Flings (3 page)

If you asked her, Ellen would say it is a testament to her own superlative taste in people that Danny and Rachel had the strength to exhaust their sickness for each other, then recover to achieve the chaste, sibling-like love they were always meant to enjoy. If this is a partisan reading, let it slide. Few enough stories end well, and even this one is haunted by the specter of Rachel's future, betrayed by but also bereft without that SOB Rowan. But that problem's on ice back in America, so for now let us say things are going well enough.

They drop Rachel's things at the apartment, then head right back out again: to Taikoo to meet Ellen for lunch. The trick is to stay busy so you stay awake. If you can make it through the first day, you'll sleep hard that night, beat your jet lag. Dylan's at kiddie gymnastics class with the live-in housekeeper, here called an amah, or helper. Ellen has to cut lunch short for a call. Danny and Rachel take the metro under the harbor to Kowloon, where they wander in and out of neighborhoods and markets until it gets dark. Ellen checks in via text every hour or so, but the upshot is she's not getting out of there anytime soon. Dylan's spent the whole day with the helper by this point, which Danny and Ellen agree is not to become a habit, but once in a blue moon like this won't damage his psyche irreparably, and the truth is even if they haul ass they won't make it home before bedtime. Danny could call the helper and tell her to keep Dylan up, but then they'll all pay tomorrow. Forget it, Ellen texts him back; it'll be fine this one time. He agrees, signs off xoxoxo, and turns to Rachel, who's looking exhausted, so they head for the cross-harbor ferry, board, and find an empty bench on the upper deck where they sit, side by side, midway between two alien skylines on a small ship bobbing in the far-flung waves.

T
wenty minutes max in the mushroom suit—that's the official rule. But it's still a smallish company and there are only two suits to share among twenty-one franchise locations, so there's pressure to make the most of your turn while it lasts. When the thirtieth franchise opens—late next year, if you believe HQ's projections—they say they'll order a third suit, and at fifty a fourth one, which sounds good until you realize that the proportion of mushroom suits to restaurants is actually in decline. Anyway, our turn started this morning and Ethan, that savvy entrepreneur, is eager to leverage this brand-growth opportunity, never mind that it's 95 degrees out with 100 percent humidity. He's a real trouper, Ethan. Especially since it's me in the suit and not him.

It's hard to stand upright in the suit, much less walk in it. I had to be led out here and planted on the corner where I'm sure to be seen by traffic in all directions. My own view, meanwhile, is like peering through the hair catch in a shower drain. “Wave your hands,” Ethan advised me. “See if you can get people to honk.”

Well, plenty of them do honk, but not because I'm waving my hands. The suit doesn't
have
hands. They're honking because the suit is bruise-purple, furry, and mottled with yellow amoebic forms across a cap like a stoner's idea of a wizard's hat blown up to the size of a golf umbrella, though I prefer to think of myself as a huge diseased alien cock. When sweat gets in my eyes I can't wipe them. The hair catch goes from HD to blurry. It's not that big of a switch.

Different people respond to the suit in different ways. Children stroke the fur, tug the cap if they can reach it. Then they ask it for presents. Their moms don't want them to touch it—“That's dirty, sweetie,” they say, which is true, every square inch of it, inside and out—but they do want, inexplicably, for Junior to stand next to it—“Big smile now”—for a cell phone picture to text to Daddy, some guy in an office park scrolling through an emojis menu, looking for the one that says,
Why is our son standing in the shadow of a huge bruised dick?

Frat boys throw a shoulder as they pass by, rarely bother to look back and witness my flailing attempts to stay on my feet. They know what flailing is; they've seen it. Their mandate is to induce, not to observe.

Bicyclists want me to get out of their way, which is not a realistic request given my ranges of speed and movement, but also, fuck them, they ought to be riding in the street. It's not my fault that's illegal in this backward-ass college town—though, having never ridden a bike myself, for all I know it's a Florida-wide thing. Anyway they scream at me. I would lunge
toward
them if I could lunge at all.

Black teenage boys—now this is interesting—will cross the street to avoid me. They'll sprint into traffic; I've seen it through the hair catch. And these are the same suave posses who practice their rhymes at full volume on the steps of the public library, who hit on girls from across the street. Now I'll grant you, a guy wearing a full-body fur mushroom suit to promote an organic vegetarian pizza pub is arguably the whitest thing to have occurred in the history of whiteness, but it's not as though it's going to rub off on them. It's not like it's contagious, like breathing the air around me will result in sudden loss of pigmentation, cravings for old
Friends
episodes, and, I don't know, a Dave Matthews box set. On the other hand, it's only fair to admit that
if
such a disease existed, and
if
it were airborne (as indeed mushroom spores are), then I am
exactly
the person who would be carrying it—patient zero, Typhoid Whitey—so maybe they're wise to play it safe.

Okay, you've got the picture: this is a shitty job. But not everything about it's shitty. In fact there are many perks. I'll tell you.

First, I get paid under the table. As far as the federal government's concerned, I haven't earned a taxable dime in three years. Second, I get a free shift meal every day I work, plus whatever I can steal, which is plenty. I mean it's not just food and booze. Ethan is a terrible businessman, the worst I've ever encountered: a blackout alcoholic and probably bipolar, though he's also a cokehead and smokehound, so maybe his emotional swerves are side effects—or, rather, the intended effects—of the way he paces his days. What I'm trying to put across here is that Ethan's the perfect boss. He is reason number three or, really, all the reasons. Whenever I see a light on in the restaurant after hours, I knock on the kitchen window, find him rolling blunts at the salad station or deep-throating the spigot on the Jagerator, a medium quattro formaggi in the oven and him without anyone to share it with. He unlocks the back door for me, and forty-five minutes later I'm shit-faced, fed, and getting another raise.

Ethan is a self-sabotaging trust fund maniac whose folks set him up with this franchise for his thirtieth birthday, mostly, I think, so he'd have somewhere other than the grounds of the family estate—a former plantation, it could have gone without saying—to play “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” at blowout volume a dozen times a day. As long as he keeps his annual losses in the mid five figures they'll keep him in business. So he has his clubhouse—with its audiophile-grade sound system, bulk alcohol purchase orders, and Showtime After Dark–grade waitstaff—and the family is spared both the Allman Brothers and the train wreck, if that's not too redundant to say. The college, for its part, inducts a freshman class every single year. (I myself was in it once, and look at me now!)

These kids, like I did, come from towns where the vegetable on the menu—when there is one—is either Jell-O or tuna fish salad, so organic mozzarella cheese is a legitimate thrill. The girls we hire cut deep Vs into the necks of their uniform tie-dye T-shirts, which is technically a violation of the terms of our franchise agreement, but so far nobody's complained. I don't know who started this tradition. I also don't know why an eighteen-year-old girl—a girl who's been in town all of four days; who decides to try our restaurant for lunch because there was a 20-percent-off coupon in her dormitory welcome packet and we're on the only off-campus street she can name; who walks over here, comes in, sits down, has to shout over the strains of “Melissa” or “Jessica” to give her order to a server who for her part is probably
named
Melissa or Jessica, wearing tell-all jeans shorts and a shirt that's essentially confetti; who is charged $8.95 for two pieces of pizza and a Sprite (that's
with
the coupon, mind you, and before tip)—stands up at the end of her dining experience, brushes the cornmeal off her skirt, and thinks to herself,
How do I become the slut who just served me lunch?
But it happens, man. It happens like clockwork, and the lesson—not the first or the last time I've learned it—is that there's an awful lot of shit in this world that I don't know.

Ethan hires girls he wants to fuck, obviously. I mean he hires girls everybody wants to fuck: radiant vortices of bleach, wax, and puka shells who know exactly what you're thinking when you look at them, who sound like TV shows—believe me—when they're pretending to get off. To Ethan's credit—and this is the only time you'll catch me using that turn of phrase—he doesn't fire them for not fucking him. He waits until he catches them stealing;
then
he fires them. And they always end up stealing, irrespective of whether they need the money. Need's got nothing to do with it. Ethan's just a hard guy not to steal from. He brings something out in people. I'm lucky he doesn't want to fuck me because it keeps him from noticing how badly I'm fucking him. If I had tits I'd have been shit-canned years ago. Instead I keep getting promoted, to the point where I've become a kind of imperial factotum, body man for the restaurant, what in a real place of business would likely be described as “the manager,” a term Ethan abjures on account of its lack of good vibes. I do the books and the purchase orders, the scheduling, plus incidental waiting, bussing, onion chopping, secret sauce mixing (half balsamic vinegar, half anchovy-free Caesar dressing, pinch of salt), and of course, at the moment, I wear the mushroom suit. It's some low-down proletarian shit, I'll grant you, especially for a guy closer in age to Ethan than the Melissa/Jessicas, but you know what? I've got an ex who adjuncts at the college and I know what she makes per poetry workshop. I also know what her current squeeze—a math PhD—gets for his Intro Stat lecture, a class that seats four hundred and is simulcast on the web to twice as many again. I'll own a house before those motherfuckers, that's for sure.

A light goes out and then comes on again, but it's blurry—I mean blurrier than usual. I feel oddly relaxed but also weighed down somehow . . . somehow . . .

Oh, that's right.

The suit seems to have become horizontal, and me with it, and there seems to be a transition scene missing, so smart money says I had a bit of heatstroke and fainted, fell. I'm facing upright—that blurry light would seem to be the sky—but stuck. If it rained right now I'd drown, which is scary, but somehow not scary enough to keep me from blacking back out.

Light again, and a dark shape blocking most of it, but a light-dark shape if that makes any sense, and long, thin golden strands descending through the grille mesh, tickling my nose. That's hair. (And so much then for the hair catch analogy.) The strands belong to one of our newer Melissa/Jessicas, who must have looked out the front window and noticed that a certain purple obscenity had dropped out of the landscape. Already proving herself a team player, this Melissa/Jessica. I ought to learn her real name, would ask her except I should probably already know it: there's a good chance Ethan told me, or that she herself has, possibly when I interviewed and hired her, which it's entirely possible I'm the one who did.

“Hey,” she says. “Let me help you.” As if I could stop her; as if she could help. But I don't say anything. Let her tug and jostle me a while; the sooner she tires herself out, the sooner she'll go get Ethan. Even through the stink of this suit, I can smell her: whatever lotion she uses, coconut-y, and beneath that a hint of something danker, the smell of her futile exertion, maybe, though I may be smelling myself.

My nose still tickles. I'm holding back a sneeze, and then all of a sudden I'm losing hold, have lost it, am making a noise that's half donkey bray and half kicked cat. My whole body shudders with the force of it, snot all over my face, the suit rocking slightly from side to side on the metal hoop sewn beneath the fur of the mushroom cap's rim.

The good news is that observing this physics lesson seems to have given Melissa/Jessica an idea. “I've like totally got this,” she says, and rolls me over on my rim so I'm facing downward, suspended two feet above the earth, watching ants march across the concrete in my shadow while gravity, happily, works some of this snot off my face. Melissa/Jessica digs around in the fur of the mushroom stem, searching for the industrial-gauge zipper, which is located exactly where I'd never be able to reach it even if the suit had arms. She unzips me in one long quick pull, like it's prom night and she's me and I'm the best she could get.

With my newly expanded range of motion I wriggle an arm free, wipe my face off with my hand, wipe my hand off on the grille mesh, then stand up and step out. The suit is splayed open on the ground like a butchered animal, a husked chrysalis, an egg sac from which I'm emerging, a born or reborn creature, baffled by the sunlight, covered head to toe in slime.

(When you go steady with a poetry prof for as long as I did, you can't help learning a few things about poetry, so don't go getting incredulous—or, worse yet, impressed—that I talk so much less dumb than I live.)

We can't leave the suit where it's fallen, so I throw my arms around its dead weight, heave, and lift. It's not especially heavy—thirty pounds at a guess, maybe forty—or difficult to maneuver, provided of course that you aren't straitjacketed inside it.

I come back inside with the suit in a fireman's carry, having refused Melissa/Jessica's offers of assistance (and also having failed to learn or relearn her name). I march it right through the dining room and the kitchen, on back to the supply closet. I drop it on the floor in the corner, give it a few kicks and a stream of curses, and when I turn around she's standing there holding a large Sprite with extra ice in one hand and a clean shirt in the other. The shirt is a size too small and has already had its neck V'd. “All I could find,” she says.