Play Me Backwards (23 page)

“Don't worry,” he said. “This thing is really just for insurance reasons. We'll have to fire you if we get the results back and they say you're a psychopath, though.”

He'd already made that joke, but I let it slide.

“That's tough but fair,” I said. He pulled a couple of contracts out of a file drawer and handed them to us.

According to the contract I'd be making a buck more per hour than I did at the Cave. At part-time that came to about twenty more bucks a week, minus the extra money I'd spend on gas for the longer commute. Not exactly big bucks.

“All right,” said Brad. “Now we can get you guys started on the training videos.”

He led us back to the office and loaded up a couple of videos that I guess were supposed to be our initiation into the West Egg family.

The first was basically propaganda about why unions were evil. The way they made it look, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union was actually a sleeper cell for al-Qaeda, and union dues paid for drug cartels to have families lined up against the wall
and shot. The whole thing reminded me of one of the antidrug videos they'd shown in health class.

I looked over at the other guy midway through it.

“Man,” I said. “They sure as hell don't want us joining a union.”

“I've seen that same video about a million times,” he said with a yawn.

“Worked a lot of name-tag jobs?”

“Yeah.”

I'd once known a guy who called himself a McHobo. He bummed from job to job, never took a promotion, never stayed anywhere long. Never anywhere longer than six months. He said that to specialize was to settle, and settling into a retail and restaurant job was the same thing as dying.

I'd settled into the Cave, for sure. I think the guy would have approved of that place, but as I sat back in the chair watching the video, I told myself that I shouldn't be settling anywhere. It was time to move on. Paige was right. And I didn't have to stay at West Egg forever. Just a few months, until I found something better.

The next video was about the dress and appearance code. The West Egg was a classy restaurant, the kind of place where people came to get engaged or celebrate retirements or whatever, and as the video said about six times, they weren't
selling food
, they were
creating memories.
And no one wanted any memories of unkempt employees. I didn't remember any event from my past where my memories were tarnished because a guy had a stain on his shirt, but that was just me. I lived my life in a world of stains.

Now and then as we sat there watching the videos, the various assistant managers, buyers, chefs, and other people who made the
machine that was the West Egg Steakhouse run smoothly came in and out of the office. Some of them ignored us, and others introduced themselves. Brad came in to check on us right during the part about facial hair regulations and got a goofy look on his face as he looked down at the scruffy guy.

“You might wanna pay attention to that part,” he said.

“Even if I'm just in the dish pit?” the guy asked.

Brad opened up one of the drawers underneath the computer monitor and pulled out a disposable razor that probably should have been disposed of a long time ago.

“This is what I make my people use if they come in looking like you do,” he said. “The store razor.”

“That doesn't look very sanitary,” I said.

“And that's how we make sure no one shows up with an appearance violation,” Brad said with a turdish smirk. “Goes for you, too. You might not need it yet, though.”

“I shave,” I said.

“Keep at it.” He laughed.

He put the razor away and started rifling through some paperwork from the desk, muttering something about how many people were asking for weekend nights off around prom season.

This whole place was starting to piss me off. What was the point of all this, anyway? The money wasn't that much better.

I thought about the servers at Casa Bravo. The people here were probably no different. Having them for coworkers instead of Stan and Dustin probably wouldn't exactly help me shape up and live my life on the straight and narrow.

Maybe Lando Calrissian made more money administrating a gas
mine on Cloud City in
The
Empire Strikes Back
than he did when he was smuggling spices in his space pirate days with Han Solo, and I'm sure it was more respectable and all, but do you think he was happier? Do you think he found it more fulfilling? Hell no. And it didn't keep him out of trouble, either.

This deal kept getting worse all the time.

Paige would be mad if I didn't take the job, but she'd also probably be mad if I
did
take it and couldn't get the night of her debutante ball off.

When the door opened again and another manager or somebody came in, I looked out and caught a glance at some of the people in button-down shirts who were sliding in for an early dinner. Slick sons of bitches who reminded me of Avery the Asshole from the suit shop, all ready to eat a steak, chug a few beers, and harass a waitress after a long day of laying people off.

My eyelid began to twitch.

No money was worth this.

“You know what?” I said. “Fuck this shit.”

I gathered up my paperwork and shoved it at Brad.

“You're leaving?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I said. “And in case you didn't get the joke on my application, ‘nards' means ‘balls.' ”

The soon-to-be-less-scruffy guy chuckled, so I felt like I was leaving on a high note when I walked out the door. I marched into my car and drove to the Ice Cave. Home.

In the back room Stan was going over something on the computer with George, the owner, and both of them were so wrapped up that they didn't notice me coming in at all. Dustin was scratching
his crotch as he sat on a barrel. Jenny was cuddling very casually with Jake on the couch, as she sometimes did, and Edie was leaning in enough that she could be said to be halfway cuddling with both of them as she typed something on her phone. True Norwegian Black Metal was on the stereo. It smelled like candy and BO and the walk-in freezer was humming.

Jake was saying that his Uncle Travis believed that all a man needs is a six-pack of beer, a decent chair, and a remote control. That was it.

“TV is evil,” said Comrade Edie.

“You don't need a TV,” said Jake. “The remote control is just so you can hit people over the head with it if they try to get you off the chair.”

“That's the life,” said Stan. “A beer to drink, a chair to sit on, and a remote control to smite your enemies.”

These were my people. It felt good to be home.

If I wanted a better-paying job, I could wait a few years take a gig at Big Jake's High-Class House of Ass.

Things felt a bit rocky with Paige for the first week of school after spring break. She didn't seem to understand that places like the West Egg just weren't for me.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the Nontoxic Club debacle, we picked up a stray at the Cave. For the rest of spring break, and every day after school the week after, one of the girls from Autumn's group, Natasha, came in by herself every afternoon. She had been the only one besides Autumn who ate her whole cookie; while the others giggled and shrieked, she had mostly just sat there, not really saying anything. But I guess she fell in love with the seamy underbelly of suburbia that day.

She had been dressed like all the other girls before, but now she was showing up in black blouses and a lot of mascara, like she was trying to go goth using only things she already had in her wardrobe. We didn't let her into the back room, obviously, and we watched what we talked about when she was around, but it was kind of
charming to see her going from prep to freak, in her way. I guess she found that she felt more at home among the weirdos in black than she did in “girl world.” She'd found her place in the universe.

The fact that her place in the universe was a joint like the Ice Cave was sort of bad luck for her, but sometimes your place in the world is enough just because it's
yours
. That's what I decided when I walked out of the West Egg. It may have been better than the Cave, but it would never be
mine.

Just because something is classier than something else doesn't make it automatically better. Take my parents, for one. All the times they could have been at the West Egg, they were staying home, dressing like hillbillies, and making fun of meals like creamed cow brains on toast and dips where the main ingredient was crumbled Cheetos. They chose fun over class, and there's something to be said for that.

The weekend before the debutante ball, they decided to do another food disaster night, and Paige came to eat with us again. This time I persuaded my parents
not
to do Lester and Wanda, or to do the meal “in character” at all, but they still insisted that we at least dress according to the cookbook, which in this case meant dressing up like we worked in an early 1960s advertising office.

“The important thing,” my mom said, “is that you have to wear your suit.”

“Yeah,” said Dad. “If you think we're going to let you get away with not wearing it in front of us now and then, you've got another thing coming, kid.”

The cookbook of the night was
Cooking to Reel Him In
, a weird little volume from 1962 that featured a cartoonish drawing of a
mermaid with pointy, nippleless bare breasts on the cover. She was holding a fishing line and reeling in a guy dressed as an executive. I took a picture of it and sent it to Paige as soon as I saw it.

“Oh, God,” she texted back. “Do you think they're trying to tell us they know we have sex?”

“Why would they use a mermaid to tell us that?” I replied. “Mermaids can't do anything. No parts below the belly button.”

I didn't tell her that my parents
always
used to give me thinly veiled warnings about the dangers of drugs, casual sex, and online fandom communities and shit during food disasters; I guess they thought that hearing that sort of stuff from Lester and Wanda or whomever made it seem less traumatic. So the topless mermaid might
have
been a subtle message from them, for all I knew. Maybe they'd picked a mermaid with really pointy boobs as a way of warning me that I could poke my eye out.

Paige spent the rest of the afternoon while I was at work texting me ideas of
exactly
what she could do with me as a mermaid, and did such a good job of convincing me that I was tempted to pick her up early so we could spend some time in the nook.

With my suit on and hair combed in the early sixties “duck's ass” style, I could have passed for a junior ad exec, or maybe even a wannabe member of the Rat Pack from the days before any of them had gone to “Stan's place.” I looked in the mirror and tried to be smooth, early sixties style.

“Hey there, doll face,” I said. “Dynamite gams. Get 'em into the kitchen or it's ring-a-ding-ding.”

I felt like a complete asshole, but I couldn't help but wonder if Paige would actually
like
it if I talked like that. She loved those
romance books where the guys act like controlling dicks, and girls in her circle certainly didn't seem to mind dating douche bags. Douchey guys never did seem to hurt for company.

Paige liked the suit, in any case. When I picked her up, she was wearing a more modest version of the sort of dress she'd been wearing on Valentine's Day, and she gave me a look like she wanted to eat me alive as soon as she opened the door.

“You should wear that
much
more often,” she said.

“Where
could
I wear it?” I asked.

“School.”

“No one wears a suit to school except teachers.”

“Trust me,” she said. “If you had been dressing like
that
all year, I would have had a
lot
more competition than just a girl who lives four thousand miles away.”

“The fact that it's black doesn't intimidate you?” I asked. “The salesman said girls are afraid of men in black.”

“Not me.”

And she moved her hand across my chest and sort of purred, which I'd never heard her do before. As we drove to my house, she showed me just how unafraid she really was. I tried to return the favor as well as I could while driving, but pretty soon I had to insist that we stop fooling around, before I ended up at home with a conspicuous hard-on. I spent the last block or two of the drive forcing myself to think about unsexy things like Stan's underpants, the razor from the West Egg, and Mrs. Smollet.

My parents' outfits were actual period getups that Dad had found in some vintage store out in Valley Junction, and while they cooked, they were talking to each other like they worked in a midcentury
ad agency. Mom was pretending to be a secretary who wanted a coffee break every five minutes and dreamed of marrying an exec and moving to Long Island. Dad kept calling her “sweet cheeks” and generally harassing her, which just made her giggle. Paige and I sat at the table, and she seemed to be enjoying the show, while I wished I could just disappear. I did not need to see my parents pinching each other's butts.

“You guys said you'd just be yourselves tonight,” I said. “You promised.”

“We said we'd be ourselves when we
ate
,” said Dad. “Didn't say anything about when we were cooking.”

Paige leaned over to me. “It's adorable,” she said. “They're role-playing!”

“Don't even say it,” I whispered.

I'd already figured out that Mom and Dad weren't really going to food disaster conventions when they went away for the weekend, but I'd never really connected the dots to notice the general kinkiness behind their hobby.

“So, what are you two office drones cooking up?” I called out, if only to change the subject.