Love Me Back (15 page)

I should have known you’d trip out if I didn’t make you wait for it, he said. He winced, lying curled up on my floor with his pants half-down. He spent the next ten days icing his balls and blaming me and muttering about how he should have known better.

I’m sorry, I said again, and I put on my clothes. All I could think about was you, feverish, hurting, wanting me.

I acquired a reputation as straitlaced in The Restaurant when I started seeing the hateful man. My colleagues interpreted it as some kind of new leaf or intentional maturity that I never went out with them after work anymore. But it was just that I didn’t need that scene to fuck with myself because he did it for me. As the employee roster at The Restaurant was infiltrated by more and more people who didn’t know anything about me, and those who did moved on, quit, or were fired, who I was to everyone morphed into this paragon of good work, consistency, professionalism. An example. I ignored new people until they had lasted for three or four months. I came in at five, rocked my shift the same hard way I did every night, no matter how busy or not, and walked out whenever it was over without looking back. I never left without polishing my tables. Not once. There were many nights when I was so exhausted I’d forget which position I had started at, and have to polish the whole thing again just to be safe. No matter how weary I was though I loved the strangeness of the place when it was empty. That every night we could walk onto a blank stage and invent all
that. Take The Restaurant from pristine and silent down to a staggering state of chaotic, deafening, and excessive disarray, and then put it all back together like no one was ever there.

Roman and the Bishop

You think we party now, it’s nothing like it used to be, Danny’s telling the liquor rep. We’ve already closed but the liquor rep has a deal with Danny—he gets a free steak and of course free drinks whenever he wants and we get a good rate on the whiskey. But the good rate wouldn’t matter if the liquor didn’t move, and it’s a shitty whiskey that nobody would request. So Danny has us telling our tables about it, that it’s the new Crown Royal, the next classic. Danny knows it’s not and he knows we know he knows. He probably even knows we know this all came about because the liquor rep sent Danny some hookers and high-quality coke on his birthday—Danny said that if the coke’s good enough the hookers will be too. Danny is telling the liquor rep a story about his best friend Roman, the bartender:

So Roman says Hey honey I’ll give you thirty dollas you come out on the boat with us, come on it’ll be fun. Thirty dollas, all right? Is that cool? You’re so pretty. Come with us. So she’s like All right, all right, and he’s like Baby you
got any friends? Hell, I’ll give you fifty bucks. Fifty dollas. Go find some friends and I’ll give em all fifty dollas. We got some guys who wanna have some fun. So she gets her friends and they all come out on the boat and I swear these girls were like seventeen, oh my God it was sick. You have not seen females like these and they were down. No rules there, ya know? We’re all wasted, totally out of our minds, and Roman, this guy has the smallest motherfucking cock you ever saw in your whole life but that don’t stop him—Roman sits down in this chair on the deck and he’s like SUCK MY COCK BITCHES!!! SUCK MY COCK!! and these women take his money and suck his itty-bitty cock and he goes like this (Danny flexes his arms WWF style) and he screams FUCKIN SUCK MY COCK!

The liquor rep sees me standing at the corner of the bar and cuts a glance my direction as he sips his whiskey, looking back at Danny as if to tell him There’s a girl over there won’t she mind your cocksucking stories, but of course Danny has known I was there all along. What are you having, honey? Danny says to me. You wanna try this new asswater Joey got us? Acts like it’s sweet as pussy juice. Danny doesn’t say anything to address the liquor rep’s unspoken query and he doesn’t apologize to me either. I have seen and heard things and I have kept secrets, so he doesn’t need to, and he doesn’t give a fuck what the liquor rep thinks.

I haven’t decided whether or not I want to drink with these two when Felipe the barback’s barback appears behind me. Pinche puta madre! he curses, holding the last tray of hot clean highballs he needs to put away before he’s done for the night. Danny is pissing on the floor behind the bar top,
his silver tie loosened and collar unbuttoned. He’s already buzzing hard, after three shots of Patrón—the real Patrón in the cabinet, not the shit tequila we pour for the guests from the Patrón bottle on the display shelf.

When Felipe turns right around in the doorway to head back to the dishroom Danny realizes he pissed on a clean floor. Aw, fuck, he says in Felipe’s direction, fuck! Fucking Sanchez told me you didn’t mop yet! Where the fuck is Sanchez where did that fucker go! SANCHEZ!! YOU’RE FUCKING FIRED AND I’M GONNA HAVE YOU DEPORTED! THEY’RE COMING FOR YOU RIGHT NOW!

He doesn’t mean it. If there is an individual in the restaurant for whom Danny would die, it is undoubtedly Sanchez. He is illegal, and his English is not that good, but he is the one. He is the barback and he has that beautiful momentum you see in the best, with his body in constant motion to mix cocktails, pulling the liquors from the well rail without looking, holding a new ticket in his mouth as he shakes a cosmo hard in his right hand and pours an exact six-ounce glass of chardonnay with his left. It’s not any horsing around like you see in the movies, with twirling or flipping bottles—it’s more of a pure dervishness that has on occasion made a fool of me as I called for a drink that was already sitting up straight right under my face.

Danny likes to tell the story, when Sanchez is not around, of how Sanchez moved up from dishwasher to glass polisher to busser to barback, and of how he thought Sanchez was going to cry the day he told him to put on a vest and tie—the same uniform as the bartenders. Sanchez makes all the drinks
for the bartenders—guests ask for whatever and Roman or Ethan will spin around and say Sanchez! Gooserocks! Manhattanup! Sevenandseven!—and he makes all the drinks for the servers too. The bartenders will be leaning against the liquor cabinets behind them, watching the game on the TV, and Sanchez will be reaching and pivoting and spinning and pouring like mad. For this he is tipped out by the bartenders each night, and he also receives a percentage of the servers’ tips. But we all know there is no way they let him make anything close to what the white English-speaking slow-moving bartenders make. Still he makes so much compared to the other Mexicans. He brought his family over. He has a baby he named after Danny, Sergio Daniel Sanchez.

We joke that Roman can’t take a piss without Sanchez. There are the servers who think the joke is funny, they laugh like it’s so entertaining that Roman gets away with it, like he’s just some harmless putzy fuck and the world is a room aglow with the coziness of ale and the bonding of all people. But some of us don’t think it’s fair that Sanchez busts his ass so Roman can make six figures. On Roman’s birthday they brought in a big cake and we were all waiting for Roman to show up and blow out his candles. I was standing right next to Sanchez in front of the cake. Calvin got restless because he needed to get back to his table of VIPs and he said Sanchez, where the fuck is this guy? You blow em out. Go on, you do it. Motherfucker make you make all his drinks can’t even get over here to blow out his own damn candles. Sanchez blew out the candles and took a piece of cake into the bar for Roman.

Roman is married to the most beautiful woman. I
don’t know why she isn’t famous she’s so beautiful. She is Puerto Rican and has this skin and this lustrous black hair and this body to smite you, with its fullness here and there and its slightness here and there. And her smile—there is a dimple—my God. She is smart. She is trilingual. She is so kind and funny her union with Roman is a mystery that thwarts discovery. I thought until I saw his cock that surely there was a secret there, and there was, but not the one I expected. Danny showed me Roman’s cock in the office one night—Danny, it is well-known, is endowed on an order to make you not want to look directly at it. But when Roman got his white cock I guess it was more of a docking than an endowment. Danny said Wanna see his cock? and Roman said I gotta cock the size of a silverback gorilla’s, I swear. Wanna see?

He got it out, I looked, it barely peeped out from the fur. He zipped up. He said The silverback gorilla has the smallest cock in the world.

I decide I just want to go home so I decline Danny’s offer of a drink and I’m waiting for him to finish talking to the liquor rep so I can turn in my cash-out when Felipe comes back into the bar pushing the mop in its yellow wheeled bucket with one hand. He has something in his other hand that he holds up for Danny to see. They find this allá, he says, gesturing with a nod toward the dining room. He sets a digital camera down on the bar top, a fancy SLR with a big fat telescopic lens. What table? asks Danny. Felipe doesn’t know.

Sanchez, I think you should take some pictures of me, says Danny, unbuckling his belt, since you couldn’t remember to say Felipe already mopped before I pissed on the floor. You know how to work this thing?

Sanchez demurs. I can tell he wants to cooperate because he knows he owes Danny for the mistake, but he hears in Danny’s voice a mocking tone and sees a threat in the thrust of Danny’s jaw and his sidelong look. The restaurant is a cash cow and it’s the only one, there’s no corporate office anywhere, there’s just Danny, so everybody learns quick that loyalty comes before all. After loyalty, which includes trusting that Danny is smarter than you and has already made all the calculations to be made in any given situation, arriving at the best or only possible verdict or at least the one that works his angle the fastest—after loyalty, there’s just the guest and saying yes, so you can get this job down fast if you know Danny’s in charge and those are his two things. Sanchez has it down, which means he knows he has to play along here if he doesn’t want to end up in deeper shit with Danny—the shit hasn’t even turned deep yet, in truth, because Danny’s not really going to blame Sanchez for the fact that he pissed on the clean floor and made more work for Felipe. But he might blame Sanchez if Sanchez doesn’t pretend to take the blame, which now involves taking the camera Danny’s holding out to him.

The camera has been in Uganda and Uganda is in the camera. I will understand this later, when by chance I see the pictures in a national magazine. The magazine runs a cover story on a controversial black religious leader—a profile of his rise to prominence and his recent work in Africa. There
will be a picture of him outside an orphanage with his arm around the shoulder of a lean young boy. The boy is wearing a golden baseball cap and is barefoot and the Bishop, as they call him even though he’s a Protestant minister, is wearing a brightly colored kente shirt.

Calvin waited on the Bishop and his guests earlier. I helped him get their wine started but I never noticed the camera and Calvin left over an hour ago. After he finds out about the camera he will consider quitting The Restaurant even though he has built up his call parties over the past seven years so that he can count on a fat night every night. Recently one of his regulars left him a $3,000 tip on a $900 tab, which none of us could shut up about until the week before Christmas when one of his other regulars left him $5,000 on $500. Even though you know that about $4,500 of it is because that guy gets off on having a handsome, older, immaculately groomed and well-spoken black man wait on him, and even though you know that about $400 of it is because Calvin is a genuinely beautiful and irresistibly charismatic individual, for neither of which amounts could you possibly qualify even though you know that your skill set is as technically proficient as Calvin’s, certainly proficient enough to have deserved the remaining standard of $100, you still can’t help feeling stunned by the mighty whoosh of air as fortune passes you by.

One of the Bishop’s guests tonight, an Ivy League professor, is in town to give a lecture at a local university for Martin Luther King Day. The $5,000 tip is weeks behind us and Calvin and I have not spoken of it. I didn’t work the night it happened, and he was off the following day when I
heard about it, but when I saw him next I didn’t even have to mention it. We just looked at each other and I raised my eyebrows and shook my head like I’m sorry, I can’t love you anymore. But we hadn’t actually traded words about it until tonight, when we were both at the caviar bar making amuse plates for our tables, after he had just seen the Bishop come in with his handler and the Professor. Calvin was glowing, he was nervous and excited and talking so fast I said What’s with you, Cal? Is Kon back?