In Which Our Plucky Young Hero’s Life Changes. Twice

Fuck you, New Girl.

And fuck you, Gordon.

And while I’m at it, fuck everyone at Les Quatre Saisons.

And fuck everyone at Transformative Transport. Yeah, especially them.

I’d say that when it feels like your world has just come crashing down, you have a right to tell everyone responsible to fuck off.

I come to work and head into the bathroom to freshen up before I head out into the mass of selfish assholes, and there’s New Girl on her knees in front of Gordon, and they’re not even going to be ruining any food.

Less than twenty-four hours after she swore to me that she would never do anything with him, there they are.

Gordon just looked at me, raised an eyebrow and shook his head.

Yeah, well, I got the fucking message weeks ago, you jackass.

That last chapter, Fifteen? You can ignore everything from it, because I don’t know what else she said was just drunken pissings, so I’m passing the whole thing away.

She could be an ex-nun for all I know. For all I care.

So we can pour our hearts out to each other, and she can kiss me, but she’ll blow Gordon. Forgive me if this sounds really shallow and petty, but what the Hell?

Maybe I’m frustrated with myself. After all, am I really such a low creature as to think that all of my little problems, that whole bit about jealousy and lack of self-confidence, could be taken away by just one blowjob?

Maybe I’m frustrated with Gordon. After all, guys have come and taken all the girls I liked before I even realized that I liked them all my life, but none of them were ever so close to me.

No, I’m definitely frustrated with New Girl. Fuck me and fuck Gordon, this issue is all about her.

At least there was one positive thing about walking in on them; I was fired up like nothing else. I was so vicious in my attacks on people’s food that the guys backstage were appalled. It was right about after I had added various quantities of blood, snot, spit, pus, urine, shitty toilet water, dirt and rat droppings to an order of corn and clam chowder that Alan threw up.

Needless to say, a bit of vomit found its way into the chowder.

And the haggis? Go ahead. Guess. I dare you.

It didn’t even matter that the majority of our clientele acts nice now.

Always find the positives.

It would have felt great, except that none of the other guys were doing anything. Not one of them. Tonight, they were as listless as any other waiter. I was the last samurai, the lone soldier keeping the flag waving even amongst a hail of bullets.

And eventually, when my cocky borrowed-from-Gordon attitude failed me and the customers were as vicious to me as I was to the food, those bastards hung me out to dry.

And suddenly, it’s like the entire world got a memo from God reading simply, “Disappoint Jimmy”. But that may be too optimistic a viewpoint to have.

All my life, I was told that God would love me no matter what I did. As soon as I met Gordon, I began to think that maybe God might hate me for what I was doing to others.

But God, He’s a smart one. If anyone could think of a punishment worse than hating somebody, it’d be God.

What if God has completely forgotten me, and I’m not on either side of the fence with Him? With all possibility, I may be a nonentity to the very being that created me.

Now how’s that for an everlasting “Fuck you”?

Always find the positives, always expect the negatives.

There were these two kids at a table tonight, college age, a boy and a girl. They looked like they made a great couple. Actually, they looked like a great couple after something tragic happened. I walked up and asked if I could take their order. They stared at each other silently for a few seconds, disappointedly, sadly, imploringly, then the guy said “Couple more minutes, man.”

That happened three more times before they actually ordered. They had left before their food even arrived.

Ironically, theirs was the only order of the night that I didn’t wreck. They seemed too sad, too broken to deserve anything I could do.

Maybe they just reminded me of me.

Gordon left work early. No one noticed. I left work shortly after him. I got a phone call from a very pissed off boss. I told him I threw up and needed to go home, otherwise I might accidentally vomit in a customer’s food, and wouldn’t that be a terrible story to get out to the upper crust public?

In the first thing to go right this night, he got the hint.

I can’t remember to this day where I went or why I went the way I did, but it led me to a part of the city that I never visit and hardly ever cast a thought on, the kind of place where, just as long as you don’t live there, you can feel at least superior to someone in the world. I don’t know why I went there, but you can call it fate, you can call it God’s will, or you can call it another inch deeper in the cosmic ass kicking I’ve been receiving all night, I was supposed to be there.

Or maybe I wasn’t. With Gordon, it’s tough to tell these days.

The place was called Transformative Transport, and it was basically a small warehouse with a few big trucks receiving orders. Men in white uniforms scurried about carrying boxes and moving crates, like little white chocolate ants. Perhaps it was the boredom or perhaps it was my inner magnet for masochism, but I walked up towards the plant.

Maybe just to see what they were shipping. Maybe to see if they had an opening.

T-shirts. They were shipping fucking T-shirts from Dim Bulb, Inc. If I had a pet, I’d name it ‘Irony’.

The head honcho comes up to me and asks me what I’m doing there. I tell him that I want to speak with Mr. Newman.

Tell him, New Girl’s here.

And the guy nods, knowingly but confusedly, and he scurries off, up some steps and through a door. What happens beyond that door, I don’t know, but half a minute later, Gordon comes storming through the door, yelling.

He gets out “How the fuck did you of all people manage to find out,” before he sees that it’s me he’s yelling at from his landing at the top of the stairs ten feet above my head, and he clamps his mouth shut.

“Hello, Gordon,” I say to him.

“Hello, Jimmy,” he echoes. His voice is hollow, like an echo of a recording of a sigh.

And Gordon walks down the stairs, Daphne Fucking Descends, and makes his way over to me. He looks at me, clicks his tongue, and nods. His expression is practiced perfectly so as to remain unreadable.

“Surprised to see me here?” I ask him.

“Hydrophobia,” Gordon says.

What?

“Hydrophobia isn’t actually a phobia at all; it’s rabies,” Gordon says.

Gordon knows his shit. I guess.

“No, that can’t be right,” I say.

“Go ahead, look it up,” Gordon says. “Or, you could save yourself the trouble and just trust me that I’m right. Or, you could just accept the fact that maybe I just made that whole fact up on the spot and see it for the allegory it is.”

“Am I rabies?” I ask Gordon.

“Yeah, you’re rabies,” he says.

What are you doing here, he asks.

“You’re shipping T-shirts,” I say.

And Gordon, he looks around and acts surprised and says “Oh am I? Well great, that’s good to know, I thought I was still at that piss-cup restaurant! Meanwhile, I thought I asked you what you were doing here.”

He just called my restaurant a ‘piss-cup’; whatever that means can’t be nice.

I don’t know, I say. Call it fate. Call it karma. Call it destiny. Call it God’s funny sense of humor. I wound up here by any of those nice little contrivances.

“And since we’re playing Twenty Questions, what are you shipping?” I ask him right back.

T-shirts, he says like I’m an idiot. And I am; I phrased my question wrong.

“So what does this little discovery mean to you?” he asks me.

It means that he works nights at Les Quatre Saisons, then one day a week he works for a T-shirt company, and now he’s shipping T-shirts. I can only be led to believe that he’s shipping the T-shirts that he makes, and that shipping T-shirts is another cushy ‘one-night-a-week’ job. Three jobs, three paychecks, one-third the work. It also makes me wonder what other jobs he has.

“Where are you shipping these shirts to?” I ask.

All over, he tells me. Most major centers of retail in America. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, all the big cities with big important places to buy things from.

“Are you shipping my shirt?” I ask him, breaking the nice game of questions that we had going on.

Yeah, he nods.

“Does that hurt?” he asks.

Yeah, it kinda does.

“Why?” he asks, breaking the game himself.

Because that was my shirt idea that I wrote down, and you executed it all wrong, and now you’re shipping it away and I don’t know where my idea is going to end up or who’s going to be wearing it, and I thought it was one of those just-between-us deals.

“Oh. Like just about everything between New Girl and I?” he asks bitterly.

Between New Girl and you implies two people, and if one of them wants to talk to me about it, then I see no reason why I shouldn’t listen.

“So why didn’t you tell me about your other jobs?” I ask him.

And Gordon, he looks at me for a second, quietly. He’s in one of those deep, dangerous places, the kind of place where he rarely goes, but when he does, it’s always to get the most perfectly polished metaphor for the situation.

Because even when I go too far, he tells me, I never go far enough. I say as little as I can about things because there are some things that I don’t want to ruin.

“You ruin things by talking about them?” I ask him.

Everything I talk about gets fucked up, he says.

“Couldn’t that just be natural entropy?” I ask him.

Entropy isn’t as systematic or meticulous as I am, he tells me.

“It was great talking with you, Jimmy. I hope we can do this again sometime, just shoot the shit about you and I,” Gordon says, a little too pointedly for me not to think that something’s amiss. “So you have a good night, and I’ll talk to you soon. We’ll talk about you and I, Jimmy. We have a lot of catching up to do, Jimmy. Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy.”

Sure, Gordon. Whatever you say.