Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

Okay, you’ve got the picture: this is a shitty job. But not everything about it’s shitty. In fact there are many perks. I’ll tell you.

First, I get paid under the table. As far as the federal government’s concerned, I haven’t earned a taxable dime in three years. Second, I get a free shift meal every day I work, plus whatever I can steal, which is plenty. I mean it’s not just food and booze. Ethan is a terrible businessman, the worst I’ve ever encountered: a blackout alcoholic and probably bipolar, though he’s also a cokehead and smokehound, so maybe his emotional swerves are side effects — or, rather, the intended effects — of the way he paces his days. What I’m trying to put across here is that Ethan’s the perfect boss. He is reason number three or, really, all the reasons. Whenever I see a light on in the restaurant after hours, I knock on the kitchen window, find him rolling blunts at the salad station or deep-throating the spigot on the Jagerator, a medium quattro formaggi in the oven and him without anyone to share it with. He unlocks the back door for me, and forty-five minutes later I’m shit-faced, fed, and getting another raise.

Ethan is a self-sabotaging trust fund maniac whose folks set him up with this franchise for his thirtieth birthday, mostly, I think, so he’d have somewhere other than the grounds of the family estate — a former plantation, it could have gone without saying — to play “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” at blowout volume a dozen times a day. As long as he keeps his annual losses in the mid five figures they’ll keep him in business. So he has his clubhouse — with its audiophile-grade sound system, bulk alcohol purchase orders, and Showtime After Dark — grade waitstaff — and the family is spared both the Allman Brothers and the train wreck, if that’s not too redundant to say. The college, for its part, inducts a freshman class every single year. (I myself was in it once, and look at me now!)

These kids, like I did, come from towns where the vegetable on the menu — when there is one — is either Jell-O or tuna fish salad, so organic mozzarella cheese is a legitimate thrill. The girls we hire cut deep Vs into the necks of their uniform tie-dye T-shirts, which is technically a violation of the terms of our franchise agreement, but so far nobody’s complained. I don’t know who started this tradition. I also don’t know why an eighteen-year-old girl — a girl who’s been in town all of four days; who decides to try our restaurant for lunch because there was a 20-percent-off coupon in her dormitory welcome packet and we’re on the only off-campus street she can name; who walks over here, comes in, sits down, has to shout over the strains of “Melissa” or “Jessica” to give her order to a server who for her part is probably named Melissa or Jessica, wearing tell-all jeans shorts and a shirt that’s essentially confetti; who is charged $8.95 for two pieces of pizza and a Sprite (that’s with the coupon, mind you, and before tip) — stands up at the end of her dining experience, brushes the cornmeal off her skirt, and thinks to herself, How do I become the slut who just served me lunch? But it happens, man. It happens like clockwork, and the lesson — not the first or the last time I’ve learned it — is that there’s an awful lot of shit in this world that I don’t know.

Ethan hires girls he wants to fuck, obviously. I mean he hires girls everybody wants to fuck: radiant vortices of bleach, wax, and puka shells who know exactly what you’re thinking when you look at them, who sound like TV shows — believe me — when they’re pretending to get off. To Ethan’s credit — and this is the only time you’ll catch me using that turn of phrase — he doesn’t fire them for not fucking him. He waits until he catches them stealing; then he fires them. And they always end up stealing, irrespective of whether they need the money. Need’s got nothing to do with it. Ethan’s just a hard guy not to steal from. He brings something out in people. I’m lucky he doesn’t want to fuck me because it keeps him from noticing how badly I’m fucking him. If I had tits I’d have been shit-canned years ago. Instead I keep getting promoted, to the point where I’ve become a kind of imperial factotum, body man for the restaurant, what in a real place of business would likely be described as “the manager,” a term Ethan abjures on account of its lack of good vibes. I do the books and the purchase orders, the scheduling, plus incidental waiting, bussing, onion chopping, secret sauce mixing (half balsamic vinegar, half anchovy-free Caesar dressing, pinch of salt), and of course, at the moment, I wear the mushroom suit. It’s some low-down proletarian shit, I’ll grant you, especially for a guy closer in age to Ethan than the Melissa/Jessicas, but you know what? I’ve got an ex who adjuncts at the college and I know what she makes per poetry workshop. I also know what her current squeeze — a math PhD — gets for his Intro Stat lecture, a class that seats four hundred and is simulcast on the web to twice as many again. I’ll own a house before those motherfuckers, that’s for sure.

A light goes out and then comes on again, but it’s blurry — I mean blurrier than usual. I feel oddly relaxed but also weighed down somehow… somehow…

Oh, that’s right.

The suit seems to have become horizontal, and me with it, and there seems to be a transition scene missing, so smart money says I had a bit of heatstroke and fainted, fell. I’m facing upright — that blurry light would seem to be the sky — but stuck. If it rained right now I’d drown, which is scary, but somehow not scary enough to keep me from blacking back out.

Light again, and a dark shape blocking most of it, but a light-dark shape if that makes any sense, and long, thin golden strands descending through the grille mesh, tickling my nose. That’s hair. (And so much then for the hair catch analogy.) The strands belong to one of our newer Melissa/Jessicas, who must have looked out the front window and noticed that a certain purple obscenity had dropped out of the landscape. Already proving herself a team player, this Melissa/Jessica. I ought to learn her real name, would ask her except I should probably already know it: there’s a good chance Ethan told me, or that she herself has, possibly when I interviewed and hired her, which it’s entirely possible I’m the one who did.

“Hey,” she says. “Let me help you.” As if I could stop her; as if she could help. But I don’t say anything. Let her tug and jostle me a while; the sooner she tires herself out, the sooner she’ll go get Ethan. Even through the stink of this suit, I can smell her: whatever lotion she uses, coconut-y, and beneath that a hint of something danker, the smell of her futile exertion, maybe, though I may be smelling myself.

My nose still tickles. I’m holding back a sneeze, and then all of a sudden I’m losing hold, have lost it, am making a noise that’s half donkey bray and half kicked cat. My whole body shudders with the force of it, snot all over my face, the suit rocking slightly from side to side on the metal hoop sewn beneath the fur of the mushroom cap’s rim.

The good news is that observing this physics lesson seems to have given Melissa/Jessica an idea. “I’ve like totally got this,” she says, and rolls me over on my rim so I’m facing downward, suspended two feet above the earth, watching ants march across the concrete in my shadow while gravity, happily, works some of this snot off my face. Melissa/Jessica digs around in the fur of the mushroom stem, searching for the industrial-gauge zipper, which is located exactly where I’d never be able to reach it even if the suit had arms. She unzips me in one long quick pull, like it’s prom night and she’s me and I’m the best she could get.