Interesting to Few: December 2009

A Volume of Unheard Wisdom

In the early hours of the day, before the lunch rush, before the trip to the bank, before the restaurant had more than two staff people on, before everything he wore was soiled in grease and sweat, Benny pondered the chicken. The meat on every menu. Restaurants always have chicken on their menus. Why don’t they fly? Chickens are everywhere, and so it is only natural that almost all people on the planet should eat them, but, then again, pigeons are everywhere too and no one’s eating those dirty winged rats. Benny thought of the chicken as he sat on a stool looking over the meat orders for the week. So many chickens. Why don’t they fly?
There is something about chicken that most people (except those who won’t eat anything that once had a face) feel a sense of comfort eating There is something unassuming about chicken that leaves little to be feared, but, accordingly, little to be desired. Benny had never seen anyone moan orgasmically over a chicken burger to be sure.
Most girls order chicken. Not only girls of course, but, indeed, more girls than boys thought chicken first when at his restaurant. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the unadventurous order chicken. Adventure is interesting when it comes to food. A tricky game. One pays for food, and thus doesn’t want to waste his or her money, and yet one does pay for food, so shouldn’t the food be worth it? Shouldn’t there be something special in it? Those who order chicken have decided not. Benny always tried to veer those timid souls away from the flightless white meat, but people are scared of adventure. He had come to that conclusion.
What of the chickens as beings then? Their lives’ journey is one from gross uncomfortable communal ghetto, to slaughter, to the mouths of the unadventurous? Fuel for the frightened. The chicken, then, is somewhat of a tragedy.
Then again, chickens are pretty boring animals when they’re alive. Pecking and clucking with little grace. Perhaps we shouldn’t feel sorry for them. Eat away. Benny had a restaurant to open.

Lunch special. The first thing in the morning to decide in a day of decisions for Benny. Benny liked this decision. It was a chance for him to control the menu. So much of the menu (all menus really) was set in stone, and the special remained a chance for the daytime shift manager to control and adventure outside the box. Benny liked control of some things. He was not control obsessed, but he did like to make decisions at times. A restaurant suited him fine. Control of the special suited his desires.
Benny. There’s something about a boy who gets a girl pregnant when he’s 17 that creates a persona different from all those around him, yet similar to a tee to those in the same predicament. He becomes a man, but not in any conventional sense. The risks of his life are over, or at the very least put on pause for a number of years. The daredevil inside must wait. The number of years being the ones in between that fateful night, and the night he gets over himself and realizes his life is neither over, nor defined by his being a single father. He is older, yet younger. He is both a middle-aged mortgage dad, and a child in need of simple love. The simple love that is choked by the pressures of the age of young men with too much imaginary going against them, and not enough visible going for them.
Benny was solid. He was not going to let the imaginary pressures that seemed against him rule him. He neither had to succeed in business nor become the starting striker for Liverpool FC. His pressure would be to provide. He was not going to let the joy that he felt when he saw his infant daughter shortly after his eighteenth birthday be taken from him by delusions of grandeur. He would not let down. He would do what needed to be done to raise her. He decided this then, when looking at his soon to be ex-girlfriend, Melanie, cradling his daughter Aspir, and he thought of this as he stood in the middle of his seventh straight shift at the restaurant. He was a warrior.
“You got any ideas for Specials Russ?” Benny yelled to the hole in the back where his morning prep guy Russ was mixing a bowl of potato salad.
“Umm. We should probably do something with ribs because I’ve got about three trays of them in the back,” Russ bellowed over his headphones.
“Right. Ribs and fries it is.”
Lunch specials are always more or less left-overs. Ribs and Fries. Classic. Just add fries to anything and all of a sudden it’s a meal. Fries. The chicken of side dishes. Predictable and always in need of seasoning. The western world is a fries world. Why have nan bread or rice when you can have fries? Fries with all, and all going with fries. Fries, fries, fries from here until the end of the west. Benny wondered why so many people wanted to live where he did. What is a standard of living if your basic food is so lacking?
There was a time when Benny wanted to go elsewhere. He wanted to leave the island he lived on and travel to exotic places and place bets at casinos where he couldn’t speak the language. Lay on beaches. Get in trouble. Waste money. Adventure. Staring at the upturned chairs on tables, he wondered if he would go anywhere in his life. Anywhere physically. Anywhere professionally. Scanning the room he stopped and the chalkboard, grabbed his chalk, and approached. The day’s lunch needed a special. The adventures of the world would have to wait.
Benny wrote as neatly as possible: Ribs n’ Fries, $9.95. He scowled at his sloppy penmanship, but was pleased with the message. He knew what was on the board could be on the menu, but people would pick the board because of its implication. Special. The person eating the meal now is him or herself something special because they are part of the special, and the special is part of them. Kind of like diet soda pop. “I’m drinking a diet drink, therefore I’m on a diet.” That special combination of left-overs with fries has created a special moment in the diner’s day. Benny loved knowing that last night’s cast offs became an event. The magical unchartered world off the menu.
A word about Russ, the morning prep guy. Benny spent a moment practically every day wondering what paths he had chosen to put him in a workplace where Russ was a part of almost every one of his days. Russ was a prep guy through and through. He arrived first so he could have a few hours to work by himself and listen to speed metal. He took some of every one of Benny’s day talking animatedly about soccer, video games, metal or weed before crashing from his sugar high and retreating to the prep area to mumble, rub meat, mix salads or stir sauces. His sanctuary. Russ always left at two and could never get along with any of the other staff members. Benny sometimes wondered about his life outside of the restaurant, but never ventured to go there. Some scenes are better left unexplored. Russ drank about a pot and a half of coffee a day.
Russ emerged from the back ready to talk. “I was listening to Killswitch Engage this morning,” started Russ wiping his meaty hand on his already mustard, pepper, soy sauce, and about twelve other spices and spreads covered apron, “A little mellow, but still alright.”
“Yeah,” Benny hardly ever knew what bands Russ was talking about, but he also knew that Russ would explain them to him whether he wanted enlightenment or not.
“Yeah, well, the guitar is solid, but… I don’t know… It doesn’t have the sort of… I don’t know… Grindtooth! Now they had it! That drummer… Man… I was listening to them when I was playing World of Warcraft and man…”
“Right.” Benny started counting the cash. The cash floated through his hands, and he thought of its journey. Passed on to others who have not been passed on. Benny thought at times that he was passed on. He thought of his daughter, and dreaded that she would some day grow and see him as a lowly middleman. The man in between food and money. The man who took money that was not his and exchanged it for food that was not his. Subsistence and existence. She would be fed and he would eat, but would they ever get past the main course. He felt that he would never, if he remained wise and of sound judgment, be allowed that after dinner coffee, or glass of true full bodied wine. An adventurous meal. The extravagances meant for those who had not been passed on. Those people that ordered from Benny, and thought not about the dent it put in their week’s grocery money. To be a have of this world, Benny thought, would be a sweet thing indeed. These thoughts could sink his spirits, but that day Benny decided that they would not. Not that day.
“Those damn Pudlians,” blurted Russ, “Damn coach Benitez is going to blow the whole wad at this rate.”
“Yeah,” said Benny picking up on the subject change that he hadn’t noticed. He still had about five more minutes of Russ’s dialogue before his sugar and caffeine crash.
“I just don’t understand why he keeps changing the line-up,” Russ continues ignoring all, “I mean if you win a game, you gotta keep that line-up. Right? He’s just going to blow it all. It’s too bad that I’ve got four of their players in my pool cuz I really thought they were going to do it this time around, but with Benitez who knows.” A brief pause. “Then again, with owners that won’t spend any money to get some decent players, what are you gonna do? They need to start spending some money. Buy a big name who can put games away. I guess they did, but then he got injured. There are a lot of injuries on the team. Frustrating… I don’t know… I’m just frustrated.”
Benny continued counting, nodding, and mumbling affirmation while Russ talked on. Benny knew that Russ just needed to be heard. Benny could bear the distraction. The inane dialogue kept him from thinking of depressing things. Also Benny always felt that if he didn’t listen, Russ would stop talking and his thoughts would fade into the stratosphere. The resting place for the voices of the unheard. Dissipating into the cloudy area between air and space. Benny sometimes wished he was a phantom of sorts that could travel to this space and listen to all the voices of the unheard and write them down. Create a ten part volume of unheard wisdom.
“I just want to see things come to something some day. I don’t want to die without a taste of victory. They were powerhouses once. Then I was born, and they’ve sucked ever since. I want some silverware,” Russ was coming to the end, “to see something you’ve invested in for so long not be rewarded is infuriating. Like when my dwarf died in Warcraft. That was really upsetting.”
“Yeah,” Benny responded finding a surprising wisdom in the conclusion of Russ’s diatribe, “It’s a shame.”
Russ muttered a few other things about the a character from his World of Warcraft universe and returned to his sanctuary at the back of the restaurant. Benny closed the cash drawer.
Walking the chalkboard ad sign outside the restaurant he looked at the passing traffic while flipping the sign from CLOSED to OPEN. He knew what his day would be like. The meandering of people on a dreary January Tuesday generally was slow, low paying and consistent. By the look of the grey sky and the cool temperature, it seemed that the day would be as per normal. Like a fishing line being towed behind a low power aluminum boat. One customer per twenty minutes ordering a sandwich (or special!), and, if Benny was lucky, if he could muster the up-sell, if he could bend a will, a drink that wasn’t water.
The prize of all prizes for the restaurateur: a beverage sale. The most marked up item on the menu with zero prep time. The extended warranty of a restaurant. Soda pop, great; alcohol, glorious. Benny mused on drinks, and realized that the coffee had to be made, so he went back inside. The pot Russ made was empty.
It had been the habit of Benny to take an hour’s worth of orders then smoke, return, then invent a managerial job so he would have excuse to leave the store for between thirty minutes and an hour. Get change, buy supplies, liquor run. Something to give him a change. There was something on Benny’s mind that day, however, that caused a riff in his routine.

Benny spent the late morning and afternoon mindlessly taking lunch orders, while his mind remained elsewhere. His six month performance review was coming up later in the day, which Benny had been waiting on for the past three weeks. The owners had put it off four times. There was nothing too too dramatic about a performance review, but if he got the full raise that accompanied such reviews, things would be exponentially better for him and Aspir in the coming year. A couple hundred extra dollars would be amazing.
The days orders rattled on as Benny’s mind was all numbers. Special, pork sandwich, chicken sandwich, pork sandwich, beef sandwich, special, special, special, chicken sandwich. He thought if he looked hard enough and dimmed his focus enough, Benny could find a pattern in the orders. A magical numeric coincidence that would change the universe. Chicken sandwich’s ratio to soda pop over special to the power of pork sandwich divided by beef sandwich add fries inverted cosine of chili with a negative factor of chicken sandwich equals… It was time for a smoke. Benny knew it.
He thought of what the owners would say to him while taking long drags of his fourth cigarette of the day. The owners, Chuck and Guy, were not bad people. Benny knew bad owners, and his current ones were not that. What they were was cheap? Chuck always talked about how he needed to sell more wine, and Guy talked of supplies. They were losing too many forks. He hadn’t sold any of the Sangiovese, and it had been on the list for a month. Classic tales of waste and woe. He stared across the dirty parking lot full of reeking dumpsters and oil stains, and thought of what they would offer him.
Chuck and Guy knew what they had, but never wanted to admit it. The restaurant was a successful one, but they made sure to keep their lowly peons (Benny among them) thinking that tomorrow might spell doom for the whole place if belts weren’t tightened and funds weren’t cut. Benny had heard the speeches and he had stopped listening. He heard the wailing and wasn’t saddened by it. He knew his worth and he knew theirs.
Worth ten pies more if not eight, Benny knew he would only get a slice for his raise. It was always the same thing when it came to reviews and raises. An epic tale of his moments of greatness, and a foreboding caution about those times he fell short of the mark. That time he sold a catering order worth five grand was really nice, but that day he forgot to put the water bottles away must be noted as well. The end result: a slightly above average raise. He knew the owners could not lose him, but he also knew they didn’t want to give him too much of their precious coin. The day of his review he hoped for more, but was ready for the norm.
What could Chuck and Guy really do for him in the end? They didn’t have the power to make him a superhero his daughter would rave to her friends about. They couldn’t make him fly. They had no magic amulet that he knew of. They wouldn’t give him the sense of meaning he had always thought he lacked. They couldn’t stop the frustration of responsibility and the pressure of wisdom.
Benny’s life was what it was, and he was responsible for living it. His daughter was his concern, and he would do good by her even if he was average for it. The casinos of Macau would have to wait. The owners were only owners. He couldn’t change that.
“Um. Hey Benny!” called Russ from inside, “there’s some customers here that are asking about the chicken, and if it has any gluten in it. Something about allergies.”
“Right,” answered Benny stubbing out his half finished cigarette, “I’ll be right there.”

A paraphrasing of Benny’s review:
Alright man, so your last six months have been good for the most part. Your co-managers, Murray and Connor, like working with you, and haven’t had too many problems. We like that your beverage sales are up even if we’d like to see a bit more in the wine and hard alcohol department. You know, that’s where we make are biggest margin. Murray says that sometimes projects get left unfinished and that he’s had to ask you more than once to complete some tasks. And there was that day we ran out of baseball steaks. You need to stay on top of the ordering situation. More or less though, he says you do a good job. You gotta take a more active role in getting on your dish washers to work more efficiently and not lose so much silverware and waste so much dish soap. That stuff’ll kill us in the end. Eighty five percent of all restaurants go out of business in the first five years, so we gotta tighten up if we want to make it that far. We’ll give you an eight percent raise starting your next paycheque, and we’ll look at moving you up to store manager by the end of next year. Sound good? Alright, we gotta go meet someone about our new location, so we’ll talk later. Thanks man.

Benny was unimpressed and unsurprised. His life would go on.

Benny, walking to the bank later that day, looked at the street around him. There were cars, buses, walkers, and bicycles; all en route. Benny thought of the flow of human traffic along Broadway at midday. A river of obligations and rendezvous of people who find themselves important in a thousand ways. No more horses though. Organic people riding organic beasts in concert with one another, and pushing each other to where they needed to go; those days were gone. No more horses. Now, people drove it instead of riding it. The horse had been pushed out to the suburbs or beyond. People were now alone in the city. No more horses.
Benny was on his way to the bank and he could not stray from the path. Benny thought of banks, cars and money and pulled on his hoodie strings walking heavily along the pavement. Thoughts pulled him down toward the greyness of the street with each step. Thoughts of his tiny raise. Thoughts of his meaning. Thoughts of how unadventurous his life was. Thoughts of how dirty the restaurant was and how he needed to clean when he returned. The blue and yellow of the bank pulled him forward while the grey pavement pulled him down. He wished a horse would appear to rescue him.
Benny lit up a cigarette, and checked his cell phone. A text message from Melanie, the ex and constant presence in his life, shone on the display. “Should chk about prvat school for Aspir l8tr.”
“Why?” Benny typed.
Melanie had become obsessed with private schools lately. She listened attentively to young parents’ tales of how horrible the public school system was, and how children doomed to their halls learned the equivalent of one ten years younger in Sweden. She was convinced that if Aspir didn’t go to a private school, she would be forced into the world sans meaning. The world of janitors, garbage men, telemarketers and restaurant managers. Benny had graduated from public school, and took all of Melanie’s slurs as symptomatic of her disappointment in him.
Benny knew, even if Melanie forgot, what his paycheque was every other week. He got his average raise after his predictable review, but he knew that meant only a trickle more; no river. He also knew how wise his daughter was. He believed she would succeed no matter what obstacle. He prided himself an objective man, and he thought, honestly, that his daughter was more talented than any four year old he had met in his life. Aspir would become queen of the world from a snake pit if it came to that, and no public school was going to be to tough for her to bust out of.
“We’ll talk on Saturday,” he texted back glaring at the screen as he typed.
“Fne, bt Im serios. We nd to dside sn.”
Taking a drag he felt himself loosened from the tug of the pavement, and moved slovenly towards the bank. Thinking of Aspir had that effect. He had to get change for the night shift. He never minded going to the bank.
His dream girl, Trish, worked there, which caused unchartable joy in his day. She flirted with him. She was pleasant and bent the bills to count the money in such a sexy way. Who cares if she had a rock the size of a coconut on her left ring finger? To be charmed was enough for Benny. To be flirted with was to be inspired.
Gripping the few bills for change in one hand, Benny opened the door to the bank, and entered to where the change girl was, and gave what he thought of as a charming smirk towards Trish when he caught her eye. She smiled in recognition as he approached the window. Oh that smile. Oh those deep green eyes. Oh that smooth black hair. An urban princess to be sure. A welcome part of his day.
“Hey Trish,” Benny said with the cool calm of the smoothest of operators, “Just need to get some change.”
“Really? I thought you were coming here to whisk me away from all this.”
“Maybe next time.”
“Such a shame. Every girl is waiting for someone like you.”
“Well, if they waited this long, they can probably wait until tomorrow.”
“Right. I’ll be right back.”
Trish counted the bills as she always did: bending the bills over her index finger, holding the wad with her thumb and flicking each twenty with her diamond ringed finger. Precision and speed. A Ferrari in a bank. Benny watched and marveled as Trish counted off the bills that would become coins. An alchemist. Then, in a moment, as quickly as it began, it ended.
“Two rolls of toonies, one roll of loonies, four quarters, one dime, and two pennies. All set. Have a great day Benny. Maybe I’ll come by for a chicken sandwich later.” She never did.
“Cool,” realizing why dream girls’ worlds should never be entered. Disappointment could ensue.
“Talk to you tomorrow.”
“Indeed. Wouldn’t miss it.”
Benny loved the thought of his dream girl Trish. She would always be in the glass cage and he would be on the other side. He would never have to enter her world, and she would never enter his. It was the perfect arrangement of elements. He did not have to see the dark days when she battled for control of his soul. He did not have look in her eyes of disappointment when he couldn’t take her away for a weekend. She remained his dream girl in a plastic cage, and he remained safe and secure in his world of two.

He thought of Aspir as his shift was coming to an end. His sweet small angel with blue eyes that flashed of green in the water. He thought of her strawberry hair falling down her back as she ran with her friends. His world was her world and there was a peace in it. Performance reviews, fights with her mother, the monotony of work and the loneliness of the city all faded when he thought about the progression of their life together. She was his adventure, and he would succeed.
“Come to me now Aspir. See your dad. See him work and know that it’s all you my sweet baby. All for you. Your days of being small and sweet are so short, and then you lose the honesty which comes from the true centre of your small self. All for you. I trade my frustration for your joy. Your joy becomes my joy.” Benny stopped himself as he noticed he was speaking aloud, and not listening to the customer.
“What ?” a dyed blond girl asked annoyed, “I said I wanted a smoked chicken sandwich.”
“Right. Anything to drink.”
“Uhh. Maybe a diet coke.”
“Sure thing,” he said as he smiled knowingly and printed out her order.

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