xtcxtc
Bluelighter
- Joined
- May 30, 1999
- Messages
- 1,978
i found this impossible to read in the original format so took the liberty of tidying it up a bit. i think not one of your best pieces but worth reading. seems to be a lot of suppressed rage there somewhere.
Hey hey. Been a long while since I posted anything in here, but here's some stuff I wrote with several glaring typos I still need to fix. Forgive any weird formatting, since I intend to publish this in half-page 'zine form. Enjoy!
*CrystalMeth Bunny* 7/11/02
SERVICE a short story that could only happen to someone just like you
1 It’s ten past six. The restaurant will be dead for another hour (like I’d like to be), but I’m currently busy attempting to sponge salsa off my shirt. They only give you one shirt here because, I don’t know, they think you have a washing machine in your cramped apartment and can wash the thing every day. Of course, if I had a place like that, I’d already have a good job and wouldn’t have to work here.
Imagine a restaurant that serves Mexican food. Now imagine a restaurant that serves watered down, Americanized Mexican food to hordes of middle class fucks who would shit their pants if they actually had to deal with someone who didn’t speak their language.
That’s where I work. It’s kind of ironic, seeing as how the kitchen staff (excepting the kitchen manager, of course) all have a somewhat limited grasp of English. It doesn’t bother me that much, if I was too busy dragging my family out of hellish poverty or away from third-world death squads, I probably wouldn’t have time for learning the finer points of a language that people who pay me shit.
One of the managers, Erica, comes along and gives me another shirt. I’ve worked here for five or so months with only one shirt. I’ve brought this up, be she keeps giving me the same crap about them not having any in stock in my size. That’s bullshit. They intentionally gave me a shirt that’s a size too small, so Mr. Breadwinner can order his family’s meal into my tits instead of my face, like a living drive-thru order box.
I get pulled aside into the manager’s office, and after a brief sermon about maintaining your appearance while carrying a fuckload of salsa to the front of the house, I get something else to wear. Turns out there’s a whole cabinet of T-shirts in there.
Although they’ve been lying to me and I still have to wear a shirt a size too small, I guess I can postpone laundry for another day. Actually, it’s not like I can’t afford it - I always have money from tips. It’s funny how people tip. They’re using it to rate your service when you’re only getting paid six dollars an hour.
It’s a good thing I attended a public high school where they teach you important life skills like sociability, being pleasant and popular. I’ve never taken a college class. If I’m just going to graduate and end up like Erica, a manager at a shitty chain restaurant in a strip mall, I say fuck it. Let someone else have my money.
My boyfriend, namely. Yeah, he’s great. His name’s Pete, he’s 24, and he’s unemployed. Not the ‘struggling-genius waiting for his big break unemployed’, or ‘down-on-his-luck unemployed’, just jobless. Sure, he can work, but it’s much, much easier for him to live off me and act like no one will hire him.
As long as he has that stack of applications he’ll never fill out and interviews he’ll never go to. Pete never really expressed any interest in me romantically or sexually until I got my own apartment.
See, there’s a problem when you’re living with two other people and you have a deadbeat boyfriend that lives off you, trashes your house, and disappears for a few days when you attempt to discuss money or bills or something like that. People are bound to point it out one day. And they have. No one wants to come over as long as he’s there, parasitically attached to TV and video games like he always is, leaving lights on, not flushing the toilet, and leaving the place in shambles.
Maybe there’s some basic tasks you have to give up the ability to do when they hand out penises, maybe not. I just think he’s a bastard. That’s what he does, though. He’ll hop from relationship to relationship, job to job (when he’s forced to work), house to house when people get sick of his petty shit.
The worst thing about him is that on the surface, he’s likable. Yeah, there he is, standing there, tall and handsome with his beautiful clothes and his beautiful smile and his beautiful eyes, weaseling his way into your heart, until he drops all that shit and proceeds to fuck everyone over for all they’re worth.
Poor guy, no one understands him, everyone’s always fucking him over. I understand him - he basically exists just to do nothing for 15 or so hours, then sleep for 10 or 12. I wouldn’t mind it so much if he actually gave me some goddamn attention, or failing that, at least kept the place clean.
The first customers are beginning to trickle in, which means I get to ignore them for 10 minutes or so while they make up their minds what slop to eat. No one’s been seated in my section, yet, but that’ll change in a minute, probably while I’m out smoking. I think I’ve pretty much figured out how the mind of the average restaurant customer works.
One. Family decides to acknowledge the fact they’re not talented enough to cook for themselves.
Two. Family decides to go out to eat.
Three. Family decides that family-owned restaurants may be laundering money for Al Qaeda, and decide against eating at someplace like that.
Four. Family thinks of familiar, non-threatening chain restaurants they can eat at.
Five. Family decides they want Mexican food without all the scary, foreign overtones.
Six. Family piles into an SUV, drives down to Casa Del Sol, where they project all their personal problems on to you, the wage slave.
I’ve said it before, but families don’t work. Maybe they did when everyone lived on farms and needed children to do farm chores and needed some sort of social structure between a couple people to live life, but not today. Today you have both parents going fucking apeshit slaving away at jobs they hate.
Of course, they’re just chained to desks, they’re not forced to memorize menus and deal with abuse and people’s poorly-concealed personality disorders, all the while putting on a plastic smile and taking all this shit in stride.
Yeah, sit their with your office humor and your vague dissatisfaction over your career choice, I have to deal with your fucking children. Restaurants aren’t daycare centers. They’re not a place to bring your diseased children to tear the place apart and hide silverware under the tables.
Your children suck, and you obviously have no idea how to raise them. I’m not much for discipline, but the least you could do is not have your kids running riot and making someone else’s life miserable. Let’s face it, you just had kids because it was socially acceptable, not because of any parental instincts you thought you had.
The couple I’m waiting on now didn’t bring their children. They’re an elderly, apparently conservative couple. I use couple in the loosest sense of the word, since they don’t seen to act like it - I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of your life with someone you don’t care about just because it’s easier to stay there, doing nothing rather than finding a more fulfilling way to live your life.
Get married, reproduce, watch your children reproduce, vote Republican. Retire, avoid any sort of change or progress, and die. Have an expensive funeral, where they say you were a wonderful, loving person who has gone like a lamb into the arms of God, blah blah blah.
2 These people are demons from hell. This guy probably was shipped off to Europe to wage war on fascists, now he’s barking orders at me and complaining about the amount of ice in his drink.
Fuck, I guess being shot at by Nazis isn’t half as bad as the shit he has to deal with. He’s going to leave a quarter for a tip, him and his sagging gut, him and his wife who’s too apathetic to leave the bastard and find a place of her own with a couple cats.
Why isn’t my food here?
You’ve had grenades explode in your face, you’ve watched your fellow soldiers wet their pants and scream and be cut down by machine gun fire, and now all you can think about is why everyone’s against you. Why your order isn’t ready. Why everyone has to drive so fast.
Greatest generation my ass, I’m not your slave. I take my time walking to the kitchen to get their two orders of fajitas with Anglo-friendly sauce. No, I’m not going to spit in their food or do anything to it, people can always seem to tell, and it’s not worth getting fired over.
Emilio, one of the line cooks, and I exchange earnest smiles through the stainless steel portal under the heat lamps. Emilio’s a decent guy, married, a kid or two as far as I know, but I never get to talk to him at any great lengths.
If this were a romance novel, we’d quit our jobs, run off to Latin America together to battle government forces in the hills. “Oh Emilo, you certainly did an excellent job of destroying that army convoy with a homemade rocket launcher! But don’t you fear the wrath of Generalissimo Murder?”
Emilo laughed and stroked his moustache, casually tossing the smoking rocket launcher he constructed from dumpstered materials over his shoulder. “Fear not! Tommorrow, we storm the the capital! Viva la revolucion!”
Nice thought, but it won’t happen. I bring the scowling elderly man and his wife their order with an artificial smile, and retreat to the dank, mossy cave of the busser’s station to wait for my next victim. Customer. Whatever.
When you have a boring job like this, there’s all sorts of ways to pass the time that don’t involve tampering with people’s food. Well, a couple ways. Right now there’s a placemat with a sketch of a surly looking policeman on it. To the left of that, there’s a drawing of stick figures with TV’s looting a department store. Next to that, there’s a drawing of a Wal-Mart.
The game goes like this: someone draws something on the placemat, and another person comes along and draws something that “beats” it. A drawing of a pineapple is a wild card, it beats anything, but can only be used once per game.
One of the bussers, a vaguely punk-looking kid, says he used to play this game as a way to pass the time in study hall. I think about what beats a policeman, and I draw a southern lunch counter.
Pete’s probably living it up right now. Probably out fucking someone else, or at least attempting to. Everyone warned me when we started going out, and I should have listened. Everyone knows what he’s like, what he does to people, but he worked his evil magic on me, and now he’s in my apartment, using electricity I have to pay for, eating all my food, probably putting cigarettes out on my couch and laughing about it.
I’m not sure how someone can fuck up an apartment that bad unintentionally. I’m not really a neat freak, and I have no problem with cleaning up my own mess, but I have to draw the line somewhere. At least I should draw the line somewhere.
It’s got to stop, or we’re going to end up like that married couple, stuck together by acceptance of fate and hating every second of it. At least I will be. It’s kind of slow tonight, almost seven and I’m just taking the orders of my second table.
A bunch of guys in their mid-twenties come in, ordering three dollar beers and scarfing down free chips. Yeah, we’re all really impressed that you’re paying a lot for alcohol in a restaurant. At least they’re ignoring me at the time, studying their menus, taking as long as possible to order.
Shit. The guy’s talking into my chest again. I’m sure it’s very very hard to lift your head up ever so slightly, and at least pretend you’re not staring at my chest. Fucking pervert. Fucking pervert with a twenty dollar haircut and their career track straight to the top, where they can sexually harass as many people as possible and get away with all of it.
Ha ha ha. Ha fucking ha. You and your friends, buddies, co-workers, laughing it up. Look at him. The guy’s probably bragging to all of his friends how he got away with staring at me, and how he’s going to get my phone number and fuck my brains out.
Yeah, they should all be high-fiving each other right now and then talking about football.
The busser’s out having a cigarette right now. I don’t blame him, Tuesday nights always suck like this. There aren’t a whole lot of people eating right now, so you tend to notice everyone’s little quirks and foibles. I pick up the barely eaten fajitas, pick up the three dimes and two pennies left as a tip, and go back into the kitchen.
That’s right, fucko. I’m going out for a smoke, and I don’t care if you need a refill on your drinks or chips or if there’s a Band-Aid in your salsa. People try to do this scam where they put a foreign object in their food and try to get a free meal. All the cooks’ Band-Aids are neon colored - I think the health department makes sure of this, so it doesn’t work if they bring their own.
Everyone has horror stories about shit they found in their food, or shit their friends or relatives found in their food. Like we’re all a bunch of evil, scheming madmen and madwomen who hate you and have nothing better to do than put cigarette butts in your ice cream and hope you won’t notice. That’s not true at all.
Well, maybe sometimes we hate you, but that’s conditional. Most of the time it’ll happen to cops at fast food restaurants. More likely the action of bored employees than anyone with revolutionary intent.
Most of the time, it’s a big wad of snot, or they’ll dust the cops food with weed. These people get caught all the time. There’s usually a bunch of bullshit charges that follow - assaulting a police officer, product tampering, stuff like that. The funny part is the police report is usually written by the cop that got the altered food, where he has to admit that his fat ass was buying five hamburgers.
Truth is, most of us need these jobs, especially the cooks. For some reason, you can be a dysfunctional drug addict with an explosive temper and still do very well in this job. On days the kitchen manager has off, you’ll sometimes see one of the cooks chopping lines of speed on the cutting board. I abstain.
I mean, if we really wanted to get back at you, for being an asshole, we could just copy the name off your credit card, look in the phone book to see where you live, and show up around 3 a.m. with a bat. I know I’ve thought of it.
I stamp out the cigarette on the ground and open the steel fire doors, walk past the shelves where they store the kitchen equipment, the malfunctioning ice machine, and the dishwasher. The fucktards’ order isn’t ready quite yet, so I get to hang out in the kitchen for a minute or so.
Bringing their order back to them, I can’t help but notice how they’re dressed. They’re all clothed in forced “casual” wear which probably cost hundreds of dollars. Give ‘em headset microphones and teach ‘em to sing and dance, you’ve got another boy band.
Four Coronas at three dollars a piece, steak fajitas, eight dollars, chicken quesadilla, seven dollars, chicken fajitas, eight dollars. If there was any justice right now, they’d all be crushed to death by the grill of an old Ford truck that’s hanging above their heads, one of our many garish decorations. You wanted Tex-Mex, you wanted Southwestern, but a bunch of garbage was vomited onto the walls to add atmosphere.
3 Another table is seated, and there’s an angry-looking poet guy who sits down at it. He just wants coffee, that I can deal with. Why he would want to drink it here is beyond me.
While getting the coffee, I notice the placemat game has progressed remarkably. Termites eat the southern lunch counter. Exterminator comes and kills the termites. The exterminator is driven off by a mob of angry animal rights activists. The animal rights activists are driven off by a fire hose. I sketch a dog peeing on the fire hydrant that the fire hose is attached to. That makes sense.
The next table I have to serve is that hot-shit TV weatherman and his fucking family. Christ, I hate them. Every week or so they come in here, and he uses his evil powers as a minor local celebrity to stroke his own ego. In any other country, he’d have been eaten by wolves.
His oldest kid is apparently in Boy Scouts. Apparently, I say because his father is the kind of person who would buy the uniform at a thrift store and make the kid wear it just to prove how much of a dedicated father he is.
I have to wonder, why Boy Scouts? Living in a country so obsessed with gun culture, shouldn’t we logically be teaching our children how to be elite paramilitary assassins instead of making them go fucking camping?
That’s my cue to kill some time in the bathroom. It’s pretty well hidden from the customers, which means the fuckers have to constantly ask me where it is. It would be quiet in here, if it weren’t for the overhead speakers.
Keeping with the theme of Americanized Latin culture, here we have a salsa version of a Sheryl Crow song. There’s only about 10 songs which loop constantly over the speakers, but you learn to tune it out pretty fast.
The bathroom door opens. I’m hidden in the back stall, languishing under the fluorescent lights. “Claire? You in here?” It’s Erica. “Just a minute.” “There’s a party of eleven coming in a half hour, and I’m seating them in your section. Just so you know, okay?”
Shit. I can’t hide. “Sure, be out in a second.” Erica’s the kind of person it’s impossible to hate, but I try. Always perky, always upbeat, nothing phases her.
Break out the carbon monoxide and gas a hundred adorable puppies to death in front of her, she’s still smiling, asking if you enjoyed your meal and to come back real soon. Then she’d hand a balloon to your kid. She has to be on some serious fucking drugs to act that way.
Party of eleven. It’s so vague, so impersonal, eleven glasses of water, eleven ramekins of salsa, six baskets of complimentary tortilla chips. Three tables together.
Who are these people? Birthday party? Relatives in town? White separatist militia? Hard-core Satanists planning their next cattle mutilation? Guess I’m going to find out pretty soon.
Sean has his hands full talking to the TV weatherman and his fucking family whose order I apparently didn’t get around to taking. Fuck me, I’m too busy preparing for the onslaught of devil-worshippers I’m about to serve.
Sean’s great, though - he doesn’t seem to give a fuck what anyone thinks, and it’s sad to think he’d end up working here. He’s tall, intimidating, and plays guitar for a black metal band called Tantalus. He’ll show you the mural of dancing skeletons he has tattooed on his lower back if you ask.
Sometimes Sean will entertain you with his vast knowledge of serial killers while standing right next to a bunch of children. He’s fun like that. In a perfect world, he’d be tooling around the post-apocalyptic wasteland battling zombies with a chainsaw (whom I suspect would bear resemblence to Mister weatherman over there).
As you may already know, the world is far from perfect. Important this, important that, do you know who I am - I’ve heard it all before. Just because you’re on TV and have perfect teeth doesn’t mean you’re some kind of culinary demigod who can make us mortals cater to your every whim.
Robert, the punk rock busser, is seating the party of eleven, who turns out to be a very normal looking extended family with a few kids in tow. They never seat the hard-core Satanists in my section, it seems.
When you’re made to wear a uniform, you try to express your individuality in any small way that you can. Robert has a studded belt, and that’s how you can tell he’s punk, even though company policy forbids him from dyeing or charging his hair into spikes.
Other than his habit of occassionaly disappearing when you need him, I like Robert. I guess if I’m digressing into the personal lives of the people I work with, I should be thorough.
I’ve never seen most of the waiters or bussers who work the day shift. Tonya is an aggressively friendly college student, Miguel is a cook that hurt himself on the job badly enough that he got moved to the front of the house, and now he seats people with his arm in a sling. Kurt is in his mid-thirties and keeps mostly to himself, and Robin is a born-again Christian who’s headed for a nervous breakdown.
Rounding out the bunch is a handful of bussers, whose names I keep forgetting due to the rather high turnover rate. All kids fresh out of high school with the collective attention span of a particularly stupid fruit fly. That’s what happens, though. High school is all about socialization, turning out a new generation of aimless clones who know how to make change and get a career in the service industry. Some of them go to college. Which, of course, does not guarantee meaningful employment.
4 Then there’s people who realize all they have to do is find someone who’s been through a series of fucked-up relationships and is emotionally vulnerable. They’ll just slide into place, end up dating you, fucking you, using your for food and shelter, all the while doing nothing with their lives.
Wait, I take that back. Two nights ago, Pete used my money to go to a strip club with his friends, get drunk, and vomit inside a mailbox. A week before that he got drunk and ended up driving his drunken friend’s car to the 7-11 to get cigarettes with my money. He jumped a curb, drove across someone’s yard, and punctured a tire running over a lawn gnome.
And let’s not forget the 7,000 hours of video games played. All his stuff is at my house. He made sure to spend a lot of time at my apartment before doing this, though. He probably figured that his friend was sick of having the fucker sleeping on his couch rent-free, and was planning on kicking him out.
He shows up, starts acting the part of my boyfriend. Thanks to situational depression on my part, we end up together, and a week later, his clothes are in my closet and on my floor, and he’s already staked out a spot on the couch where he can piss away the vast majority of his life staring at a box with funny moving pictures.
I hate TV now, especially when you have to watch someone watching the most asinine shit that’s ever been broadcast. Cartoons, infomercials, it doesn’t matter. I think he does it to rest his hands after playing video games, but still needs something to stare at. It’s almost like he’ll go into a trance where he’ll pay attention to nothing I say.
Give me the proper tools, and I could surgically remove part of his brain, cook it, feed it to yuppies at Casa Del Sol, he wouldn’t even notice. Another thing he’ll do is pick a video I have, and watch it about twelve fucking times in a row. I’m not sure how he does this. The 10 or so movies I own I can’t stand to watch.
Shit. I’ve been going through the motions of waitressing for an hour and a half now thinking about all this shit. He’s been living there for about three months, and just last month, I told him that he has to get a job and find his own place, since I can’t support him anymore.
He just ignorned me and disappeared for two days. He does that, any time you talk about money or responsibility. Corner him, and he’ll change the subject. Tell him he needs to help out, and he’ll just suck up to you for a few days instead of contributing.
I’m not knocking unemployment, I’ve been there before. There was a period of a month or two when I couldn’t find work and wasn’t able to pay rent when I lived at my old apartment with two roommates, but I actually took the initiative to clean up the place and do something productive.
Fuck, if I could, I wouldn’t work, and would find some creative way to occupy my time. Painting. Writing. Something I’ve never done before. Anything but sit on my ass absorbing mass media entertainment.
The reason so many great bands come out of England is that it’s so easy to get welfare there. You’re able to devote all your time to your music, and you end up pretty fucking good.
Sean has to work inbetween shows, which he gets paid fuck all for, but he still seems to be, for the most part, creative and intelligent. Still, you have to wonder if The Beatles would have been so sucessful if they all had jobs in a tire factory.
“We all work in a tire factory.” It doesn’t sound right. Living in a yellow submarine doesn’t really reach out to the working man in the same way, though.
Fuck, I don’t want to end up like these people. Look at them, with their families, with their new cars, their houses in the suburbs, pretending they don’t hate each other. Mortgages, babies, kids to support.
Still, that seems like what I’m doing, supporting a kid. Pete is perpetually sixteen, running around drinking and fucking and smoking pot and having a grand old time at my expense. At least he’s not shitting his pants like a screaming infant.
Yet. I wouldn’t feel right living off someone and having them support me. As much as my job sucks and puts me face to face with familial units of suburban halfwits eating familliar food with vaugely Spanish-sounding names, at least I have some sort of dignity.
Dignity stuffed into a uniform that’s too tight and forced to march around taking orders from everyone, but it’ll get better someday.
Back to reality. Back to the customers. Oh yes. Leering businessmen. Leering, fucking money grubbing businessmen, the same type of people who stare at me in public.
The same people who mistake me for a prostitute, even though I’m wearing jeans and a hoodie. I’m not sure where they got that idea, maybe they fell asleep during Soliciting Prositutes 101 back at whatever Ivy Leauge college spawned them.
Before I go on, let me start by saying that I’m not a violent person. I’ve only been in one actual fight, way back in the tenth grade. I usually think people should live and let live, with love, peace, unity, all that hippy crap. Or maybe not.
There’s a breaking point where you just let go, where your happy-go-lucky, day-glo petrochemical disposition you hide behind turns to blind rage.
One of these fuckers grabs my ass, and the next thing I know, my fist goes straight into his face. He falls out of his chair onto the colorfly Southwestern floor, and I let him have the full brunt of my formerly repressed hostility.
Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you, you fucking sex pervert, fuck you, fuck your friends, fuck your family, fuck everyone you know. Fuck you. I don’t hit him again. I wish I had.
That’s probably for the better, seeing as how I’d probably be spending the night in jail rather than just losing my job. Erica shoves me into the kitchen while she attempts to mollify this poor, poor man who just had his ass handed to him by a girl.
The last I saw of him, he was bleeding from the gums. It would be funny to hear his side of the story, where he, the innocent bystander, is savagely assaulted without cause by the hysterical bitch waitress.
Erica storms into the kicthen. Holy shit, she’s showing another emotion. That’s fucking incredible. What’s gotten into you? Have you lost your mind? Get out, and don’t come back, ever, or we’re calling the cops.
Lawsuit this. Lawsuit that. We’ll mail your last paycheck to you. And don’t come back. I’m fired, sent out the back door into the cold night to mill my way through the parked cars and strip mall shoppers to the bus stop.
I always get sleepy on the bus, but this night it’s different. I get to watch the other bus riders, the elderly with their revoked licenses, teenage skater kids without cars, all the other fuckups, just like me. The door to the apartment is unlocked. Pete is gone, as usual, but I’ll stay up. I’ll be waiting.
5 The police show up an hour or so later, announced by the unmistakable, authoritarian three knocks on the door. “Evening, Miss. We had a report about a possible domestic dispute coming from one of these units.” “Excuse me? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Are you sure you didn’t hear anything? We had a few complaints coming from your neighbors.” “No, I’ve been asleep since about 10. I have work tomorrow.”
They weren’t buying it. “Mind if we come inside and have a look around?” “I’d rather you not. I have to get up awfully early.” “I see,” the police officer scowled, “just call us if you hear anything else.” “I’ll do that. Goodnight, officer.”
I shut the door, biting my tongue to keep from laughing. You’re wondering if I killed him. I didn’t. If someone who you thought was too passive, too giving, too nice to say anything about your shameless mooching pulls a complete 180 and flips out on you, it’s a pretty scary sight.
Pete walked in the door close to 2 a.m. when he was hit in the chest by his own gaming console. It was probably a pretty cliche thing to throw at him, but it weighs about four pounds, and with the controllers removed, makes a handy projectile. Sometimes it’s hard to get up the courage to say something that needs to be said, and you need to express yourself in other ways.
“What the fuck was that for?” I use my best pasted-on waitress smile on him. “Sorry I had to do that, but I couldn’t deal with telling you to leave and having you ignore me again.”
Pete rubbed his bruised ribs and stared at me. “I just want to get this over with. Our whole relationship is bullshit. All your stuff is by the door. You have an hour to move it.”
Still smiling. Pete wasn’t really prepared for this kind of confrontation. In fact, I don’t really remember him saying much of anything during all of this. I haven’t heard much news of him for about a month now, but his friends all think I’m a crazy evil bitch. It happens sometimes, if you’re the “cool girlfriend”, you’ll make a few enemies when you break up with someone like this.
I’m still not allowed back at the restaurant under penalty of death, the guy I beat up tried to sue the restaurant, unsucessfully, and I kept in touch with Sean. He told me about a place he played at that needed a bartender, and I’m working there now. At least I have a counter between me and the teeming masses. As far as I know, none of the kitchen staff there have led an insurgency movement, no hordes of the undead have taken over the earth, and the TV weatherman and his fucking family are alive and well. One thing I know for certain is that I’m never letting myself be taken advantage of again.
(This is a work of complete fiction. Any similarities to events, persons or places real or imagined is only a product of the author’s disordered mind. Don’t do anything illegal. Disclaimers suck anyway, so this is me, the author, personally telling you to fill your veins with as much methamphetamines as possible and wreck up your house with a baseball bat before setting fire to the building. Do it. Now.)
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Hey hey. Been a long while since I posted anything in here, but here's some stuff I wrote with several glaring typos I still need to fix. Forgive any weird formatting, since I intend to publish this in half-page 'zine form. Enjoy!
*CrystalMeth Bunny* 7/11/02
SERVICE a short story that could only happen to someone just like you
1 It’s ten past six. The restaurant will be dead for another hour (like I’d like to be), but I’m currently busy attempting to sponge salsa off my shirt. They only give you one shirt here because, I don’t know, they think you have a washing machine in your cramped apartment and can wash the thing every day. Of course, if I had a place like that, I’d already have a good job and wouldn’t have to work here.
Imagine a restaurant that serves Mexican food. Now imagine a restaurant that serves watered down, Americanized Mexican food to hordes of middle class fucks who would shit their pants if they actually had to deal with someone who didn’t speak their language.
That’s where I work. It’s kind of ironic, seeing as how the kitchen staff (excepting the kitchen manager, of course) all have a somewhat limited grasp of English. It doesn’t bother me that much, if I was too busy dragging my family out of hellish poverty or away from third-world death squads, I probably wouldn’t have time for learning the finer points of a language that people who pay me shit.
One of the managers, Erica, comes along and gives me another shirt. I’ve worked here for five or so months with only one shirt. I’ve brought this up, be she keeps giving me the same crap about them not having any in stock in my size. That’s bullshit. They intentionally gave me a shirt that’s a size too small, so Mr. Breadwinner can order his family’s meal into my tits instead of my face, like a living drive-thru order box.
I get pulled aside into the manager’s office, and after a brief sermon about maintaining your appearance while carrying a fuckload of salsa to the front of the house, I get something else to wear. Turns out there’s a whole cabinet of T-shirts in there.
Although they’ve been lying to me and I still have to wear a shirt a size too small, I guess I can postpone laundry for another day. Actually, it’s not like I can’t afford it - I always have money from tips. It’s funny how people tip. They’re using it to rate your service when you’re only getting paid six dollars an hour.
It’s a good thing I attended a public high school where they teach you important life skills like sociability, being pleasant and popular. I’ve never taken a college class. If I’m just going to graduate and end up like Erica, a manager at a shitty chain restaurant in a strip mall, I say fuck it. Let someone else have my money.
My boyfriend, namely. Yeah, he’s great. His name’s Pete, he’s 24, and he’s unemployed. Not the ‘struggling-genius waiting for his big break unemployed’, or ‘down-on-his-luck unemployed’, just jobless. Sure, he can work, but it’s much, much easier for him to live off me and act like no one will hire him.
As long as he has that stack of applications he’ll never fill out and interviews he’ll never go to. Pete never really expressed any interest in me romantically or sexually until I got my own apartment.
See, there’s a problem when you’re living with two other people and you have a deadbeat boyfriend that lives off you, trashes your house, and disappears for a few days when you attempt to discuss money or bills or something like that. People are bound to point it out one day. And they have. No one wants to come over as long as he’s there, parasitically attached to TV and video games like he always is, leaving lights on, not flushing the toilet, and leaving the place in shambles.
Maybe there’s some basic tasks you have to give up the ability to do when they hand out penises, maybe not. I just think he’s a bastard. That’s what he does, though. He’ll hop from relationship to relationship, job to job (when he’s forced to work), house to house when people get sick of his petty shit.
The worst thing about him is that on the surface, he’s likable. Yeah, there he is, standing there, tall and handsome with his beautiful clothes and his beautiful smile and his beautiful eyes, weaseling his way into your heart, until he drops all that shit and proceeds to fuck everyone over for all they’re worth.
Poor guy, no one understands him, everyone’s always fucking him over. I understand him - he basically exists just to do nothing for 15 or so hours, then sleep for 10 or 12. I wouldn’t mind it so much if he actually gave me some goddamn attention, or failing that, at least kept the place clean.
The first customers are beginning to trickle in, which means I get to ignore them for 10 minutes or so while they make up their minds what slop to eat. No one’s been seated in my section, yet, but that’ll change in a minute, probably while I’m out smoking. I think I’ve pretty much figured out how the mind of the average restaurant customer works.
One. Family decides to acknowledge the fact they’re not talented enough to cook for themselves.
Two. Family decides to go out to eat.
Three. Family decides that family-owned restaurants may be laundering money for Al Qaeda, and decide against eating at someplace like that.
Four. Family thinks of familiar, non-threatening chain restaurants they can eat at.
Five. Family decides they want Mexican food without all the scary, foreign overtones.
Six. Family piles into an SUV, drives down to Casa Del Sol, where they project all their personal problems on to you, the wage slave.
I’ve said it before, but families don’t work. Maybe they did when everyone lived on farms and needed children to do farm chores and needed some sort of social structure between a couple people to live life, but not today. Today you have both parents going fucking apeshit slaving away at jobs they hate.
Of course, they’re just chained to desks, they’re not forced to memorize menus and deal with abuse and people’s poorly-concealed personality disorders, all the while putting on a plastic smile and taking all this shit in stride.
Yeah, sit their with your office humor and your vague dissatisfaction over your career choice, I have to deal with your fucking children. Restaurants aren’t daycare centers. They’re not a place to bring your diseased children to tear the place apart and hide silverware under the tables.
Your children suck, and you obviously have no idea how to raise them. I’m not much for discipline, but the least you could do is not have your kids running riot and making someone else’s life miserable. Let’s face it, you just had kids because it was socially acceptable, not because of any parental instincts you thought you had.
The couple I’m waiting on now didn’t bring their children. They’re an elderly, apparently conservative couple. I use couple in the loosest sense of the word, since they don’t seen to act like it - I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of your life with someone you don’t care about just because it’s easier to stay there, doing nothing rather than finding a more fulfilling way to live your life.
Get married, reproduce, watch your children reproduce, vote Republican. Retire, avoid any sort of change or progress, and die. Have an expensive funeral, where they say you were a wonderful, loving person who has gone like a lamb into the arms of God, blah blah blah.
2 These people are demons from hell. This guy probably was shipped off to Europe to wage war on fascists, now he’s barking orders at me and complaining about the amount of ice in his drink.
Fuck, I guess being shot at by Nazis isn’t half as bad as the shit he has to deal with. He’s going to leave a quarter for a tip, him and his sagging gut, him and his wife who’s too apathetic to leave the bastard and find a place of her own with a couple cats.
Why isn’t my food here?
You’ve had grenades explode in your face, you’ve watched your fellow soldiers wet their pants and scream and be cut down by machine gun fire, and now all you can think about is why everyone’s against you. Why your order isn’t ready. Why everyone has to drive so fast.
Greatest generation my ass, I’m not your slave. I take my time walking to the kitchen to get their two orders of fajitas with Anglo-friendly sauce. No, I’m not going to spit in their food or do anything to it, people can always seem to tell, and it’s not worth getting fired over.
Emilio, one of the line cooks, and I exchange earnest smiles through the stainless steel portal under the heat lamps. Emilio’s a decent guy, married, a kid or two as far as I know, but I never get to talk to him at any great lengths.
If this were a romance novel, we’d quit our jobs, run off to Latin America together to battle government forces in the hills. “Oh Emilo, you certainly did an excellent job of destroying that army convoy with a homemade rocket launcher! But don’t you fear the wrath of Generalissimo Murder?”
Emilo laughed and stroked his moustache, casually tossing the smoking rocket launcher he constructed from dumpstered materials over his shoulder. “Fear not! Tommorrow, we storm the the capital! Viva la revolucion!”
Nice thought, but it won’t happen. I bring the scowling elderly man and his wife their order with an artificial smile, and retreat to the dank, mossy cave of the busser’s station to wait for my next victim. Customer. Whatever.
When you have a boring job like this, there’s all sorts of ways to pass the time that don’t involve tampering with people’s food. Well, a couple ways. Right now there’s a placemat with a sketch of a surly looking policeman on it. To the left of that, there’s a drawing of stick figures with TV’s looting a department store. Next to that, there’s a drawing of a Wal-Mart.
The game goes like this: someone draws something on the placemat, and another person comes along and draws something that “beats” it. A drawing of a pineapple is a wild card, it beats anything, but can only be used once per game.
One of the bussers, a vaguely punk-looking kid, says he used to play this game as a way to pass the time in study hall. I think about what beats a policeman, and I draw a southern lunch counter.
Pete’s probably living it up right now. Probably out fucking someone else, or at least attempting to. Everyone warned me when we started going out, and I should have listened. Everyone knows what he’s like, what he does to people, but he worked his evil magic on me, and now he’s in my apartment, using electricity I have to pay for, eating all my food, probably putting cigarettes out on my couch and laughing about it.
I’m not sure how someone can fuck up an apartment that bad unintentionally. I’m not really a neat freak, and I have no problem with cleaning up my own mess, but I have to draw the line somewhere. At least I should draw the line somewhere.
It’s got to stop, or we’re going to end up like that married couple, stuck together by acceptance of fate and hating every second of it. At least I will be. It’s kind of slow tonight, almost seven and I’m just taking the orders of my second table.
A bunch of guys in their mid-twenties come in, ordering three dollar beers and scarfing down free chips. Yeah, we’re all really impressed that you’re paying a lot for alcohol in a restaurant. At least they’re ignoring me at the time, studying their menus, taking as long as possible to order.
Shit. The guy’s talking into my chest again. I’m sure it’s very very hard to lift your head up ever so slightly, and at least pretend you’re not staring at my chest. Fucking pervert. Fucking pervert with a twenty dollar haircut and their career track straight to the top, where they can sexually harass as many people as possible and get away with all of it.
Ha ha ha. Ha fucking ha. You and your friends, buddies, co-workers, laughing it up. Look at him. The guy’s probably bragging to all of his friends how he got away with staring at me, and how he’s going to get my phone number and fuck my brains out.
Yeah, they should all be high-fiving each other right now and then talking about football.
The busser’s out having a cigarette right now. I don’t blame him, Tuesday nights always suck like this. There aren’t a whole lot of people eating right now, so you tend to notice everyone’s little quirks and foibles. I pick up the barely eaten fajitas, pick up the three dimes and two pennies left as a tip, and go back into the kitchen.
That’s right, fucko. I’m going out for a smoke, and I don’t care if you need a refill on your drinks or chips or if there’s a Band-Aid in your salsa. People try to do this scam where they put a foreign object in their food and try to get a free meal. All the cooks’ Band-Aids are neon colored - I think the health department makes sure of this, so it doesn’t work if they bring their own.
Everyone has horror stories about shit they found in their food, or shit their friends or relatives found in their food. Like we’re all a bunch of evil, scheming madmen and madwomen who hate you and have nothing better to do than put cigarette butts in your ice cream and hope you won’t notice. That’s not true at all.
Well, maybe sometimes we hate you, but that’s conditional. Most of the time it’ll happen to cops at fast food restaurants. More likely the action of bored employees than anyone with revolutionary intent.
Most of the time, it’s a big wad of snot, or they’ll dust the cops food with weed. These people get caught all the time. There’s usually a bunch of bullshit charges that follow - assaulting a police officer, product tampering, stuff like that. The funny part is the police report is usually written by the cop that got the altered food, where he has to admit that his fat ass was buying five hamburgers.
Truth is, most of us need these jobs, especially the cooks. For some reason, you can be a dysfunctional drug addict with an explosive temper and still do very well in this job. On days the kitchen manager has off, you’ll sometimes see one of the cooks chopping lines of speed on the cutting board. I abstain.
I mean, if we really wanted to get back at you, for being an asshole, we could just copy the name off your credit card, look in the phone book to see where you live, and show up around 3 a.m. with a bat. I know I’ve thought of it.
I stamp out the cigarette on the ground and open the steel fire doors, walk past the shelves where they store the kitchen equipment, the malfunctioning ice machine, and the dishwasher. The fucktards’ order isn’t ready quite yet, so I get to hang out in the kitchen for a minute or so.
Bringing their order back to them, I can’t help but notice how they’re dressed. They’re all clothed in forced “casual” wear which probably cost hundreds of dollars. Give ‘em headset microphones and teach ‘em to sing and dance, you’ve got another boy band.
Four Coronas at three dollars a piece, steak fajitas, eight dollars, chicken quesadilla, seven dollars, chicken fajitas, eight dollars. If there was any justice right now, they’d all be crushed to death by the grill of an old Ford truck that’s hanging above their heads, one of our many garish decorations. You wanted Tex-Mex, you wanted Southwestern, but a bunch of garbage was vomited onto the walls to add atmosphere.
3 Another table is seated, and there’s an angry-looking poet guy who sits down at it. He just wants coffee, that I can deal with. Why he would want to drink it here is beyond me.
While getting the coffee, I notice the placemat game has progressed remarkably. Termites eat the southern lunch counter. Exterminator comes and kills the termites. The exterminator is driven off by a mob of angry animal rights activists. The animal rights activists are driven off by a fire hose. I sketch a dog peeing on the fire hydrant that the fire hose is attached to. That makes sense.
The next table I have to serve is that hot-shit TV weatherman and his fucking family. Christ, I hate them. Every week or so they come in here, and he uses his evil powers as a minor local celebrity to stroke his own ego. In any other country, he’d have been eaten by wolves.
His oldest kid is apparently in Boy Scouts. Apparently, I say because his father is the kind of person who would buy the uniform at a thrift store and make the kid wear it just to prove how much of a dedicated father he is.
I have to wonder, why Boy Scouts? Living in a country so obsessed with gun culture, shouldn’t we logically be teaching our children how to be elite paramilitary assassins instead of making them go fucking camping?
That’s my cue to kill some time in the bathroom. It’s pretty well hidden from the customers, which means the fuckers have to constantly ask me where it is. It would be quiet in here, if it weren’t for the overhead speakers.
Keeping with the theme of Americanized Latin culture, here we have a salsa version of a Sheryl Crow song. There’s only about 10 songs which loop constantly over the speakers, but you learn to tune it out pretty fast.
The bathroom door opens. I’m hidden in the back stall, languishing under the fluorescent lights. “Claire? You in here?” It’s Erica. “Just a minute.” “There’s a party of eleven coming in a half hour, and I’m seating them in your section. Just so you know, okay?”
Shit. I can’t hide. “Sure, be out in a second.” Erica’s the kind of person it’s impossible to hate, but I try. Always perky, always upbeat, nothing phases her.
Break out the carbon monoxide and gas a hundred adorable puppies to death in front of her, she’s still smiling, asking if you enjoyed your meal and to come back real soon. Then she’d hand a balloon to your kid. She has to be on some serious fucking drugs to act that way.
Party of eleven. It’s so vague, so impersonal, eleven glasses of water, eleven ramekins of salsa, six baskets of complimentary tortilla chips. Three tables together.
Who are these people? Birthday party? Relatives in town? White separatist militia? Hard-core Satanists planning their next cattle mutilation? Guess I’m going to find out pretty soon.
Sean has his hands full talking to the TV weatherman and his fucking family whose order I apparently didn’t get around to taking. Fuck me, I’m too busy preparing for the onslaught of devil-worshippers I’m about to serve.
Sean’s great, though - he doesn’t seem to give a fuck what anyone thinks, and it’s sad to think he’d end up working here. He’s tall, intimidating, and plays guitar for a black metal band called Tantalus. He’ll show you the mural of dancing skeletons he has tattooed on his lower back if you ask.
Sometimes Sean will entertain you with his vast knowledge of serial killers while standing right next to a bunch of children. He’s fun like that. In a perfect world, he’d be tooling around the post-apocalyptic wasteland battling zombies with a chainsaw (whom I suspect would bear resemblence to Mister weatherman over there).
As you may already know, the world is far from perfect. Important this, important that, do you know who I am - I’ve heard it all before. Just because you’re on TV and have perfect teeth doesn’t mean you’re some kind of culinary demigod who can make us mortals cater to your every whim.
Robert, the punk rock busser, is seating the party of eleven, who turns out to be a very normal looking extended family with a few kids in tow. They never seat the hard-core Satanists in my section, it seems.
When you’re made to wear a uniform, you try to express your individuality in any small way that you can. Robert has a studded belt, and that’s how you can tell he’s punk, even though company policy forbids him from dyeing or charging his hair into spikes.
Other than his habit of occassionaly disappearing when you need him, I like Robert. I guess if I’m digressing into the personal lives of the people I work with, I should be thorough.
I’ve never seen most of the waiters or bussers who work the day shift. Tonya is an aggressively friendly college student, Miguel is a cook that hurt himself on the job badly enough that he got moved to the front of the house, and now he seats people with his arm in a sling. Kurt is in his mid-thirties and keeps mostly to himself, and Robin is a born-again Christian who’s headed for a nervous breakdown.
Rounding out the bunch is a handful of bussers, whose names I keep forgetting due to the rather high turnover rate. All kids fresh out of high school with the collective attention span of a particularly stupid fruit fly. That’s what happens, though. High school is all about socialization, turning out a new generation of aimless clones who know how to make change and get a career in the service industry. Some of them go to college. Which, of course, does not guarantee meaningful employment.
4 Then there’s people who realize all they have to do is find someone who’s been through a series of fucked-up relationships and is emotionally vulnerable. They’ll just slide into place, end up dating you, fucking you, using your for food and shelter, all the while doing nothing with their lives.
Wait, I take that back. Two nights ago, Pete used my money to go to a strip club with his friends, get drunk, and vomit inside a mailbox. A week before that he got drunk and ended up driving his drunken friend’s car to the 7-11 to get cigarettes with my money. He jumped a curb, drove across someone’s yard, and punctured a tire running over a lawn gnome.
And let’s not forget the 7,000 hours of video games played. All his stuff is at my house. He made sure to spend a lot of time at my apartment before doing this, though. He probably figured that his friend was sick of having the fucker sleeping on his couch rent-free, and was planning on kicking him out.
He shows up, starts acting the part of my boyfriend. Thanks to situational depression on my part, we end up together, and a week later, his clothes are in my closet and on my floor, and he’s already staked out a spot on the couch where he can piss away the vast majority of his life staring at a box with funny moving pictures.
I hate TV now, especially when you have to watch someone watching the most asinine shit that’s ever been broadcast. Cartoons, infomercials, it doesn’t matter. I think he does it to rest his hands after playing video games, but still needs something to stare at. It’s almost like he’ll go into a trance where he’ll pay attention to nothing I say.
Give me the proper tools, and I could surgically remove part of his brain, cook it, feed it to yuppies at Casa Del Sol, he wouldn’t even notice. Another thing he’ll do is pick a video I have, and watch it about twelve fucking times in a row. I’m not sure how he does this. The 10 or so movies I own I can’t stand to watch.
Shit. I’ve been going through the motions of waitressing for an hour and a half now thinking about all this shit. He’s been living there for about three months, and just last month, I told him that he has to get a job and find his own place, since I can’t support him anymore.
He just ignorned me and disappeared for two days. He does that, any time you talk about money or responsibility. Corner him, and he’ll change the subject. Tell him he needs to help out, and he’ll just suck up to you for a few days instead of contributing.
I’m not knocking unemployment, I’ve been there before. There was a period of a month or two when I couldn’t find work and wasn’t able to pay rent when I lived at my old apartment with two roommates, but I actually took the initiative to clean up the place and do something productive.
Fuck, if I could, I wouldn’t work, and would find some creative way to occupy my time. Painting. Writing. Something I’ve never done before. Anything but sit on my ass absorbing mass media entertainment.
The reason so many great bands come out of England is that it’s so easy to get welfare there. You’re able to devote all your time to your music, and you end up pretty fucking good.
Sean has to work inbetween shows, which he gets paid fuck all for, but he still seems to be, for the most part, creative and intelligent. Still, you have to wonder if The Beatles would have been so sucessful if they all had jobs in a tire factory.
“We all work in a tire factory.” It doesn’t sound right. Living in a yellow submarine doesn’t really reach out to the working man in the same way, though.
Fuck, I don’t want to end up like these people. Look at them, with their families, with their new cars, their houses in the suburbs, pretending they don’t hate each other. Mortgages, babies, kids to support.
Still, that seems like what I’m doing, supporting a kid. Pete is perpetually sixteen, running around drinking and fucking and smoking pot and having a grand old time at my expense. At least he’s not shitting his pants like a screaming infant.
Yet. I wouldn’t feel right living off someone and having them support me. As much as my job sucks and puts me face to face with familial units of suburban halfwits eating familliar food with vaugely Spanish-sounding names, at least I have some sort of dignity.
Dignity stuffed into a uniform that’s too tight and forced to march around taking orders from everyone, but it’ll get better someday.
Back to reality. Back to the customers. Oh yes. Leering businessmen. Leering, fucking money grubbing businessmen, the same type of people who stare at me in public.
The same people who mistake me for a prostitute, even though I’m wearing jeans and a hoodie. I’m not sure where they got that idea, maybe they fell asleep during Soliciting Prositutes 101 back at whatever Ivy Leauge college spawned them.
Before I go on, let me start by saying that I’m not a violent person. I’ve only been in one actual fight, way back in the tenth grade. I usually think people should live and let live, with love, peace, unity, all that hippy crap. Or maybe not.
There’s a breaking point where you just let go, where your happy-go-lucky, day-glo petrochemical disposition you hide behind turns to blind rage.
One of these fuckers grabs my ass, and the next thing I know, my fist goes straight into his face. He falls out of his chair onto the colorfly Southwestern floor, and I let him have the full brunt of my formerly repressed hostility.
Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you, you fucking sex pervert, fuck you, fuck your friends, fuck your family, fuck everyone you know. Fuck you. I don’t hit him again. I wish I had.
That’s probably for the better, seeing as how I’d probably be spending the night in jail rather than just losing my job. Erica shoves me into the kitchen while she attempts to mollify this poor, poor man who just had his ass handed to him by a girl.
The last I saw of him, he was bleeding from the gums. It would be funny to hear his side of the story, where he, the innocent bystander, is savagely assaulted without cause by the hysterical bitch waitress.
Erica storms into the kicthen. Holy shit, she’s showing another emotion. That’s fucking incredible. What’s gotten into you? Have you lost your mind? Get out, and don’t come back, ever, or we’re calling the cops.
Lawsuit this. Lawsuit that. We’ll mail your last paycheck to you. And don’t come back. I’m fired, sent out the back door into the cold night to mill my way through the parked cars and strip mall shoppers to the bus stop.
I always get sleepy on the bus, but this night it’s different. I get to watch the other bus riders, the elderly with their revoked licenses, teenage skater kids without cars, all the other fuckups, just like me. The door to the apartment is unlocked. Pete is gone, as usual, but I’ll stay up. I’ll be waiting.
5 The police show up an hour or so later, announced by the unmistakable, authoritarian three knocks on the door. “Evening, Miss. We had a report about a possible domestic dispute coming from one of these units.” “Excuse me? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Are you sure you didn’t hear anything? We had a few complaints coming from your neighbors.” “No, I’ve been asleep since about 10. I have work tomorrow.”
They weren’t buying it. “Mind if we come inside and have a look around?” “I’d rather you not. I have to get up awfully early.” “I see,” the police officer scowled, “just call us if you hear anything else.” “I’ll do that. Goodnight, officer.”
I shut the door, biting my tongue to keep from laughing. You’re wondering if I killed him. I didn’t. If someone who you thought was too passive, too giving, too nice to say anything about your shameless mooching pulls a complete 180 and flips out on you, it’s a pretty scary sight.
Pete walked in the door close to 2 a.m. when he was hit in the chest by his own gaming console. It was probably a pretty cliche thing to throw at him, but it weighs about four pounds, and with the controllers removed, makes a handy projectile. Sometimes it’s hard to get up the courage to say something that needs to be said, and you need to express yourself in other ways.
“What the fuck was that for?” I use my best pasted-on waitress smile on him. “Sorry I had to do that, but I couldn’t deal with telling you to leave and having you ignore me again.”
Pete rubbed his bruised ribs and stared at me. “I just want to get this over with. Our whole relationship is bullshit. All your stuff is by the door. You have an hour to move it.”
Still smiling. Pete wasn’t really prepared for this kind of confrontation. In fact, I don’t really remember him saying much of anything during all of this. I haven’t heard much news of him for about a month now, but his friends all think I’m a crazy evil bitch. It happens sometimes, if you’re the “cool girlfriend”, you’ll make a few enemies when you break up with someone like this.
I’m still not allowed back at the restaurant under penalty of death, the guy I beat up tried to sue the restaurant, unsucessfully, and I kept in touch with Sean. He told me about a place he played at that needed a bartender, and I’m working there now. At least I have a counter between me and the teeming masses. As far as I know, none of the kitchen staff there have led an insurgency movement, no hordes of the undead have taken over the earth, and the TV weatherman and his fucking family are alive and well. One thing I know for certain is that I’m never letting myself be taken advantage of again.
(This is a work of complete fiction. Any similarities to events, persons or places real or imagined is only a product of the author’s disordered mind. Don’t do anything illegal. Disclaimers suck anyway, so this is me, the author, personally telling you to fill your veins with as much methamphetamines as possible and wreck up your house with a baseball bat before setting fire to the building. Do it. Now.)
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