Merritt Tierce - Love Me Back

Lately they’ve been coming down harder on me. There’s something wrong with Pablo’s eyes; he has kind of a flat face, like you see in the pictures of fetal alcohol syndrome victims, and his pupils are strange. The top half of each is a cloudy blue, and the bottom half is an opaque dark, so when he stares at me and says Tellen, tellen Danny que necesita pagar, tellen Danny he pay, okay? Ten. Diez. I feel disarmed by his aberrant, unreadable gaze. He tells me in Spanish, then in English; then he holds up how many fingers to make sure I get it.

My friend Calvin says they’re going to start cutting it worse for him, that even though he’s their boss they won’t tolerate it. We agree that he makes too much money to do it like this, that if he wants it he should just pay for it. Either give me the cash or get right with them straightaway.

Suck it is his favorite, but not by much — we joke that he has Tourette’s syndrome, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true. He might be looking over the seating chart for the night, trying to puzzle out how he can possibly fit another six-top in at seven thirty, and run through a litany like Suck it shit fuck cock ’n’ balls shit fuck fuck fuck fuck suck it. He might hang up the phone after sweetly giving a stranger detailed directions and declare Filthy cunt whore suck my cock may I help you?

Every night he makes snap public-relations decisions with a ferocity that is unquestionable and an accuracy that is never less than dead-on. He is a fast-talking Italian fox from the Bronx who can get his way with anyone, can make any Mur feel like a VIP, and thus has been the general manager of a multimillion-dollar-grossing fine-dining steakhouse since he was twenty-four.

( Mur is a term that denotes any individual “we don’t know.” A Mur is just a regular customer, no one deserving of special treatment. This fairly benign significance is the standard, though it might also be used more pejoratively, to indicate that the individual is a nobody, a chump, a tool — all of which in turn signify primarily an absence of wealth. Example: Honey-love, see those Murs hangin out in the fuckin doorway over there? Would you please take them in to twenty fucking seven. I once inquired about the etymology of Mur, and Danny said that he and his buddy, who is the general manager at our sister restaurant Il Castello, used to know a guy named Murray when they were kids growing up in the Bronx. Murray was a social misfit, soft or naive in some unforgivable way that inspired them to refer to any such person as a Murray, and later simply a Mur.)

But Danny is blowing his crystalline mind four square inches of shittily cut cocaine at a time, night after night. The urgency in his voice when he calls up the restaurant on his days off to ask me to get it for him — well, last night all he said was Four. Now.

Danny’s appetite is the spirit of the place: the excesses of an entire microculture are concentrated in his one body. We are accustomed to businessmen arriving with clients whom they want to impress, we are accustomed to those businessmen spending our weekly incomes on several bottles of fine wine alone, we are accustomed to a per-person average that can linger fatly around $300. We are accustomed to Danny’s binges, his unbelievable gluttony. He routinely fucks women in the restaurant — once there was a pink lacy thong on the floor by the trash can in the office on a Sunday, and he came up to The Restaurant with a friend, even though it was his day off. They were already out of control with their high and they were there for me to get them some more. Danny told the friend my name and he said Ooooh! and looked at me as if he cherished me, because Danny must have told him earlier who was going to help them along. While they were crashing around the office, laughing and pushing and glowing and shrieking, Danny told me and the wine manager how he had fucked this one girl by the trash can last night (above the thong on the floor, he reenacted his thrusting), and how he then fucked her friend in the same place. I guess that one wasn’t wearing underwear, or kept it on.

There is a kind of partying undertaken by people of my age and station on birthdays, or on other momentous occasions such as the losing of a job. The kind of partying that leaves one wrecked for days, sometimes close to death. The kind of partying that concludes with the unconscious body of the individual being arranged by any remaining friends in such a way that it can be trusted not to aspirate vomit. This is the kind of partying that lingers so badly it causes one to leave off for another year or so. This is also the kind of partying that Danny rips through several times a week.

He was in the hospital last month. No one could remember a day when Danny didn’t come in — in seven years he’s never been out sick. He’s been in all fucked up, for sure, but he maintains better than most people who aren’t fucked up, so a hush came over us when they said he was in the hospital. They said it was something with his stomach, that he’d had unbearable pains and his dad convinced his friend Roman to drag him to the emergency room, where they gave him great quantities of morphine. He was out only the one day; the next day he was back, drinking flavored water instead of the four or five Cokes he habitually downs during the shift. On the third day he had returned to his usual pace. I saw him in the back talking to Pablo.

Our ladder-back chairs have a decorative hole in the top rung, and late one afternoon I came around the corner of the bar and saw he’d stuck his cock through the hole there. Just to shock me or anyone else who walked by. Somehow he knows which girls can handle this and which can’t.

Other guys imitate him sometimes. Once Casey told me that he let his dick hang out underneath his apron all night, and because he’s about six-three, when he was standing at his tables his junk would rest on the tabletop, hidden behind the apron. Then last Sunday I was in the office before the shift started, talking to Rich, the maître d’. Kansas John walked in to ask me if he could pay me to do his alcohol seller-server recertification for him. I said yes, so he was writing down his information for me, and behind his back Rich unzipped his pants and pulled it out. He wadded it up in his hand and waited for Kansas John to turn around. But before Kansas turned around, Anna walked in the door of the office. I don’t know how Rich did it fast enough, but he covered it with his hands as if he just had his hands in his lap.

Danny and his roommate like to have the same women. Lou Ambrogetti is the Cuban-Italian chef at Il Castello. He is short, bronze, and beautiful, and though he’s only thirty-four, the stubble atop his round head is pigeon-colored. His full lips hold still underneath a gaze that’s pruriently curious, and a tattooed sun circumscribes his navel. One Saturday night I sucked him off at the bottom of the back stairs behind Cosimo, the nightclub affiliated with our restaurant. I was there only because one of the owners, Mr. Salvatore Lissandri, brought me over from the steakhouse in his Aston Martin; it was Sal himself who’d given me a job at The Restaurant.

Lissandri philandered. But first — he came into the Dream Café, one of the two restaurants I was working in that year, a few mornings a week for breakfast. We fought over him, whoever else was on the breakfast shift and I, because he always tipped $15, which worked out to be one hundred sixty percent of his $9 tab. He ate steel-cut organic oatmeal with no brown sugar and soy milk on the side, followed by four egg whites scrambled with spinach and tomatoes. He drank water only, with a straw. He didn’t say much to us and always had the paper with him. A native New Yorker and Mets fan, he stared at the sports section while he did business on his mobile phone all during his breakfast.