Said Sayrafiezadeh - Brief Encounters with the Enemy

“A grilled cheese sandwich was returned tonight, Ike,” my manager said. He stated it as if genuinely interested, philosophically speaking. “A grilled cheese sandwich and a plate of linguine. Why were they returned, Ike?”

I did not know why, and my face tightened with false concern. I realized that if I did not say something convincing, and say it fast, I would implicate myself by admitting not only that I had made defective, inedible food but that I had so little awareness of my job that I could not even recall why or when such an error had occurred. “I’ll have to look into that” was all I said, as if I had my own underlings to consult. The clock now read 1:03. The manager’s face was round and kind, with puffy cheeks, and in the office light it looked for some reason even kinder than usual. I should change the subject, I thought. And I should uncross my feet so that I don’t look like a supplicant. I should talk about the rain and ask him when he thinks it will stop. It will make him think that I respect his authority. And then I will come back in a week and ask again for a raise — or in two weeks, maybe, not more than three, at some point in the near future, when everything has been forgotten and no meals have been returned and the rain has stopped and I have come up with a good response for when he tells me that business is bad.

But before I could say anything, my manager swiveled around in his chair, faced his desk, placed his hands lightly on top of the piles of paper there, as if they were a Ouija board and he was reading a signal from the beyond. Then he shuffled the papers around. Very rapidly, he shuffled the papers. “Seven-twenty-three the grilled cheese sandwich was returned,” my manger read. “And eleven-fifty-two the plate of pasta came back.”

Those times seemed so long ago. My manager looked up at me with his kind face, almost angelic. A baby face with puffy cheeks.

Answer him! But all I could think was that I was in the restaurant at 7:23. I was in the restaurant at 11:52. And here I am at 1:07, still in the restaurant. Tomorrow, I thought, I will be here. And the day after that. And the day after that is my day off. But then I will be back.

“Is it really that complicated, Ike, for you to make a grilled cheese sandwich?” the kind face asked.

Somewhere in my past, something had gone wrong for me. Years prior, at my high school graduation, I had sat docilely in the audience and watched the valedictorian onstage in a lavender cap and gown read a tedious and patronizing speech that I knew for a fact had been patched together from a book of stock lectures. “There are some of us here this evening who will be heading off to college,” he declared, “others who are going into the military, and still others who are entering directly into the workforce.” As if all those choices were equal. His voice, amplified by the microphone, sounded exceptionally powerful and confident, and I imagined that if he were to remove that ridiculous lavender gown, we would discover that he was naked underneath, and that he had, as I well knew from the locker room, broad shoulders and a broad chest and was not at all embarrassed to be seen naked. While beneath my billowy gown was a small-large frame, short legs but long arms, soft flesh but hard knees and elbows, with no real delineation between torso and limbs or between limbs and extremities: the body of a hamster. I was irritated by the valedictorian’s speech and his three categories of life and his attempts at anecdotal humor that were supposed to seem spontaneous and ingratiate him with the parents but instead sounded contrived and wooden. The parents laughed and were won over. Sitting in the audience with five hundred other students, I had the unsettling awareness that I had already been consigned to a life of mediocrity by the very fact that I had not been the one chosen to stand on the podium. There was a single opportunity at having that happen in one’s life, and I had missed it. Nothing could make up for that now. I would forever be indistinguishable from all the others who had not been chosen. I was just one of five hundred. One of five hundred million. I am the addressee , I kept thinking as the valedictorian droned on. I will always be the addressee.

I turned nineteen working at the restaurant, making $4.50 an hour. I turned twenty at $4.75. And twenty-one at $5.75. “This is just a stopping-through place,” a busboy had told me on the day he quit. He was eighteen, blond hair, blue eyes, movie-star handsome with a dimple in his chin. He spoke with the expertise of someone who had done nothing to earn that expertise. I wanted to ask him for advice anyway. Instead I said, “You got that right, man,” as if I were also an expert on the subject of life’s trajectory. For my twenty-fifth birthday ($7.50), the waitresses got everyone to chip in to surprise me with a cake. “Happy birthday, Ike!” they sang at the end of the night. The twenty-five candles overwhelmed the cake. The flame was wide and significant; I saw the substance of my age. People joked about the restaurant catching fire. The waitresses had wanted to be nice, but I could see only pity. Who wants to celebrate his twenty-fifth birthday at an employees’ table next to a mop closet while wearing a splattered apron and a checkered cook’s uniform? I ate the cake to show my gratitude. My manager came by and slapped me on the back. “Congratulations,” he said. He was the only person there who was older than I. The slap had a proprietary quality.

When I was about eighteen, a guy I knew from the neighborhood had seen me walking down the street and picked me up in his taxi. I was a block from home, but he wanted to drive me around and show off his new job. I sat in the backseat like a passenger, and I stared at the back of his head. “I’m celebrating my twenty-fifth birthday next week,” he told me. “Big party. Come on by.”

“Okay,” I said.

“A quarter of a century,” he said. He was being boastful, but the phrase was jarring. I can tell you this much, I wanted to say. When I’m a quarter of a century, I won’t be driving any taxi.

I had dreams of grandeur. I didn’t know how to get there, but I knew that it would work out.

He drove me around for a while and then he dropped me off right where we’d begun, a block from my house.

“See you at the party,” he told me. But I didn’t go.

I start at five o’clock and I stop at midnight. On weekends I stop at one o’clock. Sundays the restaurant is closed. Thursdays I have off. On busy nights, the dinner rush begins around seven and goes until eleven. There is relative calm in the kitchen at first, and then the sounds begin to take on a discernible urgency — voices, dishes, doors, not unlike light rain before heavy rain — and then there will be an explosion of orders. How is it possible? All these orders? All these orders at once? Oh my God! There are only three cooks and a salad guy, but there are fifty orders, and then there are a hundred orders. The white blur of the manager’s shirt mixes with the black blurs of the waitresses’. Each cook in a pristine apron, soon to become filthy, hunches over a little workstation, cutting, frying, wiping, responsible for his little world. Once in a while, one cook will come to the aid of another who has fallen far behind, as if in battle, and this is always viewed as an act of extreme kindness. Generally, though, it’s every man for himself, and we let one another die facedown in the mud. I move at a steady pace somewhere between frantic and perilous. Once I scalded my entire forearm with boiling water, but I wrapped the wound with cold towels and continued marching onward up the hill. Another time I lacerated the tip of my finger, and only after my shift was over did I go to the hospital for seven stitches. I have learned precision and efficiency over the years. There is no wasted motion in anything I do. I am a study of that thin line between human and machine. The order comes in, the eyes scan the order, one hand removes two slices of rye bread (for instance) and places the bread on the grill, the other hand is already reaching for the American cheese that is in the square tin on the shelf, while another order comes in and the eyes are scanning that order as the limbs and hands continue to move. Only when the rush begins to abate do I understand that I have been in something akin to a trance, moving constantly but without full consciousness. The sounds in the kitchen will get quieter, a gentle, nonessential clattering. A lullaby of clattering — it’s near midnight, after all. The waitresses stand around idly. The dishwasher smokes a cigarette, even though he’s not supposed to smoke in here. Afterward I walk the ten blocks to my apartment, and if I make it home in time, I watch the end of David Letterman.