Love Me Back

by Merritt Tierce

  Danny likes to tell the story, when Sanchez is not around, of how Sanchez moved up from dishwasher to glass polisher to busser to barback, and of how he thought Sanchez was going to cry the day he told him to put on a vest and tie—the same uniform as the bartenders. Sanchez makes all the drinks for the bartenders—guests ask for whatever and Roman or Ethan will spin around and say Sanchez! Gooserocks! Manhattanup! Sevenandseven!—and he makes all the drinks for the servers too. The bartenders will be leaning against the liquor cabinets behind them, watching the game on the TV, and Sanchez will be reaching and pivoting and spinning and pouring like mad. For this he is tipped out by the bartenders each night, and he also receives a percentage of the servers’ tips. But we all know there is no way they let him make anything close to what the white English-speaking slow-moving bartenders make. Still he makes so much compared to the other Mexicans. He brought his family over. He has a baby he named after Danny, Sergio Daniel Sanchez.

  We joke that Roman can’t take a piss without Sanchez. There are the servers who think the joke is funny, they laugh like it’s so entertaining that Roman gets away with it, like he’s just some harmless putzy fuck and the world is a room aglow with the coziness of ale and the bonding of all people. But some of us don’t think it’s fair that Sanchez busts his ass so Roman can make six figures. On Roman’s birthday they brought in a big cake and we were all waiting for Roman to show up and blow out his candles. I was standing right next to Sanchez in front of the cake. Calvin got restless because he needed to get back to his table of VIPs and he said Sanchez, where the fuck is this guy? You blow em out. Go on, you do it. Motherfucker make you make all his drinks can’t even get over here to blow out his own damn candles. Sanchez blew out the candles and took a piece of cake into the bar for Roman.

  Roman is married to the most beautiful woman. I don’t know why she isn’t famous she’s so beautiful. She is Puerto Rican and has this skin and this lustrous black hair and this body to smite you, with its fullness here and there and its slightness here and there. And her smile—there is a dimple—my God. She is smart. She is trilingual. She is so kind and funny her union with Roman is a mystery that thwarts discovery. I thought until I saw his cock that surely there was a secret there, and there was, but not the one I expected. Danny showed me Roman’s cock in the office one night—Danny, it is well-known, is endowed on an order to make you not want to look directly at it. But when Roman got his white cock I guess it was more of a docking than an endowment. Danny said Wanna see his cock? and Roman said I gotta cock the size of a silverback gorilla’s, I swear. Wanna see?

  He got it out, I looked, it barely peeped out from the fur. He zipped up. He said The silverback gorilla has the smallest cock in the world.

  I decide I just want to go home so I decline Danny’s offer of a drink and I’m waiting for him to finish talking to the liquor rep so I can turn in my cash-out when Felipe comes back into the bar pushing the mop in its yellow wheeled bucket with one hand. He has something in his other hand that he holds up for Danny to see. They find this allá, he says, gesturing with a nod toward the dining room. He sets a digital camera down on the bar top, a fancy SLR with a big fat telescopic lens. What table? asks Danny. Felipe doesn’t know.

  Sanchez, I think you should take some pictures of me, says Danny, unbuckling his belt, since you couldn’t remember to say Felipe already mopped before I pissed on the floor. You know how to work this thing?

  Sanchez demurs. I can tell he wants to cooperate because he knows he owes Danny for the mistake, but he hears in Danny’s voice a mocking tone and sees a threat in the thrust of Danny’s jaw and his sidelong look. The restaurant is a cash cow and it’s the only one, there’s no corporate office anywhere, there’s just Danny, so everybody learns quick that loyalty comes before all. After loyalty, which includes trusting that Danny is smarter than you and has already made all the calculations to be made in any given situation, arriving at the best or only possible verdict or at least the one that works his angle the fastest—after loyalty, there’s just the guest and saying yes, so you can get this job down fast if you know Danny’s in charge and those are his two things. Sanchez has it down, which means he knows he has to play along here if he doesn’t want to end up in deeper shit with Danny—the shit hasn’t even turned deep yet, in truth, because Danny’s not really going to blame Sanchez for the fact that he pissed on the clean floor and made more work for Felipe. But he might blame Sanchez if Sanchez doesn’t pretend to take the blame, which now involves taking the camera Danny’s holding out to him.

  The camera has been in Uganda and Uganda is in the camera. I will understand this later, when by chance I see the pictures in a national magazine. The magazine runs a cover story on a controversial black religious leader—a profile of his rise to prominence and his recent work in Africa. There will be a picture of him outside an orphanage with his arm around the shoulder of a lean young boy. The boy is wearing a golden baseball cap and is barefoot and the Bishop, as they call him even though he’s a Protestant minister, is wearing a brightly colored kente shirt.

  Calvin waited on the Bishop and his guests earlier. I helped him get their wine started but I never noticed the camera and Calvin left over an hour ago. After he finds out about the camera he will consider quitting The Restaurant even though he has built up his call parties over the past seven years so that he can count on a fat night every night. Recently one of his regulars left him a $3,000 tip on a $900 tab, which none of us could shut up about until the week before Christmas when one of his other regulars left him $5,000 on $500. Even though you know that about $4,500 of it is because that guy gets off on having a handsome, older, immaculately groomed and well-spoken black man wait on him, and even though you know that about $400 of it is because Calvin is a genuinely beautiful and irresistibly charismatic individual, for neither of which amounts could you possibly qualify even though you know that your skill set is as technically proficient as Calvin’s, certainly proficient enough to have deserved the remaining standard of $100, you still can’t help feeling stunned by the mighty whoosh of air as fortune passes you by.

  One of the Bishop’s guests tonight, an Ivy League professor, is in town to give a lecture at a local university for Martin Luther King Day. The $5,000 tip is weeks behind us and Calvin and I have not spoken of it. I didn’t work the night it happened, and he was off the following day when I heard about it, but when I saw him next I didn’t even have to mention it. We just looked at each other and I raised my eyebrows and shook my head like I’m sorry, I can’t love you anymore. But we hadn’t actually traded words about it until tonight, when we were both at the caviar bar making amuse plates for our tables, after he had just seen the Bishop come in with his handler and the Professor. Calvin was glowing, he was nervous and excited and talking so fast I said What’s with you, Cal? Is Kon back?

  Konstantin was the guy who dropped the five Gs on him. We see plenty of celebrities in The Restaurant, and I haven’t known of a single one he ever went giddy over—in fact the more famous somebody was the more determined Cal was to act like they were nobody special. Don’t go pussy up around em, he’d say, then they think you weak and next thing you know you’re dropping shit and spilling shit. Oh excuse me sir I’m so sorry I just got so nervous. Naw. Just do your thing, be cool, work em like they anybody else. He explained that he was buzzed because he had just asked the Bishop if he could take care of them, which is kind of against the code among servers but since they were black I doubted anyone would protest. The Bishop had said yes, certainly, and had introduced Calvin to the Professor, who, Calvin explained to me, was a well-known Black Power figure in the seventies and had continued a long career in the movement. I peeked around the corner to check him out in the lobby and he looked so fly, with the Afro and the powder-blue suit and the broad-collared shirt he wore open to show the gold chains around his neck, that I asked Calvin, Is he for real? Calvin gave me this look like I was in trouble and said, Is he for real?! That man is rea
ler than real. That man was real long before you were. Is he for real! Get out of here. Just get on with your little old ignorant self, he said to me in mock disgust, and when I apologized he told me that the honor of waiting on the Professor was worth more to him than any amount of money he’d ever make off a table. I might not have believed him, except that he gave up his next table so he could focus on the Bishop and the Professor. Even when he’d been so in the weeds with call parties and had more covers running than three other servers put together he had never before given up a table.

  The handler goes everywhere with the Bishop. In the magazine I will read how he is a right-hand man out of antiquity, a vizier and appointed prophet, in the form of chief accountant and public relations manager. The Bishop is never seen without him. When they come into The Restaurant the handler will take the server aside at the beginning of dinner to explain how everything is to work—questions of the Bishop will be addressed to the handler, the Bishop is never to see the bill, the Bishop’s plate must touch the table first on every course. The handler is the Bishop’s personal photographer, too, and after everything goes down I can’t think how he could have forgotten such a serious-looking camera unless he was as excited as Calvin about the Professor.

  Calvin was on such a high when he left and I am buoyed a bit by his infectious joy, but my night wore me down. I waited on the people who typify our clientele, the people who’ve made work for the Professor all these years. They seemed to be attorneys, and over dessert one of them was advising another in a loud drunk way about case strategy and he said, Listen, Jack, they’re like girlfriends—it’s best to have backup, you know what I mean? As they were paying out they were trying to decide where to go next and settled on Silver City, to the disappointment of one of the younger ones who had tentatively suggested that he knew some girls they could call, which was shot down by the one called Jack who said Oh, is this a you buy em you break em type deal? Cause if not I’d rather just have my scotch and look at some titties and call it in. We have a long day tomorrow.

  They don’t know Danny spends so much money and time at Silver City that they could get VIP treatment just by mentioning his name. There are a few male servers who might discreetly apprise Danny of their table’s intent to go over there, and if Danny feels like it he might make a call, and then the server could go back and lean over next to the one who paid the bill, the one who said it was best to have backup, and the server might whisper to him that the GM had them all set up over there, and there would be an exchange of Man, you didn’t have to do that, and No, it’s my pleasure, and Thanks, pal, and Don’t mention it, just come back, and Oh we definitely will, and You should ask for me, I’ll take care of you and Sure, man, you take care of us we’ll take care of you, that’s how it works right? And that server would have scored a call party and maybe a little extra in a handshake. I can’t do it, I mean I don’t want to but it would come off wrong from a girl anyway.

  I am tired and I want to go home and take off my boy suit, the vest and the double Windsor-knotted tie and the button-down shirt. I want to take a shower. But you don’t interrupt Danny. Even Ana, who’s six, knows this, has known it from the first time I brought her up to The Restaurant on payday and Danny shook her hand and looked her in the eye and said How are you tonight ma’am. When she tells me she wants to work in a restaurant when she grows up I don’t tell her this wasn’t my ambition when I was her age and it still isn’t. I just say to myself Don’t fuck up. If I don’t cross Danny and I don’t let any of it get to me the money is so good I can turn it into something else, something honorable.

  Sanchez is trying to say that he really has no idea how to work the camera or any camera at all ever, No sé, jefe, no sé, he is repeating with his hands in the air as Danny shouts over him, Don’t fuck with me, I know you’re fucking fucking with me, Sanchez, don’t do it, but the closing valet comes into the bar to drop off the liquor rep’s keys because his is the last car in the lot. If he were famous or rich they’d wait around for him but he’s like one of us now. The valet’s entrance distracts Danny from his harassment of Sanchez. Hey, he says to the valet, I met your sister tonight, we bought her and her friends some appetizers and drinks, I think they had a good time. The valet says Yeah, she’s visiting from L.A. so I told her she should come up here and check it out. Thanks for doing that for her. You want me to lock up? he asks.

  This is sharp of him, to know that Danny likes to lock the front door after the valets leave, and to offer to do it for him. Danny notices if you go out of your way. The valet is in a bad hurry to get home after such a long night, just like the rest of us, to get to whatever it is he has waiting for him, probably weed or coke, maybe just a beer or a woman, and whatever that thing is it starts to pull on you hard late at night. When your shit is done you jet. Danny has his own habits that must be taken up nightly but not until he has closed the place down, and the valet’s gesture lets him stay at the bar and pour himself another shot. He pours one for the valet too and tosses him his keys. Here, he says, holding out the shot, Thanks buddy. Just leave my keys by the office on your way out the back door. Tell your sister come back anytime. They down the tequila and Danny throws his shot glass on the floor where he pissed. It shatters and he turns back to Sanchez.

  Fuck it, Sanchez, I’ll deal with you later, he says, but he picks the camera up off the bar and slings the strap over his shoulder. I’m goin to Silver City soon as I get this bar drawer counted. Roman’s already there. You wanna come? he asks the liquor rep. Now that the valet is gone he starts telling the liquor rep about the valet’s sister. You can tell she’s got something in her, he says. She’s real pretty but she has—you know, her hair’s different and shit, so I asked her where she’s from. She says Oh I’m from Jersey, and I say, So … where are your parents from? And she says, My mom is German and my dad’s American. And I say, American! There’s no American! What do you mean American? Well, he’s from Houston, she says. Houston! I say. So? I’m from New York but that don’t mean nothing, I’m Italian-American. And finally she says, Well my dad’s African-American. Oh! Danny says to the liquor rep, so her dad’s black! But she wasn’t that pretty, I wouldn’t fuck her.

  Danny has me do various administrative tasks for The Restaurant because he hates the tedious paperwork side of the business, so I’m in the office paying some invoices the next day when he shows up in his street clothes, rather than the $2,000 handmade Italian suits I’m used to seeing on him. His after-hours hip-hop accessorization used to perplex me but I’m starting to get it. If you want to be a gangster you have to look like one. The spotless puffy white sneakers, the hoodie, the huge black tinted-window SUV, the playing of serious games. At all moments he defies you to underestimate him.

  The office is an unventilated fire hazard, a closet of a room that has accumulated various computers and filing cabinets and broken-down pieces of The Restaurant like busted chairs and menus whose leather spines have torn. Banker’s boxes of outdated cashouts encroach on the safe and the copier so when you want to get paid or reprint the wine list it’s like one of those strategy puzzles where you move one piece and you have to move a dozen others to get the next where you want it. It is not surprising to me that the camera Felipe found last night is sitting precariously on top of the paper shredder. I pick it up by the long lens and ask Danny if he figured out whose it was. He lets out a huge low belch and says No, but whatever fucker left it now has some prime footage of the silverback gorilla in the wild.

  What if they come back for it? I ask. You’re just gonna give it back to them with that on there? What if it’s somebody we like?

  It don’t show his face, Danny says, just his cock, so what are they gonna do? I think it’s pretty fucking funny.

  Danny goes home to change into his suit and I try to turn on the camera, thinking I will at least see if I recognize anyone in the noncock photos, but the battery is dead. Later that day I am in the wine cellar updating the eighty-sixed list when the Bishop’s hand
ler comes by. The wine cellar is all glass on one side and looks out on the lobby, so I see the handler come in and walk up to the front desk. I wave at him, indicating that I will come out to help him, realizing immediately that the camera is probably the Bishop’s. I squat down by a bin, facing away from him, putting the bottles of Silver Oak away very slowly as I imagine saying Sir there are pictures of white cock on your camera or No sir we haven’t found a camera but we’ll let you know.

  If I take out the card before I give it back he’ll notice as soon as he gets wherever he’s going and it might get back to Danny. If I don’t give him the camera and I hang on to it until I can figure out what to do it might get back to Danny. The Bishop calls Danny directly whenever he wants a reservation and Danny is the only person in the restaurant the Bishop will speak to in person, besides Calvin. One thing you can get fired for faster than Danny can unzip his pants is if he hears about something from a guest when you could have told him first. So if I take out the card or I don’t give the handler the camera I will have to tell Danny just to cover my ass, and who knows how he will react to my do-gooding. Don’t fuck up, I say to myself, don’t fuck up. Three weeks ago I took Ana on her first airplane trip ever. Just the two of us, we went to Chicago and had chocolate-chip pancakes across the street from the Art Institute. We built a snow-woman in Grant Park. In the museum, looking at the giant Impressionist canvas with the people holding umbrellas, my daughter said she thought maybe she would be a painter when she grew up. Or how do you get to work in a museum? she asked. I realize that if I just give the handler the camera the Bishop will never know about the cock photos, because the handler’s job is to absorb anything that’s pretty fucking funny.