Play Me Backwards

by Adam Selzer

  I nodded. “We may be a motley crew of damned and forsaken souls around here, but we aren’t douche bags.”

  “Whatever,” said Paige. “If it bugs you so much, I won’t talk about it anymore. But that’s no excuse to make my sister eat paint.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “We won’t do it again.”

  “Do you have enough money to take me to dinner and a movie tonight?” she asked. “And pay for both of us?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “You need a better job,” she said. “This place is shit. You might as well just turn in pop cans for nickels, like a fucking eight-year-old.”

  And she walked out, leaving me feeling like a complete asshole.

  So this was love.

  I remembered the night she’d first come to my house excited to be with me even though I was a complete bum. I wouldn’t have believed that someone like her could ever love someone like me.

  Now, I was starting to realize that love is like one of those songs where you have to play the whole thing backwards to hear all the hidden messages.

  22. LOVE

  Love is like a middle-school dance: You’re supposed to be having a good time, but mostly you just stand around questioning your value as a human being and thinking that maybe you should have stayed home.

  Love is also like a Slushee: It’s so sweet, but so, so messy, and deep down you know, from the first sip, that the smooth texture won’t last, and after a few sips your tongue will be too numb to taste much, and pretty soon there’ll be nothing left in the cup but some shaved ice that takes more work than it’s really worth to suck through the straw at all.

  Love is like a blanket on the bed in a cheap motel you check into when the rainstorm gets too hard to drive your leaky car in. It’s warm and dry and feels like just what you needed, but you can’t help thinking that it might very well give you a rash.

  Love is like a maze of mirrors. No map can help you through it because you can never quite tell where you’re going. Also, you’re likely to see sides of yourself that you normally don’t.

  Love is like putting on a new pair of glasses that makes you experience the whole world differently. You hear birds chirping and bells ringing, and you feel soft breezes and notice that the flowers on the trees smell like Heaven. But sometimes you also notice the weeds growing up through the cracks, the noisy floorboards, the rattle in your engine, the hole in your shoe, the stains on the ceiling, and everything else that never bothered you before, and now it drives you nuts.

  Love is the feeling that your life is finally about to begin. But that’s one thing when you’re younger and think being an adult will be awesome, and another when you know it’s all about busting your ass to have a stainless-steel kitchen and shit.

  Love is a whole new gnawing feeling in your guts. And it doesn’t replace the old one. You just have to hope that it compliments it.

  Love is something you get by without for a long time, but once you find it, you can’t imagine life without it anymore. Which seems like a good thing, but you could say the same thing about a colostomy bag, probably.

  Love is like fitting two puzzle pieces from two different puzzles together. You try not to think about the fact that the original puzzles they came from will never be quite the same, or that the new picture they’ll make might look all wrong.

  Fuck.

  23. MARKETING

  By the time I got home from work that day, Paige had sent me links to about fifty restaurants in town that let you apply for jobs online. They all said they were looking for people who were self-motivated, friendly, and detail oriented.

  I wanted to just write “Fuck detail orientation, you bigoted scum” right into the name field, but I didn’t. Paige was right. I was never going to amount to anything worth being if I just kept working at the Ice Cave forever. I still didn’t mind the idea of not amounting to anything so much, but if I was ever going to move out of my parents’ house, and have enough cash on hand to get cheese sticks and things now and then, I was going to need a job that paid better. It’s one thing to be broke and living in a tiny hovel with cars up on cinder blocks in the yard if you’re single, but having a girlfriend isn’t cheap. So I filled out the applications.

  None of them asked what my grades were like, so I had that going for me. Most just wanted a résumé. A few had a box in which you were supposed to answer the question “Why do you want to work on our award-winning team?”

  I usually just put “so I can gain real-world experience with a successful organization.” That was bullshit, of course, but it sounded better than “for the cash.” A lot of would-be employers hate to hear that, for some reason. You’d think they’d like honesty, but people seriously expect you to say you always dreamed of being a fry cook.

  I couldn’t resist messing around with a couple of them, though. One was a place clear out in Altoona, which was farther than I wanted to commute. With that one I added a part in my résumé saying that I was a wide receiver on the school crotch-kicking team. A wise manager would look at that and think, Let’s hire him! A guy who can be a wide receiver on a crotch-kicking team can probably take a lot of torture.

  On another one, for a place clear the hell in Indianola, I even added a bit about how I had led the crotch-kicking team to the state championship, despite the notable handicap of only having one leg. “The guys who are making a movie about me say I’m a hero,” I wrote. “But I’m just an ordinary, detail-oriented young man who won’t let adversity stand between me and my love of kicking people in the crotch.”

  At the West Egg Steakhouse there was another question: “Describe a time when you’ve utilized outstanding leadership skills.”

  That just about made me want to barf. I was applying for a job working in a restaurant, not rallying armies to cross mighty rivers into battle or bossing whale hunters around.

  I figured that the West Egg Steakhouse was way out of my league, being a fancy downtown steakhouse, so I decided to have some fun with my answer:

  Last year in school I took a class on marketing. My group had to develop a new product idea and then make a commercial for it. The other people in my group were slackers, but with my leadership, we developed a concept for a breakfast cereal called Nards. The commercial we made was so good that everyone in the class wished they were eating Nards right then! I was fascinated by the psychology behind it, and how marketing could make people get so excited about Nards. Maybe I can make it for real sometime, and you can sell it at the West Egg. You could even put it on the sign. WEST EGG STEAKHOUSE: EAT NARDS HERE!

  That, of course, was the one application that got a response.

  The day after I sent it in, the West Egg Steakhouse called me in for an interview. I halfway thought they were kidding, but I cleaned myself up as well as I could and drove out there after school.

  The manager there was a younger guy, maybe thirty or thirty-five, who had his hair slicked back. He was wearing a midnight-blue suit and a red bow tie, and his nametag said BRAD. He seemed a little less slimy than the salesman back at McIntyre’s, but not by too much, and the nonblack suit didn’t make him seem comforting or approachable to me. But I did my best. Stand when they stand, sit when they sit.

  “You must be Leon?” he said, offering his hand.

  “I am,” I said, taking it. I shook it hard and looked him in the eye, like you’re supposed to.

  Brad glanced down at a printed-out version of my application. “I see you’re interested in marketing,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. I managed not to laugh here, somehow.

  “And you go to Cornersville Trace High?”

  “For a few more weeks. Graduation is coming up.”

  “Would you be leaving us for college at the end of the summer?”

  “I’ll probably just go to community college or junior college for a couple of years,” I said. “So I wouldn’t have to quit.”

  Brad gave me a thoughtful look. “That’s probably smart, in this economy,�
�� he said. “Not that I wouldn’t hire you if you were going to college, but I wouldn’t love it if you left us in three or four months.”

  He read over the application again, while making noises like choo choo choo choo choo under his breath, which I guess he thought made him look very busy.

  “Now, if we hire you, you’ll have a lot of responsibility,” he said. “We value our guests here, and we always want them to have a positive experience.”

  Everyone calls customers “guests” now. Stan and I preferred to call them “idiots.”

  But I smiled and nodded.

  “So, Leon,” Brad said, “do you think you can handle the responsibility of a job here?”

  “I’m sure I can,” I said.

  “I know you were asking for a server job, but would you be okay with starting out in the dish pit? We like to start people at the bottom here.”

  I shrugged. “I guess,” I said.

  “Well then,” he said, “we’re actively and aggressively hiring right now, so all I’ll need you to do is fill out your W-2, sign the contract, and take the personality test, then we’ll get you started on the training program.”

  “Personality test?”

  “It’s nothing serious, just something we have all our new hires do. I don’t love it, personally, but it’s company-wide policy. We’ll have to let you go if it turns out that you’re a psychopath or you fail the drug test, but I’m sure you’ll be fine.” He winked, then held up a large packet and handed it to me. “Just fill in all these answers, and let me know when you’re done.”

  He set me up at an empty table, and I was soon joined by another potential new hire: a scruffy guy who looked to be a couple of years older than me and didn’t seem capable of reading silently to himself. He whispered the questions and talked to himself as he worked his way through his packet.

  The packet was labeled Spumoni Restaurant Concepts, Inc. Personality Assessment Survey. It was full of multiple-choice questions about what I thought about employee theft, snitching on employees who break the rules, and of course, leadership skills.

  What a crock of shit.

  An awful lot of the questions repeated themselves. One yes-or-no asked, “Have you tried illegal drugs?” Then, a couple of pages later, there was a multiple-choice question that asked, “Which of these drugs have you tried? Check all that apply.”

  I suppose I could see the logic behind the whole thing—it was a good way to weed out the complete dumbasses. Anyone who took a test like this and said that they’d tried heroin, thought employee theft was “acceptable in most cases,” and thought that honesty was “not very important” or “not at all important” was probably too dumb to hire. It’d be like getting stoned on the way to a drug test.

  I finished in ten minutes, then waited a few minutes for the other guy to finish.

  “Pretty stupid, huh?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I’ve seen worse, man.”

  The two of us brought our tests over to Brad, and he put them into a manila envelope.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “This thing is really just for insurance reasons. We’ll have to fire you if we get the results back and they say you’re a psychopath, though.”

  He’d already made that joke, but I let it slide.

  “That’s tough but fair,” I said. He pulled a couple of contracts out of a file drawer and handed them to us.

  According to the contract I’d be making a buck more per hour than I did at the Cave. At part-time that came to about twenty more bucks a week, minus the extra money I’d spend on gas for the longer commute. Not exactly big bucks.

  “All right,” said Brad. “Now we can get you guys started on the training videos.”

  He led us back to the office and loaded up a couple of videos that I guess were supposed to be our initiation into the West Egg family.

  The first was basically propaganda about why unions were evil. The way they made it look, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union was actually a sleeper cell for al-Qaeda, and union dues paid for drug cartels to have families lined up against the wall and shot. The whole thing reminded me of one of the antidrug videos they’d shown in health class.

  I looked over at the other guy midway through it.

  “Man,” I said. “They sure as hell don’t want us joining a union.”

  “I’ve seen that same video about a million times,” he said with a yawn.

  “Worked a lot of name-tag jobs?”

  “Yeah.”

  I’d once known a guy who called himself a McHobo. He bummed from job to job, never took a promotion, never stayed anywhere long. Never anywhere longer than six months. He said that to specialize was to settle, and settling into a retail and restaurant job was the same thing as dying.

  I’d settled into the Cave, for sure. I think the guy would have approved of that place, but as I sat back in the chair watching the video, I told myself that I shouldn’t be settling anywhere. It was time to move on. Paige was right. And I didn’t have to stay at West Egg forever. Just a few months, until I found something better.

  The next video was about the dress and appearance code. The West Egg was a classy restaurant, the kind of place where people came to get engaged or celebrate retirements or whatever, and as the video said about six times, they weren’t selling food, they were creating memories. And no one wanted any memories of unkempt employees. I didn’t remember any event from my past where my memories were tarnished because a guy had a stain on his shirt, but that was just me. I lived my life in a world of stains.

  Now and then as we sat there watching the videos, the various assistant managers, buyers, chefs, and other people who made the machine that was the West Egg Steakhouse run smoothly came in and out of the office. Some of them ignored us, and others introduced themselves. Brad came in to check on us right during the part about facial hair regulations and got a goofy look on his face as he looked down at the scruffy guy.

  “You might wanna pay attention to that part,” he said.

  “Even if I’m just in the dish pit?” the guy asked.

  Brad opened up one of the drawers underneath the computer monitor and pulled out a disposable razor that probably should have been disposed of a long time ago.

  “This is what I make my people use if they come in looking like you do,” he said. “The store razor.”

  “That doesn’t look very sanitary,” I said.

  “And that’s how we make sure no one shows up with an appearance violation,” Brad said with a turdish smirk. “Goes for you, too. You might not need it yet, though.”

  “I shave,” I said.

  “Keep at it.” He laughed.

  He put the razor away and started rifling through some paperwork from the desk, muttering something about how many people were asking for weekend nights off around prom season.

  This whole place was starting to piss me off. What was the point of all this, anyway? The money wasn’t that much better.

  I thought about the servers at Casa Bravo. The people here were probably no different. Having them for coworkers instead of Stan and Dustin probably wouldn’t exactly help me shape up and live my life on the straight and narrow.

  Maybe Lando Calrissian made more money administrating a gas mine on Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back than he did when he was smuggling spices in his space pirate days with Han Solo, and I’m sure it was more respectable and all, but do you think he was happier? Do you think he found it more fulfilling? Hell no. And it didn’t keep him out of trouble, either.

  This deal kept getting worse all the time.

  Paige would be mad if I didn’t take the job, but she’d also probably be mad if I did take it and couldn’t get the night of her debutante ball off.

  When the door opened again and another manager or somebody came in, I looked out and caught a glance at some of the people in button-down shirts who were sliding in for an early dinner. Slick sons of bitches who reminded me of Avery the Asshole from the suit shop, all ready
to eat a steak, chug a few beers, and harass a waitress after a long day of laying people off.

  My eyelid began to twitch.

  No money was worth this.

  “You know what?” I said. “Fuck this shit.”

  I gathered up my paperwork and shoved it at Brad.

  “You’re leaving?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” I said. “And in case you didn’t get the joke on my application, ‘nards’ means ‘balls.’ ”

  The soon-to-be-less-scruffy guy chuckled, so I felt like I was leaving on a high note when I walked out the door. I marched into my car and drove to the Ice Cave. Home.

  In the back room Stan was going over something on the computer with George, the owner, and both of them were so wrapped up that they didn’t notice me coming in at all. Dustin was scratching his crotch as he sat on a barrel. Jenny was cuddling very casually with Jake on the couch, as she sometimes did, and Edie was leaning in enough that she could be said to be halfway cuddling with both of them as she typed something on her phone. True Norwegian Black Metal was on the stereo. It smelled like candy and BO and the walk-in freezer was humming.

  Jake was saying that his Uncle Travis believed that all a man needs is a six-pack of beer, a decent chair, and a remote control. That was it.

  “TV is evil,” said Comrade Edie.

  “You don’t need a TV,” said Jake. “The remote control is just so you can hit people over the head with it if they try to get you off the chair.”

  “That’s the life,” said Stan. “A beer to drink, a chair to sit on, and a remote control to smite your enemies.”

  These were my people. It felt good to be home.

  If I wanted a better-paying job, I could wait a few years take a gig at Big Jake’s High-Class House of Ass.

  24. LEGEND

  Things felt a bit rocky with Paige for the first week of school after spring break. She didn’t seem to understand that places like the West Egg just weren’t for me.

  Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the Nontoxic Club debacle, we picked up a stray at the Cave. For the rest of spring break, and every day after school the week after, one of the girls from Autumn’s group, Natasha, came in by herself every afternoon. She had been the only one besides Autumn who ate her whole cookie; while the others giggled and shrieked, she had mostly just sat there, not really saying anything. But I guess she fell in love with the seamy underbelly of suburbia that day.