Play Me Backwards (22 page)

Just then, Mindy strolled out of the back room.

“Hi, hon,” she said to Paige.

Paige gave her a nasty look, then gave me a nastier one. The stabbing look.

“And
she's
here?” she asked.

“Hey, I didn't invite her,” I said.

She reached out and held my hand, but not with much affection or anything.

“My love,” she said, “I think you're starting to understand now that we belong together.”

I gulped, but I nodded.

“Well,” she said, “I'm not going to be stuck with a loser who hangs out with other losers forever. I don't want to spend my whole life cleaning up your messes.”

“You won't,” I said.

“Or bailing you out of jail when these idiots talk you into doing something stupid.”

“You won't,” I said.

“Or listening to you apologizing when I catch you with some skank you didn't know you were flirting with.”

“Look, I didn't invite Mindy over, and I haven't even gone back
there all day. If I had, I would have been able to avoid your sister and her pervert friends.”

Paige took a deep breath. “I know that,” she said. “But don't you think you should find a better place to work than this?”

“I like it here,” I said.

“But if you worked someplace else, you could make more money and not have fucking
Mindy
show up all the time,” said Paige.

Mindy smirked, then said, “Well, fuck you too.”

Paige ignored her.

“Also,” she went on, “I wouldn't have to reassure my idiot sister that she isn't going to die because some dumbass made her eat paint because she
might
have been talking about his dick.”

“She
definitely
was,” I said.

“So?” she asked. “What are you worried about? I told her you were above average.”

I wished Stan would snap his fingers and turn the whole store into a lake of fire right about then. I didn't dare to look at Mindy to see how she reacted to that one.

“You
told
her that?” I asked.

“What's the big deal?”

“Is that even legal?” I asked. “Talking about stuff like that with a kid her age?”

“Sorry, okay?” said Paige. “It's not like you haven't told all the people back there about fucking me.”

“No, I haven't,” I said.

“You haven't told them we did it?”

Stan and Mindy snickered like a couple of seventh graders.

“I told you,” I said. “Guys sound like douche bags when we talk about sex.”

“Yeah,” said Stan. “Girls sound liberated, guys sound like douche bags. That's just the way it is.”

I nodded. “We may be a motley crew of damned and forsaken souls around here, but we aren't
douche bags
.”

“Whatever,” said Paige. “If it bugs you so much, I won't talk about it anymore. But that's no excuse to make my sister eat paint.”

“Sorry,” I said. “We won't do it again.”

“Do you have enough money to take me to dinner and a movie tonight?” she asked. “And pay for both of us?”

“Not really,” I said.

“You
need
a better job,” she said. “This place is shit. You might as well just turn in pop cans for nickels, like a fucking eight-year-old.”

And she walked out, leaving me feeling like a complete asshole.

So this was love.

I remembered the night she'd first come to my house excited to be with me even though I was a complete bum. I wouldn't have believed that someone like her could ever love someone like me.

Now, I was starting to realize that love is like one of those songs where you have to play the whole thing backwards to hear all the hidden messages.

Love is like a middle-school dance: You're supposed to be having a good time, but mostly you just stand around questioning your value as a human being and thinking that maybe you should have stayed home.

Love is also like a Slushee: It's so sweet, but so, so messy, and deep down you know, from the first sip, that the smooth texture won't last, and after a few sips your tongue will be too numb to taste much, and pretty soon there'll be nothing left in the cup but some shaved ice that takes more work than it's really worth to suck through the straw at all.

Love is like a blanket on the bed in a cheap motel you check into when the rainstorm gets too hard to drive your leaky car in. It's warm and dry and feels like just what you needed, but you can't help thinking that it might very well give you a rash.

Love is like a maze of mirrors. No map can help you through it because you can never quite tell where you're going. Also, you're likely to see sides of yourself that you normally don't.

Love is like putting on a new pair of glasses that makes you experience the whole world differently. You hear birds chirping and bells ringing, and you feel soft breezes and notice that the flowers on the trees smell like Heaven. But sometimes you also notice the weeds growing up through the cracks, the noisy floorboards, the rattle in your engine, the hole in your shoe, the stains on the ceiling, and everything else that never bothered you before, and now it drives you nuts.

Love is the feeling that your life is finally about to begin. But that's one thing when you're younger and think being an adult will be awesome, and another when you know it's all about busting your ass to have a stainless-steel kitchen and shit.

Love is a whole new gnawing feeling in your guts. And it doesn't replace the old one. You just have to hope that it compliments it.

Love is something you get by without for a long time, but once you find it, you can't imagine life without it anymore. Which seems like a good thing, but you could say the same thing about a colostomy bag, probably.

Love is like fitting two puzzle pieces from two different puzzles together. You try not to think about the fact that the original puzzles they came from will never be quite the same, or that the new picture they'll make might look all wrong.

Fuck.

By the time I got home from work that day, Paige had sent me links to about fifty restaurants in town that let you apply for jobs online. They all said they were looking for people who were self-motivated, friendly, and detail oriented.

I wanted to just write “Fuck detail orientation, you bigoted scum” right into the name field, but I didn't. Paige was right. I was never going to amount to anything worth being if I just kept working at the Ice Cave forever. I still didn't mind the idea of not amounting to anything so much, but if I was ever going to move out of my parents' house, and have enough cash on hand to get cheese sticks and things now and then, I was going to need a job that paid better. It's one thing to be broke and living in a tiny hovel with cars up on cinder blocks in the yard if you're single, but having a girlfriend isn't cheap. So I filled out the applications.

None of them asked what my grades were like, so I had
that
going for me. Most just wanted a résumé. A few had a box in which
you were supposed to answer the question “Why do you want to work on our award-winning team?”

I usually just put “so I can gain real-world experience with a successful organization.” That was bullshit, of course, but it sounded better than “for the cash.” A lot of would-be employers hate to hear that, for some reason. You'd think they'd like honesty, but people seriously expect you to say you always dreamed of being a fry cook.

I couldn't resist messing around with a couple of them, though. One was a place clear out in Altoona, which was farther than I wanted to commute. With that one I added a part in my résumé saying that I was a wide receiver on the school crotch-kicking team. A wise manager would look at that and think,
Let's hire him! A guy who can be a wide receiver on a crotch-kicking team can probably take a lot of torture.

On another one, for a place clear the hell in Indianola, I even added a bit about how I had led the crotch-kicking team to the state championship, despite the notable handicap of only having one leg. “The guys who are making a movie about me say I'm a hero,” I wrote. “But I'm just an ordinary, detail-oriented young man who won't let adversity stand between me and my love of kicking people in the crotch.”

At the West Egg Steakhouse there was another question: “Describe a time when you've utilized outstanding leadership skills.”

That just about made me want to barf. I was applying for a job working in a restaurant, not rallying armies to cross mighty rivers into battle or bossing whale hunters around.

I figured that the West Egg Steakhouse was
way
out of my league, being a fancy downtown steakhouse, so I decided to have some fun with my answer:

Last year in school I took a class on marketing. My group had to develop a new product idea and then make a commercial for it. The other people in my group were slackers, but with my leadership, we developed a concept for a breakfast cereal called Nards. The commercial we made was so good that everyone in the class wished they were eating Nards right then! I was fascinated by the psychology behind it, and how marketing could make people get so excited about Nards. Maybe I can make it for real sometime, and you can sell it at the West Egg. You could even put it on the sign. WEST EGG STEAKHOUSE: EAT NARDS HERE!

That, of course, was the one application that got a response.

The day after I sent it in, the West Egg Steakhouse called me in for an interview. I halfway thought they were kidding, but I cleaned myself up as well as I could and drove out there after school.

The manager there was a younger guy, maybe thirty or thirty-five, who had his hair slicked back. He was wearing a midnight-blue suit and a red bow tie, and his nametag said
BRAD
. He seemed a little less slimy than the salesman back at McIntyre's, but not by too much, and the nonblack suit didn't make him seem comforting or approachable to me. But I did my best. Stand when they stand, sit when they sit.

“You must be Leon?” he said, offering his hand.

“I am,” I said, taking it. I shook it hard and looked him in the eye, like you're supposed to.

Brad glanced down at a printed-out version of my application. “I see you're interested in marketing,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. I managed not to laugh here, somehow.

“And you go to Cornersville Trace High?”

“For a few more weeks. Graduation is coming up.”

“Would you be leaving us for college at the end of the summer?”

“I'll probably just go to community college or junior college for a couple of years,” I said. “So I wouldn't have to quit.”

Brad gave me a thoughtful look. “That's probably smart, in this economy,” he said. “Not that I wouldn't hire you if you were going to college, but I wouldn't love it if you left us in three or four months.”

He read over the application again, while making noises like
choo choo choo choo choo
under his breath, which I guess he thought made him look very busy.

“Now, if we hire you, you'll have a lot of responsibility,” he said. “We value our guests here, and we always want them to have a positive experience.”

Everyone calls customers “guests” now. Stan and I preferred to call them “idiots.”

But I smiled and nodded.

“So, Leon,” Brad said, “do you think you can handle the responsibility of a job here?”

“I'm sure I can,” I said.

“I know you were asking for a server job, but would you be okay with starting out in the dish pit? We like to start people at the bottom here.”

I shrugged. “I guess,” I said.

“Well then,” he said, “we're actively and aggressively hiring right now, so all I'll need you to do is fill out your W-2, sign the contract, and take the personality test, then we'll get you started on the training program.”

“Personality test?”

“It's nothing serious, just something we have all our new hires do. I don't love it, personally, but it's company-wide policy. We'll have to let you go if it turns out that you're a psychopath or you fail the drug test, but I'm sure you'll be fine.” He winked, then held up a large packet and handed it to me. “Just fill in all these answers, and let me know when you're done.”

He set me up at an empty table, and I was soon joined by another potential new hire: a scruffy guy who looked to be a couple of years older than me and didn't seem capable of reading silently to himself. He whispered the questions and talked to himself as he worked his way through his packet.

The packet was labeled
Spumoni Restaurant Concepts, Inc. Personality Assessment Survey
. It was full of multiple-choice questions about what I thought about employee theft, snitching on employees who break the rules, and of course, leadership skills.

What a crock of shit.

An awful lot of the questions repeated themselves. One yes-or-no asked, “Have you tried illegal drugs?” Then, a couple of pages later, there was a multiple-choice question that asked, “Which of these drugs have you tried? Check all that apply.”

I suppose I could see the logic behind the whole thing—it was a good way to weed out the complete dumbasses. Anyone who took a test like this and said that they'd tried heroin, thought
employee theft was “acceptable in most cases,” and thought that honesty was “not very important” or “not at all important” was probably too dumb to hire. It'd be like getting stoned on the way to a drug test.

I finished in ten minutes, then waited a few minutes for the other guy to finish.

“Pretty stupid, huh?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I've seen worse, man.”

The two of us brought our tests over to Brad, and he put them into a manila envelope.