Where Denny waited.
“I’m dating one-uh the waitresses at the Officers’ Club.” That always got him in the gate. No one even asked who, but he wouldn’t have minded telling ’em Sherry if he had to. She was a good-looker all right, a real sexy woman.
Sherry started glancing at the back door usually around one a.m., squinting through the screen for her skinny, limplegged beau. What she saw in him nobody could guess. He had a scary glint in his eye. We closed at two.
“You gonna stay up past your bedtime again tonight?” came the first round of catcalls from the cooks.
“Not Sherry, Sherry baby,” said another. “She always knows when it’s bedtime.”
Sherry disappeared with entrees for four, through the swinging double doors to the thick maroon carpet and chandeliered dining hall, where astronauts brought their wives and officers sported formal dress attire. Different world. Twenty-piece orchestra playing “Strangers in the Night” and even early Beatles songs…
Michelle, ma belle,
These are words that go together well,
My Michelle
… sometimes with a crooner, mostly instrumental. Men drank whiskey and women stirred swizzle sticks in fruity drinks or rum and cola, till everyone shed the skin of daytime sufficiently and eased into the star-spangled night. Then lights came up, the show was over, and busboys split tips with the waitresses. Eighty-twenty, advantage waitress. That was the deal.
On nights when Denny waited, Sherry would go fifty-fifty if her busboy did her cleanup work and let her leave early. You’d have to be nuts not to go for a deal like that. Made me want to be a busboy again, all those crisp dollar bills changing hands.
Till one Saturday night, early. Cooks and kitchen help, the night shift, were getting dressed when Sherry walks into the men’s room, flips her Camel ashes, and says, “If Denny comes to the back door tonight, tell him I am not going out with him, ever again.”
“Why don’t you tell him?”
“I did tell him, last night. But he won’t give up. He’ll be back. Lemme know when he comes, and don’t give him the time of day. Just tell him to leave me alone.”
“You got it, sis,” we all of us agree.
As soon as she was gone, the speculating starts.
“Man, whatever Denny did, he messed up this time.”
“Yeah, and she was in LOVE with that skinny fool.”
“Not no more.”
“Un-uh. Gonna be cold day in hell ’fore she sees him again.”
“Maybe some other leg went limp.” Hoots and laughter, especially from the black cooks, and a buskid buddy, Eddie, asked me later, “So did Denny hurt his other knee?”
“Whatever happened, she better off for it. That Chevy he drives ’bout to fall apart.”
“You right about that. Giddy-yap, giddy-yap, 409.”
“Giddy-yap to the junkyard.”
Everybody laughs, and ten minutes later no one gives a second thought to the demise of Denny and Sherry.
Including Denny. He had other plans, though for the next week he appeared, as expected, at the back door of the Officer’s Club, his figurative hat in hand. “Would you mind telling Sherry I’m here?”
“She don’t want to see you no more,” said whichever cook was out back smoking.
“If you’d just let her know, I’ll wait here for a while, in case she changes her mind.” Denny wasn’t so good at kicking the dirt and sighing regretfully, but he did the best he could, and since none of the cooks were so good at detecting guile, everybody seemed to buy the fact that Denny was pining and Sherry was holding her ground.
First indication otherwise came a few days after the breakup, when I snatched a half-full margarita glass from a bus tray and dashed to the men’s room. I was just about to push the door open when the screen door banged and I saw Denny standing there. “Have a cigarette, kid,” he said, tossing me a pack of Marlboros.
“I don’t smoke.” I tossed them back.
“Have it your way,” he smirked, then flicked his lighter, cupped his hand, and leaned into the flame. “Enjoy your drink.” He had to see the panic on my face.
“Look, Denny, don’t tell anybody about me drinking, please.”
“Kid. Do I look like some kinda snitch? Your secret’s safe, no worries.”
“Thanks.” I stepped in the men’s room and downed the drink. On my way out, he was still there.
“How old are you, kid?”
“Fifteen, be sixteen in November.”
“Too young for beer.”
“Too young to buy it, maybe,” I told him.
“But not too young to drink?”
“Nope.”
“That’s good, kid. ’Cause I’m up for a few beers tonight. Maybe let the other boys know. You spring for the bucks, I spring for the ID.”
Simple as that. Saturday was a great night for tips, and Denny found four takers, myself and three busboys-Eddie Serge, Bobby Haney, and Charles Savell. Ready for kicks. We pooled our tips, gave Denny six bucks, and he had a case of Lone Stars iced down in a brand-new cooler by the time we finished our clean-up work.
“New cooler? You buy that?” Charles asked.
“Yeah, kid. I bought it with this,” he said, tapping his head with the tip of his longneck. We let it go at that, but an hour later, when we passed a snatch ’n grab, as my old man always called a convenience store, Bobby said, “Denny, man, pull over. I need some smokes.”
“Not here,” said Denny. “That’s where I got the cooler. No reason to risk it.”
“Huh?”
“I done told you. I used my head. Paid for the beer like a good little boy, then asked the man where the john was. After I finished, I told him the toilet was overflowing. He ran to check, and I grabbed the cooler from a stack on the sidewalk.”
Denny drove another two blocks, to the Gulf Freeway feeder road, and we piled out for cigarettes and chips. Denny grabbed me by the shoulder before I could enter the store.
“Okay. You seem to be the smart one here. So listen up. Never leave the car, unless we staying for a few hours, then you park away from the place. Get it?” I nodded. “If we here for a quick stop, keep the engine running. Better yet, back into the space. If we need to leave in a hurry, no problem, we do it.”
He tossed me the keys, and I started the car. Ten minutes later, he dropped a bag of Fritos in my lap and slid in beside me. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Galveston Island. Beaches are nice and deserted at this hour.” Denny popped the cap off another beer.
So we drank and smoked-even though the cigarrettes made me dizzy, I had a few-and prowled up and down Galveston Beach our first night as Denny’s hoodlums. Sometime around three o’clock, we snuck up on a car parked on a shadowy stretch of beach. The windows were rolled down and we heard moaning and mumbled words coming from the backseat. I slow-crawled the car as close as we dared, then waited at the wheel with the engine humming while Denny and my buds crept out and surrounded the parkers.
“THIS IS THE POLICE!” they all hollered. Denny shined his flashlight on two college kids from the mainland, scared out of their wits, and I hit the headlights on bright. We all laughed, and Denny tossed an open beer can on the couple while they scrambled to get dressed.
As we pulled away, squealing the tires on the ramp from the beach to the seawall, Bobby said, “Man, I would hate to be those two!”
“Yeah,” said Charles. “Gonna be the last time they go parking on the beach.”
“Then we did ’em a favor,” said Denny. We all turned our eyes to him as he lifted a switchblade from his hip pocket and flipped it open. He held it out the window, twisting the steel in the streetlights and slicing the night air at fifty miles an hour. “They could’a got this.” We drove in silence to the base.