Play Me Backwards (18 page)

“We just
had
a girl in here who didn't know what it was like,” I said. “If
she'd
been the one who saw that, she could probably get us shut down.”

“Someone probably
should
,” said Paige. “This place is out of control.”

“Not to mention out of the health code,” said Jake.

The back door swung open, and Mindy ran out into the store in
her bra, waving her shirt above her head like a lasso. She ran around the counter three times, then ran back into the back room.

“Permissions, I presume?” asked Jake.

“Yeah,” I said. “Stan and a bunch of girls.”

“And me,” said Jake, as he bolted for the back room, leaving Paige and me alone again in the cool quiet of the front of the house. Sunlight beamed in through the windows and lit up the freezer, where the antique Willy the Whale ice cream cake kept its lonely vigil.

“Spring is in the air,” said Paige. “When everyone wants to get naked and a young man's fancy turns to love.”

Love.

I'm pretty sure that was the first time either of us had said that word out loud in front of each other.

She looked at me for a second. She'd tossed the word out as bait and wanted to see if I took it. I waited for a bit to see if she said anything first, and for a second I was panicked all over again and thought she was going to say she loved me. I wasn't sure I ready for that sort of thing.

I didn't get the same frantic feelings about Paige that I used to with Anna.

But this wasn't the same sort of relationship, either. This was a
real
one. An adult one. Maybe saying that word was the logical next step. The next phase.

Maybe falling in love is just about finding someone who is willing to put up with most of your shit if you put up with most of theirs. Making two puzzle pieces fit together, even if they weren't exactly from the same puzzle. Maybe all of that “my whole world is on fire” thing is something else.

Paige and I were still letting the word hang in the air when Stan stepped into the front—fully dressed, but with his boxers tossed casually onto the top of his head, like a beret.

“Debutante ball,” he said. “I command you to go to the debutante ball. This is not negotiable. You'd just be fighting with fate.”

“We're going,” said Paige.

He turned to me, balancing the boxers on his head. They started to slip, so he readjusted them—instead of just resting them on his head, he put them on like a crown, the elastic waistband circling his infernal brow. The legs stuck up above him like rabbit ears.

Or, you know, horns.

Big, floppy horns that probably smelled like ass.

“You're getting a suit?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

He bowed, then stood up perfectly straight. “Very good, sir.”

A puff of smoke came through the crack in the door to the break room. Stan turned and walked back in, with the greatest amount of dignity and pomp I could possibly imagine for a guy with underpants on his head.

I looked at Paige and she looked at me and said what may have been on both our minds.

“I think you need to find a better place to work, baby.”

Most days when Paige was working at Casa Bravo, I'd swing by for a while at the start of her shift. If it wasn't busy already, I could grab a table in Paige's section and she'd slip me some fries or something.

But some days, when it got busy early or when the manager was being nosy, I was exiled to the little outdoor space by the Dumpsters where the servers came to smoke, and I'd stand around talking with them until Paige found a chance to come out and say hello. This could take a while, but if I left before I saw her, she'd be pretty upset.

On the day my dad was taking me suit shopping, I went straight to the restaurant with Paige after school to wait for him to pick me up. They were already slammed inside, so I headed right for the Dumpsters, where I found myself talking to Chris, a balding server in his midthirties who looked like a washed-up professional wrestler, about
Moby-Dick
. The night before, I'd listened to the section about whale genitals, and I was dying to talk about it with
someone
.

“The whole last three or four CDs have just been the guy going
on about whale anatomy and shit,” I said. “I didn't think he'd ever get around to talking about whale dicks, but he finally did.”

Chris gave this a thoughtful nod as he puffed on his cigarette. “Bet those aren't small.”

“Nope. Apparently the sailors used to call that part the ‘grandissimus.' They're roughly the size of a whole person.”

“So's mine,” said Chris.

I almost asked him if he knew a girl named Mindy, but instead I just went on. “Some guy in the book actually takes the skin from one and goes around wearing it like papal robes or something.”

“Weird.”

“And then when the boat washes up on a desert island, all the natives see him dressed like that and think he's a god. That's what gave George Lucas the idea for the Ewoks and C-3PO.”

“Yeah?”

“Nah. I made that last part up.”

He flicked his cigarette lazily at the Dumpster. “Paige
said
you were kind of weird,” he told me. “What's she like in bed?”

The most obvious response here was, “None of your fucking business, baldy,” but before I could say anything, a bunch of other servers showed up at the smoking area, and one of them, a middle-aged woman named Jane, announced that they were about to have a contest to see who could make their mouth look the most like a butt hole. One by one, they pursed their lips together so that they looked like anuses.

The conversations out by the Dumpster were often way, way nastier than anything we ever got up to in the Cave. They had the same pissing contests over which of them was the most fucked up, but there was a bit less pride in their voices. They were older than
us, and dealing with stuff like custody issues, getting thrown out of apartments, and shit like that. I think that pretty much every restaurant is like this; all the people your parents don't want you hanging out with in high school seem to grow up to work in food service.

But the smoking area behind Casa Bravo wasn't a permanent den of sin, like the back of the Ice Cave. It was just a little one that existed for five minutes at a time when enough people could sneak away from their tables long enough to smoke, then ceased to exist when the cigarettes were tossed out. Most of the night the space by the Dumpster was just a space by the Dumpster.

The anus-mouthed servers finished smoking and went back inside just as Paige slipped out.

“Hey, baby,” she said. “Sorry it took me so long. My tables are all pains in the ass.”

“No problem,” I said. I kissed her, then asked if she realized that her coworkers were probably actually sicker than mine.

“Yeah,” she said. “But I don't smoke, so I'm hardly ever out here when they really get going. I just do my work and go home. At least they work their butts off before they come back here.”

She gave me a quick kiss and a squeeze on the ass, then ran inside to get back to her tables. Every minute of downtime was something she had to fight for in her job. The servers at Casa Bravo may have been fucked up, but you couldn't call them slackers. Their jobs were way, way harder than mine.

A minute later my dad texted me to say he was out front in the Casa Bravo parking lot. He was so enthusiastic about seeing me in a suit that he'd offered to buy me one, and I couldn't really afford to say no.

“So, run this by me again,” he said as we drove towards downtown. “It's a debutante ball?”

“Technically I guess it's a scholarship cotillion,” I said.

“That's even worse!” said Dad. “Do you have to know what kind of fork to use on your grapefruit?”

“I just have to escort Paige down a walkway or something, then mingle and dance around.”

“I didn't realize Paige's family was in that kind of circle,” he said. “I didn't know we
had
high society in Iowa.”

“That's because you and I spend our time at thrift stores, flea markets, and B-list ice cream parlors,” I said. “You don't run into the country club set at those.”

“Hey, your mother and I go to fancy places sometimes,” he said. “We went to the West Egg Steakhouse a while ago.”

“When?” I asked.

He thought for a second, then said, “About two years ago, I guess. But in a couple of years when you're out of the house, we'll probably go more.”

“What's stopping you now?” I asked. “I'm not home that much as it is, and it's not like you need a babysitter for me.”

He didn't have an answer for that, but he nodded for a bit rather than just admitting that he and Mom had turned old and lame.

Mom and Dad were barely into their forties. They were still young, really. At an age when a lot of people these days are just starting to think about settling down and having kids, they were about to enter the kid-free phase of life. They were young enough that they could still probably go to rock concerts and night clubs and stuff and not look completely stupid.

But would they? Nope. Maybe they planned on that when they got married young and had me in their early twenties, but instead they'd probably just bought themselves ten or twenty extra years of playing shuffleboard and watching game shows.

Suckers.

I directed Dad through downtown Des Moines to McIntyre's, the place where Brianna worked. I sort of wanted to talk to her and make sure she wasn't going to organize a protest against us or something.

Inside the store, she was sitting at a counter, wearing a plain black blouse and with her hair in a bun. Seeing her dressed like that, instead of like she was going to a protest rally, made me think about how most of the hippies from the 1960s ended up becoming yuppies in the eighties. But I suppose you shouldn't look too hard for symbolism in people's work uniforms.

Before she noticed us, I was whisked me over to some slick-looking asshole with a tape measure in his hand. My dad put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I have a young man here who needs a suit for a debutante ball.”

“You've come to the right place,” said the salesman. “The Harverster Club one?”

“That's the one.”

He flashed me a no-cavities smile, and I looked around the store and felt sick to my stomach. I wasn't a suit kind of guy. I was so far out of my element in a place like this that I almost wanted to pee on the wall just to make the place seem more agreeably squalid. The suits on the rack seemed like they were closing in around me, ready to swallow me up and spit a yuppie version of me back out.

But I shook the salesman's hand. “Do you have anything made from the skin of a whale's grandissimus?” I asked.

He didn't quit smiling, but I could tell he thought this was going to be a long afternoon.

I waved at Brianna while Dad and the salesman talked about what sort of suits were hot this year (plain dark colors and shades of gray, of course), and she sort of smirked when she saw me. I pretended I was looking at some ties and walked over to her.

“Hey,” I said.

“Getting ready for the ball?” she asked.

“What else?”

She smirked again. “You know your coworker is insane, right?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “He's been claiming to be Satan since he was at least nine.”

“Did he ever really even live in Japan?”

“Not that I know of.”

She just smiled and shook her head a bit. “Cute,” she said. “I guess he thought he was seducing me or something, right?”

“He probably just wanted to get you to hang out and join in the game they were playing in the back room,” I said. “But I sort of feel like I should apologize on his behalf.”

She shook her head. “Let me guess,” she said. “He spent the next hour talking about what a bitch I was for leaving.”

“No,” I said. “He can take no for an answer pretty well.”

She tilted her head to the side and played with a pen that was on the counter. “Guess I'll give him that, at least,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I hear that if a guy takes no for an answer and doesn't text you pictures of his scrotum, he's probably ahead of the curve.”

“Unfortunately, that's about right. And that carbonated milk was really fucking good.”

I leaned in closer and motioned my head toward the salesman. “This guy strikes me as a scrotum texter.”

She nodded and leaned in even closer to me to whisper in my ear. “That's Avery. He would probably send me pictures of his asshole as a morning pick-me-up if he didn't know I'd sue him.”

“He could just send a shot of his face,” I said. “Same difference.”

She smirked, and I walked back over to the suit racks, where dad and Avery the salesman started having me try on suits, one after the other.

While we went through suit after suit, each of which looked alike to me, I developed a theory that we think of shopping as a women's activity because it's got to be more fun to shop for women's clothes than men's. Women get to pick out a dress style, the color, the accessories, all kinds of stuff. There are a million kinds of dresses in the world. Suits for men are all pretty much the same. They don't even have plaid ones anymore. I looked. I liked the idea of showing up for the ball dressed up like a used-car salesman from an old movie and telling all the country club people that I owned Crazy Leon's Used Car and Antique Hair Follicle Emporium, just to see how they reacted. Dad probably would have gotten a kick out of that, but he was determined not to walk out of there without getting me into a decent, “for realsies” suit.

I shrugged my way through the whole ordeal, and after a while my dad started getting frustrated.