Pay Day

It’s hard bringing the old hot oil out at the end of the night because the waitresses are usually camped in the alley behind the bar, smoking a joint and showing each other dick pics on their phones. Janelle, my favourite, sits quietly on an upturned bucket a few feet away from Daria and Krystine while they make uncertain boot prints in the snow. Daria told me earlier in the shift Janelle’s father just had his plug pulled after falling off a roof and into a coma. She seems to have liked her dad, and nobody knows why she came to work.

“You need help with that?”

“Nah, he’s got it.”

The hot oil hits the cold oil in the grease trap and it spits and sputters up and out of the large black drum and onto my chef’s whites.

Janelle is still sitting there when I turn around and set the heavy steel pot down but the other girls are heading back inside. 

There’s another bucket just outside the door to the back of the kitchen and I flip it over. I’ve lost my matches so I’m forced to light my smoke with the barbecue starter we use to reignite the pilot flame of the deep fryers.

“I think I’m a sociopath,” I say for no good reason.

Janelle looks up from her joint and gives me a strained smirk.

“Why?”

“I don’t know, just a feeling.”

“Ah.”

“I have trouble relating to people. Interacting.”

“Maybe you have aspergers,” she sniffles in the cold.

“Maybe.”

Janelle hands me the joint and I wave it away,

“I get weird.”

“Weirder than normal?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s James?”

“Who fuckin’ knows. This is the fourth time he’s no-show’d.”

The sound of snow being crushed beneath footsteps carries up the alley as James comes around the corner.

Janelle whispers.

“Can you tell him to not be so creepy? The other girls always hear him muttering creepy shit.”

“Tell Markus, he’s the one who hired the mother fucker.”

“Was he really just in jail?”

I nod.

“Or so he says.”

James is in earshot now so we go quiet even though it’s a dead giveaway that we’re talking shit.

“Hey buddy,” James says showing his rotten smile.

He explained once that his crack-teeth got that way from smoking crack. Motherfucker I know. I know you have crack-teeth. We’re in Surrey right now.

Janelle stubs out her roach and goes back inside.

“Car trouble?”

“It’s snowing man. We had to dig the car out of the driveway and the baby didn’t like the cold.”

“Sucks.”

“It’s payday isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

Janelle goes back inside and James takes her seat.

“It’s warm,” he says wiggling his eyebrows.

Restaurants are the same everywhere. The cooks are fucking the waitresses or they won’t give up trying.

I hear a chit printing inside.

“Did I tell you about the cigarette game yet?” James says lighting a cigarette with the barbecue starter

James shows me a game they played in prison. You smoke a cigarette down halfway then place it running lengthwise along the inside of your forearm. It’s a competitive game to see who can let the cigarette burn them for longer. Last person to drop the cig wins.

“Wanna play?”

“That’s fucking retarded.”

“Boredom hurts worse.”

He had scars on his forearms. Not all the scars were shaped like cigarettes though.

James doesn’t give off the pretense that he’s turning his life around. His glamfuck stories of identity fraud, credit card skimming, and stealing disability money from paraplegics, which he says, he SAYS he’s sorry about are overcooked. Listening to him talk endlessly about all the forged cheques he’s written helps pass the time..

After work I sit at the long wooden L-shaped bar to make eyes at Janelle as she cleans her station. James sits next to me and whistles to get her attention.

“Can you cash this?”

He hands her his paycheque and she opens the cash register and gives him six hundred and fifty some-odd dollars in fifties and twenties. 

Out of the corner of my eye I see James eyeing up the pull-tab machine off to the side of the bar.

“What do you think the odds are of winning a thousand bucks off one of those machines?”

“One in fifty thousand maybe.”

“Nah not that much.”

He walks to the vending machine and pulls a fresh twenty off his new wad of cash and slides it into the machine. It spits out twenty four inch tickets and he brings them over to the bar and hands me half the stack.

Two pitchers later, James is putting his last twenty into the pull tab machine.

“Probability means there’s no memory. A coin flip. A fucking dice roll. There’s no memory. No result is owed to fate.”

I’m doing a shit job explaining math concepts that I wasn’t awake for in high school. Barely awake or drunk or coming down from X.

James hands me another stack of pull-tabs and I brush away the losers and start tearing the paper flaps.

“Fuck ya boys,” James jumps up and I take a swig off my luke warm pint.

“A thousand?” 

James waves at Janelle and she gives this exasperated expression that everyone in the bar except James picks up on. “Nah close enough. Fifty.”

She hands him a fifty dollar bill that looks more like red toilet paper than money.

“Let’s catch the last dance at T-Bars.”

“I don’t have ID.”

“Use mine.”

“We don’t look the same.”

“Doesn’t matter. Trust me.” 

Janelle calls us a cab and says good night looking tired. I feel shitty for not telling her something, anything like ‘my condolences’ or ‘I’m sorry to hear about your father’ but James is like the undertow of the Fraser–he just takes hold and drags you under.

In the cab he hands me his ID and my hands are sweating all the way to the peelers. Fourteen people have been shot and stabbed and killed at T-Bars this year. The weekend before a dude stood at the entrance with a chinese made sks until the manager gave up the safe. I’m making my peace with death.

In front of the entrance is a big bald headed tan gorilla standing under a pinkish red light somewhere nestled in under a red nylon awning. James walks right past the bounce without even a glance between them, but the bouncer stops me before I step foot inside.

“Two pieces of ID.”

I pull out my student card and fumble with James’ ID and hand both over to the living bicep in front of me.

“Who’s fucking ID is this?”

“Uhh.”

I see James peeking around the corner shrugging his shoulder at me.

“My friend’s. I’m nineteen. He said my student ID wouldn’t be good enough.”

“Don’t pull this shit ever again.” 

The bouncer gives me back the cards and waves me through.

We sit at a table behind gyno-row and my arms stay crossed while James orders a pitcher. The stage is empty, and hear my dead grandmother’s voice scolding me in the back of my mind. The words “disgusting” oscillates between her voice and the voice of the bouncer. I hate being scolded.

The DJ announces the next dancer and the first thing I notice about her is that she is significantly less attractive than the waitresses. I’d still fuck her but I have only fucked two people and I could use practice.

“Show us your pussy!” A large woman says. She sits next to an equally large man at the table next to us.

The clothes come off and she has a small scar beneath her belly button, a tattoo across the top of her stomach, and glitter on her fake tits.

Some man yells out “Woohoo” right in my ear and I feel my body fold into itself like an origami crane.

We finish the first pitcher about halfway through the dance, gyration, whatever the fuck you call it, a waitress comes over and taps James on the shoulder and tells him ‘last call.” He orders a second pitcher and points to me.

When the music finishes most of the people are already on their way out the door. The stripper is in negotiation with two men on gyno-row but I try not to stare for too long.

James forces me to do my part and guzzle my half of the pitcher before the bouncers push us out.

Cabs won’t stop for us, so we walk the ten blocks to Surrey Central Station. I see the bus parked with its lights on down at the end of the street, so I start walking quicker. James keeps up, until what I thought was a trash-can stands up and says, “crack.”

James stops immediately, but I don’t even look at the guy who said it.  I walk backwards and see James trade his last ten dollar bill for a baggie. My head turtles into my jacket, and I turn around just as the bus starts to leave.

“Fuck.”

James leans against a shop window, his reflection completely black in the glass. He pulls a one-hitter from his pocket and asks me for my lighter. “Ah well.”

I watch James smoke crack rock on that dead city street, while the overhead street lamps make the snow piled up on the curbs, and the snowdust curling off the awning of the shops sparkle.

His eyes go red, and I get the courage to tell him something.

“You need to stop creeping on the waitresses, man.”

“Totally, totally, totally, totally.”

“Seriously,” I say. “It’s fucked up.”

“Yup, yup, yup, yup.”

“Okay.”

“I’m starting to get cold,” James says. “Can you call a cab again.”

I look at his eyes and he looks possessed. They are bloodshot, pink-ish red and glassy. I’ve met his girlfriend once but she seems like her head is on straight, despite being one of those people who thinks they can fix people. I’ve been told many times that I have “potential” so I know what it’s like to continuously disappoint someone who thinks you are better than you really are.

When we pull up to James’ house I can see his girlfriend holding their baby in the living room window. She is featureless standing in front of the flickering blue light from the television.

“She’s probably pissed right,” he says getting out of the cab.

“Probably.”

“Can you cover the cab man? I’m out of money. I can pay you back next cheque.”

“Sure.”

He stands at the entrance of the house with his head stooped low like a dog that just got caught stealing food off the table. I think about how he seems more afraid of his girlfriend than drug dealers, pimps, bouncers, and other criminals like himself. I think about how every scar burns or cuts out the fear a person has of the unknown, but there aren’t any scars big enough to kill the fear of disappointing the person you love.