The Cloud of Unknowing (12 page)

The menu gave a nod to soul food, for which the neighborhood was then still known. We served salty greens shimmering with fat, and sweet potato pie, and you could get grits with your eggs. And then there was all the ham, which I cannot think of without remembering the Hamily: three young black women and a baby who came in almost every morning. One was tall and thin and had a wig like a girl-group bouffant. The other two were very fat. The fatter and younger of them was light-skinned, with smooth red hair and freckles. The baby must have been hers, because it always sat in its car seat on a chair next to her. They ordered ham every morning—ham and eggs, or ham omelets, or just great slabs of ham steak—so we called them “the Hamily.” I assumed they were hookers, and probably junkies too, because they drained the entire sugar jar into their coffees every morning. They didn't tip much, usually no more than a few sticky dimes and quarters, but I missed them on the mornings when they didn't come in. And when I spotted one or another of them on the street, it seemed somehow auspicious.

To understand what the Hamily meant to me, it would help if you'd waited on tables. It didn't come naturally. I was, I suppose, competent, but I had to remind myself not to look agitated; to sympathize with someone who'd asked for rye toast and gotten wheat. “It ain't that hard,” said Lloyd. “Just do what they say do.” Which was only sort of right, because the key to waitressing is not efficiency or stamina or the ability to calculate a six percent meal tax on the fly. Waiting tables, like prostitution, is largely a matter of play-acting. I knew this, but I willfully blew my lines in the scenes we all ran through every morning.

“Why are women like tornadoes?” a cabbie nursing his bottomless cup of coffee at the counter might ask.

“Okay, why?”

“They moan like hell when they come and they take the house when they leave.”

In such exchanges I had the options of hilarity and shock, but I was stubborn and usually chose a third way: indifference. If this was received as prudishness or abraded feminist sensibilities (which amounted to the same thing as far as I was concerned), I'd bristle at the idea that I could be offended. Meanwhile, the Hamily gummed their ham slabs serenely, geologically, requiring nothing from me but ham and coffee and a full jar of sugar. Rightly or wrongly, I took them for kindred spirits.

After a while, I was riding to work under a pale sky; then, as spring approached, a weak dawn. Soon it was warm enough to prop open the kitchen door. I'd take my mid-morning cigarette break while Osman, the doleful Turkish prep cook, peeled potatoes, the oud music on his boombox pulsing under the noise of the dishwasher. As soon as weather permitted, the manager abandoned the lawn chair in the stockroom and began
napping in his station wagon—a Pontiac Safari that barely fit in the narrow brick alley leading out to Washington Street. From the kitchen door I could see the top of his pompadour lolling on the bench seat. Above, the back wall of the hospital, and the A/C condenser looming over the alley, and beyond that, a patch of sky.

I'd had my doubts about the breakfast shift, but in some ways I found the routine agreeable—even a relief. Where there was no choice there was no anxiety. I stopped looking for meaning in how I spent my time and who I spent it with. What I did was I worked, and the people around me were my co-workers and my customers. That was the meaning of our relationships, and to investigate further was pointless.

Which is not to say I didn't enjoy their company. Sometimes I'd run into the manager or Lloyd or someone else from the greasy spoon at Lou's after work, and we'd sit at the long, curved walnut bar in the watery afternoon light drinking rum and cokes from blue plastic dixie cups. If I stayed around for a second drink I might see a truck driver I'd waited on earlier in the day, or a construction worker or two, or one of the neighborhood people.

One Friday afternoon I stayed late at Lou's, drinking with Lloyd and the manager. As the light faded in the high glass brick windows, our barman stepped out from behind the bar to plug in the jukebox. Until then, I hadn't noticed a jukebox. I'd only known Lou's as a quiet place for afternoon drinking, where the shuffle of bedroom slippers on linoleum could be heard; where conversation competed only with steakhouse commercials on an AM radio, and the echoey clank of empties under a high tin ceiling.

The machine came to life with an a cappella doo-wop intro, its final sad-trombone note resolving into the Spaniels' “Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite.” Had this song been queued up
when the jukebox was unplugged at closing time? As if propelled by the music, two construction workers got off their stools and headed over to the pool table. One fed the quarter slot, the other racked 'em up. That sound—the tumble of rented pool balls—traveled some neural pathway eroded in my brain by nights of barroom loitering and booth parties . . . all that I was missing on the breakfast shift. I put my two quarters on the rail of the pool table, strolled over to the jukebox, and punched in a few songs. There was some really great stuff on there. I sat between Lloyd and the manager, watching the game, waiting for my turn.

“If you should lo-o-o-ose me, oh yeah . . . you'll lose a good thing,”
sang Barbara Lynn.

“Who's playing those fine songs?” asked the barman. When I raised my hand, he put a stack of quarters in front of me and said, “Keep 'em coming.”

I won my first game on an eight-ball scratch and the next one on a lucky rail shot. Then Lloyd was up, and the manager dragged a stool over to watch us play. Lloyd's game was stealth: deceptively casual, never an easy leave, but I somehow ended up winning that one too, and Lloyd stuck around to coach me as I took on the next guy.

“Bank the ten,” he'd say, or “Try the combo.”

“Put some English on it,” ventured the manager, and Lloyd leaned in and whispered, “It ain't even about that, kitten. You got this one.”

A row of quarters appeared on the rail. I've never been better than a fair pool player, but the planets aligned that night, as they sometimes do, and soon I was ruling the table. Lloyd would point at a ball and I'd sink it, as though the pockets were magnetized. Everyone kept giving me money for the jukebox and buying me drinks, and the more rum and cokes I drank, the truer my shots were.

“Cry, cry baby,”
sang someone named Garnett Mimms,
“Welcome back home
.” In a place like Lou's you can't go wrong playing songs you've heard of by people you haven't.

I don't know how long my winning streak lasted. I exhausted the construction workers, who—like me—had to be up early, and the night customers lined up to take their place. The barman, the cardboard-suitcase bachelors, everyone in the place gathered from the four corners of the bar, all eyes on me. I kept my face immobile for as long as I could, like a pitcher in the middle of a no-hitter. When I looked up from the table at one point, I saw the manager stretched out across a booth seat, snoring.

“Lloyd,” I asked, eyeing the low center of the cue ball as I steadied my bridge, “what's your favorite part of the breakfast shift?”

“Favorite how?”

“What's the part that really makes you feel good?”

“Going home, I guess. Don't try to bank it, honey. You can cut it straight in.”

“I like the mid-morning cigarette best of all. You know? That buzz you get? Like a virtuous feeling of knowing how long you've been up?”

“Cross-side. Three in the side.”

“And then you ride home, and sometimes you see someone you know from, oh, from before, and it's like you've had an indescribably, unrelatably weird experience and you can't explain it to them.”

“You paying attention? He's sneaking up on you.”

“Imagine, say, that you've been trapped in an elevator for hours and hours with a talking dog. Lloyd, are you listening? You couldn't believe it at first—I mean, obviously—but after a few hours you get used to it. And then you escape from the elevator finally—like, through a hatch in the ceiling—only to
find that the day has just gone on without you.”

“No, not the fourteen. That's one of his. You're solids.”

“You walk down the street and the rush hour traffic flows past, indifferent to you and your hours of confinement with the talking dog.”

“Okay, kangaroo, time for you to hop on home.”

“Okay.”

“You need a ride?”

“Yes, please.”

On Monday, when I tapped on the glass at quarter to six, Lloyd let me in. I saw over his shoulder that Osman, instead of being in the kitchen mixing biscuit batter, was sweeping the floor, ineffectually poking his broom under tables and around chair legs. His cheeks were flushed and his dark-lashed eyes were narrowed, turning his usual expression of philosophical gloom into something else—perhaps anger, or humiliation, or both.

Lloyd met my questioning look with a cocked eyebrow, and then I noticed an unfamiliar man counting bills at the cash register. What had happened here, some sort of audit? This person was dressed for the office, perhaps an office with a casual dress code. He wore large, rimless glasses and a blue striped oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had a coppery tan, and his hair looked like it was growing out of an expensive cut. The man looked up and walked over to me with his right hand extended.

“Hi!” he said. “I'm Michael. I'm taking over around here as of today. No, not taking over—I'll just be taking on the management duties going forward. But I want you to know that I'll be here with you guys, shoulder to shoulder in the trenches. Like I told Osmond, we're all going to pitch in from now on wherever we're needed. And Osmond, I want
you
to know that
no one here is above pushing a broom. Not even me! Excuse me.” With that he disappeared into the stockroom.

“Where . . .?” I looked around for the manager.

“Fired,” answered Lloyd. “And watch out for this one. He sneeze with his eyes open.”

So began the era of Michael. As promised, he pitched in everywhere. He never stopped moving and always seemed a little overheated. When he mopped his face with a handkerchief you could see a spreading dampness under the arm of his oxford shirt. He ran around making toast and answering the phone and, yes, stabbing frantically at the counter stools with a broom while the cabbies lifted their feet; but he left little piles of sweepings everywhere, and he burned the toast, and his rushing and darting disrupted the coordinated rhythm of movement in the narrow passage between the counter and the grill. He seemed to especially like working the cash register. He would send the cashier to bus tables or do dishes so he could take over. The Hamily, the truck drivers, the slip-and-fall artist, the neighborhood activist: Michael rang them all up with the same impersonal cheer. Then he would disappear into the stockroom, and for a while the pre-Michael equilibrium would return.

When it was slow, and even when it wasn't, Michael was chatty. You might even say he was prone to talking jags. I found out that he had been a lawyer—it was unclear how recently—and that in fact the owner of the greasy spoon had been his client. He said he'd replaced the rheumy-eyed manager “as a favor to the owner” and was vague about the circumstances under which he had stopped practicing law. Embarrassingly, he took a liking to me. He opened up about his recent divorce, how he was petitioning for visitation rights so he could have his son at his condo for sleepovers. Massachusetts family law, he said, was stacked against him. “The father, for all intents and purposes, has fewer rights than a grandparent or even a
maternal aunt or uncle,” he explained.

He buttonholed me for advice about his kid.

“Just be there for him,” I suggested vaguely.

In a moment of weakness I invited him to join me at Lou's after work. I instantly regretted it, but he seemed so grateful for the friendly gesture. Sitting next to him at the bar, I realized that I hadn't seen the old manager there since the night of my winning streak.

Once, Michael's ex-wife came into the restaurant. She walked up to him and said nothing—just held her hand out, palm up, her expression suspended somewhere between disgust and rage. She looked like she might be a lawyer too. You could see lines and hollows of exhaustion under her makeup. Michael, also without saying anything, took a wad of bills out of his front pocket and put it in her hand, and she spun around on her pumps and left. I found that my jaw was clenched in sympathy with hers.

The register started coming up short at closing: ten or twenty dollars here and there, until one night it was a few hundred light. The owner wanted to file a police report, but Michael intervened, and they let the cashier go without getting the cops involved. But money kept disappearing. One of the dinner waitresses got fired, and another cashier. Then one morning I came in to find the owner in the restaurant there, conferring with Michael and Lloyd. Michael said he'd found the stockroom door ajar when he'd opened up. Some cases of canned goods were missing, and some hams, and half a dozen frozen turkeys: obviously an inside job.

This time the owner did call the police. Several hours later, as the breakfast rush was winding down, a cruiser pulled up and double-parked outside the restaurant. Through the glass, we
saw the owner and Michael talking to the two cops on the sidewalk. After a few minutes, they came inside and went straight back to the kitchen. I skipped my mid-morning cigarette break in the alley door and sat at the counter instead, watching Lloyd scrape the grill down. Finally I gave up waiting for him to say something.