“No mud,” said Frida. “No flowers. You have to focus on how the pain of now can lead to the joy of tomorrow.”
“So you’ll turn all this mud into flowers?”
“Of course not,” said Frida.
Remote became sadder.
“We’ll turn the mud into flowers together.” Frida stroked her unibrow. “I have seeds for us all.”
Frida passed out pouches to Remote and the Earthlings and we waddled through the mud scattering seeds.
In time, flowers grew. Once the flowers came, the earth was dry again. To commemorate our hero, we named the day Friday.
And Friday became the day to celebrate the end of the sadness. To listen to music. To go out. To enjoy the evening.
I lay in bed looking at the scabs on my knuckles and every now and then I counted the money I’d found in my uncle’s wallet. Money is so weird. In jail, people hide it up their asses. They call that a prison wallet. If a kid loses a tooth, you put a bill beneath their pillow. That bill could’ve been up someone’s butt a week before, could’ve passed through the hands of meth dealers who’d murdered people. And then that kid takes it to buy candy.
I don’t know.
I was going to be washing dishes that night at Broth, and I didn’t want to do much. I wanted all my energy to be saved. I knew once I got out of bed, I’d pace around. My nerves would start to work. I’d burn myself out from the inside.
What would I tell Peggy? What would she do after she knew? What would they do to me? Where would I go then?
I tried to sleep the day away, but I just lay there looking at the texture of the ceiling. I texted Erika that I missed her, but she didn’t text back. I texted the unknown number that Bennet had texted from, but it didn’t text back. It’s weird waiting for that kind of communication. Because you don’t know what’s been seen and ignored, and you don’t know what hasn’t been seen yet.
You start to make things up. You start to imagine the worst. Maybe Erika didn’t miss me back. Maybe the person who had the unknown phone was just laughing at me.
I picked up my philosophy book and read about another philosopher. I read about Epicurus. He was a hedonist. He wanted to know why people were happy or unhappy. Everyone thought that he was kind of a wild dude. That he banged virgins and drank all day. Ate whatever. Did nothing but dance. But that’s not the way he was. He studied happiness, but he was real chill about it. He ate almost nothing. Just enough to keep himself alive. He only owned a few pairs of clothes. He said people make three big mistakes when they think of happiness. He said people think happiness is this:
Sex
Money
Luxury
Which is kind of like that song of Drake’s called “Successful.” He wants money, cars, clothes and hoes. Epicurus said, though, that those things don’t mean shit. Epicurus would’ve looked at Drake and called him a miserable motherfucker. And if you think about it, maybe it’s true. Go watch Drake giving Rihanna the Vanguard Award. It might be the saddest shit on the internet.
Instead, Epicurus said that what you really want is:
Friends
A job you enjoy
Time to think
Can you imagine if Drake sang:
I want some people
People who I like
A job that’s alright
And time
To unwind
I just wanna be successful
Dude wouldn’t sell shit. He’d be back in the Six, and maybe he’d be the happiest motherfucker alive.
When I got up to shower, Peggy was gone. I knew rent was due, so I put the eight hundred dollars on the kitchen table, texted her that I’d left money, and then headed to work.
On the way, I saw Autistic Ross, and I went up to him to see if he had any answers.
“You boy,” he said to me. “We talked afore. The other day. About right here.” He looked around on his little spot. He had on a pink Polo shirt and he was wearing navy slacks. He pulled his elbows up at his sides and he smiled big and squirreled around some. “Talked Alaska,” he told me. “Talked the dadgum weather,” he said. His top teeth dangled out of his grin.
“That’s right,” I told him. His joy was infectious. His words seemed to cleanse me. “I had a question for you?”
“For me? You gonna ask if I’m cold? I’m about to go get my jacket on,” he said. “Beyond that I am generally lacking when it comes to the answers department. Momma use to say I’d forget my name if it was any longer than Ross. But I like Ross better than any other name anyhow, but I couldn’t tell you why. Ain’t that funny how you never really know why you like what you like. Like I like creamy peanut butter better than crunchy peanut butter, but if you chew on crunchy peanut butter a bit, it gets real creamy in your mouth. Maybe I just don’t like all that dadgum work.”
Everything he said made sense, but I swear you got stupider just following his lines of thought. “When I came by the other day you showed me something?”
“I showed you where the body’s buried?” He had a shocked look on his face.
“What?” I said.
He cackled. “That’s my little joke. I tell it different ways. Sometimes people say, ‘Wanna know a secret?’ and I say, ‘I know where the body’s buried.’” His eyes watered. “The way I just told it to you. I ain’t never told it quite that way before. Maybe you can teach an old dog new tricks.”
“Maybe,” I told him. I could feel my brain shrinking. I held up Remote.
“I know that fella.” He held up his hand like mine.
“Yeah,” I told him. “Where’d you learn that.”
“Promised not to tell,” he said. “And Ross don’t break no promises. I break wind sometimes though.” He kinda leaned to one side and clenched his face. “It was a quiet one,” he said. “Oh, boy, it’s smelly though.”
“What the fuck?” The stench was insane. “What do you eat?”
“Sausage,” he told me. “Peanut butter. Raisins.”
“Fucking rank,” I said and I started to walk off.
“Come again,” he told me, and I swear the smell followed me a half a mile.
At Broth, the banging around had started, and I jumped into my apron and filled up my sinks. There wasn’t much to wash, but there was a lot of stuff to run back. There were stacks of plates, pans to shelve. There were forks and spoons and knives to wipe clean. They had to be spotless.
Chef showed me a spoon and was like, “Would you put that in your mouth?’
I looked at it. “Sure.”
She held it closer to me. There were spots on it, I guess. “Sure, Chef. But that’s old dishwater,” she said. “That’s about as bad as dried sweat. Would you lick my armpits?”
“Are they shaved?”
Chef laughed. “You’re a fucking gem,” she said. “Spotless spoons,” she told me. “Spotless forks. Spotless knives. Spotless everything.”
“Spotless armpits,” I told her.
“Spotless armpits, Chef.”
It’s weird when you look at a tub of forks and realize that every single one of those is going to go into a different person’s mouth. At home, those forks and spoons you have go into five people in an average cycle. The forks and spoons at a restaurant go into dozens of people in a night.
I thought about that as I was getting rid of all the spots. That everything I was cleaning was going to be inside somebody soon.
The waiter who had given me the ride came up as I was polishing the silverware. “Moving spots?” he said.
“Huh?”
“Matter can’t be created or destroyed.”
“Okay.”
“You think you’re getting rid of the spots, but you aren’t. You’re moving them.” He pointed to the silverware. “From there,” he pointed to the towel I was holding, “to there.”
“Chef,” I hollered. “Washing dishes blows my mind.”
“Oh, it blows,” she called back.
That afternoon, a storm came through and we caught four inches of accumulation, and we only had three tables all night. Almost everything I had thought before was a lie. My silverware barely went into anybody.
“Can’t trust this Indiana weather,” Chef said.
She saw my knuckle. The warm water from the sinks had made it open back up. “What happened?”
“I caught it on something.”
“Health inspector sees that and we’d get cited for sure. Let’s wrap it up.”
She took me into the office and pulled a first aid kit down from a bookshelf full of cookbooks. “You read at all?” she asked, I guess having seen me eye the shelves.
“Yeah,” I told her. “I’m reading about Epicurus.”
“The food site?”
“Nah, the philosopher.”
“This is gonna sting.” She had an alcohol pad that she rubbed over my wound, and it felt hot and cold at the same time and my eyes clenched. “Would you read a food book if I gave it to you?”
“Sure,” I said. I gritted my teeth. “Eventually.”
“This lady’s my hero.” She reached up and grabbed a book called Blood, Bones & Butter. I took it in my good hand, and Chef took back my right hand and put a butterfly bandage over the split knuckle and smoothed it over. My mom was the last person who’d held my hand. I’d hooked up with some girls, but I hadn’t held hands with anyone, and definitely not like this. Chef held my hand like she felt sorry for it. Like it meant something to her to help me, and it occurred to me that I was going to read the book she gave me and that the woman who wrote it would be one of my heroes too. Then Chef handed me a latex glove. “Hand condom,” she told me. “No knuckle AIDS for you.”
I put it on. “Thanks, Chef,” I told her.
“De nada,” she said. “Now get to fucking work.”
A slow shift in a restaurant and a busy shift in a restaurant might as well be two different jobs. I had hoped my night at Broth would take away my time to think, would fold me into its insanity and the hours would go streaking by. Instead, we all waited tensely in the kitchen for customers who never came. Listening to the energy of the kitchen purr.
“Fucking lame,” hollered Chef.
She started cutting the servers. She had the cooks kick me all the dishes they didn’t need. The kitchen was dismantled into a skeleton configuration. The chattering of it sounded like machinery. All the hotel pans consolidated, all the elements of the line shifted down to one station. Chef had me take everything out of the walk-in cooler. She had me wipe down the surfaces. She had me put everything back.
“Imma spell a word,” Chef told me, “and you tell me what it spells.”
“Okay.”
“C-H-E-V-R-E.”
I thought a second. “Cheaver,” I said.
Chef smiled. “Shev-ra,” she told me. “It’s a cheese. Ever had it?”
“Nah.”
She opened a container, took a plastic spoon from her pocket and spooned me a taste.
“You always have spoons in your pocket, Chef?”
“Always. I need to get away from plastic though. I need to find some wood ones or something. They’re great for tasting, but they say by 2050 there’ll be more trash in the ocean than fish. By weight,” she said. “But try it.”
“It looks like cream cheese,” I told her.
“It’s goat though.”
“It’s goat?”
“Well, goat’s milk cheese. So it doesn’t taste like cream cheese. And cream cheese isn’t really cheese anyhow. And we wouldn’t use it in my kitchen. Neufchâtel maybe.”
“Noof-sha-what?”
“We’ll get to it. Try the chèvre.”
I did. The little bite of it took over my mouth. The wallop of it was astounding. It was hideously creamy. It was disgustingly delicious. “It tastes like how river water smells.”
“Like it?”
I swallowed. “Afterwards tastes like change,” I told her.
“Change?”
“Money,” I said.
“Metallic,” she said. “It’s local. See? You learned something.”
I threw away my spoon.
When I was done cleaning the walk-in, I started scrubbing away at what all the cooks brought me.
My glove kept filling up with water, and it kept breaking, and after I’d changed it a few times, I decided it was a waste.
Eventually, my Band-Aid got lost in the dishwater, and if I bled on anything, I just sprayed the blood away.
There was one table left late in the evening, and the conspiracy-theory waiter kept coming in and rolling his eyes. “If they tip well,” he said, “I don’t mind. But I hate working this late for one table.”
“They’re drinking though, right?” said Chef.
“Like fish, Chef.”
“Then let ’em stay.”
The waiter went back out to the dining room and came back a bit later with a dessert order. “And,” he said handing the order to Chef, “they want to know if they can see the kitchen.”
I’d never even heard of that, but apparently it’s a thing. Especially in nicer restaurants. People want to get pictures of themselves with cooks, they want to see where their food came from.
“We’re pretty broken down,” said Chef. “But as long as you tell them, I don’t mind.”
I had filled a mop bucket the way I’d been shown on my first shift, and I was about to go over the kitchen floor. Normally, we would’ve scrubbed the floors with a long-handled brush first, but the night was so slow Chef said we didn’t need to.
“Hang back on mopping a bit,” she told me. She went into her office and grabbed a fresh jacket, took off her hat and messed her hair a bit. “I look okay?” she asked.
She did.
It occurred to me then, I liked women. I didn’t like girls. I liked Peggy and I liked Chef. I liked them physically, but there was something more than that. They had power over me, they had control. Peggy could have kicked me out onto the street and Chef could have fired me, and something about that was interesting. They could also teach me. They knew things I didn’t know. And I’m not sure that’s what men are supposed to like, but you can’t help what you’re into.
I mean, I knew plenty of girls who dated older boys. Hell, they almost all did. Part of that was because the older boys had cars, but maybe there was something else to it.
It used to be more common for men to date women a lot younger. I think these days it’s more frowned on. But maybe the men like younger women for the same reason I liked Chef. Just because. They liked girls who needed their money. They liked girls who they were smarter than. Who they had power over, and maybe those women liked that the men had power. Liked they had money. Liked they had knowledge.
It’s weird how society makes decisions for us. How society tells us how to feel about what we like—about what we’re like.
If I told my friends that I was into Chef, they would tease me. If I told my friends that I had a girlfriend two years younger than me, they’d think it was cool. But where do all the lines start and stop, and why do we have to carry the opinion of the world on our eyes like lenses?
I suppose you have to have some boundaries. You have to tell men they can’t fall in love with seven-year-olds. You have to tell women high school teachers they can’t sleep with their students. You have to tell bosses they can’t fire employees for refusing them blow jobs. I don’t know. It’s confusing. All of it.
I barely recognized her when she came to the back because her mouth was blue from drinking wine and her eyes looked wonky, but she recognized me right away.
“I know you,” the kitchen visitor told me, wagging her finger. She was wearing h
eels and she kinda stumbled a bit, but the conspiracy-theory waiter steadied her, and then she reached down and took off a heel. It was my counselor. The one who had pinned the vape on me.
“It’s not the safest place to go barefoot,” Chef told her.
“Where’s the chef?” my counselor said.
You could feel a kind of temperature change, and Chef said, “Gone for the evening.”
And the counselor looked at the waiter and said, “But you said . . .”
“Just stepped out,” I said. “Just like right now.” I pointed to the back door. “Had to go see . . .”
“A man about a man thing,” said Chef. “Y’know,” she said. “Men.”
My counselor nodded heavingly. “You can’t count on ’em,” she said. She pointed at me. “This one’s kinda trouble.”
“I hope so,” said Chef. “This is a kitchen. We only hire trouble.”
“Weed smoker,” said my counselor. “Vape pen.”
“Vaping’s not smoking,” Chef said.
“True,” said the counselor. “He had a funny word for it. What was that funny word?”
“Candy fog.”
“Sounds like a stripper,” Chef said.
“His mom didn’t think it was funny,” my counselor said. “I told her what you wanna be when you grow up.”
“You mean my aunt?” I asked the counselor.
“Some woman,” she said. “She said you’d be lucky to be that bicycle guy. That you’d be lucky to be homeless. She didn’t think you’d live long enough. I figured she was gonna kill you.”
“I’m still here,” I said.
My counselor looked around a bit. “Well I’ve seen it,” she said to the waiter. “Food was AH-MAZING.”
“Thanks,” said Chef.
Then the waiter helped her back to the dining room.
“No wonder kids shoot up schools,” Chef said once the counselor was gone.
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