Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

I’m not a tourist. I live here.

Where’s your place? We can go to your place if you want.

Why aren’t you two in school where you should be?

We graduated!

Yeah, sure. Babes on blades.

Slowly the Kid pushes back his chair and stands. He looks down and sees with relief that his pants are loose enough that his woodie doesn’t show. He takes a last lingering look at the two and almost choking says I’m outa here. Stuffs his map, newspaper, cigarettes, and cell phone into his backpack. Turns and walks away.

The girls watch him go, shrug and giggle and skate off in the opposite direction. Halfway down the block the Kid glances back as they roll past Victoria’s Secret. He sees them lifted quickly off the pavement by warm updrafts and over the heads of the pedestrians into the air. They soar above the trees and the flocks of squawking green parrots into the blue sky where they make slow interlocked circles and renew their search for unwary prey below. On the corner of Mantle and Rampart Road the man called Molly who carries a clutch bag and wears only a gold lamé Speedo and flip-flops gazes up at them mildly amused by their audacity and deftly rolls a joint without having to look at his hands. He looks down the block at the Kid and flashes him a wink and a pinkie-wave.

THE KID LIKES HIS JOB AT THE MIRADOR. He’s a noon-to-ten-at-night busboy in a beachfront hotel restaurant the size of a major airport terminal which is pleasant enough — no previous experience required, no hierarchy among the busboys, no Babes on Blades — but beyond all that the job appeals to his innate affection for order and cleanliness. He gets to clear away dirty dishes, silverware, glassware, and crumpled napkins and strip the tablecloths off the tables. He gets to cart everything back to the kitchen and separate out the plates, cups, and saucers from the silverware and glassware and rack them in separate dishwashers and drop the used tablecloths into one basket and the stained napkins into another. Then he gets to go back to the dining room and shake out a fresh clean tablecloth and lay down four or six or eight shiny new place settings for the next batch of diners. He likes all this. He enjoys squaring the circle of the plate with the knives, spoons, and forks and folding the napkins into little cloth pyramids and placing them just so in the exact center of the plate. He takes pleasure in delivering the basket of bread and plate of little shell-shaped butter pats and filling the glasses with ice water and then disappearing until the meal is finished. And he likes wearing the starched white jacket with the mandarin collar. It makes him feel like he’s a scientist.

Most of all he likes the anonymity of a busboy. No one checks him out. No one asks his name. No one remembers him. It’s almost like being invisible. He’d make better money if he were a waiter but then he’d have to interact with the diners, describe the daily specials to them, reassure them about portion size, degree of spiciness, ask and answer dumb questions about hotness, coldness, well done, medium or rare, whether or not it really is kosher, endure the diners’ complaints and make small talk and smile all the while. He’d have to say, My name is Kid and I’ll be your server today . He’d have to come regularly to the table and ask, How is everything? He’d have to bring them their food and say, Bon appétit or Enjoy. Some of the waiters, usually the gay guys, just say, Enjoy. That is definitely not the Kid’s style. But neither is Bon appétit.

Actually the Kid doesn’t have a style. He can’t be pegged as one kind of person or another except by age, race, and gender. He’s a white guy in his early twenties. Otherwise he’s almost invisible. Which is the way he likes it. When he was a teenager in high school or working at the light store and later in the army at Fort Drum in upstate New York it bothered him that no one could seem to see him or remember having met him before or simply forgot he was present even when he was trying to draw attention to himself. It puzzled and irritated him and made him even more insecure than when he was alone and every now and then he tried to effect a personal style — he tried gangsta for a few months, then preppie. He tried techno-geek, goth, surfer dude, urban cowboy. Once at Fort Drum he tried sex machine and told the guys in his outfit that he’d auditioned for a porn flick but they needed nine and a half inches and he only had nine. The part about auditioning for a porn flick was a total lie but the part about nine inches was close enough. He had the biggest dick in the outfit but when his fellow soldiers dragged him into the showers and stripped him they just laughed at it and acted like it was wasted on him. Which it was.

Nowadays though he’s happy to be invisible. Sometimes when he’s clearing a table even though the waiters and waitresses wear black tuxedo-style jackets and the busboys are in white a diner mistakes him for a waiter and asks him to bring another menu or more bread or the check but he just pretends he doesn’t speak English and turns his back.

Table seven is a large round VIP table over by a floor-to-ceiling window with a view of the beach and crashing waves and the turquoise ocean beyond. It’s usually bused by the pretty little Mexican girl who wants to be promoted to waitress so she does a lot of smiling and leaves the top two buttons of her jacket unbuttoned. But she called in sick today so as soon as the Kid comes into the kitchen ready for work Dario the manager assigns it to him.

Hurry the fuck up and clear seven, they’ve already ordered dessert.

Dario is Italian from Philly in his late thirties, dainty as a dancer with little hands and tiny wedge-shaped feet but hard-bodied, a man who works out regularly and dresses the same way every day like a prosperous gangster or an actor playing one in a black silk T-shirt, black Armani suit, sockless black Bally loafers, and a large faux-diamond pinkie ring. He has straight black hair in a ponytail and keeps a fresh carnation in his lapel and likes to be seen sniffing it. He reminds the Kid of Al Pacino in Scarface only without the scar.

Dude, it’s only noon. What is it, a late breakfast? Brunch? We haven’t started serving brunch, have we?

Don’t fuck with me, Kid. I let ’em in early. They got a golf game or something and needed to eat now.

Must be big cheeses.

Never mind that. Just get out there and clear the fucking table.

There are four large beefy men at table seven, a thick-necked black guy with his back to the Kid facing the window and three white guys with barrel-bellies, all of them in pastel-colored golf clothes. Mob friends of Dario down from Philly, the Kid decides although he’s pretty sure Dario isn’t a real mobster, only a guy who likes to be regarded as one. He goes all smarmy and overhospitable whenever the real thing shows up at the restaurant. One of the white guys at the table looks Spanish and has a bad dye job on his black pencil-thin mustache and comb-over. The big black guy wears a baseball cap and even from behind looks familiar to the Kid. Usually he avoids looking at the diners’ faces when he clears the table but this time as he goes for the black guy’s plate and silverware he glances up and recognizes him.

His legs go all watery and his breathing turns shallow and fast. O. J. Simpson is in the house! How weird is that? the Kid says to himself. More than weird, it’s a little scary because to his knowledge at least the Kid has never been this close to a real cold-blooded killer before. He somehow hadn’t realized O. J. Simpson was a real person and not just a famous killer who existed only on TV since nothing you know only from TV is real. Not even the news. Not even the president. He wonders what O. J. would do if the Kid accidentally knocked over his half-filled glass of red wine and it splashed into his large lap or dropped his plate of half-eaten ketchup-covered fries onto the floor and got ketchup all over O. J.’s spotless pale green slacks and white shoes.