The Tao of Apathy (13 page)

Somewhere, hidden well, but near the surface
of his gray matter was the knowledge that there were only two
reasons anyone in his department listened to him now. The first
reason was they thought if they got in good with him, they could
somehow get promoted from dishwasher to management. The other
reason was that most of his employees were older women that had
barely made it through high school and looked up to anyone that
didn’t have to wear a hairnet.

Seuss feared that his workers would begin to
feel equal to him by being in the union and take that team crap to
heart. He feared this would give them the impudence to suggest
ideas about how to run the Food Service Department better. “How to
run the Accredited Professional Roustabouts of Nutritional Services
better,” Seuss corrected himself. Then, he bemoaned the fact that
he would not get any sleep and would have to go into work tired and
pale. He blamed his employees for this despite the fact those
erotic dreams of that faceless den mother already keeping him
awake. If there was anyone to blame, it was his mother. She held on
to the secret that she had also been his den mother.

Chapter 25

“
Yes, I love man with a haggard
look,” Jan, Seuss’s secretary said. Jan had grown wide in the hips
over the years, so that she was pear shaped. Her large, outdated
glasses obstructed the view of her face that had once been striking
and bright. She was developing jowls and lava flows of loose skin
under her chin. Still, it was a pleasant face. She eagerly awaited
her boss’s arrival everyday. They had casually dated for the last
twelve years; they had been to many clandestine places and brunched
every Sunday with his mother. She had a thing for him. However, for
the last decade, she had been concerned because he had never made a
proclamation of love for her or even tried to get into her pants.
Yet each morning, he always looked like he had spent the night
making love to one of original girls from “Save by the Bell.” She
was beginning to wonder if there wasn’t something suspicious about
him.

“
I am talking about the union,”
the vice-director’s secretary said. “Aren’t you excited that we
will no longer be under our bosses, but toiling beside them?” (She
had been an English major.)

Someone coughed to get their
attention.

“
Bigger, where did you come from?
We didn’t even see you come in.”

“
Must be my invisibility. Can you
see me now?” He waved his hands in their faces. “Mr. Seuss wants to
meet with me.”

“
He overslept and is not in
yet.”

“
The man is a workaholic. I heard
that if your drive by his house, even in the middle of the night,
he’ll have all his lights on,” the vice-director’s secretary
said.

“
You heard that from me,” Jan
said. “And I told you to keep it a secret. Bigger, I do have a
message for you from Gregg. He says he isn’t meeting with you today
because he doesn’t feel like it.” Jan squinted at Bigger who was
again dressed all in white and was not flourishing in his state of
compliance. In fact, his worrying about being demoted from food
service worker to ghost was keeping him up, too. His worried,
harried look peeked Jan’s interest. She smiled at him. “Are you
doing anything for lunch, today, Bigger?”

“
Yes,” Bigger said putting on his
paper hat. “Eating. Thank you, Jan.” Bigger stepped out of the
office and grabbed a food cart that was waiting to go up and sent
it rolling in front of him. “What does Seuss want with me now?” he
wondered. Seuss had come up to him earlier in the week and told him
to meet with him. Seuss then spent five minutes setting up a good
time with Bigger. When Bigger asked him if he was in trouble, Seuss
had only replied that it would only take five minutes. Bigger had
brooded over the meeting from that moment on and imagined that
Seuss was going to do everything from fire him to pull out a gun
and shoot him. Worried and pissed, Bigger bumped through the
kitchen door and slammed his food cart into a housekeeping cart
being pushed by Irene.

Bigger ignored Irene (for she had retired and
therefore was no longer here) and pushed his cart to the elevator
doors. When the elevator opened, Bigger let a bunch of people out
and then grazed the smallest one of the group with the side of the
cart as he got on.

Inside, there was the smell of bacon and
cigarettes and a small man with his head bent down and eyes shut in
a wince. “Hey, Dykes.”

“
Oh, Bigger, it’s you. Good. Last
time I looked up there was a bunch of nurses and a doctor with me.”
Dykes sprang up and smiled. “I tried to avoid it, but they all said
‘Good morning’ to me.”

“
Really?” The elevator stopped on
Bigger’s floor. “I never had any doctor say hi to me or give me any
acknowledgment that we were even in the same dimension.” Bigger
slowly pushed his cart forward. “I don’t think I can handle being
Mr. Annunzio much longer.

Dykes held the door open for Bigger to get his
cart out. “Consider yourself lucky,” he said.

Bigger wished that someone would consider him
important enough to be condescended to. To prove to himself that he
was not a poltergeist, he veered his food cart into the calf of a
nurse who was trying to squeeze on past him to prove to her that he
existed. She fell to the elevator floor and yelled to Dykes who was
facing a corner, “What the hell was that?”

Chapter 26

Joe mixed one hundred pounds of hamburger with
a dozen eggs, two pounds of bread crumbs, a half gallon of milk,
two handfuls of powdered onions, and a couple of three pound cans
of tomato paste into the big mixer that stood five feet off the
floor. He leaned an arm on the mixer and wiped his sweaty forehead.
When the machine finished mixing, Joe picked up a glob of raw
meatloaf and threw it on the scale. Five pounds. He then took the
five pounds, rolled it in a cloth apron and spun it quickly. When
he unrolled the meat into a large metal pan, it unrolled out of the
apron a round loaf. He worked quickly; in ten minutes, he would
slip out for a smoke.

Joe was on his twelfth loaf when Seuss made
his way to where Joe was in the back of the kitchen. Seuss wore his
blue, pin-stripped suit and just had his haircut. Joe wore a white
T-shirt that he had spilled beet juice on. “Joe,” Seuss called
out.

“
Hey, Gregg,” Joe called out with
cockiness and trepidation. Everyone called him Mr. Seuss like he
was famous or an English butler, so it sounded strange to hear
Seuss’s first name, even from his own mouth. But he was not going
to call him Mr. Seuss when all of the other directors at the
hospital were called by their first names by their subordinates.
The rest of the food service employees called him Mister Seuss,
though, and they didn’t even know why. Joe thought it was stupid.
Bigger figured it was because a lot of the kitchen help had barely
finished high school and did not feel worthy to call their boss by
his first name. Bigger had finished high school Summa cum Laude but
still called him Mr. Seuss, even when his mom had Gregg over for
dinner.

Seuss clearly enjoyed the extra respect.
Whenever he could, he called himself Mr. Seuss. He might say, “If
someone asks you why you are doing that that way, you can tell them
because that’s what Mr. Seuss said.”

“
What can I do for you, Gregg?”
Joe said, then whispered, “Besides not call you, Gregg.” He bent
down for more raw meat out of the mixing bowl. Again, he felt some
trepidation. Not from the name this time, but because he felt like
he had just volunteered for something. What can I do for you were
not the words Joe wanted to be taken literally by Seuss. It
connoted a willingness to please and to help have the kitchen run
smoothly, which was not there. Joe wanted things a mess and with
Seuss’s management style, he was not often disappointed. He wanted
Seuss to get an ulcer and have insomnia and he wanted to be the one
that caused it. Seuss had those things, but he also always had the
upper hand. If Joe disagreed or had any complaint, valid or not,
Seuss could pull the attitude card. “Mr. Seuss thinks you are not
being a team player with an attitude like that,” Mr. Seuss could
say to anything that wasn’t what Mr. Seuss wanted to hear. No
employee had a defense to that. All Joe could do was rely on his
boss’s own ineffectiveness to keep things a mess and be diligent
about inadvertently contributing something. Asking “What can I do
for you?” was something Joe was usually smart enough not to
do.

“
I am glad you asked, Joe. I am
still working on getting Louise some help for the cafeteria line
earlier. She says she needs help at eleven-forty and you don’t go
help her until twelve.”

“
Why don’t you have the newbie go
help her?” Joe said nodding toward where the new guy wasn’t which
was his assigned area.

Seuss leaned on one of the worktables. “He is
too undependable and too lazy to rely on. And I wish you would stop
telling him that I am going to fire him.”

“
If he’s so undependable, why keep
him around?” Joe wiped under his nose with the back of his
hand.

“
Because I need him around to fire
him.” Seuss smirked the smirk of an evil genius.

“
You just said you’re not going to
fire him because you’re going to fire him.” Joe gave him the
puzzled look that Seuss had been looking for.

“
Right. It was the only reason I
hired him.”

“
I knew that.”

“
I suppose you did. Did you,
really?”

“
No, not really.”

“
Well, Joe. What is probably going
to happen is each department is going to be asked to make a 6% cut
in staff. So I hired this guy to by my 6%. That's his only job. My
department doesn’t become smaller so that I don’t become less
important and I still look good by cutting staff 6%.”

“
Did you ever think of running for
Congress?”

“
It wouldn’t pay to give him this
added responsibility. And everyone else is busy or on break at that
time.”

“
I’m busy, too.”

“
Of course you are. Of course you
are. I was just wondering, with what?”

“
What?”

“
Well, I need to know what you are
doing then, so I can figure this problem out.”

“
Don’t you know? Aren’t you
working on this problem with my new team guider babe,
what’s-her-name?”

“
Yes, but you need to work as a
team here. She has never worked in a kitchen, so you need to fill
her in on what she is in charge of. It’s not her job, nor my job to
know what you are doing. Now, what are you doing?”

“
I am rolling meat into meat
loafs.”

“
Really? Neato. I always wondered
how you got those so round. How did you ever figure out to roll the
meat like that?” Seuss really wanted to know what Joe was doing
from eleven-forty to noon everyday, but the kitchen held such
wonders to him that he jumped at any chance to learn the mysteries
of food service. He also wondered how they got the fruit into the
middle of the Jell-O; why pudding goes from a liquid to a solid;
why fresh fruit turns brown when cut up, but canned fruit doesn’t;
why people do not like stale bread but put croutons on their
salads; and how his employees get the cheese in the middle of the
pizza burgers (they came frozen from the distributor that
way).

Joe looked at Mr. Seuss. Seuss stared at Joe.
Joe wiped meat off his hands with the front of his
apron.

“…
Well, I guess I’ll get back to
you, Joe.” Seuss turned and sulked away, not knowing how to get
back on the topic of helping Louise. He stopped to wet a paper
towel in one of the small hand sinks and wiped small flecks of meat
off his shoes before going back to his office.

“
What if,” Seuss said suddenly
across the room, deciding to hit Joe while he had at least a chance
of getting Joe to do what he wanted. He did not yell or raise his
voice, yet Joe heard him over the sound of the ventilation fans
that stirred the heat in the kitchen and the loud hum of the dish
machine in the next room. “What if,” Seuss said, walking back to
Joe. “What if I get Thelma to replace you for those few extra
minutes while you go help Louise.”

“
Is she able to do that?” Joe
asked, knowing that eventually he would end up doing what Seuss
wanted, but trying to make it as difficult for Seuss as
possible.

“
Hmm. I don’t know,” Seuss
replied, knowing that he could not go back and ask Joe what he was
actually doing when Louise wanted the help. He had left his flank
exposed by talking foolishly about the meatloaf. He had tried to
mount another attack, but now he must do the only thing to be done;
retreat to his office and live to cause a fight another day. He
couldn’t know if Thelma could do what Joe was doing at eleven
forty, since he didn’t know what it was. However, he did know that
whatever it was that Joe was doing, it wasn’t anything. “I’ll find
out and get back to you. Joe thanks for all your help.”

“
Anytime,” Joe said and began
pushing the half-filled cart of meatloaf into the walk-in
refrigerator so that he could sneak out for his ten o’ clock
cigarette.