Of Deep Fryers and Dark Nights

Chris was a huge white grin under a ratty yellow baseball cap. It was my second day on the floor when he showed the staples on his forehead with real pride. He had cut himself jumping into the kitchen from the upstairs laundry room. "Look, they're real staples," he bragged. I looked at the same low overhang I had ducked under just a moment ago and shook my head.

Cooks. That was why I worked in the front of house.

"Why don't we get a pitcher?" Long ago I had made it a sort of personal policy to drinks on occasion for the kitchen guys. They often made less money than the waiters and it never hurt to have a little love coming back to you on a busy night. But still, I wasn't making enough to buy the kid five-dollar pints all night long.

By the third pint, I knew I wasn't getting off easy this time. "We could stop up the street," I tried after a quick mental count of my dwindling cash. "They've got dollar drafts, tonight."

"Dude, I'm not twenty-one," he laughed.

I realize now, that I can't write about this and give it justice at my age, with the years past and make you feel for him: a ratty cap and a bright smile without telling you who I am and what I've done. No apologies, but Chris is dead.

He put a bullet in his brain 4 years ago and I'm still trying to reconsruct the smooth surface of the bar and the transculent lighting coming up from inside the clear top.

A beautiful hand-written script lent shadow to the lighting on the bar. Sepia-toned pictures ofchariots of fireathletes completed the faked atmosphere. Chris is still dead and I'm listening to an internet-only release of "Makes me wanna die" by Tricky

It's not my fault. I love people and through no fault of their own they love me back.

I was on the phone with distant phantoms tonight. Hours after Molson XXX, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Hoegaarden, Beck's Dark, Lambic Kriek, Dos Equis Special Lager, Mackeson's Stout and Miller Lite, my ghosts asked me to come back and work for them, still.

This is fiction, so you don't have to believe what I'm saying: and I'd rather you didn't, to be honest. I'd rather you remember the nice guy with compliments and a shy way than a drug dealing thief and son-of-abitch who sat outside the projects and watched two black girls that night.

Its was the usual tensed out waiting for the product and the car was off except for the dimmed-out stereo playing James Brown. He was promising me Payback. We'll see. It smelled like fear, dust, crap and all the usual ghetto bullshit. Put Hope and Promise against the nearest wall and ass-fuck 'em; you've got the smell down, then.
Two girls, on a home-made see-saw (a board and a crumbled pyramid cinder-blocks) calling "Holla....Holla...Holla...Holla," as the wood cracked under the 60 pound frames. Call it a picture. Call it a moment we still laugh about as we remember the burn of the shit as it eats away my brain and nostrils.

"Chicks think male waiters are gay," Chris promised me all those years ago.