Merritt Tierce - Love Me Back

We fumble quietly out of the sleeping bag. I put on my shoes and kiss him and put my ear to the door. I don’t hear my whole life being written for me inside my body, cell by cell.

I burn my neck with a fondue skewer while you watch The Cosby Show on my bed. You are watching all two hundred episodes for the second time. You refer to the episodes by sweaters: the one where Vanessa wore the black sweater with the yellow cars. Sondra’s flower sweater episode. The skewer is sharp but I don’t use the prongs. I turn on the gas burner and hold the metal rod over the blue flicker until the plastic handle begins to feel warm in my fingers and the prongs turn red, devilish. I wait for the laugh track because I know the skin will make a popping crackling sound I don’t want you to hear but it would most likely go unnoticed anyway. It would sound like a normal cooking sound. I press the metal rod in hard and let up after a count of three. I put it in the dishwasher, small shreds of skin stuck to it.

It hurts but it feels good. I mean it feels like relief. The pain is real and synchronizes all the pain in the rest of my self that I cannot manage to organize. Draws it up to my neck and tells it what it is: You are pain, this is what you feel like.

When you ask about the greenish bubbled stripe that appears across the hollow of my clavicular notch I say I think a bug bit me.

You ask to touch it and you are fascinated by how the blister feels full but fragile. You say it’s gross but you want to do it again. You are skeptical. You say I should go to the doctor. You say What kind of bug would do that?

We can’t have pets in my apartment so we put together a jigsaw puzzle of a Saint Bernard on the floor in the hall. You name him Barry, after the legendary Alpine rescue dog. You buy a bag of dog food with your own money and leave bowls of food and water next to him. I hear you apologize to him once when you accidentally step on his tail.

You tell me you have decided you are not going to have children when you grow up. You are going to live in an RV, which you call a house car. You will have two dogs and it will just be the three of you, traveling everywhere with the windows down. You tell me Barry will be too old to go with you. You whisper so his feelings aren’t hurt. You ask me if I will take care of him when you leave home and I say I will.

Cal is a hustler. Maybe he’s a type, maybe he’s all over Chicago or Atlanta or some other bluesy black place like Memphis, where he’s from originally. But his stuff works in Dallas because there’s a lot more space around a black man striving here than in those other places. He was king at The Restaurant. First thing he ever said to me was What are you doing crossing the guest like that. Don’t ever cross the guest. I was new to The Restaurant and fine dining both, I was serving someone’s salad with the wrong hand on the wrong side. I cared about him from that instant. Wanted to please him, got Velcroed to his there’s a right way to do this. That was when The Restaurant was my life, when it was all I had, when I’d run away from her. I’d sleep till nine or ten, one big meal before the shift with the paper or a book. Alone, most always alone.

To do a good job at a table you have to care. Whatever show you’re doing, wherever else your mind is, you have to put a twist of real on the very end of it. The people are waiting for that and if you don’t pull it out they know and they don’t like it. Cal did care, or at least he did that show better than anyone. Something in the way he leaned over people, touched their backs even though you’re not supposed to do that, it was like they were in his home and he’d say Now what you want to do is put that first bite together with all of it, get you a little tomato, a little that purple onion, and the thing that brings it all together is get you a piece of that basil. Rub it around in that bas al mic — mm! Mm. Tell me bout that.

He said a lot of words that way, slightly off. Mama gon kick me to the curve if we touch, he’d say to me as we messed around on my floor in the afternoon. He had a bank job in addition to The Restaurant, something one of his highrollers made up for him. What he did there was try to look lively in a beautiful suit. Something from Bachrach. He could wear any color and he could put stripes and checks and prints together and it would work because he was puffed up inside it like he was born to win. What I want to know is was that real.

In that restaurant all of us were off. Chipped. Everybody on the way to the curve. Maybe it’s the same in a law firm, a nail salon, whatever high or low. Maybe that’s just what it is to be alive, you’ve got that broken sooty piece of something lodged inside you making you veer left.

Calvin was profiled in a local newspaper when they did a piece on great Texas steakhouses. “Mr. Colson provides what he calls an ‘old-school’ dining experience, part service, part performance, and all professional. Ask for him at The Restaurant or you’ll miss out on what fine dining ought to be,” the reviewer said. Lissandri gave him a Rolex for that. If you read up on our level of service you’ll find all kinds of uptight lists about not engaging with the guests, don’t say your name, don’t try to get call parties, don’t push anything on the menu over anything else, be formal and anonymous and perfect. Cal broke all those rules and people tipped him outrageous sums for it.

One night one of his call parties didn’t come through for him, this German-American guy Konstantin who brought in big business clients and left Cal somewhere between fifty and eighty percent on tabs that were never less than five hundred and could push up on four grand depending on how many guys he had with him and what he wanted out of them. On this particular night Konstantin was distracted or drunk when he signed the credit card voucher and tipped Cal $300 on $1,620, a figure that any one of us would have called a good night. Cal called it cheap and called it to Konstantin’s face.

See, anybody else would have been fired for that. If a guest says to you Did we take care of you? after paying the bill the only possible answer is an effusive Yes, thank you for asking. Doesn’t matter if they didn’t. Like it doesn’t matter if they’ve been sitting there for two hours after the dishwasher left for the night, if they say Are we keeping you? the only possible answer is Oh no, sir, the place is yours.

Cal went up to Konstantin in the lobby where he was still working these Japanese guys, trying to get them all in cabs to the strip club, and made it clear he needed to talk to him immediately, and when Konstantin said What’s up, my brother? Cal pulled him aside and opened the check presenter like he found a turd in it and showed it to Konstantin and said What is this?

Konstantin went all meek and said Oh did I fuck up? And Cal said I don’t know Kon you tell me, but usually I see something closer to what I’m worth on this line. Is that what you think I was worth tonight? Something you weren’t happy with? Because it seemed like all your guys had a great time and it seemed like they was going the way you wanted em to.

I’m not sure how he got Konstantin to think that the multimillion-dollar deal he had just closed succeeded in part because of Cal’s excellent service but Konstantin rescribbled the tip in as $900 and said to Cal Is that more like it? I’m sorry, my man, I didn’t mean anything by it. You know you’re my guy here. And Cal had the audacity to shake his hand and say stiffly, still trying to be cold, That’s what I thought but I was about to have to let somebody else be your guy here and Konstantin said I feel you, we straight?