“Murder,” said Dick, the word burning in his eyes. “I get that. But how could you, you of all people, how dare you sell out all the best dreams up here.”
Joel said: “Everybody gets a hill.”
Stiffed
by David Slater
Thomas Circle, N.W.
The restaurant had emptied after the Friday lunch shift, so Gibson shoved open the battered back door to get a quick taste of sunshine. He leaned against the chain-link fence, pulled his lunch tips out of his pocket, and slowly counted the crumpled bills. Seventeen lousy dollars.
He plopped down on an overturned five-gallon pickle bucket and lit a Camel to mask the dumpster’s ripeness. He added some numbers in his head, trying to figure out how much he had earned that week. He needed at least another thousand by the end of the month or he was going to lose his apartment. But if he was going to continue living off his eight-dollar-an-hour salary while putting his tips toward the thousand-dollar goal, there was no way that seventeen bucks was going to cut it.
He still had to man the grill until the next guy came on in a few hours, but he figured that there wouldn’t be many more tips coming his way that day. The afternoons had been slow lately as the stifling summer heat settled over D.C.
The heavy door groaned opened and Karen, the day waitress, walked squinting into the sunshine. “There you are,” she said. “Want to make a few extra bucks?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m supposed to hang around till the next girl comes in at 5:00. But I was hoping to get over the Bay Bridge before it backs up. You want to hold down the fort?”
“You think I can work the grill and wait on tables too?”
“Come on, Gibson, look at how dead it’s been. You can handle it for a couple of hours.”
Gibson shrugged his shoulders. What the hell. He had been counting on pocketing more than fifty bucks from the day’s lunch shift, and this might get him there.
“Give me a couple minutes to finish this cigarette,” he said, “and I’ll be out.”
The Shelbourne Grill was a dying breed for the neighborhood just below Thomas Circle. Nothing fancy or modern: People came in for made-from-scratch onion rings and fat burgers, grilled behind the bar by the same guys who served the beer. The crane-strewn neighborhood was upgrading fast, but the Shelbourne hadn’t seen much change in its four decades. It was narrow and dark, with seating for around sixty at a worn bar, six uncomfortable wooden booths, and a row of two-tops. The prices were low and the place only accepted cash, even though ten times a day they had to send customers scurrying to the ATM machine at the corner bank across the street.
Working as a combined grillman/bartender took some getting used to for Gibson. In the fourteen years since high school, he had bounced around a lot of restaurant kitchens, but this was the first place where he had worked behind the bar and around customers. When he first took the job, he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to put up with the patrons’ bullshit, but he had been doing it for more than a year now without any major hassles.
Gibson only worked the lunch shift, and most of the customers he dealt with were generally all right: low-key folks from the neighborhood or from the offices on 15th Street, most of whom would rather read a book or paper than talk anyway. But according to Williamson, who had worked dinners at the Shelbourne for a nearly a decade, an increasing number of twenty-somethings had been stopping in at night for a cheap tune-up, in part because of City Paper ads placed by Barry, the young owner who had inherited the place from his father around eight months earlier.
Gibson had dealt with some of these kids during his afternoon shifts. He found most of them impatient and a couple of them obnoxious, but so far he had managed to keep things in check. The tips, which cooks never saw at most restaurants, gave him a reason to watch his temper. And that motivation had intensified since he learned five months ago that his apartment building was turning into co-ops. Now, his only chance of holding onto his place, the place he had lived in ever since his mom passed away a decade ago, was if he came up with the down payment by the end of the month.
He stood at the end of the bar and poured himself a cup of coffee.The tables were all empty and so was the bar, except for McManus, the college kid that Gibson had just carried all through the lunch shift. He was a preppy little snot who moved in slow motion behind the bar and didn’t even care enough to cut a sandwich on a bias. The word was that he had been hired because he was a family friend of the owner. That seemed logical, because Barry wasn’t much older than McManus and, in Gibson’s eyes, was just as worthless. Barry was probably locked in his upstairs office at that very moment, jerking off as usual to a copy of Golf Digest.
Gibson looked down the bar at McManus, who was reading the sports section with his crisp red Nationals cap turned backwards on his head. Asswipe didn’t even know enough to go home after punching out on a beautiful Friday afternoon. He looked up at Gibson and waved his empty Budweiser bottle.
“Gibster, can I get another one of these?”
Gibson, who was half-heartedly filling the salt and peppers, sighed and rolled his eyes. “Fine with me if you want to drink up your tips.” He grabbed a beer from the cooler and put it in front of McManus, who nodded and said, “That lunch shift sucked today, didn’t it?”
“You’re telling me. Seventeen dollars in tips ain’t working for me.”
“I heard that,” said McManus. “Not when I’m only making ten bucks an hour.”
Gibson walked back toward him. “Did you say ten bucks an hour?”
“Yeah, man, can you believe that? I tried to get more out of Barry but he wasn’t budging. Said that’s the max for a starting cook.” He turned back to his newspaper, not noticing the color rising in Gibson’s face.
Just then, as if on cue, Barry appeared on the stairway.
“Gibson, where’s Karen?” he asked, as he sauntered toward the bar.
“She took off twenty minutes ago.”
“She left already? Who the hell told her she could do that?”
“I guess I thought you did,” said Gibson.
Barry turned his back, began walking to the stairway, and called out over his shoulder, “Come up to my office. Now.” Gibson hung back for a few minutes, refilling the tooth-pick containers so he could gather his thoughts. Then he walked upstairs, knocked on the door, and pushed it open. Barry pulled his feet off the desk and tried to pretend he had been doing paperwork. But Gibson saw the Sporting News peeking out from under the spreadsheets.
“So, did you and Karen even think of asking me before she took off?”
“I told you: I thought she had cleared it with you.”
“Bullshit.” Barry stood up, turned his back, and pretended to swing a club at a golf ball. “It’s too late for me to do anything about it at this point, Gibson. But I’ve got paperwork to do, so I’m not gonna help you if you get in the weeds.”
Gibson stared at him in disbelief, thinking, This idiot is probably five years younger than I am. He’s got a big-ass college ring, a fifty-dollar haircut, and a dive restaurant that his daddy bought him, but he doesn’t know the difference between a saucepan and a colander. And he doesn’t know how lucky he is that I don’t smack that smirk off his face.
“It’s gonna stay slow, Barry. I can handle it,” he said. “Anyway, I thought you’d appreciate it. I’ve been here since 10 a.m.”
“Oh yeah? You’ve been here since 10? Guess what? I’ll be here until we lock the doors at 10 p.m. tonight, and then for another hour closing up. So please don’t tell me what I’m going to appreciate. What I’ll appreciate is if the waitresses wait on the tables and the cooks do the cooking.” He turned and eyeballed Gibson. “You’re a mess, too. Put on a clean apron. And from now on, shave before you come to work.” He momentarily turned back to his paperwork, then looked up at Gibson as he stood there, seething. “Something else?”