“Stupid bitch.”
“Yes, stupid bitch.”
“We should find her and cut her legs off.”
“That would accomplish nothing. My penis would still be lonely.”
“A lonely penis cries in the rain,” Chang says.
“
When we kissed goodbye and parted, I knew we’d never meet again
,” Sasha says, laughing.
“Please don’t turn my penis into a Willie Nelson song,” I say.
“
Vasily’s penis is a dying ember, and only memories remain, and through the ages I’ll remember, Vasily’s lonely penis crying in the rain,
” Chang sings.
“I should kill both of you,” I say.
Sasha and Chang laugh hysterically about my lonely penis.
I lower my head in shame.
Sasha says, “What about Gina? You talk about Gina all the time.”
“I know, but Gina has such expensive shoes. Her Nikes daunt me.”
“She has Nikes?” Chang says.
“Yeah, Nikes,” I say.
“Nikes are really expensive,” Chang says.
“They are those Nikes with the air shock system thingy,” I say.
“You wear ADIDAS,” Chang says.
“Yeah, ADIDAS are almost like Nikes,” Sasha says.
“Yeah, but my ADIDAS were bought from a discount outlet store for twenty dollars. Her shoes were bought at the mall.”
“The mall, that’s serious shit,” Sasha says.
“The mall, where old people power walk?” Chang says.
“Yeah, the fucking mall. She’s a mall person,” I say with terror.
“Sometimes when things are on sale, I can get things at the mall,” Sasha says.
“The Nikes Gina wears are like brand new. She like, went in there, and was like, ‘Give me those hundred-and-twenty dollar pair of Nikes.’”
“Is she rich or something?” Chang says.
“I don’t know. She lives in Cortland. Her parents might be school teachers or engineers at the Chevy plant.”
“Cortland,” Chang says.
“Cortland,” Sasha says.
“We live in Youngtown and own ADIDAS.”
“We are a sorry bunch,” Chang says.
“Is that why you asked Isabella out, because she’s poor?” Sasha says.
“Yeah, I guess. I’m a dishwasher. It makes sense for dishwashers to date Waffle House servers, not girls who wear brand new Nikes.”
“Yeah, I guess it does. But Isabella never graduated high school and you have junior year credits in Political Science,” Sasha says.
“I know, I fucking know. But I didn’t graduate. I dropped out and became a dishwasher.”
“I guess you’re fucked then,” Sasha says.
“Get me a Captain and Coke. I need to get drunk.”
Sasha pours a Captain and Coke and hands it to me. I take the small straw, stir it around, and throw the straw on the bar and drink.
While gulping the drink, a song comes on. “Strawberry Wine” by Deana Carter.
Everyone becomes quiet.
During the chorus, me, Chang, Sasha, and everybody else in the bar sing along.
When the song ends, a menacing silence encompasses the bar.
Sasha picks up an empty glass and flings it at the wall!
It shatters!
No one even mentions it.
9
It’s Saturday.
The busiest day at the steakhouse.
I hate Saturday.
It’ll be like Wednesday and I’ll lie in bed and think, Saturday is coming, it’ll kill me.
I dread Saturday.
I have fifteen minutes till I have to start so I’m standing at the bar being useless.
Beth, an attractive twenty-two-year-old with a two-year-old daughter, walks up to me and says, “You have that belt on.”
I’m wearing a robin-egg blue belt. It holds up my pants.
“Yeah, so.”
“People are talking.”
The phrase, ‘Hell is other people’ zips into my brain as I say, “What are people saying?”
I feel like I’m playing some deranged game, because this conversation is so predictable I could kill myself.
“They are saying you might be gay.”
“Gay?”
“Yeah, gay.”
“Is there anything wrong with being gay?”
She looks confused and says, “Hmm, no.”
“Then I’m okay.”
“Are you gay?”
“Do you mean I take it up the ass from men?”
“Yes, do you do that?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“I have hemorrhoids. I would bleed horribly.”
“You’re weird, Vasily.”
“So are you, Beth.”
Beth walks away.
I’m sitting on a milk crate outside before I have to start.
Larry is there.
Larry is a crackhead.
Larry is five-foot-five, 130 pounds, has bad skin and spits a lot.
He has worked at the steakhouse for five years and makes $7.50 an hour.
The boss hates him.
Once the boss screamed, “Larry, if you want to leave, you can go.”
Larry stayed.
Larry knows the boss hates him and it pisses her off more that he stays.
The boss won’t fire Larry because she knows he wouldn’t get a job and would collect unemployment and smoke crack with it.
Larry says to me, “You got any metal?”
“Metal?”
“Yeah, metal, for scrap.”
“You scrap shit?”
“Yeah, that’s what I do to make extra money. I scrap shit. I go into abandoned houses in Youngstown and take the copper pipes. I get $2.60 a pound for copper.”
I don’t believe he gets $2.60 a pound for copper, but I don’t care anyway.
“I got some stoves in the garage.”
“How much do you think they weigh?”
“I have no idea how much the stoves weigh.”
“Probably like two-hundred pounds.”
“Yeah, probably.”
I start work.
There are a million dishes to wash.
They are stacked up three feet high.
I’m not daunted.
I’m the uber-dishwasher.
Diego Jones, an older black cook who used to be a crackhead, runs over to me and says, “I need ramekins.”
Everybody always needs ramekins.
I throw the ramekins in.
I start to contemplate suicide.
There are large knives everywhere.
I could grab one and plunge it into my stomach.
Say something really profound like, “I hate Saturdays.”
Then die.
I go out to smoke again.
Crazy Dennis is there.
Dennis looks like a man.
But tells people he is a woman.
Dennis does have small tits though, and a bulging ass.
Dennis tells people that he was once a woman, that he got into a car wreck and had to go on steroids, and the steroids made him into, in his words, ‘a morphidite.’ (Which always makes me think of
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
.) I always imagine Dennis morphing into a robotic tiger when he speaks.
Dennis also says he was in the army and a Green Beret, once a mechanic, once a trucker, and even at one point a belly dancer.
As we smoke on milk crates, Dennis says to me, “They won’t give me a black hat.”
The managers gave all the cooks that have been here for at least six months black hats, but they didn’t give one to him because he has only been working here for five months, and they don’t like him because he’s lazy and insane.
Dennis keeps talking. “They won’t give me a black hat. I’ve worked for this company for three years. I mean it was down south where I worked. But I was transferred here. I have seniority over most of these cooks. The managers don’t understand how important I am to this business. If I left, half their customers would leave.”