nothing to steal but an ashtray. I would never have done that. At this point in the evening it was a very popular ashtray, an attractive spa resort to the sweaty and disheveled angels of service. Asking the five or six of them not to smoke while I ate might have produced some mild comic effect, but more likely the assertion would have gone evidently unnoticed and be passed back to me in an acrid rejoinder days or weeks later. Like me, they all had a lot of work yet to do, but the part of the arc where people might scream at each other had passed. Everyone present had been deepfried in adrenalin and stress and had, with injuries, survived.

Each had survived, that is, except Cy. Cyrus had triumphed. In his blur he had in fact already finished his share of the closing tasks. Since he had been handed other servers’ tables during the rush, now he handed back two-tops coming in for dessert drinks, small tabs, and long conversations. Cy paid back his fifties in fives. None of these customers would calculate their tip based on how many refills of coffee they had been offered nor how many hours they had stayed, and Cy, his eyes big behind his huge glasses, lit a cigarette, slipped on his trenchcoat, said he’d see us later, and walked, still smoking, through the kitchen and out the back exit. 

“He left in a hurry,” Jane remarked. 

“You never count your money/when you’re sitting at the table,” sang an astute busboy. 

“No shit. Know when to walk away and know when to run.” 

In a corner, Iain, rubbing a newly bandaged wrist, was on a cellphone gently cooing lies to his wife, telling her he would be home late, assuring her that he would not get drunk. 

“Honey? Two beers. Just two beers.” 

All gave way to bitter laughter. 

 

Flogged, I came home to nobody. My jeans were soaked with dishwater from the knees down. I peeled them off, leaving them in a puddle on the kitchen floor. I smelled like fish. I pulled a sixpack from a paper bag, collapsed in a chair, propped my numb feet on an overturned wheelbarrow. The sixer sat atop three hardback volumes and did not live long enough to get warm. I unlatched the prison window high on my basement apartment wall. A breeze pushed in. Something thumped somewhere in the apartment. The air had a barely restrained violence. Clouds erased the sky. Grey buzzed in the silent auditorium of night. Crumpled pages lay across the table, broken notions. And then silence. Old machines with corroded bolts, I thought, ran themselves in an installation behind a rusted barbed wire fence deep in the country at the end of an uninviting road. No people go there, no cars parked there, just a clanking and smoke rising from a chimney. Another beer, gratuitous and abusive, and not enough of it. An abrupt and angry wind picked up a stinging cloud of dust. I stood, face to the window, and stared up and out. The people walking by on the sidewalk turned familiar. I knew their muted foggy glamour as they flashed through headlights beneath a pink neon cursive typographic affluence. Sunken men conducted tense relations with idling cars. My mind became a telephone and I called them up to tell them. A car alarm went off. I had been disconnected. I thought it might rain but it didn’t. I lifted a glass to the sky. Still later I typed something but did not know what.  

At three in the afternoon the alarm chiseled into my dream. I found myself inside a person sprawled on a couch, lint-mouthed. My bookmark had read a hundred pages and there was a poem in my notebook I did not recognize. And, as I stood bearded with shaving cream at my dry sink, the faucet silent, I looked deep into my eyes with searching honesty and understood the water had been shut off. 

I went to work early and told the owner I wanted to move up to the floor, become a waiter. 

He was uncomfortable with that. There was no concept of promotion in restauranteering; it was purely a caste system. My year of impeccable service as a dishwasher meant only that I was an indispensable dishwasher. Of course he didn’t know that I hadn’t paid for food, alcohol, kitchen utensils, light bulbs or coffee since the week I started.  

His face was a bad cut of meat. But he saw that I meant it. 

The previous night, inexplicably, a full tropical fishtank had disappeared from the dining room. For the moment, it looked like somebody might be fired. The owner was all too willing to add extra waitstaff on the spot. He hired me. 

I left for a bowtie and tuxedo shirt, studs and a cummerbund, and overturned my apartment in search of any not-yet-empty bottle.  

I returned to the wake of an execution. The kitchen staff had evacuated to the alley where they used cigarettes and appraised with song college girls passing on the street. Jane got the axe for the stolen fishtank. She left the restaurant shrieking curses with such abandon that all hearts were punctured — even the owner may have felt a twinge of something. A single mother who was thoroughly focused on the task of survival, that she had stolen a tropical fishtank as a prank was inconceivable. But she was not a hottie, was slow, had told off the owner at least once and memorably, so he fired her to set an example for the real culprit, and to settle the matter before golf. 

It was all wrong. I had never waited tables before. In the kitchen we frowned on that sort of prostitution. I was only peripherally familiar with the menu. And it was still graduation weekend. Jane had been there a long time and knew the menu as well as anybody, certainly better than the younger waitresses. She was direct and sincere. Nobody believed she was responsible for the theft, and her dismissal enraged the other waitstaff, who resented my presence in the waitstation, spurning me before the ranks of dirty cola nozzles and blackened coffeepots. They acted as though I had been the one to fire her when in fact she had been one of the only servers who had ever spoken to me. They behaved as though they might force me out and reverse the tragedy. They were not going to help me my first night, and the only one who would deal with me—whether because he had a heart, or because a catastrophe in my section would make the entire evening go that much less smoothly for everyone—was Cy, who explained the basics. He was uninvolved in the restaurant’s politics, would not miss Jane and was focused on the task at hand: Saturday night graduation rush. On the chalkboard by the kitchen window where the specials were listed we would write 85 when we were almost out and 86 when we were out. That was one of many details I could never have guessed.

Once Cy had caught me smoking a joint in the walk-in. I don’t know what he was going in there for — it was off limits to floor staff. But he laughed and left, and this contact seemed to have brought us together on a level beneath the others.  

Waistapron hanging before me like a loincloth, I rehearsed insincere endorsements of the specials to my first table, Mr. “Call-Me-Adam” White, an eccentric regular who ate alone, always there to request his usual table the moment we unlocked the front door. By the time he had talked me through his usual special order, three more families were seated in my section with open menus, looking around. Tom the manager glared at me as I went back to the kitchen. “I’ll be right with you.” “I’ll be right with you.” “I’ll be right with you.” From the outside of the metal kitchen window I clipped my ticket to the wheel and spun it so it faced the cooks. Derek took one look at the ticket, and spun it so it was facing me again. “No,” he said. Cy appeared, grabbed my ticket, snapped three of his in its place, spun the wheel, pulled out a blank, and translated my longhand into the kitchen’s preferred notation. If you wrote sour cream they would give you bad cream, if you wrote scream they would give you sour cream. Cy snapped my ticket to the wheel, spun it, and handed me a small black folder. “Take this,” he said. I opened it. An expert piece of spy equipment: concealed within were miniature photocopies of the menu, dessert menu, wine list, tea list. “Write your tickets that way.” And his finger struck beside the first appetizer on the miniature menu where in red pen he had noted the proper abbreviation. I looked closer. Beside some of the menu items were adjectives: “smoky,” “piquant.” I checked the wine list and indeed every bottle came with evocative jargon: “gunmetal,” “leather,” “oak.” It was a masterpiece. Cy could speak knowingly about every item on the menu without ever having once to think. “We’re getting slammed. Don’t fuck up.” I looked up and Cy was already gone and Jennifer elbowed me out of the way to snap a ticket to the wheel and shout out a panicked round of appetizers. “Okay they want this antipasto without radishes, they hate radishes, and they’re already in a bad mood — ”

Round tray cocked before me, I quickly learned to bullshit, to tell interested faces about whatever smoky or piquant dish they felt they needed my inside opinion on. Some of the dishes I had actually eaten, but, since I had seen how they were prepared, and by whom, I learned not to let my knowledge interfere with my descriptions. The soliloquies I improvised at five were polished by eight. Don’t know the menu, know the customer. “Serve from the left, take away from the right,” advised Cy as he sped past. Customers pondered thoughtfully, orders filled the air above the tables, tickets poured through my book. In the waitstation, to appease the cooks who were irate at how slowly I was picking up my food, Cy had loaded a giant oval tray with nine plates of my customers’ entrees and numerous side plates. I did not see how it could be lifted but my right hand found its center of gravity and hiked it above my head, my shoulder silently screaming at this unprecedented vector of exertion. Moving to serve these dinners, I got dizzy when I glimpsed a party of twelve sitting where two of my tables had been pushed together. Cy appeared and asked me if I wanted him to take them, and I nodded, too weak to speak. I refilled waters, teas, coffees, fetched more drinks, asked if everything was all right, pushed the dessert cart by, fashioned weirdly complicated ice cream delicacies following shouted instructions, put lemon wedges on the edges of saucers, brought extra plates, anticipated future requests, made jokes I didn’t hear, read at a glance from afar water levels, impatience levels, empty or pushed-away plates. And I pocketed cash. And twice or thrice poured coffee into a glass of ice and sugar and drained it standing right there in the waitstand, against regulations but I knew no health inspector would dare intrude on such a night — health regulations were for Tuesdays. Cy pounded the metal shelf under the heat lamps and asked the cooks if he could get them any soda, saying it was on him though nobody suspected he would actually pay. I had been working for three hours and hadn’t once thought about stealing anything. In these circumstances, I felt that if I stole for example one of the fancy peppermills from the dining room, that karma would be passed directly back to me the next time one of my customers sent me for fresh ground pepper and there was none available. In fact, I considered bringing back the peppermill I had stolen from storage and keeping it in my apron.

In the middle of my section, a plastic fern postured inauthentically where the fishtank once was. 

Bing bam boom. As I approached Tom the floor manager I could tell by the look in his eyes that he could tell by the look in my eyes that I wanted to tell him something he didn’t want to hear. 

“One of the gentlemen at T3 has trapped a cockroach under his water glass.” 

“What.” 

Eisenhower’s had no windows, an indoor wood grill at the edge of the dining room, allowed smoking and had an ambiance one reviewer described as “Early American Mine Shaft.” It was night dark inside even at noon. What gave it atmosphere were antiques. The giant wooden booths were taken from a Pullman dining car. The dining room featured an oak grandfather clock—a seven-day regulator made for the Triangle Shirtwaist company. The mounted bear was an eccentric, rustic touch that appealed to old men and hipsters. The walls were covered with weathered planks salvaged from a demolished barn, picturesque, porous and impossible to fumigate to the depths of their pestilent crevices. I had worked in the kitchen, I knew all about the roaches. The one trapped under the glass was a baby. 

“What?” 

“One of the gentleman at T3 has a baby cockroach trapped under his water glass.” 

“Did he see it?” 

“He pointed it out to me.” 

“Did you remove it?” 

“I started to but he asked me not to.” 

“He asked you not to.” 

“Right.” 

“He has a roach under his glass and he wants to keep it.” 

“Yeah.” 

“Why.” 

“I didn’t ask. Maybe he’s an entomologist. Or something.” 

“Entomologist.” 

“Oh boy.” 

Tom vivisected me with a look and went to put on his finest tableside apologia. I chased down a dessert order. Out of maraschino cherries. Need to restock the maraschino cherries. In kitchen waitress in tears over some incident. Up two flights of stairs. Storeroom. Cherries. Down stairs. Desserts. 

“We wanted this without green peppers.” 

“The chef insisted. He said the dish is not piquant enough without the green peppers. Try it. Trust me. If you don’t like it we’ll make you a new one.” 

“I’m allergic to green peppers.” 

“Very well. . . Like I said: can I get this without the green peppers please! Huh? Iain. . . Dude if you just pull out the peppers and send me right back out with it they’re going to know. The gentleman is allergic to peppers. Jesus don’t threaten me. Fuck. . . I’m terribly sorry sir, they were about to whip you up a fresh order but we have just run out of angel hair. Is there something — ” Ba da boom ba da bing. Cy circled his tables like a shark. His tickets went into the red, a carnival strongman every time he brought the hammer down. He saw their desire and worked it. 0 bottles of champagne, seldom served, were decanted and plunged into silver ice buckets. Corks ricocheted around the battlefield; we apologized to our customers. It was bad form to let champagne corks go flying but Cy took a perverse pleasure in this theatrical ejaculation. Cy would prepare Caesar salads tableside with hands as rock steady as a surgeon’s, taking his time with the desperately needed salad cart while a row of unseen waitstaff cursed him backstage. He would finish with a flourish by wielding his giant peppermill importantly above the romaine, or he might conjure up a fireball of cherries jubilee. He officiously presented for approval bottles of beaujolais, shiraz, cabernet sauvignon and, upon receiving the approving nod of his patron, flipped out his winekey with the precise purpose of a switchblade in a streetfight and corks no matter how rotten or tenuous gave way to their bottlenecks in smooth pops heard all around the dining room. He never touched bottles to the table nor spilled a drop of their blood on the linen. Cy sold the biggest, choicest cuts of steak, and awaited them by the kitchen window pacing like an expectant father outside the delivery room.

“Medium-rare, he said it like. Emphasis on the medium.”

“Fuck off, Billy Ray Cyrus.” 

“Cook this steak to his liking and I’ll order you a bourbon and put it on his tab, he’ll never notice.” 

“Bourbon talks, bullshit walks.” 

“Heard that. Hey Billy Ray, here’s your spinach salad. Can I get a Cuervo for that?” 

“Cuervo no, house maybe.” 

“Who the fuck do you think you’re dealing with. Do I look like an amateur? Get me a worm.” 

“How am I going to get you a worm without getting you the whole bottle?” 

“There you go. And a lime.” 

“Excuse me, did you graduate from something today? Because — ” 

“Because I graduated from draft beer in styrofoam to-go cups. Because it’s gonna be a long night. And because I’m either gonna core you — ” 

“Hey man can we just pretend this is fine dining?” 

“ — or make you a special dessert tray.” 

“Tiramisu?” 

“Tiramisu, cannoli — ” 

“Double chocolate torte with — ” 

“ — with Chambourd glaze and white chocolate shavings.” 

“Nice. I like.” 

“I get creative when I’m drunk.” 

“They don’t call it a speedrail for nothing boys. When Calvin turns his back, I attack. I want your best baked potato with this prime rib, don’t serve me up one of those mealy fucking spuds. V.I.P. customer, I think this guy wants to buy me a new watch.” 

“The green pepper people reordered. Can I get a rush on this. . .? . . .Hello?” 

I was staring at a ticket hashed out in my handwriting, mumbling to match up its inscriptions with the menu items in the window when Cy came up, put a bundled apron in the window that was snatched by eager hands from beyond, and turned to me. 

“I’ll bet you twenty dollars I can throw a tray from the front door over the entire front dining room.”  

“Swordfish for the lady, steak for the gentleman. What the fuck is this tapeworm-looking shit? Sure Cy.” 

“Over the grill. Twenty.” 

“And pasketti for the brat. Choke on it. Right, Cy.” 

“Shake.”

“All right, all right. Wait, what?” 

“Manager is in the bathroom so I’m going to do it now.” 

For a second I thought he might mean it but the second passed. I shouldered the tray and weaved out past panic-stricken incoming waitstaff, almost losing control of the barge I held above my head. Cy stood by the front door, bow-tied and aloof, arms folded over his tray, and nodded to me. He had a peculiar look. Then he struck the pose of an Olympic discus hurler. A cloud of conversation drifted above the boothtops and seemed to slow such that I could hear every word. A burst of laughter rang out staccato and Cy spun and flung. The clink of a suddenly upset glass of water and somebody saying oops followed by a burst of excited voices and chairs scooting back. The tray went up as must have my eyebrows, my jaw dropping. Excuse me she spilled her water can we get — The tray went just over the rafter. A music of forks on plates, cups on saucers, slow drawling pleasant conversation. There must have been a hundred ways that tray could hit someone’s head and injure them if not kill them outright. The word college frozen in the air, a ring of glasses raised in toast, cheers, everyone smiling, a flashbulb popping as slowly as a matchflare. Oh yeah I have a birthday in my section T12 the little kid, almost forgot. Cy had spun to halt and stood seriously by the door, dreamily watching over his flock. It passed close enough to a chandelier to make it swing so slightly. If it hit someone would he run? The tray was spinning, losing stability, descending over the glassed-in grill area. “And how’s the tilapia?” I could just hear a tap over the crowd as the tray hit the floor behind the bar, ricocheting who knows how among the bottles down there. The bartender was not present and nobody seemed to have seen what had cast a flicker of shadow across their tables. I stared at Cyrus in what must have been shock. He let loose with a smile. “Twenty” was what he mouthed to me, emphasizing this point with a handgesture that imparted the numerals two-oh.

From that point on I had no trouble. I beamed at every table, knowing what they didn’t. They had been saved from decapitation, they were all blessed. 

In front the last customers started to leave and in back the first employee beers started to tip. I was flushed with gratitude that I had been allowed to survive all that by who knows what twists of luck and reserves of endurance. I bade my last tables farewell like the final departing guests at a family reunion, almost sad to see them go. I accepted their generosity, added their cash to the wad in my pocket, began my full evening of getting drunk while pondering the laminated printout of what seemed like a laughably long list of closing details for my section, a full two hours more work for a man in my condition. I handed Cy a twenty in the breakroom. A couple of the others regarded this exchange with detached curiosity. Cy beamed at me but said nothing. Obviously he required no encouragement. “Still selling blowjobs Cy?” chuckled Iain. 

“Save your money, Iain.” 

“Yeah, Iain, that’s your rent money. You need that to buy beer with.” 

“He should give old Iain a discount because Iain so tall Cy won’t have to kneel.” 

“Now Iain, you go spending your paycheck on head again you really will be in the doghouse.” 

“Hey. Tonight I’m being good. Two beers. I’m still on my first.” 

On the breakroom table Cy had set a full forty-eight-ounce pitcher of Double Diamond. Iain raised it and took a swig off the side so long it drew hoots from the crowd that had gathered there by the ashtray. 

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