Brett and Leslie: Chapter Three
Sucker Punched
"Oooooh," I grunted in pain, rolling out of the long, narrow closet where I kept my bed. Way back when The House was built, they used to build big closets all around your upstairs bedrooms as a form of insulation. It’s one of the most comforting architectural tricks since the moat and drawbridge.
I felt safer when I had two doors between me and the rest of the house. I like feeling like a minotaur. And the closet smelled like my grandmother’s attic, which, a mere handful of years earlier, had been ancient magic.
When did I stop getting my magic out of attics, and start believing in guitars? It’s incredible how long each year seems when you’re a teenager. It could have been the product of one long, awful week I had left in an oubliette.
Now I was finally old enough to drink, so I, like most of Madison in 1995, was accustomed to wanting to puke when I awoke.
Thus I was able to crawl to my pair of south-facing windows this bright new summer’s day and almost fully enjoy the delicious morning sun. It assiduously sizzled off the silver dew, like a phalanx of fairies with gentle little blow-torches, promising another precious day of being safe from the cold. Maybe today would be a great day for making music.
But why did my eye hurt so bad? You don’t usually get a sore eye from vodka.
I blinked at the sun. I heard the faint “wrrrr” that my guinea pig, Chumpy, made each day when he noticed I was awake.
Then I heard a violent snoring, much closer to me than it should have been.
I guess it isn’t true that my murder fantasies are the only thing I remember clearly. I also remember random, strangely peaceful things, like the morning light in that window. There are details I can recall with almost voluptuous completeness; I can recall the different shades of hardwood in each room I occupied in that place, not with a word, but with a unique color. The one I was in now had flooring that was positively blond, and generous sun; the room into which I would move after The Occurrence, on the other side of the landing, was a near-mirror image, larger, but cursed with a morbid quality of light.
I can remember the dirty-oak color of the floorboards, and the way little Chumpy’s fur changed its apparent hue when he scampered from my side in our closet nest to the patch of sun below the blackened, dirty window casement. My memory of the details of the lovely old house, once a farmhouse on the edge of town, is sharpened by the guilt that rushed in when I saw it ruined.
But I also feel guilty about these long, useless morning hangovers, the time wasted... and, if you put a gun to my head, I still wouldn't be able to tell you how I survived them, much less got up, washed dishes for eight hours, and then got drunk again. I think I relished the pain.
Was this the magic of youth? Imagine: I was reading Oscar Wilde then, and he was screaming at the top of his lungs about how youth is the only thing worth having. And did I do a thing to slow it down?
On the other hand—how? Why does the passage of time make us feel foolish? Like we could have clawed something from the gaping gullet, if only we had… had what?
I remember how random and hopeless, violent and insane, the world seemed before I found vodka; I had almost infinite, uncontrollable energy as a young person, but something was bleeding out.
I remember hearing older people whine back then, and thinking: “Why are you crying? You got your chance! Let me have mine!”
But as it turns out, most people don’t get much of a chance. Or it comes too late. Or they didn’t know what they were looking at when the chances finally came.
And the people who DO get a fair swing, holy cow. Nothing will ever be enough for them again, as long as they live.
I can’t think of anyone I’ve met who didn’t have a drug.
And there’s none worse than being an anger junkie. Not even actual drugs. Although actual drugs have the worst hangovers.
This was no ordinary hangover, either! On top of the normal horrors, there also seemed to be a nest of fire ants where my right eye used to be.
They were tired, rotten-feeling fire ants, as opposed to the enthused, civic type; my stomach turned and I loped over to try to inspect myself in the bathroom mirror.
Alas, I couldn’t get there. Oh, the bathroom was two feet from my door; all three bedrooms upstairs and the bathroom shared a landing—a real, old “use the kids you’ve got to stop yourself from making more kids”-style farmhouse.
But when I tried to open my bedroom door, I felt the kind of softish, heavy resistance that could only be a human body.
“Snnnnn-uck-cuk,” it snored. Not a corpse, but close.
What kept me from screaming was that Leslie did this pretty often. There was about a 90 percent chance that he was not dead, merely passed out. If I could wake him up, I could get rid of him; if not, he never ate anymore, so maybe I could wiggle and wedge the door open?—but he was still pretty tall. Maybe a few failed attempts to budge him would wake him up, but for the moment, I had to slouch back to my bed...
"Blood pressure," I muttered. "Salt." There should have been potato chips in my backpack, but someone, hopefully me, had disappeared them at some point. I looked at the head of my bed where I typically perched my last couple of beverages of a night. No luck as far as booze went, but there was enough water in an inexplicably greasy jar ("Don't look at it," I told myself and gulped) to bring my blood volume up to something reasonable.
I chucked the empty glass on the bed and flopped down next to it. Suddenly, up from my person wafted the scent of my coworker Claude’s fake Calvin Klein cologne, and the horror of the night all began to come back to me.
Oh, I’m lucky I’m not blind.
My eye began to throb emphatically.
C’est ça, l’amour.
You might have got the impression that I was an asexual cipher. The alcoholic, heartbroken character in the gang who never takes a body home. Eh, kind of. I certainly didn’t trust anyone. I wasn’t exactly… nice, myself. But most of the town was drunk and mildly violent, so it took an Olympian level of pants-pissing dipsomania to kick you out of the dating pool, or at least the f£cking pool. In fervent spite of everything that had happened in my short and dreary life, along with my inability to translate anything into or out of Regulation Human, I was something of a romantic, so I kept trying to fall in love.
But love, in the 1990s, meant trying to figure out how to enjoy sex without dying of AIDS, which was still a death sentence—but sex still sold everything. Condoms in 1995 were like medical masks in 2020: The world was a terrifying place, so layer up. I had a guy insist on wearing three of them. I guess it was better than lying in bed alone?
Also, I had never in my life—outside of Julie and Johnnie—encountered a happy couple.
But then there was the counterculture: my books and records seemed to not only recommend love, but to hint that the more the love hurt, the more significance it would add to my little frozen-tundra life.
Incredibly stupid.
Suffering doesn’t add meaning. It adds to your hunger for meaning. Gah. How are kids supposed to know that? They’re only learning how to pilot their little bio-self capsule, and all the owner’s manuals are badly translated. It’s as if we set each other off on a doomed course on purpose. (A couple years later, I began to suspect writers like Bukowski only put on a show of being drunk all the time, in hopes that their young competition would emulate the sad-clown persona and destroy themselves. I hadn’t quite accepted how sad life is, not only at the fringes.)
So, instead of ignoring my first adolescent love affairs like the jejune virus they were, I mixd the bitter lees of those sentiments into people who were clearly not apt to get too close to me. Like Claude, the stupid but hot line cook from work—and… ah, yes, it was coming back to me—Claude, the bar, chess, thence the mushy flesh around my poor eye.
Oh… sorry, let me explain: If you’ve never worked a shit job, “hot line cook” probably sounds like gibberish.
But as bad as we smelled—the Basic cigarettes, metabolizing beer, fake perfume, undertone of mop bucket water, grease, garlic, and things marinating in the dish sink that sillaged behind us like eau de misère—we were hot to each other. We watched each other perform physical feats of strength and endurance all day and all night. We bonded in the trenches. We BATHED, which is more than I can say for most of you mad sedentary swine (although there are times when getting from the industrial kitchen to the half-closed bar to the bed without a stop in the shower makes sense).
And we had more common enemies than you could shake a stick at, or a primitive rabbit vibrator: the better-paid waitstaff, the sleazy owners and their creep buddies who hung out getting high all day on the profits; the entitled grad students, feeding at the trough, Dad paying all the bills, who already knew they were as special as we hoped to be:
Easy villains all!—the food of young lust. All that, and only the most delusional hopes for the future.
It’s easy to idealise the past when the future is so uncertain. I’m guilty of reminiscing about how we had unprecedented and now-extinct freedom of speech.
But when I reel the tape back to what I actually thought at the time, freedom of speech didn’t feel all that free, back when “going viral” only happened through the TV. You could make all the free-speech you wanted to, because nobody could hear you.
No Onlyfans, no YouTube, no Substack, no Twitter. To get published by the dinosaurs who ran the table, you had to get discovered, by an agent, in the meatworld. Most of the country was un-discoverable—and who has the money to get to New York or LA? There were zines and indie labels, both of which required a shocking amount of start-up cash to do correctly. That was it. And most of the industry was tied up in already-famous writers and musicians from the mid-20th century.
So we drank and worked and screwed to keep up the delusion of hope and then crept out at midnight to pound away at a vocation, Xerox ten copies of a zine, play as the opening band at O’Cayz, or on a Tuesday night; we were all in the same boat, lost at sea. And occasionally we played chess, which is where I messed up.
Until last night, I had never played chess in my life. If you lived in Madison and were currently not enrolled in the university, this made you an anti-intellectual. Believe it or not, on top of finding each other sexually attractive, the people who serve your slop also have intellectual pretensions, even if they didn’t have artistic ones. I’d say half of the clown-collar workers in Madison already had college degrees, and the UW was no basket-weaving school—but nobody knew how to get a college-degree job unless their parents knew people. So they got stuck there.
And Claude, that hot but crazy line cook, got very drunk last night and decided that if he and I were going to keep having benefits, I would have to learn to play the game of the kitchen intellectual. As it was, I was an embarrassment.
Ugh. It was all FLOODING back to me now—I can’t work with Claude anymore, I’m definitely going to kill him—and I felt that tangy burn you get all over the back-insides of your face right before you puke helplessly… the window screen was stuck… should I aim for the litter-box?
I heard Leslie begin to roll over. But he rolled AT the door and wedged himself in harder. Then Chumpy came shyly up to me, lifting one little possum-hand at a time, and tapped me with his furry nose-face (so-called because his entire face was a nose with eyeballs), wheezing slightly: He was thirsty.
“GODDAMN IT, LESLIE!” I snarled.
No answer. I grunted.
The pain in my eye seemed to begin somewhere in the center of my brain… Jesus Christ. I had taken to the game of chess with relish, at first. Claude wasn't doing a terrific job of explaining the rules, however, so it was a surprise to me when the bartender puttered by laughing and said:
"Whoah, Claude. She's already got you’n checkmate."
"No no no," said Claude.
But I cocked my head at the board and giggled. "Holy cow, he’s right! I just do this, right?” I picked up a pawn and clunked it down. “You must be drunker than you seem, Claude. I won!"
"Either that's some maaaaad beginner's luck, or old Claude was cheating the last time I played with 'im." The bartender giggled too and turned to grab a glass for another patron.
"This is fun," I said. "Hooray! I never win anything! You wanna play another—"
WHAM!!
WH-WHAM!!!!
My fist was being delivered before most of my brainham was even aware that Claude had sucker-punched me in the eye.
That’s right, he didn’t merely hit a guy wearing glasses, and I wasn’t even a guy—he served that dish of courage on a sucker-punch combo platter.
And what do you do when somebody hits you? Unless you have a serious brain problem, YOU HIT THEM BACK. Which caused Claude to emit a rather satisfying whine, at C above high C.
Two wrongs don’t stop a massive contusion, though. I was wearing glasses, too, which explained why my face the next morning felt like a ham roast that got stomped by a deranged Thanksgiving guest (but that’s a different story). He had crushed the flesh under the glasses frames with not merely the force of his own Claude-paw, but with metal and plastic.
What really pissed me off, though, was what happened after I popped him one in return: Claude didn't get kicked out of the bar—I did!
I don't know if it was a case of the referee only seeing the second foul, or the two of them were buddies, or what.
I suppose if I had lived in a "better" place, the "girls can do no wrong" clause of feminism would have kicked in, and Claude would have been the one standing outside the bar in the night with his head spinning and his bell rung, and not me, regardless of the facts.
But not only was 20th century Wisconsin a glorious place for casual violence, the mores of a rural milieu even carried into the university towns where you used phrases like “rural milieu”: There’s no princess of a farm. Anybody who wanted a pink canopy bed got those ideas from the television. If you don't fight the bees, you don't eat the honey, and if you get your dumb ass into a fistfight your word is the same as anybody’s. Less, if you’ve been caught lying and cheating.
I miss that kind of fairness now. It made people less paranoid and better behaved, even if you did score the occasional unearned shiner. And I didn’t get blamed for everyone else’s sh§t. (If you don’t count my mom in her fugues, where she thought I was my grandfather. But I had left all that behind forever, or so I thought.)
At the time, though, I could've choked that bartender. That wasn’t fair either, now, was it? I grabbed an unattended drink on my way out of the bar, and I was followed out by a chorus of jeers. For what? Who knows; Claude was an annoying fuck, but maybe they were chess sharking him and I blew their cover. Or maybe the drink wasn't as unattended as I believed. I was seeing little tweety birds circle round my head, what do I know?
I never get away with sh£t like lying and stealing, though—everything takes practice—so on top of the punch, that last drink was full of so much karma it put me over the edge: I couldn't remember how I got home, and looking down, there were bruises and bits of grass stuck to scabs all over my greasy little legs. Madison was small enough that you walked everywhere as a matter of course, but I felt lucky I hadn't been scooped up and dumped in the drunk tank. Or worse, although that wasn’t the closest I got to getting my dumb a&s deleted that summer.
Lawd awmighty, though, how I wished I could get downstairs to put some ice cubes on my skull meat. Probing it, poking it, there were squishy, sometimes crunchy, noises, eurgh; I thought better of the bathroom mirror. I didn't want to look at me. I didn’t usually. On the best of days, in the mirror I saw my mother, teeth grinding and ready to attack me.
"NIGEL!" I yelled, kicking at the door that held me captive. The guinea pig trotted over and gave it a mournful sniff. His water bowl was completely empty, poor creature.
Now I was pissed. "NIIGELLLLL! YOU PEDOPHILE! CHUMPY IS GONNA DIE OF THIRST!"
For the first time, Leslie gave a sign of life:
"My name isn't Nigel, Rain Man!"
“It’s not Leslie, either! Move your drunk ass!”
No retort. I knew he kind of liked that guinea pig. Chumpy was a bushel of cool in a two-pound bag. He could charm a dead snake. Which is more or less what we were dealing with.
"I think he's dying," I added.
"Join the club," Leslie snarled, but moments later I heard a body dragging itself toward the stairs.
No! I did not make this up; it was decades till the internet gave a name to a “TV trope” called “Kicking the Dog,” a shortcut for showing the audience whether a fictional character is meant to be redeemable. If they get a chance to Kick the Dog (or hamster, orphan, accident victim, grandma, or simpleton) and they let the poor creature be, they might get a spin-off.
Even if they know about this trope, not all modern Leslies remember to be good hypocrites. And yet 1995 Leslie—despite the endless torrent of his own parasitism and borderline pedophilia, which, if Rumor is ever true, eventually got him imprisoned—skilfully avoided Kicking the Guinea Pig all on his own.
Down in the kitchen, I found Paul and Yollie, who were trying to act like a cute couple. If anyone had an annoying laugh to rival Leslie's, it was Yollie. They should have traded. Where Leslie insisted on squeezing a woman's laugh through male vocal cords and came out with a hyena noise, Yollie tried to push a low, rumbling fat man's laugh through her curly-headed-girly voicebox and came up sounding like the monster under the bed, mating with Shirley Temple and Dopey Dawg.
"Huh huh huh huh!" she was snorting. I could hear her from the stairs. The first and last “huh” were octaves apart. "Where is it, where is our cock ring? Did we leave our cock ring in here, huh huh buh huh?”
Clutching my little pet's bowl, I cursed my stupidity. Every day brought a new reason to hate my stupid, idealistic self. The House was the worst idea of my entire life.
Ohhh, if I only knew!
I thought I could cure whatever was wrong with me by forcing myself to be around as many people as possible. I had already—shamefully—tried to get into a hippie co-op, because I knew being on a lease with other people was a risky way to learn to be a people, but I was rejected as “too abrasive.”
Hung over, with a mushy eye, my simplest needs now lay hidden at the center of a labyrinth of assholes—and I did it to myself, trying to fix myself.
OK, don’t flip out over your whole acccursed life, Lucy. We just gotta grab the supplies. Aspirin for me, water for me and the little one. If I was extraordinarily lucky, there might be a Huber still hidden in the vegetable crisper. A slim chance some of my granola bars might be left, but I didn’t let myself anticipate having any. Nothing fixes your hambrain faster than paying rent to feel like you’re camping under the overpass with locusts.
What if I’m not the problem?
As much as I dreaded encountering her, Yollie was overjoyed to hear a potential audience member coming down the stairs.
"Heyyyy, whatsername, you!” Yollie shrieked.
I made a fist. I was paying for her electric, and I was “you.”
“Have you seen our cock ring? We lost our cock ring, you gotta help us find our COCK RING!"
One thing never changes: Stupid young people always think they're the first people in the world to discover sex.
“I don’t think so. If I’d seen it, I’d be sick in bed.”
"Huh huh huh I'm serious, it's been two days since we saw our"— and now she finally noticed my hamburger-face, and pointed: "WHOOOOOOOW! Huh huh huh huh holy shit!" Torn between the displeasure of being upstaged and the glee of schadenfreude, Yollie trembled in place. Rather, I thought smugly, like a rocking monkey.
We're breeding a planet of psychos, all right, all right-o.
"Yeah, I—"
"Congratulations, Petunia! You get into foxy boxing?"
"What?"
"Never mind, never mind. Huh huh. So, you gonna kiss and tell?"
"I uh, sure, I got in a fight with... with your cock ring dealer. After I kissed him. With my other fist. Don't worry, I can hook you up with a new one."
"Buh hoo hoo hoo wahh wah wah wah! Oh, my mmmmfuck me, Paul, this one's all right! Can I offer you some weed?"
"Uh... love to, gotta work though." I couldn't afford to smoke pot myself, normally—and the idea of having to go chat up some stupid drug dealer all the time made me need a drink. So whatever turbo weed those two blasted all day was going to knock me out till noon tomorrow.
I told them so, and Yollie was so delighted with what she considered a compliment, she allowed me to fetch my water—and oh boy, miracle, a beer!—without any more discussion of anything that had ever been in her vagina.
Back upstairs, Chumpy and I relished our drink. Leslie had vanished, crawled back down to the living room with Brett, presumably, although I hadn’t seen him pass. Like a vampire. Why does everyone here remind me of Dracula?
The guinea pig was so pleasant, by comparison. He took a few licks from his beer, then had a nuzzle at my finger, picking up salty sweat with his tiny, pink tongue. All he needed was a lime! Chumpy had been with me through the last set of roommates, then the lonely drunk days, and he was still the best person I knew. If he wanted to split a beer with you, he only took one or two bottlecaps.
Granted, if he tried to hog beer like a people, he would die, but still. I didn’t have that many dead pets yet, so I didn’t obsess too much about feeding him beer. Probably too little.
The good thing about being young is that you don't have too many bad memories yet, hemming you in. Oh, it feels like you have a mountain of sadness already, especially if your parents acted like they hated you. But this in fact applies ESPECIALLY to you, my brother, who was blamed for his birth by the people to blame for his birth: You have no idea how many bad memories can fit in there.
Enjoy it while you can, relish it, having only a sole blackened eye filled with pummeled meat. One day, the whole of your head will be a suppurating bruise, skin tearing like a bloated peach.
Sitting there sharing that beer with that friendly little pig is one of my favorite memories. I was free of my family, delusional with hope but trapped in the present, waiting for the future. But it was only the eye of the hurricane. September 11, 2001, provided a handy hinge between the centuries, the eons even, yet in its way it was more of the same: For as long as I can remember, most of American life, if not life on Earth, has consisted of waiting for the other shoe to fall.
Maybe it’s always been that way. But this time, those shoes weren’t falling from a biped, or from an adorable quartet of doggie boots. Not even a spider, with eight prickly shoes.
They were falling from a millipede.
Ô peach, thou art sick
Somebody should eat you
Instead they will beat you…
I scooped up the Chump: It was finally quiet downstairs, I could get us some food.
Digging for the alfalfa pellets in the cupboard, the pigler crawling happily over my feet, I looked at the kitchen clock, above the 1970s electric stove. Poor thing never got used, that stove, except as an annoyingly lumpy bartop. And yet, someone had found a way to fill the sink with a dish and food mess which had fermented enough to have a white-and-caramel, rising crust, like a macchiato—a word none of us would have recognized at the time—that smelled like a corpse…
What the fuck? I did a double-take at the clock. It was only two hours till I had to work.
How…? But I just saw… it was just morning!
“FUCKING NIGEL!” I shouted out loud. I must have passed out for god knows how long, waiting for that smeg to wake up.
A weak moan, but cheerful, answered from somewhere in the house. I kicked the damn stove. I thought at least I could have had a moment to read my Kingsley Amis. To think about being in a nicer time. Kingsley died in 1994 or so, but his heyday was the early 60s. When the broad backs who won The War were only 40. Imagine: being able to own your role as the panic-stricken, drunken, mentally weird but bold and creative literary guy—but still wake up tomorrow and find most people acting sane…
Ah, the sanity was just the lithium talking; the 60s were probably awful, too. All that itchy polyester, drunk people smoking in flammable plastic. Maybe misanthropy is the dashed hope that maybe somebody out there wasn’t as bad and lost as I:
Eight billion of you, and not one role model?
I never wanted to live in a world full of mes! If you're crazy and you want a whole world full of people like you, you're extra crazy. If you’re an astronaut, you don’t want to look out the window and see everybody from Mission Control in another spaceship, passing by smiling and waving at you like a bunch of idiots. Shouting encouragement.
We’re all going to die: I saw a crack begin in the windscreen of my helmet. A little fog of my breath, molecules of me sneaking out to spread my territorial scent across the Milky Way. I’m immortal, because nobody is immortal. Is that how reincarnation works?…
Nonono shut up, no hangover crying jags, I’m LATE! Well, at least it’s my OTHER job, I thought, grabbing my shoulders to bring me down to earth—I didn’t have to work with Claude or defend my promotion for a couple days; it was my weekend from the brewpub job. The hot-dog-stand people were a lot cooler. I had a couple days of dogs, so some of the swelling to go down and I could to do the math around purchasing some Walgreens makeup on State Street. I didn't want that sucker-punching chess-weasel to see any bruises. Make him think he couldn’t dent me.
SUCKER-punching! The B*TCHERY of it!
Yet the honor would all belong to my family, in the end.
Ha! It would take till after Christmas, but… OK, Claude and I had run into my younger sister, let’s call her Tigger (I hope it’s obvious that’s not her real name), a couple months earlier. He was so rude to her, she remembered him clearly. He was too drunk to remember meeting her, so the fact that he didn't recognize her made his comeuppance all the more comical.
My “little” sister is about six feet, a lanky but lean, irritable, natural athlete with long bones and plenty of leverage to begin with and, at the time, an employee at a kayak place for tourists. She spent ten hours a day hauling boats overhead and bouncing the river-rat drunks.
You can guess where this is heading. A year or two after the incident, Tigger was hauling her stuff home from the laundromat when who should she spy at last but old Claude?, day-drunkenly slaloming down the sidewalk across the street from her, no taller than I am. Steam and glory tooted from her ears. We hold grudges.
What he saw—this unknown, giant fitness model suddenly dropping her laundry basket, sprinting through traffic for no apparent reason, then whoah she zig-zags and starts closing in upon him!; WHAT, ME?; too late to run, now she beats his hide like he’s a rug in a whorehouse!—makes me giggle every time I think about it.
And the worst consequence that happened to any of us was getting booted from a bar.
Somewhere between 1995 and now, civilization forgot there’s a difference between a warning shot, defensive violence, or playful violence—versus a&&hole, murderous violence on the other; they even confuse murder with words.
While men are unfairly stronger than me, if not Tigger, because Nature hates us—she only truly loves sharks and bears—I’m not sure vigilante justice is a worse way of policing the imbalance than the law. At least when it comes to minor offences amongst reasonably cowardly social circles. Claude barely had to wait for that shoe to fall. And nobody who wasn't involved got blamed.
But this vindication lay in the unknown future. Presently I was humiliated and worried for my job. The more I stewed—adding some cheese, bread, and tap water to my meal of beer—the more worried I was about losing that prep cooking promotion. If Claude could get the bartender to kick me out for hitting him back, the little weasel could be on the phone with the boss right now, working the mysterious magic of as&holes…
Fucking Claude! Unless it was to apologize, he had better not open his mouth. I had been washing dishes in that town since I was young enough for Leslie, and I was a great dishwasher... which is why it took me so long to score that better-paying prep cook job.
Oh, boy. You would think one would be rewarded for hard work with advanced opportunities, but it was hard to find a good dishwasher. Which once again, you would think would be good for the dishwashers. Except it’s a bottom-rung job, and they want to KEEP you in there.
They’d do just about anything—a free shift drink, compliments, five shift drinks, talking the waitstaff into tipping you out, “free”weekend trips where you paid your way by carrying their photo gear around for them (I think the boss was also hoping to have sex with me on that trip, but he should have picked a less oblivious target, as I didn’t realise till years later why he was getting so weirdly frustrated)—anything, as long as it didn’t involve paying you a penny over the minimum wage.
I would have been THRILLED to stay in one dishroom, loyal and well fed, staring at the wall, till I figured out how to have a grown-up career without any social skills—if only they had given me a raise. Maybe recognize that the guy who spent most of the shift finding elaborate ways to avoid working was not getting them as much cash as I was, and shouldn’t be paid the same—but that was never on their list of possibilities.
So I worked and worked and worked for, what was it?, four or five bucks an hour, watching the waitstaff with their massive tits and their Regulation Human personalities walk home with a hundred dollars a night, till I was so angry I quit. Then repeat, repeat, till holy shit, a quarter of my life has played out already, and I haven’t even found my seat in the auditorium.
To me, that prep gig was like a gold bar in my own Fort Knox. And here was my stupid reproductive drive, literally screwing me out of it. If only Claude could stop himself from being a giant child… then again, if he could do that, he could probably manage to play chess without finding himself wrist deep in my nose.
Augh, I was worrying over nothing. Maybe he would be too embarrassed to ever look at me again. That would make it worth my shiner! As hard as I had worked to get the prep gig, it was only half my income really, and come on, Lucy, focus, you’ve got your other glamorous career move to worry about: Feeding time approached at the ol' hot dog stand.
I sighed, and dug around the kitchen for the duct tape. My black Ramones sneakers needed the bottom patched again. I taped them up and hit the road.