Merritt Tierce - Love Me Back

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?

Konstantin was the guy who dropped the five Gs on him. We see plenty of celebrities in The Restaurant, and I haven’t known of a single one he ever went giddy over — in fact the more famous somebody was the more determined Cal was to act like they were nobody special. Don’t go pussy up around em , he’d say, then they think you weak and next thing you know you’re dropping shit and spilling shit. Oh excuse me sir I’m so sorry I just got so nervous. Naw. Just do your thing, be cool, work em like they anybody else . He explained that he was buzzed because he had just asked the Bishop if he could take care of them, which is kind of against the code among servers but since they were black I doubted anyone would protest. The Bishop had said yes, certainly, and had introduced Calvin to the Professor, who, Calvin explained to me, was a well-known Black Power figure in the seventies and had continued a long career in the movement. I peeked around the corner to check him out in the lobby and he looked so fly, with the Afro and the powder-blue suit and the broad-collared shirt he wore open to show the gold chains around his neck, that I asked Calvin, Is he for real? Calvin gave me this look like I was in trouble and said, Is he for real?! That man is realer than real. That man was real long before you were. Is he for real! Get out of here. Just get on with your little old ignorant self, he said to me in mock disgust, and when I apologized he told me that the honor of waiting on the Professor was worth more to him than any amount of money he’d ever make off a table. I might not have believed him, except that he gave up his next table so he could focus on the Bishop and the Professor. Even when he’d been so in the weeds with call parties and had more covers running than three other servers put together he had never before given up a table.