Noah Cicero: Best Behavior

Frankie didn't snitch on the man who shot him. He didn't seek revenge. He knew that the man who shot had meant it. He wanted Frankie dead. To snitch would ensure his death.

Frankie lived in Warren in a small apartment with a short little girl who comforted him in the night and made him laugh. He had two kids with women he wasn't with. He had a lot of moments that would break most people, but he kept going.

I walked by him and Frankie said, “Look at this, look at this,” holding his cell phone.

I looked at him with a curious expression.

He held up his cell phone and said, “Look.”

I looked down and it was a sumo wrestler's ass.

“What the fuck is that Frankie?”

He laughed hysterically and said, “That's a man's ass.” He laughed like a madman.

“That sure is.”

He turned serious and said, “This white girl says she had my baby. She said they ran the DNA and used one of my past DNA tests and they say its mine.”

“That's three babies, isn't it?”

“Yeah, I got too many babies as it is.”

“Have you tried pulling out?”

He didn't recognize that comment and said, “It's my first white baby.”

“I almost had a black baby.”

“You did?”

“Yeah, but the umbilical cord killed it.”

“Oh, I have three babies now. But I gotta talk to a lawyer about this DNA test.”

“That sounds good. Bring in the lawyers.”

I walked away and realized that he didn't tell me the child's sex or name.

I was outside smoking in a small shack where the potatoes and cleaning chemicals were stored. I sat on a box of potatoes. It was chilly and lightly snowing. Beth came out, sat on a box of potatoes and began to cry. Beth was always crying. She cried every day. She was from Geneva, up by Cleveland and was a poor white girl that never had anything. She never confessed what her childhood was like. She wasn't into sharing her life. She got pregnant when she was 17 and got married to the father because she was told it was the right thing to do. Her husband refused to do anything. He would sit on the couch everyday instead of changing diapers and doing the dishes. In the last nine years of marriage he had worked for a total two years. He went to trucking school, graduated, got a job and then quit in less than two months. Beth once said, “I never had a life.” We were all talking about the bar and how much fun we had. How we were in college, learning, not caring about things, like kids. How our lives were less hard than hers. And she said, “I never had a life.”

We asked her why she won't go out drinking. She said she wasn't allowed because she became a whore when she got drunk. We told her that was normal for a woman to become a whore when they got drunk just like it was normal for a man's penis to not work when he got drunk.

She didn't respond to that. She kept scorning her life and her choices in her head, silently in despair over how things turned out.

I said to Beth, “What's wrong.”

She looked at her feet with tears flowing from her eyes and said, “I asked for a divorce today.”

“That's good.”

“But we're supposed to stay together for the kids.”

I considered a response and said, “My parents didn't love each other. It sucks in its own way knowing that your parents are living in the same building even though they hate each other. You'll end up teaching your kids that maintaining a failed relationship is a good thing.”

“I'll have to pay for a lawyer and have a custody battle. It'll be so hard.”

“Yeah, but imagine how hard it'll be if you have to live like that for the next 40 years.”

She didn't want to consider either of those fates and said, “He won't do anything but sit on that couch and watch television. We've argued so many times. I've begged him to get up, I've cried so many times to get him to help me. But he won't. He won't help me.”

She stood up, threw her cigarette at the cement and went in the building.

The servers of America are a pitiful bunch. Some were in college and it wasn't bad. They were just passing through. But a lot were trying to live off of tips. It was a degrading job.

It was the end of the night and I was mopping the floor. I had mopped many floors. I mopped floors at Wendy's, Taco Bell, a nursing home, and several other restaurants. I was 28 and still mopping floors. The world looks down on people that mop floors. I would be going to New York City the next week to a world full of people that didn't mop floors. It never bothered me to mop floors though. I kind of liked it. I would look down at the floor before I would start and say to myself, 'Wow, what a dirty floor.” Then I would mop it with industrial strength de-greaser and bleach. Then spray it off with a hose so it would look beautiful.

After we were done at the end of the night I went in the office and said to Renee, “We're done, can you check us out?”

“Oh, my god, whatever.”

I left the office and stood in the kitchen. Diego stood near me staring at his shoes. Every night we had to get checked out. We COULD NOT LEAVE until a manager had checked us out. We were adults but we needed to be checked out by another adult.

Renee came out and said, “Oh, you think you boys are done?”

She walked up the line and kept saying, “This is disgusting. This is so disgusting… don't you have any self-respect? Don't you take any pride in your work?”

We listened and wiped down the areas she designated.

It was the same thing every night. She would come out and say the same things, about how everything was disgusting and how we needed to take pride in our work.

And every night we didn't care if it was disgusting or about taking pride in our work.

It never occurred to me how to take pride in cooking at a restaurant when I didn't own it. They didn't give good raises and didn't pay enough to afford the crappy health care offered to their employees. None of the cooks had gotten a raise in a year since the hiring of the new head manager. Before we got raises every four months if we did a good job. And especially since the economy had recently collapsed raises were really out of the question. The only thing keeping us at that job was the fact that there were no other jobs. The area factories had recently sent out several 1000 workers into the labor pool that didn't mind working 50 hours a week and had kids to feed. The classifieds were empty. Craigslist was silent to our needs. The only thing that kept us there was the phrase, “At least I have a job.”

But I liked the job. Or maybe I liked working. It gave me something to do. It was thoughtless. It was an escape. You went somewhere and did things you didn't care about. People told you what to do. You had a level of responsibility. If you performed their tasks the way they wanted them, they never cared. Without work I felt bored. I didn't really like work when I was younger. Taking shit and doing things I didn't want to do. But I got used to it after it awhile. One learns to suffer after a while with stupid shit. I recognized this is what everybody does and what makes the world. People going to work. Everyone doing their own little part; everyone agreeing that everybody else needs to find something to do. Each with their own little thing.

It was around that time that I noticed the strange relationship co-workers developed. My mother always mentioned it. She had worked at the Chevy plant for 33 years and always talked about how she watched her co-workers grow old. But what was strange to her, was that they didn't notice it happening. It was slow over the course of 30 years. Like time lapse photography. Watching each other slowly wrinkle up and droop.

I had worked at the steak house for two years and had already watched four women go through complete pregnancies. They even came in and I held their babies. I had attended birthday parties, cookouts, college graduation parties and a New Year’s bash with my co-workers. They had slowly become my friends. People I thought and even worried about. There were some I disliked at first, but eventually after spending 30 to 40 hours a week together, for years, they become like a sibling and you learn to put up with it.