Waylaid (5 page)

The permanent population of our town could never sustain the businesses and “public works” of the area. I read an editorial about it in the paper. Everybody hated the Bennys, but we needed them to come in and buy our food and beer, buy parking spaces, pay for beach tags to pin on their swimsuits, and rent our rooms. After one stormy summer, the township raised property taxes for the year, citing the drop in tourism. After that, the extra drunk-driving, vandalism, and litter in the summers didn't seem so bad.

The teachers needed the Bennys, too. When school was out, you could spot your teachers working summer jobs, most of them no more glamorous than what teenagers would do. They wouldn't be perched by the fryer in McDonald's, but they might end up like Miss Creach as a cashier at Food World. Watching her bag up groceries and make change for smelly guys in shorts with hairy legs and bare feet, I lost respect for Miss Creach, even though she was the one who'd taught me about how plankton fit in the food chain. When she worked at Food World, she wore an apron that read, “I'm here to help you!” across the front pocket. She

looked like a high-school dropout.

“Hi, Miss Creach,” I said.

“Hello there,” she said as a minor logjam of Slim Jims and Fruit Roll-Ups advanced on the conveyor belt along with bread, a box of rice, eggs, ground beef, peppers, onions, and apples. Slim Jims and Fruit Roll-Ups covered two of the four food groups — red meat and fruit. Miss Creach frowned, like she caught me with crib notes. “Your mother know what you eat?”

“No. She has no idea.”

“You sure you don't want two bags?” she asked as I stuffed everything into a brown paper bag.

“I got my bike, so I can only take one,” I said.

“Drink some milk, okay? Or else your bones are going to stop growing,” she replied, wiping her arm against her forehead.

I got onto my bike, one hand on the handlebar and one holding the bag. The bike had come with a basket in front, but I'd torn it off because baskets looked gay. I was fine with one hand.

My parents sat in the kitchen eating Chinese food, and I was in the living room, eating a bowl of Sloppy Joe and watching “M*A*S*H.” Two Korean women were sitting on Klinger's cot, crying. In the background, I could hear my mother and father talking in Chinese. Actually, my mother was talking in Chinese and my father was saying, “Umgh, umgh,” as he ate.

“You want to open burger stand?” asked my mother.

She was speaking in English, so it was understood that I

was being addressed.

“What?”

“Turn down TV!” she ordered. Canned laughter washed over the sound of the Korean women sobbing.

“I can hear you fine! Why do you want to open it?” I looked over at my parents. They were fixed in a brightly lit realm of tile, wood, and table, while I was sitting cross legged on the worn rug of the living room. They were in a completely different world.

“Come over here! You can't hear me! You should eat with us!”

“I don't like the way your food smells! Just tell me what you want!” I said, getting annoyed.

“We want you run burger stand on weekend. People get hungry and go across street to Barnhouse. You know how — you cook hamburgers. You cook Sloppy Joe.” The Barnhouse was a drive-in across the highway from the hotel. Bennys would pick up burgers, fries, and onion rings there, and come back and sit by the pool. I was always sweeping up soggy, flattened cartons smeared with oil, ketchup, and ants.

The burger stand by the pool had been closed for years, but the equipment was still there, alongside the crates of hotel supplies we stored in the space. The only times I'd go inside was to get spare light bulbs or ashtrays.

The scene inside the hamburger stand reminded me of those National Geographic features where they'd run a waterproof camera through the former living quarters of undersea shipwrecks. It was dark and murky and filled with drifting particles. Layers of gunk coated all the flat surfaces. Chairs were strewn about as if they had been abandoned in haste. And surrounding everything was an eerie stillness. Fixing that place up would be way harder than flipping burgers.

“I can't run that place by myself. I need some help!” I yelled.

“From one to five, you're going be open. Saturday and Sunday. All you do is play Atari, anyway.” There wasn't much sense in arguing that point. When all the rooms were rented, there wasn't anything to do in the afternoons but sit in the office and tell people we didn't have any more rooms or make change for the phone or for the candy or cigarette machine. But I still had to sit there.

I was trapped at the hotel, watching people older than me having fun. Fun that was supposed to be mine. I was the kid. Instead, I was just another employee at the hotel. I wanted to be a customer and get that air conditioning, get those girls, get some fun.

That hotel owned us. Reopening the burger stand just meant adding another room and more chores to our prison.

A local woman named Nancy helped with the cleaning on Sundays in the summer when the Bennys checked out and nearly all of the hotel's rooms had to be straightened up. Nancy would start working at around 11 a.m., which was check-out time, and finish around seven. For lunch, she'd sit on the bed in one of the dirty rooms, eat a Snickers bar, and watch the second half of a half-hour sitcom.

Nancy wore rubber gloves when she picked up used condoms and joints. She disposed of the pornography more discretely than my mom, but I fished it back out of the garbage at night when she was gone. Her long hair was the color of paint on a broken-down barn, and it shook from side to side as she scrubbed or vacuumed. Nancy worked hard for the $30 we paid her for the day, and she also got tips. She was only 40, but her face was badly wrinkled. Her husband walking out on her had left permanent marks.

Nancy talked incessantly, but she only had three themes — loneliness, love, and her daughter Anne-Marie.

“Ah, Jim and I got married too young, you know? You try and fight so hard to be an adult, and when you get there, everybody's trying to claw their way back. But an older man can always get a younger woman and get halfway back, so you're lucky you're a boy, kid. Just like Jim. Ah, if you're a girl, you've only got the television, and you keep it on because when you turn it off, you see your reflection in the black screen.”

“Ah, these kids, all the drinking and sex, I like to see kids having fun. I think it's okay, stay young, hold on to your dreams. Don't let other people tell you what to do. Ah, you're too young to know love. This room, this is what young love smells like.”

“Ah, I always tell Anne-Marie it's okay to be confused. Sometimes the only way to find yourself is when you're confused. You've got to turn off all the voices in your head one by one until you find that last one that's your own. You have to experience everything before you can make decisions. Experience is more important than education, Einstein said that. See, you thought I was stupid. The secretaries from the principal's office keep calling me about Anne-Marie and ask me why I can't control her. I tell them, ‘Hey, look how far high school got you!' Ah, you've got to climb every mountain.”

One day, when I was helping Nancy wring out a pile of beer-soaked sheets in the driveway, she said Anne-Marie was going to work at the burger stand with me.

Anne-Marie was her right name, but my mother always called her “Annie-Marie.” She was 16 and was going to drop out of high school as soon as it was legally possible. Until then, she was cutting altogether. I'd only seen her a few times when she'd come to drop off and pick up Nancy on Sundays, but seeing the silhouette of her upper torso behind the tinted glass of her car made my skin feel hot and prickly, even when I was standing in the shade.

I would stare at the little charms on the bracelet Anne-Marie wore on her left ankle when she stepped from the car. She would lean over on the open door and flip her shades up into her dark red hair. The door and tinted glass would block out most of her body, except for a space from the wound-down window that framed her belly button in a rectangle.

She wasn't prettier than Lee Anderson, but she was sexier because she knew how to move her tits and ass. There was no way she was a virgin.

I was thinking hard about her while I was scrubbing away at the crusted grill. I'm not sure when the burger stand was last open, but they hadn't cleaned up before closing. Someone had left behind a portable stereo. The radio didn't work, but there was a tape in it, The Byrds' Greatest Hits. After hearing “Mr. Tambourine Man” for the fourth time, I took out the tape and destroyed it with a milk crate.

A discolored sheet of paper taped by the light switch gave directions on how to clean the grill. Who knew there were so many steps to cleaning a grill? I rubbed the grill with Brillo pads and a porous brick that smelled like a bad fart as it wore down. I scraped all the solids off the grill with a spatula. Then I paper-toweled a layer of oil over the cleaned surface.

I dragged all the hotel supplies into a corner and threw a sheet over them, so no one would notice. The four flimsy tables seemed to be made from artificial Christmas tree bases and were so scummy, I didn't want to go over them with a sponge. That would have taken hours. Instead, I pulled them outside and sprayed them down with the pool hose. It took a whole week to get that place ready, and the heavy cleanser fumes killed a lot of my common sense.

By the time we opened, most of the kitchen was still pretty raunchy, but everything the customers could see looked clean. After I wiped down the fluorescent lights, the counter shone like a shelf in K-Mart after the blue-light special sold out.

The menu, spelled out in white plastic letters on a Pepsi sign board, read: “BURGER $1.50 CHEESEBURGER $1.75 FRIES $1.25.” There was only one 5, so the other two were S's. Everything was 25 cents cheaper than the Barnhouse. We didn't sell any drinks, because the soda machines were right outside.

A rack of snack chips sat by the cash machine. Each dinky bag of Fritos, Ruffles, Lays, and Doritos was marked “NOT FOR INDIVIDUAL SALE,” but I went over them with a thick black laundry marker. I had bought three six-pack Snax Pax for 99 cents each and now each bag was priced at 60 cents.

With only three things on the menu — really only two,

— it would be pretty hard to fuck things up, even for a wannabe high-school dropout and a 12-year-old boy. My parents had checked to see if there was a minimum age for working a grill or deep fryer. There wasn't any if an adult was present. My father was officially down as the supervisor on duty, but how he was supervising from his workshop almost a quarter of a mile away was beyond me. If the burger stand went up in a mushroom cloud, would he run to get there before the cops and pretend he'd been there the entire time?

That first day, I was wondering how we would get away with charging 25 cents for a slice of cheese when Anne-Marie walked in. She was wearing shorts and a white tanktop. I thought all her curves were a little soft, but in the right places.

Because there were no customers to serve, I constantly found Anne-Marie bending over the counter, leaning on the rack of the grill, or slouching over a few boxes. She'd brush her hair behind her ears and turn to face me, smiling — a basic pose from the porn magazines. My body couldn't help but respond.

“Oh, Jesus, what's this?” she asked, rubbing my cock under my corduroy shorts. “How old are you?” Her hand hadn't left my lump.

“I'm 12,” I gulped. We'd been working less than an hour together. It was all unfolding like a letter to Hustler, where women always made the first move. I put my hands on her ass.

“I'm impressed,” Anne-Marie said, letting her fingers slide off and slipping her body out of my grip. I took a deep breath and felt my head throb. Then I swallowed the wrong way and coughed.

The place was still empty. Two people had stopped in earlier, but they'd only wanted change for the soda machines. At around 2:30, I fried up two cheeseburgers and fries for us. I took some change out of the register and bought two Briardale colas. I watched Anne-Marie make zig zags in the ketchup splotch with her fries.

“Let's fuck,” I said, feeling Vincent's voice coming out of my well-greased mouth. She laughed and I felt a light spray of chewed food on my hands.