Brief Encounters with the Enemy Read online

  But before I could say anything, my manager swiveled around in his chair, faced his desk, placed his hands lightly on top of the piles of paper there, as if they were a Ouija board and he was reading a signal from the beyond. Then he shuffled the papers around. Very rapidly, he shuffled the papers. “Seven-twenty-three the grilled cheese sandwich was returned,” my manger read. “And eleven-fifty-two the plate of pasta came back.”

  Those times seemed so long ago. My manager looked up at me with his kind face, almost angelic. A baby face with puffy cheeks.

  Answer him! But all I could think was that I was in the restaurant at 7:23. I was in the restaurant at 11:52. And here I am at 1:07, still in the restaurant. Tomorrow, I thought, I will be here. And the day after that. And the day after that is my day off. But then I will be back.

  “Is it really that complicated, Ike, for you to make a grilled cheese sandwich?” the kind face asked.

  Somewhere in my past, something had gone wrong for me. Years prior, at my high school graduation, I had sat docilely in the audience and watched the valedictorian onstage in a lavender cap and gown read a tedious and patronizing speech that I knew for a fact had been patched together from a book of stock lectures. “There are some of us here this evening who will be heading off to college,” he declared, “others who are going into the military, and still others who are entering directly into the workforce.” As if all those choices were equal. His voice, amplified by the microphone, sounded exceptionally powerful and confident, and I imagined that if he were to remove that ridiculous lavender gown, we would discover that he was naked underneath, and that he had, as I well knew from the locker room, broad shoulders and a broad chest and was not at all embarrassed to be seen naked. While beneath my billowy gown was a small-large frame, short legs but long arms, soft flesh but hard knees and elbows, with no real delineation between torso and limbs or between limbs and extremities: the body of a hamster. I was irritated by the valedictorian’s speech and his three categories of life and his attempts at anecdotal humor that were supposed to seem spontaneous and ingratiate him with the parents but instead sounded contrived and wooden. The parents laughed and were won over. Sitting in the audience with five hundred other students, I had the unsettling awareness that I had already been consigned to a life of mediocrity by the very fact that I had not been the one chosen to stand on the podium. There was a single opportunity at having that happen in one’s life, and I had missed it. Nothing could make up for that now. I would forever be indistinguishable from all the others who had not been chosen. I was just one of five hundred. One of five hundred million. I am the addressee, I kept thinking as the valedictorian droned on. I will always be the addressee.

  I turned nineteen working at the restaurant, making $4.50 an hour. I turned twenty at $4.75. And twenty-one at $5.75. “This is just a stopping-through place,” a busboy had told me on the day he quit. He was eighteen, blond hair, blue eyes, movie-star handsome with a dimple in his chin. He spoke with the expertise of someone who had done nothing to earn that expertise. I wanted to ask him for advice anyway. Instead I said, “You got that right, man,” as if I were also an expert on the subject of life’s trajectory. For my twenty-fifth birthday ($7.50), the waitresses got everyone to chip in to surprise me with a cake. “Happy birthday, Ike!” they sang at the end of the night. The twenty-five candles overwhelmed the cake. The flame was wide and significant; I saw the substance of my age. People joked about the restaurant catching fire. The waitresses had wanted to be nice, but I could see only pity. Who wants to celebrate his twenty-fifth birthday at an employees’ table next to a mop closet while wearing a splattered apron and a checkered cook’s uniform? I ate the cake to show my gratitude. My manager came by and slapped me on the back. “Congratulations,” he said. He was the only person there who was older than I. The slap had a proprietary quality.

  When I was about eighteen, a guy I knew from the neighborhood had seen me walking down the street and picked me up in his taxi. I was a block from home, but he wanted to drive me around and show off his new job. I sat in the backseat like a passenger, and I stared at the back of his head. “I’m celebrating my twenty-fifth birthday next week,” he told me. “Big party. Come on by.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “A quarter of a century,” he said. He was being boastful, but the phrase was jarring. I can tell you this much, I wanted to say. When I’m a quarter of a century, I won’t be driving any taxi.

  I had dreams of grandeur. I didn’t know how to get there, but I knew that it would work out.

  He drove me around for a while and then he dropped me off right where we’d begun, a block from my house.

  “See you at the party,” he told me. But I didn’t go.

  I start at five o’clock and I stop at midnight. On weekends I stop at one o’clock. Sundays the restaurant is closed. Thursdays I have off. On busy nights, the dinner rush begins around seven and goes until eleven. There is relative calm in the kitchen at first, and then the sounds begin to take on a discernible urgency—voices, dishes, doors, not unlike light rain before heavy rain—and then there will be an explosion of orders. How is it possible? All these orders? All these orders at once? Oh my God! There are only three cooks and a salad guy, but there are fifty orders, and then there are a hundred orders. The white blur of the manager’s shirt mixes with the black blurs of the waitresses’. Each cook in a pristine apron, soon to become filthy, hunches over a little workstation, cutting, frying, wiping, responsible for his little world. Once in a while, one cook will come to the aid of another who has fallen far behind, as if in battle, and this is always viewed as an act of extreme kindness. Generally, though, it’s every man for himself, and we let one another die facedown in the mud. I move at a steady pace somewhere between frantic and perilous. Once I scalded my entire forearm with boiling water, but I wrapped the wound with cold towels and continued marching onward up the hill. Another time I lacerated the tip of my finger, and only after my shift was over did I go to the hospital for seven stitches. I have learned precision and efficiency over the years. There is no wasted motion in anything I do. I am a study of that thin line between human and machine. The order comes in, the eyes scan the order, one hand removes two slices of rye bread (for instance) and places the bread on the grill, the other hand is already reaching for the American cheese that is in the square tin on the shelf, while another order comes in and the eyes are scanning that order as the limbs and hands continue to move. Only when the rush begins to abate do I understand that I have been in something akin to a trance, moving constantly but without full consciousness. The sounds in the kitchen will get quieter, a gentle, nonessential clattering. A lullaby of clattering—it’s near midnight, after all. The waitresses stand around idly. The dishwasher smokes a cigarette, even though he’s not supposed to smoke in here. Afterward I walk the ten blocks to my apartment, and if I make it home in time, I watch the end of David Letterman.

  A few days after I was turned down for a raise, an anorexic waitress started working at the restaurant. She was pretty but had no breasts or ass. I caught her a few times eating the scraps from customers’ plates. She chewed and swallowed slowly, methodically, as if it took all her concentration. The waitresses said that they heard her sometimes in the bathroom coughing violently, and if they entered after her, they noticed traces of blood in the toilet.

  The first time I saw her, she was sitting at the employees’ table before the dinner shift, clipping flowers and placing them in vases. She looked up when I passed by, and I saw that her eyes were bright blue, contrasting with her hair, which was jet black. Her arms were thin and her shoulder blades protruded at a sharp angle. When our eyes met, she looked down quickly and then looked back up, and when she looked up, I looked away. A couple of days later, she was standing at the time clock trying to figure out how to punch out after her shift. I was just arriving at the restaurant, and my shoes were wet from the rain. “Here,” I said. “Like this. You do it like this.” I pu
t her time card in and jiggled it, because sometimes it has to be jiggled, and the clock crunched out the time: 4:52 P.M. “What a piece of shit,” she said. “The manager should fix that.” Her voice was deep, considering how fragile she appeared. I saw that she had a red rash on her neck that she was trying to conceal with makeup. The rash seemed to be either creeping up toward her face or down onto her body, as if it might be the thing that had eaten away her breasts and her ass. Her elbow touched my elbow, but I couldn’t tell if it was on purpose. And then my manager came into the break room.

  “Busy night ahead of us,” he said, and slapped me on the back.

  “The time clock,” the waitress said to him. “It doesn’t work.”

  “Oh?” the manager said. He looked embarrassed. “I’ll tell the fix-it guy.”

  He was wrong: it was a slow night. Which can be worse, because then one must make oneself busy. Or at least appear busy. A self-imposed punishment for the lack of business, as if the employees were to blame.

  I spent my time polishing all the stainless steel in the kitchen, using an old jar of cream that guaranteed immediate results. It lived up to its billing, and I got satisfaction from seeing things gleam. When an order came in, it was burdensome, and I had to drag myself to the grill to put together whatever it was that had been requested. Tonight, I was certain, was not the night to ask again for a raise. I commended myself on my foresight. Occasionally I would look through the little round porthole of the kitchen door and see the anorexic waitress carrying trays of coffee mugs from one end of the restaurant to the other. How was it possible for her to carry a tray of coffee mugs? How was it possible for her to stand on those skinny legs? But she showed no signs of exertion in anything she did, like one of those small birds that take off with great power, beating their wings angrily. I should ask her out, I thought. We could come back here to eat. Take a long time looking at the menu. Inconvenience other people for a change. At the end we could ask to see the manager, and if he were feeling generous, he could waive the bill.

  That night I sat on my couch and watched David Letterman interview a starlet. She wore unusually long earrings, high heels, and a red dress that I kept hoping I’d be able to see up. “What’s your dream vacation?” Letterman asked her. “Oh, I just want to stay home in my pajamas,” the starlet said. And David Letterman looked at the camera in that way he has, and everyone in the audience laughed, and Paul Shaffer played something quick on the keyboard, and the rain was coming down outside my window, and I realized that, shockingly, it was the anorexic waitress being interviewed by David Letterman. David Letterman was looking at the camera, which is to say he was looking at me, and he was saying, “Is it really that complicated for you to make a grilled cheese sandwich?” The anorexic waitress was holding a plate with a grilled cheese sandwich as evidence of my incompetence. “Why was this returned?” David Letterman was asking. But before I could respond the valedictorian said that some of us here tonight would either go into the military or enter directly into the workforce.

  Suddenly I was wide awake on the couch. A police show was playing on the television. Buddy talk. I switched it off. Light was just beginning to break. I got up and paced around the living room and then I sat back down on the couch. The couch was soft; next to it was a chair and a lamp, all generously provided by the landlady. When I first came to look at the apartment, I was disconcerted to observe a refrigerator standing against the living room wall. “You can have that too,” the landlady said, as if having a refrigerator in the living room were a desirable thing. I made a show of considering it. We walked out onto the balcony, which was the apartment’s main selling point. It was a sunny day, and we stood together for a while, looking down five flights to the street. The previous tenant had spray-painted a pair of shoes on the balcony without bothering to put down newspaper as protection. Positioned between myself and the landlady was the permanent silhouette of two feet facing the railing. They had a ghostly quality, as if someone had leaped and left behind his imprint. I wanted to ask the landlady if she might be able to clean away those feet at some point, but I didn’t ask and I took the apartment anyway.

  Now I opened the balcony door and stood outside. It was raining lightly. Perhaps today was the day it would stop altogether. No one was out on the street. In the distance was a line of dense trees that in the dim light seemed closer than they actually were. Beyond the trees were the mountains. The mountains and the trees made the city seem rural, or on the verge of becoming rural, as if civilization were working in reverse and nature were reclaiming the land for itself. The mayor had countered this by referring to the city as “The Emerging International City.” He hoped the moniker would catch on. So far it hadn’t. On local television, there were commercials every fifteen minutes, poorly made, with people on the street pretending to make unprompted remarks about why the city was already an international city or deserved to be one. But it was clear that none of them really knew what they were talking about. Furthermore, the phrase “emerging international city” was so cumbersome and took such great concentration to say that you could detect, after watching these commercials over and over, the way people paused ever so slightly before uttering it. The very fact that everyone managed to pronounce the phrase without stumbling once was evidence that the whole man-on-the-street conceit was fraudulent.

  Below my balcony, two black boys were riding by on bicycles. They were drenched from the rain and they were laughing and they were full of bravado. One of the boys happened to glance up at me. “What are you looking at, white man?” he yelled out, speeding away as if I might be able to swoop down and get him. I was humiliated, not by the use of “white” but by the use of “man.” He sees me as a man, I thought. When I was eight years old, I had spent the afternoon playing with a group of my friends and a lone black boy who lived in the next neighborhood over. All afternoon we played, until another one of our friends showed up, making the lone black boy superfluous. “Time to go home, fella,” my friend had told him. But the boy had refused to go home, and an argument ensued. My father heard the argument and threw open the kitchen window.

  “Go home, boy,” he said, assuming that the black boy was the cause of the trouble. “Go home before I come down there and slap the taste out of your mouth.”

  When I woke in the morning, it was raining hard. My downstairs neighbor hadn’t taken in his newspaper yet, so I sat in the vestibule and read it.

  Business is bad. That was the big news. Business is bad and the rain won’t stop. Business is going to get better, but first it’s going to get worse. The rain is going to get worse too. And then the rain will stop.

  When my neighbor came down, he was wearing a gray bathrobe.

  “Here’s your paper,” I said, as if I’d been standing in the vestibule with his newspaper in my hands for the purpose of handing it to him.

  He looked aggrieved. “Thank you,” he said. Hollow words. He folded the paper and put it under his arm; his armpit was stained. He nodded at me. “Have a great day,” he said.

  Later, I did my exercises. I do them every day. If I ever end up joining the military, I will be ready. But I have no intention of joining the military. A couple of years ago, on the basketball court, an older guy had come over after the game and talked to me about life. He was friendly and showed interest, and I thought he might be gay. He smiled at everything I said. “Is that right, son?” At the end of our conversation, he handed me his business card: Sergeant Robert Alton. “Stop by, son, and talk to me sometime.” I thought about stopping by, but what I really wanted was for him to come back to the basketball court and ask me again to stop by sometime.

  I did fifty push-ups, straight and with no effort. Several minutes later I did fifty more. Those took effort. Then I did sit-ups. The room vibrated. When I was done, I examined my body in the mirror. Sharp corners met round corners. When I turned to the side, the sharpness gave way to roundness. The body of a hamster, I thought. And then I thought about the anorexic waitress
standing next to me at the time clock. The body of a hamster meets the body of a bird. “Here,” the hamster said. “Like this. You do it like this.” And the bird’s wing touched the hamster’s paw, but it was not clear if this was intentional.

  On Saturday night, I decided I would ask again for a raise. Especially considering that one of the other cooks had not shown up for his shift. I was covering for him, a near-impossibility, because that night the orders were unceasing. I loathed the waitresses who brought them to me, even the anorexic one. The manager said that he would come and help out, as if he had any idea what needed to be done, as if anyone could just drop in and do my job. But he didn’t help, and I saw this as even more reason to ask for a raise. “I’m looking to move up to …” “I’m looking to move up from …”

  Near midnight, things finally slowed down. My apron was splattered, as if I had been shot with food the way people are sometimes shot with paint for fun. The dishwasher smoked a cigarette, and I hoped the manager would come in and catch him. Through the window of the kitchen door, I could see the anorexic waitress tallying up her tips for the night. The way she concentrated over the pile of money accentuated her cheekbones. I knew she’d be gone by the time I was done cleaning up my workstation. A last-second order came in, and I got it ready. And then I scrubbed the grill with a long wire brush. I was supposed to scrub it every night, but I never did, and no one noticed. Tonight, though, there would be no evidence that could be used against me. Hard bits of ash that had accumulated over the years fell from the grates like ants. My shoulder ached from the exertion. When I looked through the window, sure enough, the anorexic waitress was gone.