Stupid and Contagious (5 page)

“What did you do?” we al ask simultaneously.

“What do you think I did? I told her to go home!”

None of us laughed at him. I mean,
all
of us laughed at him, but we felt so bad for him that it wasn’t real y malicious laughter. And he’s so unaware that he didn’t real y get that this isn’t the kind of story you tel everyone at work on Monday morning. Or any morning, for that matter. You tel your best friend.

Maybe. But now everyone knows. God bless him, he’s not ashamed. As far as he’s concerned, it’s just another experience of al that America has to offer.

“What’s up with the eye patch?” I ask.

“I lost it.”

“What do you mean, you lost it?”

“I had a car accident, and it broke.”

“What do you mean, it broke?”

“It broke!” he says, like an eye “breaking” is a common occurrence.

“Your eye?”

“It broke. It came out and got broke into a mil ion pieces.” I look at him, but before I can inquire further, a customer waves me over. Later, I found out that Marco has a glass eye. Or
had
a glass eye. When his face hit the dashboard of the car, his eye popped out and it broke. Apparently they’re like seven thousand dol ars and he can’t afford a new one. Apparently
I’m
the only one who didn’t know he had a glass eye, as wel . I heard that once he asked another waiter to hold it, and the other guy took it—not knowing what it was

—and then freaked out. I never got the privilege of seeing that. I guess a customer once did, though, and threw up. Which made another customer throw up, and made the majority of the restaurant
want
to throw up. They had to comp everyone who saw. Jean Paul and Bruce sat Marco down and told him if he ever took out his eye again he’d be fired. This al went down before I got hired. I always miss al the fun.

So to help Marco’s cause, I take an empty Opus One wine magnum and place a sign on it. It says

“Glass Eye for the Bus Guy.” The “Queer Eye”

reference is almost mean, considering the blow job, but it’s a tip jar, and I place it prominently on the bar. If helping Marco get a new eye is my mission . . . then I’m gonna do it. Marco is so touched, he sheds a tear out of his one good eye. We hug, and I toss the first dol ar into the magnum.

I spit in someone’s Caesar salad today. I’m not proud of it. But I promise you . . . the customer was such an asshole, he deserved it. It was a preemptive but prophetic spit. He went on to leave me a five-dol ar tip on a bil for one hundred seventy-eight dol ars.
And
he complained about me to my manager.

Luckily, it was Jean Paul that he complained to and not Bruce. Jean Paul never cares when people complain. As far as he’s concerned, the restaurant is so “in” right now that if someone’s not happy, they can just go somewhere else and not take up space here.

Anyway, Jean Paul had a cigarette in his hand when the guy cal ed him over. He tel s Jean Paul that my service was “poor” and my attitude so disgraceful, he was embarrassed to have brought clients here. I’l admit when I do something wrong, but this guy was on me from the minute he sat down. I did
nothing
to offend or embarrass him.

First, he snaps his fingers when he wants me to come over to the table. When I offer to tel him the specials he rol s his eyes and says, “Fine.” Then as I’m tel ing him and his guests the specials he actual y blurts out “Blah, blah, blah,” while I’m talking.

Stunningly rude. I mean, what is
that
? So, fine, I ignore it.

He was nasty the entire time, and I swal owed it and smiled. Even when he loudly announced that he dated a waitress once, but dumped her because it was embarrassing when people asked her what she did for a living. I chuckled at that. Maybe that was what pissed him off. I’ve developed the habit of smiling and sometimes even laughing when people go out of their way to be jerks. I find it amusing. Life’s too short to get that worked up over nonsense, and when people freak out over virtual y
nothing,
I can’t help but laugh at them. Probably not the best idea, I know, but it’s either that or letting them get to me, and there’s way too many of them, so
amused
is what they get, like it or not. In his case
not.

So I don’t feel bad about the spitting. He deserved it. Okay, maybe I feel a little bad, but not that bad.

Considering the fact that I know waiters who have wiped people’s credit cards in their ass cracks and then handed them back to customers, a little spit doesn’t seem so bad. Like everything that happens to us in life, it’s al relative, and I try to keep things in perspective.

I feel awful about the spitting. I cal ed my best friend, Sydney, and told her. She gave me a spiel about the karmic ramifications of what I did. She said I had just opened up the floodgates for some real y bad juju.

Actual y, it’s not that I feel worse about what I did or that I’m overcome with guilt, real y. I guess it’s that now I have to live in fear of bad juju. Which is worse.

Now I can never eat in a restaurant again. Thanks, Sydney.

“La-di-da, la-di-da, la la.”

—
Annie,
Annie Hall

“I’m not talking to you. Cal me!”

—
Neil,
The Big Picture

Brady

I went back to my apartment today. Only just when I was about to turn the key, I remembered it’s not my apartment anymore. So I leave, and I’m walking away from what
was
my apartment building, and my cel phone rings. I answer.

“I knew you’d change your mind,” Sarah says. I look up and see her standing in the window. Her hair is pul ed back in a ponytail, the way I always liked it. That is, back when there were things to like about her.

“Less hair . . . more face,” I’d always tel her. I wave hel o. “I was just about to shower,” she says. “Want to wash my back?”

“Hi,” I say awkwardly. “Shit, Sarah . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t change my mind. I’m tired. I just got off a long, annoying flight. I just came back here out of habit.”

“Fuck you, then. I’m changing the locks.” She hangs up, slams the window shut, and then flips me off with both middle fingers. I wave good-bye, feeling very, very good about breaking up, and head back to the subway.

Along the way I see an ambulance and a crowd watching as paramedics careful y lift someone onto a gurney. I shake my head in disgust and continue on. I
hate
that. People who slow down to see the crash or stop and stare at other people’s misfortunes. It’s morbid curiosity and bad karma. Who knows? Maybe someday they’l be carted off as other people watch.

However, there
is
one thing I always do whenever I see the wreckage of a car crash or the wreckage of the relationship I just left behind. I see the flashing lights on an ambulance and immediately start to think about how every moment in that person’s life or my life has led up to this moment right now. How your whole life had to be measured out in such a way that you step out in front of the car at that very second. And for the person driving the car to be at that spot at that second. Right now I think about my life and how every single thing I’ve ever done has gotten me to right here.

Walking away from a failed relationship and a cheap apartment.

And for some reason known only to God and the operators of torture chambers the world over, into my head comes “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers. A song destroyed—along with the art of making pottery—for a generation to come by the movie
Ghost.
A movie I was once forced to watch for the thousandth time by—you guessed it—Sarah. “Oh .

. . my love . . . my darling . . . I’ve hungered . . . for . . .

your touch . . .” The next line of the song is about how time goes by so
slowly.
Maybe it wouldn’t go by so slowly if you could just . . . finish . . . a . . . fucking . . .

sentence.

I think about the first time I fel in love with a girl and a song at the same time. The Beckets’ house. They were friends of the family, and they stil had a bad shag carpet. I was eleven and Sheryl Becket was thirteen. When I passed her room, she was playing

“Cars” by Gary Numan, dancing around her room, singing along. She didn’t see me, but I thought she was the most graceful girl in the world. With the most beautiful voice in the world. And I loved the song.

Although, truth be told, it wasn’t the best showcase for her teenage lyrical chops. Not only did that moment show me the hold that music could have over women .

. . it made me want to learn how to drive.

I think about the first time I kissed a girl. Maggie Stanhope. She had a Band-Aid on her chin to cover a zit, and she thought somehow the Band-Aid was less conspicuous. We were thirteen and hanging out at her friend Monica Sel ers’s house. Maggie took me into Monica’s closet and planted one on me. I can stil taste her bubble-gum lip gloss. Elvis Costel o’s

“Alison” was playing on Monica’s radio. When he sang the words “My aim is true,” I thought about what a target her lips made and that I should keep aiming my kisses right there at the bul ’s-eye. Now I think about the promise that kiss held—and every other kiss with every other girl I kissed after Maggie—with a similar sense of hope, each one turning out progressively more disastrous.

I think about the first time I got fired from a job. I was washing dishes eleven hours a day. Day after day, in a non-air-conditioned kitchen. My clothes stuck to me.

The only thing I was al owed to drink for free was soda water. Not soda. Soda
water.
And my boss would walk around every now and then and take a sip of my soda water to make sure it wasn’t actual y 7-UP.

Every time he took a sip, I’d toss it because I didn’t want his germs or God knows what else lurking in his mouth. One day he did a spot check and took a sip. I tossed it. Then, thinking he wouldn’t check again for a while, I got a cup of 7-UP. Five minutes later he took a sip, and I was busted. I was so distraught that right after he fired me I ran to Kmart—it was the only place open past nine—and bought the new Tears for Fears album. When I got home, I played “Mad World” over and over again and wal owed in self-pity. I’d become a lonely traveler in a world of broken dreams, and no song seemed a better accompaniment on the journey.

Al of my most significant moments somehow involved music. It’s like my life was a John Hughes film and somebody had to put together the perfect soundtrack.

My first KISS concert. Which led to my buying an electric guitar. Which led to my starting my first shitty band. Which led to my finding out that girls are impressed by guitar players—even if they play in shitty bands. Which led to a career of helping
other
guitar players with
their
shitty bands. Which led to a 2002 New Year’s Eve gig at Roseland and an unwarranted spirit of optimism at the moment a stranger named Sarah ran up to me at midnight and demanded that I kiss her. Which led to my kissing her, which led to my living with her, which led to my finding out what a screaming psychotic banshee she is, which led to my leaving her, which led to . . .

Wel . To here. Right here, descending the steps to the subway, after being flipped off outside
her
apartment. A straight linear progression from then to now.

But you can see that it’s not my fault. I should real y blame KISS. Or John Hughes.

Heaven

Last night there was a lunar eclipse. I set my watch alarm, but I’ve never been good at that, so it didn’t go off. Then I was looking at my toilet-seat cover thinking I wanted to get one of those furry carpet covers, and for some reason it came to me . . . the lunar eclipse! I raced to my window, but my window is north facing, and directly north of me is a brick wal about seven feet away.

So I raced outside with a paper plate and a rol of aluminum foil, because those were the items I vaguely remembered from my fourth-grade science project involving lunar eclipses. Or maybe it was solar eclipses? Anyway, I didn’t know what to do with them exactly, so I used the plate to sit on, in an effort to buffer the cold concrete, and I rol ed the aluminum foil into a telescope. Then I realized that without lenses it wouldn’t be good for much, so I turned it into a mini megaphone to bay at the moon.

I stayed up half the night, enchanted by a lunar eclipse I never got to see. The other half of the night I stayed up for a less enchanting reason. Some asshole in my building was screaming “Hel o!” at 2

a.m. repeatedly. In the apartment
right next door
to mine. I don’t know what the hel
that
was about, but I final y pounded on the wal and screamed back,

“Yeah, hel o! Can you please shut up now?” He yel ed,

“Sorry.” And then he stayed quiet. Then I couldn’t sleep for the next two hours because I started worrying, What if that guy was retarded? He must have been. What if he couldn’t help himself . . . and I just told him to shut up. I felt awful. Completely guilty. I couldn’t fal back asleep.

Brady

Last night there was a lunar eclipse. From al the press, you’d have thought a meteor was going to hit us. I looked al night . . . for someone who actual y
gave
a damn.

It was my first night in my new place. It echoes. I don’t know if it’s a guy thing or what, but I had to test the echo from al possible angles of the apartment to see where it was best. Al of my furniture is being delivered tomorrow, and then it won’t echo anymore.