Merritt Tierce - Love Me Back

After all that Kole and Shaila became a thing but Frank and Danny would still drink with them in the bar. Danny told me Kole called Shaila Boo and Shaila called Kole’s dick Baby Bear.

I won’t ask how you know that, I said.

Good honey, he said, then I won’t tell you I passed out on the floor of her penthouse and they forgot I was there.

The hateful man was supposed to come back from Miami soon and was sweet-talking me for a smooth reentry but after everything that happened over the summer I wasn’t interested. I called him and left a message saying he needed to start paying the rent on the storage space for his stuff. I know none of that shit with the Dangler and the other dangler even happened to me but somehow just watching it made me want to kill whatever yearning self I had inside me. Whatever was in me hoping for something from someone, hanging on.

I was with the hateful man when you got sick. Later I found out it was just a bad cold. But when you are five and you are sick all you want is for your mother to hold you and rock you and I was with him and I didn’t answer the phone when your dad called. He left a message saying you were sick and he needed me to take care of you so he could go to work tomorrow but I didn’t call him back. The hateful man showed me some pictures of Rome and asked if I thought they were any good. I didn’t like them — some trees, some stone. No heart. I drank bourbon with him until it would have been a bad idea for me to drive to you to hold you and rock you. The man fucked me and told me I was drunk like it was a weakness. But his apartment was full of empty bottles. In the morning he drove me home and when he parked in front of my place he said I think I need to fuck you again. As we walked in the door my home phone was ringing. I unplugged the cord. I knelt in front of my loveseat and he got behind me. As he was thrusting he shifted his balance and I tried to adjust to match his position but we went opposite ways and he jammed into me wrong. Fuck! he yelled and doubled over, holding his nuts. You broke my cock! he said. You moved, I said. I’m sorry.

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.

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.