A Working Stiff's Manifesto (4 page)

Most of all, I grab fish. I wrap one-pound chunks of Chilean sea bass up in three layers of plastic and stuff it down my pants every night on my way out the door. Rule one is nothing ever goes in my duffel bag. Management reserves the right to search the duffel bag at any time. Everything goes down the pants.

Before long, Corey and I are eating sixteen-dollar-a-pound sea bass and salmon like it's a bag of Doritos. We have langostinos in cream sauce, lobster tails on a bed of saffron rice, Pacific red salmon and Alaskan king crab legs mixed with jumbo Maryland scallops, a gigantic seafood extravaganza served on a nightly basis. Soon my roommate is begging for burgers. So I talk to Rocker and arrange a trade-off at the butcher stand. We go to two-inch-tall cuts of New York strip steak, filet mignon, big wads of hamburger meat, dry-aged rib eye, even a rare cut of Kobe beer-fed beef. Every time Zoe makes a comment to me that I deem to be less than positive, more things go down the pants.

I start noticing how many other Market employees feel the same way. While waiting for the train, I listen to them bitch about their jobs. They've all been made to read one directive too many, about oxfords and hair length and “Have a nice day.” They are all getting paid a different wage for the same job, and there's no reasoning behind it. People are promoted based on nothing. A sweet nineteen-year-old girl is promoted to head cashier after two weeks, leaving the others seething. I wonder if they all have pants stuffed with stolen groceries.

Ippolito, I notice, starts giving me the cold shoulder. Obviously, Sue is riding him about me, and he takes to snapping at me. A customer calls and orders poached salmon, and I get the water boiling, and Ippolito comes in and starts screaming.

“I cook the salmon,” he tells me. “I cook all special orders.”

“Knock yourself out.”

“From now on, I cook all the orders.”

“Fine.”

Later that day, just before Ippolito leaves, I start getting scrap fish together for a soy and sesame display I have planned. Cooking fish is one of the things I'm good at. Most of the customers like my samples.

“I'll do it,” he says. He takes the scraps without looking at me. “From now on, I do the cooking.”

“Do it up.” He stays around an extra half hour, waiting for his samples to come out of the oven. Even then he doesn't leave.

Zoe apparently has instructed him to keep an eye on me. I am getting twelve dollars an hour to stare into space.

After he has left, I am sitting at the desk behind the fish counter, and I open a drawer looking for tape to date the scallops. I see the next schedule. I am not on it. A guy named Roberto is.

The next day is the last day of the scheduled week. Usually, they have posted the schedule by now. I spend most of my shift wandering around the store, looking for expensive stuff. I find a thirteen-dollar can opener, the cutting edge of can openers, with round black rubber grips. I take two of them, pop them down my pants, and go out to smoke a cigarette. I throw them into a bush.

I grab more can openers, smoke again. I grab chocolate bars, expensive German chocolate, duck back behind the fish counter and load my socks with it, then go and smoke. Into the bush. I double wrap about four pounds of sockeye salmon and smoke again. When I come back inside, John is waiting for me.

“Can I talk to you for a second?”

“Sure.”

“I hired a guy yesterday. Eight dollars an hour. He can cut fish. I don't think we're going to have room for you here anymore.”

“Sure.”

“It's nothing personal.”

“It's fine.”

“Come with me.” He escorts me to my locker, which I clean out while he watches. Once you've been dismissed, there is a Market policy that a manager has to be with you all the time, to prevent theft or unsightly displays of emotion. He escorts me outside.

“I'm going to have to look in your bag,” he says. He takes it from me. I have a book and a t-shirt inside. He hands it back. “You were always an honest guy,” he says. “It's just a policy.”

“No problem.”

“So long.”

I shake his hand, circle the block, and load up on can openers, fish, and chocolate. The irony is that after three months at the Market, I have become a half-decent fish cutter.

My insurance would have kicked in after ninety days. I have worked there eighty-nine.

“What're these?” I am emptying my bag onto the kitchen counter, looking at my legacy from the Market. Corey is examining the contents, disappointed. He'd been expecting sea bass.

“Can openers.”

“Where'd you get 'em?”

“A friend gave 'em to me.”

“Why'd he give you nine can openers?”

“Do you want 'em or not?”

“Not really.”

Maybe I'll sell them. Maybe not. I don't have a gift for sales.

Back to the classifieds.

Corey has to leave town that night on a shoot, and just minutes after he walks out he gets a phone call from a woman in Scars-dale, which I am lucky enough to intercept.

“I'm desperate,” she tells me. “I need you.”

I'm wondering what she looks like when I remember that, for the last several weeks, Corey has had an ad in the paper for a private bartending service to make extra money. Some months back, he answered an ad for a bartender, which turned out to be a cleverly worded ad for a bartending
school
, and, too embarrassed to admit his mistake, he'd shelled out $1,000 to learn how to make Golden Cadillacs and Harvey Wallbangers. By the time he'd realized that most of the people who drink these drinks are dead, the check had been cashed. Now he felt obligated to try to get himself some bartending work to recoup the cash.

Her name is Patrice and she is throwing a party at her Scarsdale mansion for a hundred or so of her influential friends, and she has had a last minute falling-out with her caterer. I feel her pain. I hate when that happens. Anyway, Patrice needs a bartender for tomorrow evening, someone to stand around and pour bottles of Chateau Whatever for her apéritif-sipping friends. I get the feeling there will be little skill and plenty of subservience required. I can do subservience for an evening, especially considering my current employment status.

“Do you have a cummerbund?” she asks. This apparently is a key requirement.

“Of course,” I say. What unemployed guy doesn't have a cummerbund?

“And a bow tie?”

“Sure.”

She gives me the address and some directions, and we agree on four o'clock the next day.

I go rummaging through Corey's stuff, figuring that anyone who places a bartending ad is going to have a cummerbund and bow tie handy. If he does, he's got them well hidden. So I have to go downtown and buy these two things at the only place I can find them, which is a high-end men's clothing store. The cheapest possible alternatives cost me thirty-six dollars so I figure that I'll just wear them for that night and then take them back the next day.

“Make sure you've got the right ones,” the sales girl tells me. “Absolutely no returns.”

“Sure. No problem.” Fuck. Maybe I can sell them to Corey.

The next day, I take the train out to Scarsdale (three dollars each way) and the cab to her house from the station (eight dollars each way), and I realize as I'm walking up her driveway that I've already laid out fifty-eight dollars on this affair. I'm getting fifteen-dollars an hour and am expected to work four hours, so I'm now looking at a two-dollar profit margin for the entire evening. Fuck it. It'll be easy work, and I'm jobless, so I have nothing else to do. And who knows, maybe I'll meet a guy who owns a publishing firm or a nymphomaniac heiress whose husband is out of town.

The first person I meet is Patrice. She's probably okay under normal circumstances, but arranging this party has stressed the normalcy right out of her. She's running around in circles talking to herself, stopping every now and then to scream at a teenage boy, who, it turns out, is her neighbor's son. He's setting up a table to shuck steamed oysters on. She comes over to me.

“You must be Corey,” she says. Corey's ad had his name in it, and before I can correct her, she starts off with a barrage of instructions. I'm to set up a long card table on the patio, cover it with a table cloth, then arrange dozens of bottles of liquor, wine, and mixers as attractively as possible. Easy enough. While I'm doing this, she comes by every few minutes to micromanage, move a few bottles around, adjust the tablecloth length, but other than that she leaves me alone. I get finished early and help the kid set up the oyster table. He is going to be shucking oysters while I pour wine.

“Getting cold out,” he observes.

I've started to notice that myself. Since I left Manhattan, the temperature has dropped about thirty degrees. I get my coat out of my bag and bundle up, thanking God that I brought my coat, which I did only as an afterthought as I was walking out the door, just in case the night turned chilly.

Guests begin to arrive as a light dusting of snow starts to fall, mixing intermittently with freezing rain, which makes the smooth-stoned patio slick and dangerous. The temperature seems to be dropping even more. The first guests open the patio door and slip and slide eagerly over to the bar table, and I crack the tops off a few bottled beers for them. A few want wine, and I use my trusty wine tool (I actually had one of those) to elegantly open some expensive Merlots. The minute they get their drinks, they run inside again to get away from the gradually worsening elements.

Then something unexpected happens. Night falls. This woman, who has obsessed about every detail in preparing for her party, who has carefully arranged bottles of liquor so they look attractive, who has fretted over the lengths of tablecloths, has forgotten that in the wintertime in New York it gets dark around five thirty. And she has no outdoor lights. So now the oyster guy and me are standing on an ice-slicked patio in freezing rain and complete blackness.

Every few minutes, the patio door opens and a few people come out for refills of drinks. They stand and shiver in the dark while my now-frozen hands claw at wine corks and beer caps.

“Aren't you freezing?” they all ask as they run back inside, not waiting for the obvious answer. I doubt any publishers or nymphomaniacs are going to want to chat with me under these conditions. But it could be worse. I could be the oyster-shucker kid. Nobody even visits his table. Waiting for him to shuck the oysters takes too long. He stands as close as he can to the steamer, shivering, shoveling oysters down his throat for warmth.

“Let me have an oyster or two,” I say. He shucks them for me and eyes my table.

“Trade you,” he says.

“What do you need?”

“A-a-anything,” he says through chattering teeth.

I open a can of Coke, dump three quarters of it out, and pour some bourbon into the hole. “Try this.” I like the idea and fix one for myself. I'm not sure it's legal to be serving alcohol to minors, but I'm also not sure it's legal to have them work in an ice storm. We are both bundled up like Eskimos now, and I realize that my nonreturnable cummerbund and bow tie cannot even be seen underneath my layers of survival gear.

Every few minutes, the door opens and someone rushes out and grabs a beer, asks us if we're freezing, and then runs back inside. Most of them are in such a hurry they don't even want to wait for me to make a drink. They just grab the first thing they feel on the table and dart off. So our being here is essentially pointless, except as a conversation piece: “And out the east window you'll see the two guys who are being paid to freeze in the dark. Or maybe you won't see them, but they're out there.”

One of the wine bottles runs out and I have to open another, which is becoming difficult as I can no longer feel my fingers. When the wine drinkers have ducked back inside, the kid says, “Hey man, I think you cut yourself.”

I look down. In the slivers of light coming through the blinds, I can see blood all over my hands, my coat, my wine tool. I must have stabbed myself earlier while opening a bottle of wine. I get a couple of wine glasses off the table and take them over to the window where there is enough light to check them. There is blood on every one. I check the beer bottles. Yup, blood.

I peer through the blinds at the party-goers, standing around in clusters next to the roaring fireplace, chatting away, with their blood-soaked wineglasses held at elegant angles, pinkies extended. At any second, I expect one of them to notice, and to hear a blood-curdling shriek of horror. Fortunately, most of them are drinking a nice, dark Merlot, so the color is almost indistinguishable.

“Come look at this,” I tell the kid. He comes over. “They're drinking my blood.”

He finds this funny. Way too funny. He bursts into shrieks of uncontrollable giggling and I realize he is plastered. When he catches his breath, he asks me, way louder than necessary and slurring slightly, if he can have another bourbon and Coke.

“Sure, why not.”

Patrice sticks her head out the door. “You guys can break it down,” she says. The kid thinks this is hilarious too. She looks at him oddly.

“Everything okay out here?” she asks me.

“Wonderful.” Patrice seems a lot more upbeat now that her party is going well, and she's had a few belts herself, but I don't know how she's going to feel about returning the kid to the neighbor's house covered in his own puke. There's still the issue of being paid to resolve, so it might be better if I just break down the oyster table for him.

“I'll take care of this,” I tell him. All it involves is putting all the stuff in the garage. “Why don't you just go on home.”

“Naw, I'm fine. I'm gonna go talk to Missy.”

“Who's Missy?”

The kid explains that Patrice has a daughter to whom he has taken a shine, and he plans to go and introduce himself to her after his work here at the oyster table is finished.