The rest of the shift was no better. By the time Williamson arrived to relieve him, Merle Haggard was blasting and Junior and the blonde were dancing awkwardly in the narrow aisle by the jukebox. No one ever danced at the Shelbourne. Gibson had to slide around them, loaded with dishes, every time he went to a table. His shirt was soaked with sweat and stained with ketchup.
Williamson took one look at him and said, “Rough one, huh?”
“You don’t know the half of it,” he replied through clenched teeth.
He finished up all his parties while Williamson restocked the garnishes behind the bar. The big party asked Gibson for their check and he brought it to them with a forced smile. It totalled $104 — not much for four people who had been eating and drinking for a few hours, but a lot for the Shelbourne, where a burger cost only six bucks. When he got back behind the bar, he watched the guys look long and hard at the check, trying to focus on it.
The table bucked up. It took them awhile. He walked over and they handed him the check and a thick mess of bills. “I’ll be right back with your change,” he said.
They were already getting up from the table. “It’s all yours, sport,” said the tall one, who actually slapped him on the back. Gibson thanked them.
He got back behind the bar to the register and counted it, facing the bills out of habit. He counted it once, then again, thinking that some bills must have been stuck together. There was $112 in his hand. Eight bucks on 104. Not even ten percent, after what they put him through.
He walked fast to the front door, pulling his apron over his head as he went. By the time he got to the street, they were nowhere in sight. He continued to look for a few minutes, then went back inside the restaurant and into the kitchen to calm down.
Willie B., the prep guy, had just started his shift, and was slicing and peeling a bag full of fat white Georgia onions. A Backyard Band go-go tune blasted from a flour-covered boom box on the shelf above his stainless steel prep table. Gibson stormed past him and was about to punch out and head home. But instead he turned and barreled up the stairs to the office.
Barry opened the door and looked up at him. “Everything all right?”
“Yo man, you gotta do something for me!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Barry, you gotta give me more money or start giving me some good night shifts. I need money and you owe me.”
Barry’s eyes narrowed. “How do you figure that?”
“You’ve been underpaying me since I’ve been here. I’m telling you, I need money, man! They’re gonna kick me out of my apartment.”
“Now you listen to me, Gibson. I don’t owe you shit. I offered you eight bucks an hour on good faith and you accepted it. And as for better shifts…” He hesitated, then took a breath and said, “Listen, Gibson, I don’t want to be any crueler about this than I have to. But you’re lucky I even let you behind the bar on day shifts. You’re really not the type of guy I want out in the front of the house with the kind of customers I’m starting to get at this place.”
“What’re you saying?” said Gibson. “You’ve—”
“Gibson, just call it a day. Go home and think about whether you want this job — the way I’ve set it up. If you come back Monday, I’ll know you do. If not… honestly, I don’t give a flying fuck.”
Gibson crossed Thomas Circle and trudged through the neighborhood. A woman with a broken flower in her tangled hair sat on the wall of Luther Place Memorial Church, belting out a song that Gibson didn’t recognize. He walked past brick town houses and an apartment building with a sign that read “Starting in the low-400s!” as if that were something to be excited about. Office workers and tourists didn’t bother with this part of 14th Street, but for Gibson it was home, and it bothered him that even here a new upscale furniture store was bumping up against his favorite chicken joint.
He got home around 6:30, went straight into the bedroom, and threw a wad of bills on top of his worn dresser. Not counting his hourly, he ended up making sixty-two dollars, which was more than he thought he’d end up with when he headed out in the morning. But all he could think about was the platter of shit sandwiches he was force-fed all day by those fucking Hill punks and that asshole Barry.
He climbed into a hot shower. His skin tingled, then got used to the burning spray. As the water ran over his head, a rank smell of burgers and fryer grease filled the shower stall, like he was one of those freeze-dried meals you eat while camping. He ran the water full blast on his head for a couple more minutes until the smell disappeared. But the steam couldn’t ease his anger and shame, or the pressure he felt behind his eyes.
He had to get out of the apartment, so he slogged down 14th toward Franklin Square. On the way, he dropped into a small liquor store for a forty-ounce beer. With his back to K Street, he sat down on a bench in the square, staring at the towering statue of John Barry in his cape and commodore’s hat. After five months of near sobriety, the beer tasted incredible.
While Gibson drank from the bottle, which was still wrapped in brown paper, he looked up at the office buildings surrounding the square, and then at the new luxury apartment building on 14th. He thought about the home where he had grown up in Arlington, right across Key Bridge. His old man, an honest, hard-working guy, had lost that place — and killed his wife’s spirit in the process — by running up around $15,000 in debt. Twenty years later, even a small bungalow there went for more than half a million. Where’s the fairness in that, Gibson wondered.
He watched a skeletal man with a scraggly beard rifle through a trashcan, and thought for the fiftieth time that day about the money he had to come up with by the end of the month. Gibson finally admitted to himself that there was no way he would be able to raise enough scratch in time.
He was restless, so he walked a block along K, stopped in at A-1 Wines and Liquors for another forty, and grabbed a bench at McPherson Square. Across the park he saw a man huddled inside a dirty hooded sweatshirt next to a mis-matched set of Samsonite luggage and a stuffed black trash bag. Over his shoulder, straight down Vermont, the top half of the Washington Monument was visible above a clump of trees. The streetlights cast an eerie hue over the park. Gibson leaned back, stretched out his tired legs, and sipped slowly from the bottle. Late-night businessmen and tourists from the nearby hotels avoided him as they crossed through the circle, on their way to the subway stop on the corner.
A little past 10:30, he polished off his third forty. He had been doing numbers in his head again, thinking about how many hours he had worked over the past year at the Shelbourne. At forty hours a week for roughly fifty weeks, he calculated that he’d put in around 2,000 hours over the past year. He multiplied that by the two bucks an hour that he figured Barry had cheated him out of, and arrived at the tidy sum of $4,000. Money that he could have easily saved. Money that would have enabled him to reach his down payment.
He twisted the open end of the damp brown bag tight around the thin neck of the empty bottle. He reckoned that $4,000 might be in the range of what the Shelbourne was going to do that day, since they rang nearly a grand on a decent lunch and at least two or three times that on a Friday night.
He crossed K Street and walked slowly back toward the restaurant, still grasping the heavy, empty bottle by the neck through the bag. Across the street from the Shelbourne, he found a spot, half submerged in shadow and half lit by a streetlamp, which gave him a good view of the front door. A few minutes after 11:00, the restaurant’s interior lights went out. Barry emerged and pulled the heavy wooden door shut tight behind him.