Noah Cicero: Best Behavior

Andrew had it bad, though. His mother was a heroin junky and he had no father. He would sometimes describe, without showing emotion, how his mother would shoot up in front of him. How his mother would have huge abscesses where she plunged the needle into her body. Everyone would stare with pained faces while he would tell us these stories. It wasn't the stories exactly; it was the way he said it, like it seemed normal. Like it was normal for a mother to shoot heroin in front of her son. No one had the heart to tell him that it wasn't normal. Even though we all wanted to, no one gave him a hug.

You got the sense that he wanted to be black. A lot of white people had that from the Youngstown and Warren ghettos. A lot of white people — much more than the media shows — grew up in the world of poor black people. The poor black kids had outlets in the media to represent them: musicians, movie stars, sitcoms and politicians. But poor white people weren't represented in the media except maybe the trailer park hicks. But white kids from the ghetto couldn't look up to them. So Andrew looked up to the rappers, and what the rappers exude were the anger and wants of the poor people of the ghetto. Andrew was poor and he would probably die poor. But he was nice and a good worker.

My job that day was to do expo. Expo really wasn't cooking. Andrew, the grill man, cooked all the steaks and chicken. The only things I cooked were mushrooms and onions. The first thing I did was stock my area. It was important to have a stocked area. The managers didn't care if anyone stocked. They barely ever went near us unless something went wrong. We stocked our areas because it made things easier for ourselves.

There was a rush for a while. I had to hurry around putting the plates in the pass-window, throwing baked potatoes on them, sweet potatoes, grilled veggies, and French fries. I was sweating and wanting to leave and go on vacation to New York City. Nothing of what was happening mattered to me. I was a robot repeating motions in response to stimuli.

Saw a ticket.

Read ticket.

Four top.

Four adults.

Eating off adult plates.

Grab four adult plates.

Flick them on window.

Read main dish line to see if any fried shrimp was needed to be called to Diego on Fryers.

There was.

“Diego, three fried shrimp.”

Diego yells back, “Three fried shrimp.”

I have to keep yelling, “Three fried Shrimp,” until he calls it back.

Read line below main dish.

That was the side dish line.

It was indented.

Look to what had to be microwaved.

Grilled veggies and broccoli.

Grab broccoli and grilled veggies.

Both in plastic bags made from petroleum.

(Sometimes while putting the veggies in petroleum based bags I would remember an article I read online on how that might cause cancer.)

I put the bags in the super microwave that would cook food five times faster than a normal house microwave.

Look again at the ticket.

Two plates need baked potatoes.

They weren't plates for people or food that was going to be eaten by my fellow humans.

They were plates that needed to be filled.

Plates that required side dishes.

I went and got the bake potatoes and slapped them on a plate.

The microwave buzzed.

Veggies were done.

Veggies were stuck on plates in little white dishes.

The ticket was complete.

Then I looked and the broil cook had put up four tickets. I had to do the same thing but with four tickets.

Five minutes later Andrew would say, “The ticket is sold.”

I would have to stop what I was doing and run over to the plates.

Read the ticket to see what the potatoes needed, not what the customers wanted, but what the potatoes needed.

The potatoes needed sour cream and butter.

I would grab scoopers in hot water and scoop out butter and sour cream then flick them in the potatoes.

Then grab a large ladle and scoop lemon butter onto the steaks to give them a nice shine.

I looked at the top of the ticket to see what the name was and yelled, “Tammy.”

I looked around the kitchen and Tammy was nowhere to be found.

There was no server in sight.

So I had to yell, “Runners.”

No one came so I yelled, “If no one runs this food it will die and the window will be backed up and everything will be screwed.” When I said, “die” I meant that the temperatures of the steaks would rise from medium rare to medium because the steak cooks itself to a new temperature every three to four minutes.

A server came and took the food and the ticket was able to be stabbed.

Another ticket was sold.

That is how my time was spent at the steak house. The tickets would come and I would put the food on the plates and sell them to the servers. The managers would tell us to have pride in our work. I couldn't. I didn't care about steak. I didn't care about the steak house. They didn't give good raises, when they gave raises. The managers weren't awesome; they were generally lazy. The microwaves wouldn't work. The ovens wouldn't work. The grill had parts of it that didn't work, and sometimes dish tank wouldn't work. The place was ghetto and no one cared. I looked online out of boredom to see who the owners were and found out that one of them lived in a giant castle in Ireland with a moat around it.

After the midday rush was over the dishwasher came in. His name was Frankie. Frankie was a very wide and strong young black man. Frankie was a collection of horrible things nobody would ever want to happen to them in one person. He grew up on the worst street in Youngstown on Evergreen. Evergreen was horrible in the 80s when he was child and still to that day a person could drive down that street and see nothing but ramshackle houses and poor black people, jobless, sitting on their porches drinking forties waiting for their lives to change but without having a clue how to make it happen. They were so psychologically disenfranchised and restricted to their respective slums; they had no idea how to live in the white man's world. When driving down that street the old Hobbes quote rang in one's ears, “The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Frankie had shot someone in high school. It was an infamous shootout between high school kids in the late 90s. Youngstown had a lot of infamous shootouts. There was the story of Flip Williams who executed four people. There was a murder over a video game. There was a race war in the junior high. There was a car chase and a shootout that led to an old Mexican woman being shot while watching a rerun of Mash in her living room. And last year there was a fire lit by a mentally retarded person that killed six people, the result of a dispute over a cell phone.

Frankie had participated in the shootout at a Youngstown high school. What it was about, no one even remembered. It didn't matter. It wasn't over oil or conquest. It was high school kids who grew up poor, badly rationalizing that shooting guns would lead to happiness. Frankie was caught in the crossfire. Someone dropped a gun on the cement. Other people were shooting at him and his friends. He picked up the gun. He did not say but one could assume that he cried and wet his pants in fear when he shot at the people who were shooting at him. He never had the land to practice shooting a target so he fired in the general direction of the shooters out of fear and hit one of them in the leg. Frankie was arrested. The principal of the school testified that Frankie was shooting in self-defense. Frankie got one year in a juvenile detention center. When he got out, his mother sent him to Dallas to live with relatives. Frankie lived down there staying out of trouble for several years. He graduated high school, went to parties, got jobs, and talked about the Cowboys. He came back. He was out with his cousin at a bar on the south side of Youngstown. A fight broke out and his cousin was shot in front of him. He said he was close to his cousin. They grew up together, playing on the same streets, going through the same tribulations. Then a year later he went into a bar and the man who he shot when he was in high school; he saw him and followed him home back to his mom's small house on the south side of Youngstown. Frankie laughing, still drunk from the drinks at the bar, still happy from dancing, got of his car. A man yelled. Frankie looked and three bullets hit him: one in his stomach, one in his arm, and one in his leg. He said he couldn't feel it at first. But soon enough he knew he had been shot. He got in his car because he realized he had not died. He saw his cousin die of bullets; he knew that bullets could kill a man. He drove to the hospital bleeding from three holes in his body. He dragged his wounded body into Saint Elizabeth's Hospital. They asked him if he had health care; he said no but they took him anyway. They saved Frankie to keep him living, to keep him washing dishes.