the waiter said. “Salad and water for your friend. But you’ll be paying?”
“Well, yes,” I said, a bit put off at such a forward question before the meal was even served. But, then, I had ordered for the devil, so I supposed it to be a fair question.
“Yes, for me and my friend,” I said.
With what seemed a rude sound, the waiter stormed off.
“Bee in his bonnet,” the devil said, shaking his head. “People aren’t so polite anymore, are they?” he asked me.
“No, maybe not,” I half agreed.
“Or maybe ‘polite’ isn’t the word,” the devil continued. “There’s a lack of decorum, of understanding of place in the world. He’s a waiter. We’re the customers. See it for what it is, Timothy. Look with your new eye. Don’t be pushed around.”
I thought on that for a minute. True, the waiter had been rude. And as I thought on the event, it did crystallize for me; the gift the devil had given me to see things in a different way worked whenever I wanted it to, not just at the computer.
“That’s right,” the devil said, interrupting my thoughts, or so I thought; turns out he was simply continuing them. “The eye of the writer is all-seeing, Timothy. The same detachment that has served you so well at the keyboard can be exercised, must be exercised, anywhere, everywhere.” With self-satisfaction, the devil proclaimed, “You have been given the writer’s gift. Use it well.”
The writer’s gift. It sounded so extraordinary; felt so extraordinary. The devil was right; it made a difference. My grasp of grammar, or even of style, had not changed—but I had, at least a little.
“Do you see what happens when the world is not controlled, unorderly?” he asked. “People are taken advantage of—all the time. I got one word for them—and for you mostly, Timothy: fight. Don’t go down without a fight. It’s unhealthy. You’ve let people push you around all your life, thinking it’s because you’re nice, and you don’t really care about life’s little insults. As if you’re above it all. Look inside you, buddy-o. I think you’ll find that you’re not. Your soul sits atop a mountain of resentments.”
The vision came to me; every little hurt, every little insult, every little shove appeared in my mind, captured in a moment in time, frozen for my inspection. I moved to one in particular, and wrapped my mental hands around its icy form—and my soul burned as if it had touched dry ice. I snarled in pain and anger.
“Sir, your meal,” the waiter declared, looking down at me as if a madman. “And your ‘friend’s’ salad and water? Shall I place it here?” Sarcasm dripped from his voice; his words stank, hanging in the air like some acrid eruption of a paper mill smoke stack. He contemptuously placed the salad and water in front of the devil and quickly turned on his heel and started to walk away.
I snapped. “Hey!” I yelled, calling attention to myself, the few others in the restaurant jumping a bit in their seats. But I didn’t care.
The waiter turned slowly, a look of exasperation on his face. “Yes?” he asked.
“I don’t know who the hell you think you are,” I said, emphasizing hell, just for fun, thinking it a private little joke between the devil and me, “but I’m a paying customer. A regular customer. I will not be treated in this fashion.” I felt my face flushing; the red worked its way up my neck to the top of my head. I had never used this tone of voice on a stranger; but I liked it. Rage boiled up within me, and I simply let it go.
“Bring me the manager,” I demanded, throwing my napkin onto the table for good measure. The fellow’s name was Jerry; six of seven nights he worked this shift, overseeing things. He knew to see me, being a regular customer. And he knew I had money; there had been enough stories on the sales of my little books in the Trib and Sun Times for me to be on the radar screen, at least, for most of the locals. I tipped very well; I treated large numbers of people, at times.
Jerry appeared out of the kitchen, a puzzled look plastered on his face. He had heard the commotion and came out to investigate.
“A problem?” he asked, looking at me then giving the waiter the once-over.
“Yes,” I declared. “This waiter is simply too rude to put up with. Have I ever complained about the service here, or the food, in any way?”
Jerry allowed as how I had never done such a thing.
And then, something came over me. Maybe the images that had popped into my head had been too much, brought back too many bad memories. I blurted out, “Fire him!”
“What?” Jerry asked, not believing what he had just heard.
I took on the best dead-level tone I could muster, despite the fact that I was shaking inside. The rage had hold of me, and I thought my insides would explode. This was new territory for me, but I was determined to explore it as fully as possible.
“Fire him, or I never come back,” I demanded. “And I’ll tell all my friends never to come again.”
I could see Jerry considering it, but I couldn’t tell where he’d come down.
“I’ll write something,” I blurted out, “send it to the papers. Talk about the decline of ‘decorum’ in restaurants.” I stole a glance at the devil, and he gave me a little smile, obviously pleased I had picked up on his observation. Then I delivered the coup de grâce. “And Orly’s will be front and center,” I declared, “as a prime example of everything that’s wrong with restaurants today.”
That did it. Jerry was a manager, and a good one. He knew a business decision when he saw it. My stature as an author helped me here; actually, I probably couldn’t have broken into the Trib except on the obituary page, truth be told. But all Jerry knew was that I was a famous writer (which meant he didn’t know enough about the biz to recognize that “rich” didn’t necessarily mean “famous,” not in the sense of influence or appreciation), and so he turned to the now-wilting waiter and said, “Come in for your check tomorrow. You’re fired.”
The waiter began to babble a bit. “Leave now,” Jerry said, “or I call the cops.” Jerry turned to me and said, “I’ll get you a new waiter,” then turned to go back to the kitchen, without looking to see if the newly unemployed had left yet or not. His posture was clear—he fully expected him to be gone, or he would call the police.
The waiter turned and walked slowly out the door.
Maybe it was the adrenaline rush; I wasn’t really hungry anymore.
And so I looked at the devil to see what he was up to—mostly he had moved the salad around on his plate. “Let’s beat it,” I said to him, getting up without waiting for his agreement, slapping thirty bucks on the table for the bill. A waiter rushed out toward us, but I simply called back over my shoulder, “We’re done.”
The walk home was quiet. The devil hummed some song or another—maybe one of his operas, but I wasn’t sure—while I went over the scene again and again in my head. My stomach knotted up—I realized I was hungry. I’d have to order a pizza because I hadn’t eaten very much in several days. A weird feeling. Like what I had done was just right; I shouldn’t have had to take that waiter’s guff. I was the customer, for crying out loud. And it was like all the times in the past when I had let things slide; but seems they just slid right down into some place in my memory where the scoreboard flashed “zero” for my side, and I was tired of always being so far behind.
But it was wrong, too. Wrong for me. It wasn’t like me to yell at someone like that. I was a nice guy; in all the good ways that attribution can be meant, and all the bad ways. People did walk all over me, at least more than they should. But I also think some people’s lives were, at least for a little while in some place or another, a little more tolerable because I had been nice to them when I didn’t have to be. Why did the wrong sorts have to take advantage of that?
Before I knew it, we were back at the apartment.