“What the fuck is your problem, man?”
I couldn’t say anything right.
Roy came up.
I said, “What’s up, Roy?”
He said, “You want me to punch that guy in the dick?”
“Not yet.”
Emily said, “I’m fucking done with this.”
She walked out in a hurry. Roy and Joe left after her. They said it’d probably be alright. I didn’t know but I had to stay where I was. I had to look after the bar/salad station. And that’s what I did. And I felt like shit. Around one-thirty the manager told me to shut it down. Then one of the real bartenders, a guy named Chris, said I should look after one of the patrons for him, a guy named Tommy.
“Tommy just got out of prison,” he said. “Tommy’s a real stand-up guy.”
Tommy was drunk as fuck. I was supposed to help him to not throw up on anybody or goose a slut or whatever it was they thought he might do. Tommy had been in prison 20 years, which meant he’d gone away in the early ’80s, which meant he’d been locked up longer than I’d been alive. He had big plastic eyeglasses and a grey bowl cut and a shiny red bowling jacket. He said everybody was full of shit and they were all a bunch of fakes. He meant some of the guys you would see in the area who acted like they were real Cosa Nostra motherfuckers. Tommy said all these guys liked to talk the big game. “But they don’t have the balls…to put a gun to the guy’s head and BLOW HIS BRAINS OUT.”
That’s what he kept saying, the stuff about the brains. He’d start talking about this punk and that peckerhead and the other turkey, and he’d finish up by saying that they didn’t have the balls to put a gun to the guy’s head and BLOW HIS BRAINS OUT.
Then he got to asking me about what I did. I said I didn’t do much but I was going to join the Army soon.
“Don’t be a fool,” he said. “Those people don’t give a shit about you.”
I said I already knew that.
“So what the fuck are you thinking?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t have any other ideas.”
“But do you have the balls…to put a gun to the guy’s head and BLOW HIS BRAINS OUT?”
“I don’t know.”
“AGGH! You’ll be alright.”
The night was about over and I said, “Listen, Tommy, I’ve got to help close. If you need anything, let me know, alright?”
And I went around the place, pushing tables and chairs around, spraying things and wiping them off and sweeping and mopping. I was really moving because I needed to get out of there and I needed to see Emily.
I got done and I went outside, and there was Tommy standing out on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, looking like a lost child.
“Tommy,” I said, “you alright?”
“Yeah. What are you doing?”
“I’m all done. I’m about to walk home.”
“You need a ride? I’ll give yaz a ride.”
“I can walk. I’m not even five minutes that way.”
“No, come on. I’ll give yaz a ride.”
“Alright. But hold on a second cuz I’m gonna go run over to the bakery and buy a cake.”
“Whatcha buyin a cake for?”
“My girl. She’s leaving town and I want to buy her a cake.”
“Don’t waste your money.”
“It’ll just take a second.”
There was a 24-hour bakery across the street and up toward the hill a little ways. They didn’t have any cakes to sell me and I had to settle for a dozen cheesecake muffins. But they were impressive muffins and I thought it was just as well.
Tommy said, “Let’s go. You ready or what?”
He was driving the blue Chevy Astrovan that was parallel-parked next to the restaurant. We hopped in and Tommy fired up the engine. He ran into the car in front of us and backed into another car before he could get us into the lane. I glanced over and he looked like he was feeling real ill. All of a sudden he stopped the van and opened his door to retch. He retched for a minute. Violently. When he was done retching he leaned against the driver seat. He was going, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus Jesus Jesus.”
In the dome light I saw that he had caught himself with a fair amount of the vomit.
I said, “Bad news, Tommy. You threw up on your sleeve.”
Tommy looked down and saw what he had done to the right sleeve of his shiny red bowling jacket.
He went, “AGHH RATS!”
I said, “Don’t worry, Tommy. We can fix it.”
There was a paper grocery bag on the floor of the van. I tore it into napkinesque shapes that Tommy could use to scrape the lion’s share of the vomit off his sleeve. They didn’t work like magic or anything, but they did alright.
Tommy said, “Close enough for rock and roll.”
And we resumed our drive up the street. We only had another ten houses to go and we were there. Tommy ran over the curb for good measure. I thanked him for the ride and asked that he be careful getting home. He said he would be okay. I gave him one of the muffins and I never saw him again.
* * *
—
EMILY WAS still awake when I got upstairs. She’d been drinking and I joined her at that. I gave her the box of muffins and said I was sorry about earlier when I was being an asshole. I said I understood that she hadn’t meant anything by bringing Benji around and that she was just a sweetheart who believed in diversity and developing countries and stuff like that and that she wanted friends. I said there was supposed to be a dozen muffins but I had given one to Tommy and Tommy was a good man and he had needed to eat something. She said that it was all very nice of me and that I was forgiven. Then I saw that she was crying. I hadn’t ever seen her cry before and I asked her what was wrong and that just made her cry more. She said she didn’t know what was wrong. It was a while before she stopped crying. I asked her if she was alright. She said she was alright.
I said, “This is fucking crazy, isn’t it?”
She said, “Yeah. It is.”
And we laughed about it.
And we fucked around.
And we went to sleep.
PART TWO
ADVENTURE
CHAPTER NINE
Staff Sergeant Kelly had the face like Death and the every other word out of his mouth was joker; he had the black sweater and the green slacks, the patent leather shoes. A fuckload of piss cups was in his desk drawer. He said the latrine was at the end of the hallway. “Go left out the door and follow it around,” he said. “You can’t miss it.”
My piss was clean, so Kelly told me how his wife was a Korean. He told me how he drove a government car and got BAH and TRICARE. He made it sound real good. I had to show him I could do 20 push-ups and 20 sit-ups; then he took me next door to the Bally Total Fitness so I could show him a mile on one of the treadmills. I was wearing Vans (Geoff Rowleys, vegan shoes) and my pants kept trying to fall down, but I did okay. We went back to the Armed Forces Career Center, and I took a practice ASVAB so Kelly could be sure I wasn’t a subnormal. He checked it over when I was done, and he said I’d scored in the 85th percentile. He said I could have any MOS I wanted if I did as well on the real thing. I could tell he was excited. This was the first week of 2005, and for a while the news mostly had been about kids going off and getting themselves killed and maimed, so Kelly and his like were having a hard time getting enough kids to sign up. But there I was, and I was too easy; I’d made his day.
We went to talk to his boss, Sergeant First Class Space, and Kelly said, “Pardon me, Sarr, but I have a joker here says he wants to be a ninety-one whiskey, says he’s tryin to go ASAP.”
All Space’s teeth were gold and he was one long and thin motherfucker. I hadn’t known that people could be named Space. He said, “Have a seat, Mister Ninety-One Whiskey.”
I told him the same shit I’d told Kelly, and Space agreed that I was going about things the right way. He said I’d made a smart choice because 91Ws had it made in the Army; then he got on the phone, and when the other end picked up he said, “Hamburger hamburger hamburger,” and laughed like this was real funny.
And for whatever reason I wanted to say hamburger hamburger hamburger too, even though I knew he was laughing at me.
* * *