Noah Cicero: Best Behavior

Barely anyone was on the subway and the lighting was horrible. We walked back to her apartment in the night. I thought she would sleep with me. I expected it. But she didn't. I slept on a small couch. It was not that I was mad at her for not sleeping with me; I was mad because she didn't announce that she wouldn't at the beginning of the event. Many months later I wrote a blog post that she considered was about her. It was a mean blog post. Her friend, who was part of the elite of hipster New Yorkers, decided to find ways to hate me through the Internet. We fought. I wondered if I would see Lin in New York. I knew she was still friends with Hu Chi so there might be a chance. I didn't hate her. But I knew she hated me. I wondered if I would see her there.

My trips to New York City were always strange to me. I was never a big city person. When money was saved, I would take trips to the Colorado Rockies or the Redwoods. I would sleep in tents and drive down highways surrounded by fields of corn. The open landscapes of the west always eased my sense of claustrophobia while New York City always heightened it. New York City is where a person goes to buy things, get a dream job, become an artist, work with stocks, and party. It wasn't a place where a person went to ease their mind or to create a real sense of harmony for themselves. There was no peace there. But I had been living a peaceful life all year and needed chaos and some frantic days.

I worked as a dishwasher for a year. I was poor. Making $6.50 an hour until minimum wage went up. After that I made $7. When the world looked at me, they looked down. After nine months of dishwashing they moved me to the cook line. I didn't want to be a cook. It made me a little bit more money than I used to but it was a lot hotter over there. It didn't seem worth it. But I went anyway. At least I would get the prestige of calling myself a cook.

I cooked and took shit. No one gave me shit as a dishwasher. No one ever went near me. The managers would say hello and that would be it. But as a cook they spoke to you. They yelled at you. You mattered to the establishment. You were vital to how things ran. If they ran smoothly or badly. If you messed up someone would say something.

All the cooks had been incarcerated but me. They were getting arrested all the time. All of them had DUIs and listened to rap music. They smoked weed when they took out the garbage with the permission of the managers. They bet on football and basketball pools. They had romantic relationships full of jealousy and arguments. They had kids and child support. I didn't have any of these things. I was an outsider and couldn't relate. I did my best to be friendly and they did their best to be friendly to me. But their lives had taken a different direction than mine. All of them had grown up poor and not one of them had a stable father figure growing up.

The servers were a mixture of social classes. They were mostly women. A lot were women in their thirties trying to make some money to stay alive and feed their kids. And the other ones were girls in nursing school or college passing the time using their money to pay their cell phone bills. Most of the people there were drunks. There was a lot of after work drinking and the attaining of DUIs. Nobody really had any hobbies besides exercising and text messaging. They were good people though, courteous and caring in the simple way mankind has always been.

I walked in the back door of work to the prep line. The prep workers were there. A large man who just lost his job at the Craftmade factory. Craftmade started laying off workers several months ago. One of the broil cook's baby momma was laid off from there too. They were making good money with benefits, now she's out of work and he works as a prep cook for minimum wage with no benefits.

I walked by a young woman in her early twenties named Mary. She had beautiful blue eyes and only weighed 100 pounds. Her arms were small but strong. She had already been married and divorced, and moved onto a man that beat her, wouldn't work, and didn't take out the garbage. So she moved onto another man, the new one didn't beat her but he would show up during her shift demanding that she gave him a twenty to buy smokes and beer so he could sit around all day playing video games not taking out the garbage either.

Mary looked sad so I said, “You look sad again, what he do now?”

She kept cutting the cores out of the tomatoes and said, “He's cheating on me, of course.”

“Did you yell at him?”

“Of course I yelled, I've been yelling at this cell phone all morning.”

“Did you forgive him?”

“Yeah, he was drunk.”

I laughed a little and walked away. Some people say that getting drunk and cheating on other people isn't a good excuse. But it is when you know that when you've gotten drunk you've had sex with other people and didn't get caught.

Before I got my coat off, there she stood, assistant manager Renee, an overweight woman who barely did anything all day but complain — talking constantly about Weight Watchers; how when she was little her father used to beat her every time she swore or broke things; how she got married to a man, had a child, only to have man leave her for a homeless shelter and not pay child support; how that man still owed her 24 thousand in child support — and watch the television at the bar, and yet she pretended that she worked harder than everybody there. She loved to say things like, “You would know where it was if it was up your ass,” “Stop trying to get that steak to fuck you, and put it on the plate,” “What took your smoke break so long, how long does it take to give a blow job?”

I was putting my coat on a hanger and she said, “Oh, look who it is. Finally decided to show up.”

I responded sadly, “I'm here ten minutes early.”

“Oh my god, whatever.”

She walked away. She and I never engaged in a real discussion. She was so obsessed with defending her little reality that she made a joke out of everything and made it impossible to get any sense of enjoyment out of talking with her.

A few months before, I had a panic attack. I had just started school and the making of new habits threw me into a mental frenzy. For five years I had gone to work and done nothing else but read. The jobs I had didn't require any real responsibility, thought, or waking up early. My life had changed. Work was not going well. It was busy and everyone was being ignorant to each other. All the servers were screaming for soups, their fried onions and cheese fries. I felt isolated and alone. Minor chords on a piano were pounded. I was worried that John McCain would win the presidency. The DOW kept dropping, people were getting laid off that I knew and cherished. I was very stressed out. I was cleaning the fryers and a young cook came over and, as a joke, poked me in the chest and said, “Boy, you better do those fryers right.” He said it with a smirk on his face. It was obviously a joke to everyone else. I was so caught up in my own thoughts, in my own life, trying desperately to adjust to new habits that I didn't notice. I clenched my fist and looked at him with hate in my eyes. A look of fear came over him. The young cook was a nice guy. He was my friend. A person I considered with warm feelings. A panic attack started; I couldn't breathe and started crying a little. I went outside to smoke. It was night. I laid on the cement. Three nursing majors came over and helped me with water and encouraging words. The only cook that came out to help was Diego Jones. He had a real look of concern on his face and ran to get me water. After that, I realized that he must have seen a lot of men struggle. He had grown up poor, been to war and prison. Situations where all men breakdown.

Sundays always meant working with the grill cook Andrew. Andrew was 24 and grew up in Warren. Unlike half the people who went to Warren, he graduated. He went to business school after high school but dropped out. Later he got in a car wreck, was sued, and owed over 20 thousand dollars. He was the best cook we had and he never let us forget it. He always talked about how other people couldn't hack it, how they couldn't hang, how basically everyone sucked but him. Besides being a good cook he was also a good rapper. He didn't aspire to be famous. Sometimes he would daydream about it. But he didn't tell anyone he was going to be famous and didn't have bitches hanging off of both arms or anything like that. He would make his songs at his friend's house and put them on MySpace. Every time he made a new song he would tell everyone to listen to it, and we all would. He had a soft yet tough voice and he could rap with emotion. The songs were typical of 2008 rap. It had themes about money, girls, and nice things, which he had none of; but you could tell it made him happy to do it. I liked that very much, there were a lot of people I worked with that didn't do anything to make themselves happy but smoke weed and drink. And he had found an outlet for his emotions, which led to him having the confidence to be a better cook and do less drugs and drinking.