Boulevard (7 page)

The whole afternoon and evening were busy, in fact, and she hardly got a breath of air before ten, when she locked the front door; she stood on the street for a long time, wandered to the corner. Upstairs, beyond the open shutters, the boy's lamp was burning. He was sitting in the doorway reading. He had but the one lamp, maybe she ought to get him another. Still, she had given him a toaster oven. But it was clear from his reaction that he was not accustomed to being given anything at all.

On Tuesday morning he woke up when the clock said 5:30
A.M
. He had hardly ever woken up so early before, and he stumbled to the bath tub and ran hot water. He lay in the tub waking and sleeping, waking and sleeping, till finally he washed and rinsed himself as best he could. He dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, like the other guys he had seen in the restaurant.

He headed for the Circle K with plenty of time. Some people were already seated in the dining room, and a thin waiter in a tight T-shirt slouched over them writing down their order. Curtis was at his desk, looking half asleep,
yawning as Newell walked in.

“Oh, hi, it's you,” Curtis said, and yawned again. He showed Newell the kitchen, introduced him to Felix, the breakfast cook, and Alan, the morning waiter. Umberto, the prep guy, was out back, washing out the garbage can with a hose, visible through an open screen door.

The job was simple. Newell picked up dishes and brought people water. When the tables were empty he cleaned them off. He was the only bus boy for the breakfast shift; someone named Tyrone came in to cover the late part of breakfast and lunch. Newell set to work. At first there was little to do, then suddenly the tables filled. Curtis only returned to help when there were too many dirty tables for Newell to handle.

Often Newell found Curtis watching, though pretty soon Newell was too busy to notice what anybody was doing. Alan tapped Newell on the shoulder and said, “Those people have been asking for water for fifteen minutes. You need to move your behind.” Or came up to Newell and snapped, “If you can't clean these tables any faster than this I'm not going to tip you. I could do it myself this quick.” Or, while passing to the kitchen, said, “Come back here and help me take out these plates to that party of eight. That woman at that table has an attitude about me.” A woman was in fact scowling at them both from the table, and Newell set her plate in front of her, and she asked for something unfamiliar to him, and he took the message back to Alan and Alan said, “Well, here, take it to her.” It was Tabasco, a bottle of hot sauce
that the customer sprayed over her eggs. Half the morning Newell spent running around doing what Alan said to do and the rest listening while Alan offered another harangue about how slowly Newell cleaned the tables.

Help came and things settled down, and sooner than he could have guessed the rush was done. Curtis clapped Newell on the back in the kitchen door. “You lived through it.”

“It was all right,” Newell said.

“Except you're so slow and clumsy,” Alan added, from the side.

“Shut up, Alan,” Curtis said.

“I will not shut up. He's slow and he's clumsy with the plates.”

“He didn't break anything.”

Alan whirled away with his order pad. Curtis watched him go and said, “You did okay. But you need to wear a tighter T-shirt.”

“A what?”

Curtis laughed nervously. “Your jeans are all right but your T-shirt's not tight enough. You need to wear a tight one. We have to keep the queens happy.”

In the lull between breakfast and lunch Newell ate his own eggs and bacon, served without a word by Felix, who watched Newell eat the first couple of bites, then grunted and lumbered back to the kitchen. Alan ate his breakfast, too, but he sat at a different table, away from Newell, refusing to look at him or speak to him. But by then there were other waiters, Frank and Stuart, Curtis's
boyfriend, and they were friendlier than Alan, and cuter.

Lunch shift shocked Newell with its intensity, so many dishes on the table, so many empty water glasses, everything to be done at once, and people crammed into the restaurant leaving only the narrowest space through which Newell could slide. He moved as fast as he could and hoped for the best. His whole mind focused itself on the need to note the level of water in a glass across a room, despite cigarette smoke swirling in the air and bodies moving this way and that across his field of vision; he concentrated on the balance required to haul a heavy tray of dishes over the heads of the customers, who were often staring at him as he moved, trying to make eye contact. He was assigned to Alan's and Stuart's sections and kept them clean as best he could, kept the customers flowing through, kept the water glasses full, and picked up the used napkins from the floor, but even so, Alan found plenty to criticize—that Newell was setting the tables the wrong way, that he took forever to fill a simple pitcher of water. That he was bumping into the customers as he walked, that he was so slow he couldn't help to carry out the food.

At the end of the shift Stuart tipped him eight dollars and some change and Alan refused to tip him at all, at first, until Curtis and Stuart took him aside and talked to him for a while, after which he gave Newell four dollars even and said, “You're lucky I give you that much, as slow as you are. I think you're in the wrong line of work, honey.”

“Don't pay any attention to her,” Stuart said, indicating
Alan as the “her” in question. “Her stars are all in the wrong place this month.”

“Fuck off, Stuart.”

Stuart smiled and glided away. Newell imitated the glide though not the smile, and said, “I'll see you tomorrow, Alan.”

So his first day was over, and all he had to think about till then was finding a tight T-shirt to wear. He tried on the ones he had brought from Pastel, six of them, including the one that had Bruce Springsteen's picture on the front; that one was tight, and one other green one from high school was also a bit tight.

He put the twelve dollars and some change from his tips with the rest of his money, which grew to nearly fifty dollars again. The fact pleased him, and he thought, I can start saving for the rent right now.

But at work the next day, with Newell in the Springsteen T-shirt, relations with Alan were even worse, and now Stuart was cold to him, too. Every dish Newell touched was the wrong dish, every time he carried out the water glass he went to the wrong side of the restaurant first, or when Alan asked for a simple glass of orange juice Newell needed ten minutes to find it. Up to a point it had made sense, but by the lunch shift Newell was wondering what bothered Alan so much.

“He really liked Travis, the last guy,” Frank told him, when they were eating breakfast together, Frank lowering his voice to float just over his eggs and potatoes. “But Curtis fired Travis for coming in late all the time and not
showing up one day, and Alan has been pouting ever since. Because Curtis lets Stuart come in late as much as he wants.”

“That doesn't have anything to do with me.”

“Honey, to a princess like Alan, common sense like that does not matter one little bit.”

“Well, I hope he gets used to me soon.”

“It's because you're cuter than he is,” Frank added, as if he had not already offered another explanation, standing with his cup of coffee. The restaurant had gotten quiet, around ten-thirty, just before lunch would start. “And younger.”

Alan, sitting alone at the window, legs crossed like a girl, smoked a slow, drawling cigarette, his elbows sharp and dark against the window. Hair combed straight back, long sharp nose, thin lips, narrow eyes, soft chin. His parts had a look of hanging together only loosely, an uncertain whole. He's not cute, Newell realized, and, at the same moment, but I am.

Curtis had that day off, but was at work the next, when Newell wore the tight green T-shirt from high school, and the tight faded jeans with a slight flare at the bottom. Curtis said the T-shirt was better, was more like what he had in mind, and all morning he found reasons to talk to Newell, helping him with tables during the breakfast rush. Newell had to concentrate on his work and hardly thought about Curtis or what he might be up to, but as the morning wore on, Stuart began to harangue Newell pretty much as Alan continued to do, get the water
faster, there's too much ice in the pitcher, this orange juice is soured, didn't you check it?

For breakfast Felix prepared Newell a nice omelet, a change from the usual eggs. Frank handed Newell the plate, noting, “Well, I guess Felix is in love with you too.”

“What do you mean?”

“He never fixes omelets—you have to beg him.”

For Frank, Felix had made the usual breakfast, scrambled eggs and bacon, potatoes on the side.

“Who else is in love with me?”

Frank laughed. “Are you kidding?”

“No.”

“Well, darling, Curtis is following you around like a puppy. It's got Stuart all upset. Haven't you even noticed? You cold bitch.”

From there on through lunch he did notice that Curtis was more or less following him around the restaurant and Stuart was watching the whole thing, slamming dishes around and getting in a fight with Umberto, the prep cook, about the salad. Alan was meanwhile sitting calmly by the window, puffing the usual cigarette, off his feet for a moment, as he called it, but glaring at Newell whenever he passed.

You cold bitch
. He liked the ring of the words, though he had simply been oblivious and not really cold. But he liked that he had appeared cold to Frank.

The work was what absorbed him, the novelty of it, which he knew would wear away; but for the moment it was what he needed. Alan and Stuart tipped him, if
poorly, and his stock of cash grew, if slowly. Payday was coming. Saturdays and Sundays the restaurant was busy from the time it opened till the time Newell got off, and the customers were all in a jolly mood. The dining rooms became so crowded that every trip he made through the mazes of chairs and tables became a performance, and he became easy at making eye contact with the customers, for the most fleeting of moments, but enough to fulfill the apparent requirement; he twisted and shimmied through the chairs with his pitcher, his tray, his cloths for cleaning, and he forgot whether Curtis was watching him or not, he forgot whether anybody liked him, he did what he was supposed to do and remembered that he was getting paid money for it, and with the money he could pay his rent, and with that accomplished he could stay here, in the city.

At the end of the shifts on the weekend, even Stuart and Alan had to give him pretty big tips, they had made so much money off the tables themselves, and Curtis supervised the payout, not only for Newell but for Tyrone. Nearly forty dollars for each day, twenty from each waiter, more money than Newell had counted on. He could buy some decent sheets and a stack of clean, new towels.

On Tuesday he overslept by a few minutes and arrived at work a few minutes late, only to find the place in an uproar. Alan had caught Umberto looking in Curtis's desk drawers without permission, presumably for the cash bag from last night, as if it would still be there. Everybody was shrieking at everybody, and the dozen or so customers sat struck with mild astonishment. Newell
went to the office, stuck his card into the punch slot of the time clock. Alan said, “Well, Umberto, if you're so innocent, what were you doing in there?”

“I was looking for a book of matches.”

“We have matches right at the register.”

“I wasn't at the register.”

“Well, ten steps would have taken you right there. You were not looking for any matches.”

“Everybody knows Curtis takes the deposit to the bank at night.”

“Sometimes he doesn't.”

Umberto waved his hand at Alan and headed back to the kitchen, and Alan followed him there to argue more. Alan came out in a few minutes and spotted Newell with an empty tray, heading to the tables where the customers were paying their bills and fleeing. “And don't think I didn't notice you were late.”

“I forgot to turn on the alarm,” Newell said.

“Convenient to be so forgetful. When the rest of us have to do double work.”

“It was only ten minutes, Alan,” he said, but this time he looked Alan in the eye. Alan wavered and looked away. Newell cleared the empty tables, his stomach already in a knot, and the week was only an hour old.

When Curtis came in and Alan rushed to tell him the story, Curtis called Umberto to the office in front of Alan and handed Umberto a book of matches. “Here,” Curtis said.

“That's it?”

“Alan, what do you think you're doing?”

“He was going through your desk. You don't let people go through your desk.”

“There's nothing in my desk,” Curtis said, “I don't keep anything in it. I don't even lock it.”

“You don't let people go through your desk.” Alan waved one hand in the air and stalked away. “What kind of boss are you?”

At the end of the shift, Curtis handed Newell a pay envelope and gave him a receipt to sign. Inside was a check for one hundred and fourteen dollars and thirteen cents. “I can cash it for you if you sign it over to me,” Curtis said, and Newell waited, and Curtis looked at him, and then turned the check over and said, “Sign it across here. Sign your name.”

Later he went to Mac's, as he had come to think of the adult bookstore, and hung out there for a while. This time he changed three dollars for quarters with the woman at the cash register, a platinum blond he had never seen before. “Where's Mac?” he asked.

“This is his night to prowl with the alley cats.” She gave him a grin, her lips caked with pink lipstick. “He'll be back tomorrow. You a friend of his?”

“No. I just speak to him when I come in.”

Newell walked behind the curtain for the first time. The booths were a maze of partitions, heading off two ways, though not quite in straight paths. He wandered in the dark spaces, trying to read the postings for each movie in the blue-tinged light. He could not bring himself to enter any of the movies except the one called, “Roger,”
which was apparently a man by himself, and that seemed like a good way to start, to Newell, but he found there were already three people in the booth when he opened the door. In that tiny space there was hardly room for another, nice as they were to invite him.