Terrance Wedin
Cash in Hand
The night I fell in love with my new life, I split a man’s head open. We’d been slow at the restaurant that night, only a few covers, and the servers and bar staff all got cut loose before last call and headed to Sixth Street. It was the middle of the week, and I was drunk again. I was still getting used to being drunk every night being normal, being acceptable. You earned the right to rage after your shift—dealing with rich fuckers hassling you, polishing glassware until your hands cramped, bussing tables and dropping waters. The harder you worked, the more the servers and bartenders liked you. But the more you could drink and party and still do your job, the more they respected you. They bought your tab, maybe threw you a few extra bills at the end of the night. Hangovers you had all day to sleep off before you did it all again the next night.
That night, I was also busy chasing Erica, the only young woman valeting in Austin. She would read Russian novels between cars, and capture the attention of every man coming into the restaurant, trophy wives attached to their arms, when she sprinted off with their keys. I was just another new guy at work, but we were finally drinking together. What I wanted was to get in bed with her. I’d been scheming up our love affair in my head ever since I started at the restaurant. In my head, it was like those bedroom scenes in Breathless. We stood together at the bar and drank our beers. Mostly, I listened to her talk about her life. She talked about not wanting to go back to architecture school, about wanting to get a real job—not a restaurant job. When she was done talking, she chugged the rest of her beer, gave me a high-five, and stumbled out of the bar to a cab. I tried convincing the bartenders to give me one more shot before last call, handing over the rest of that night’s tip envelope. I’d make more cash the next night. That was how I lived back then.
I walked down Sixth, through the packs of people holding cellphones to their heads. Cars lined the streets ready to take people home. I’d been in Austin for almost a year, but it was still crazy to me that you could step out of an air-conditioned bar and be blasted by a heat wave well after midnight; back in southwest Virginia, it was the opposite. I passed the organic grocery store, the outdoor clothing store, the bookstore where I’d once met a woman from the internet who had a two-headed rabbit tattooed on her forearm. Behind me, the Frost Tower was lit up, glowing purple against the night sky. My body was electric and loose with booze. I finally had a steady job, an apartment, money to pay people back. The things I’d done to survive that first year weren’t important anymore. I was free to become whoever I wanted to be.
As I crossed over the traffic on Lamar, into my new neighborhood, a voice called out behind me. What he was saying I couldn’t make out. I stopped, listened.
“Hey, faggot boy,” the voice said, slurred.
They paid us seven an hour to unload trucks at the warehouse. Make it ninety days and they bumped you to eight, the staffing agency told us. I’d gone to the agency after I’d had a realization on the set of the television show where I was picking up background work: acting was a pipe dream that wouldn’t pay the bills. And if I didn’t make money soon, I’d be out of the boarding house room I was renting month-to-month.
The first woman I’d met in the city had a skull and crossbones tattooed in the middle of her chest like a warning label. Cuts covered her thighs—another warning, I guess. I tried asking her about the cuts, the tattoo, but she didn’t have anything to say about them. We didn’t have much to talk about. We met in a dive bar one night, both of us drunk and alone. Still, I showed up to her apartment to be used and ignored. One afternoon, sweating at a bus stop after work (my truck had broken down again), she called to say that I should probably get checked for gonorrhea. The next morning, the free clinic off Riverside cost me thirty dollars—groceries for the week.
There was another woman who had her clit pierced, and when I’d go down on her, everything tasted like metal afterward. She let me borrow her car while my truck got repaired, until I managed to get it towed from a Jack in the Box. I used my rent money to get it back for her and then never heard from her again.
I donated plasma for the first time after that. Left the clinic with a brown bandage over my arm. They told me the earliest I could come back was in seven days.
I answered a Craigslist personals ad. The man gave me one hundred dollars up-front, one hundred dollars when he finished. He lived in one of the high rises downtown, wore a ski mask while he sucked me off. We didn’t exchange a word. I’d never had another man touch me like that. The rush and thrill that went through my body before entering the apartment was a feeling I kept chasing. The next week he e-mailed again. I went back.
I called my mom crying after a few days, after thinking about what I’d been doing to make my rent money.
“Sweetie, what’s wrong?” she asked.
But what could I tell her? There was nothing she could do.
The voice belonged to a man stumbling up the hill behind me. His dress shirt was untucked, tail flapping as he zagged the street. He touched his hand to the ground to stop himself from toppling over. A fluorescent lamp buzzed at the edge of the street, illuminating the intersection where I turned and walked toward my apartment building at the top of Castle Hill. The man stopped in the halo of light, slump-shouldered. He pushed his bangs back. We were the only two people still out on the street. I kept walking.
“Hey,” he yelled. “Faggot boy.”
I didn’t turn around.
“Pretty boy faggot,” he yelled, coming a step closer. “I bet you’d like to suck my cock.”
“Fuck you, man,” I said, turning around. I watched the man sway in the light. I had him by a few inches. I’d been in a couple scraps during college. I figured I could take him. “I’m just trying to go home.”
I walked backward as he shuffled toward me.
“No,” he said. “Fuck you! Fuck you, faggot!”
“Fuck you,” I said, giving him the finger.
“Go back to where you came from, faggot,” he said. “Nobody wants you or your faggot cock here!”
His head was tilted at an angle, the light shining on him like he’d stepped on a stage. I charged toward him. I cocked back and hit him with a left hook right over his eyebrow. That fleshy and wet sound of skin on skin rang out. He yelped as his knees buckled, body folded. His head bounced off the asphalt. A puddle of blood formed underneath him, but his eyes were still open, his pupils big and dark. It was hard to tell if the blood was from the cut or the collapse.
The man said something I couldn’t understand. “Are you alright?” I said, terrified.
He tried speaking again.
“What are you trying to say?”
He held up a bloody hand in the light. He blinked, then set his eyes on me. “He knows no haste!” the man screamed.
I took off running toward my apartment.
Back home, I paced the three hundred square feet. I splashed water on my face. I was still drunk and needed to sober up. He was going to die out there on the street. I was sure of it. Maybe I could go back and help him. Maybe I could save him. I could call an ambulance anonymously. I sat on the floor of my tiny bathroom, sobbing. I expected an officer to knock on my door at any moment. The words he’d screamed right before I ran off looped through my head. It didn’t make any sense. A few hours went by like that. Eventually, I walked down to the intersection, cautious of being seen. Birds had started chirping, but the sun still wasn’t out. I expected red and blue lights, his body covered by a sheet, blood-staining the street.
But when I got there, he was gone. The blood had already dried on the hot asphalt.
I showed up to my first shift at the restaurant in a white button down that I’d found at the Goodwill, faded black pants from my warehouse job unloading trucks, and a pair of black skate shoes. It was an approximation of how I’d been told to dress for the job. I didn’t understand that looking the part was the first rule of working the floor in fine dining. It was more important than bussing dishes or setting tables, cutting fruit or polishing glasses. I’d gotten the job through Tony, one of the servers. We’d met on the set of the high school football show before I’d quit, and he’d become my first real friend in Austin. When I got downsized by the warehouse, he asked if I had any interest in working with food. I thought about my brother, working in the campus dining hall for near minimum wage back in Virginia. “You can’t beat going home with cash every night,” Tony said. He was taking online classes to become a personal trainer, saving up money to get his certifications. He talked with his hands, testing the strength of the buttons on his dress shirt as he told customers about the specials.
It took Jason, the GM, only a few minutes before he pulled me off the floor and into his office.
“We’ve got to do something with this,” he said, looking me over.
He pulled an iron and board out of a closet. He set it up and went back to his computer. I looked at it, hesitating. I was supposed to know how to iron a shirt. I didn’t.
* * *
When I was thirteen, I’d gotten arrested for stealing sunglasses out of unlocked cars in our apartment complex. The day before my court date, Mom went to the Goodwill and bought me an oversized polo and a clip-on tie. My father told me he hoped they’d send me to juvenile hall—it would smarten me up, make me into a man. Later that night, drunk, hand around my throat, he told me if he ever caught me stealing from him, he’d break all my fingers with a hammer. That court date to receive my community service was the last time I’d ever “dressed up.”
“You’ve never ironed a shirt before,” Jason said.
“No,” I said. I was twenty-five years old.
“It’s okay,” Jason said, laughing. He was bald, barely in his thirties, and talked aggressively with his hands. He puckered his lips while he thought. “Well, we can’t iron it if it’s on your body.”
I unbuttoned my shirt and turned away from Jason. I looked over my shoulder at him grinning, staring at my torso.
“You skater boys always have the best abs,” Jason said. “It’s a shame you’re straight. You’re straight, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, be nice to the gays,” Jason said. “Once you learn to dress yourself, we have some regulars who are really going to like you.”
He ran the iron over the back of the shirt first, then the front, the arms, then the collar. He handed the shirt back. I slid it on, still warm.
“See?” Jason said, pointing at my reflection in a full-length mirror balanced on a milk crate. “Much better.”
“I don’t own an iron,” I said.
“You can come in early if you need to iron your shit,” Jason said. “But you’ll have to strip for me again.”
I couldn’t tell if he was serious. I couldn’t tell if he knew something about me.
“I’m fucking with you,” Jason said.
I slept late into the afternoon the night after the punch. My hangover killed. In the bathroom, I jammed my fingers down my throat. I didn’t leave my apartment until I had to work later that night. I tried not to think about the man or the blood. I told myself I was going to stop drinking for a while.
Why I’d punched him I didn’t know exactly. But the things he’d said bounced around in my head, touching something dark and biting. If I concentrated on it long enough, the voice began to sound like my father’s voice. Not so much what the man had said, but the way he’d said it. The year before all this, on my drive from Virginia to Texas, I’d made a pact with myself that the past was the past.
At work that night, I got to barback, a step up from bussing. I ran racks of glassware back and forth to the dishwasher, cleared the bar, juiced fruit, and cut garnishes. I smiled politely at the older women sitting with their husbands, deferred to men with heavy credit cards. Kelly, our head bartender, fed me baby shots all night, making sure I absorbed a factoid before we downed each stealthily. Green Chartreuse is made in France by monks. Fernet Branca was once used to treat malaria. Sailors called Wray & Nephew Rum “Kill Devil” because of the sin it caused you. Kelly expected me to take each shot, to listen, to hold my liquor, to not fuck up. I didn’t know how to say no.
That night, on top of those shots, I drank the rest of a bottle of vodka I kept in my fridge and blacked out in my scummy work clothes. A pile of puke covered my pillow in the morning.
Days went by like that, paranoid. I worked and drank and thought about all of that blood. I told myself I wouldn’t drink, and then I drank until I blacked out. I worried about the police knocking on my door, arresting me for killing a man.
“Don’t be a pussy,” Jacqui said my first day training in the bar. “But these assholes like you better when you’re docile; they want somebody that can take the abuse with a smile.” Every week she came into work with different colored nails, done by one of the girls at the salon where she worked as an esthetician during the day. About the nails, Jacqui said, “The men look at your hands and they want to fuck you. The women look at your hands and they want to know who did them.”
I’d never dined at a restaurant as nice as the one I was working at. The cars parked out front were always BMWs and Bentleys, and every now and then someone would drive up in a Lambo or Lotus. Laura Bush, the former first lady, would come in every month and eat in the bar, the secret service dudes hanging out at a separate table. Rick Perry and Lance Armstrong and Matthew McConaughey would eat in the back room together with their agents and managers. Everybody that came to the restaurant had money. They made you believe that all the recession talk was bullshit. I knew that talk wasn’t bullshit. Because of how I’d been making money the past year, because of the things I planned on taking to the grave.
People warned me: if you hustled, the servers didn’t give you shit. When I bussed the rich ladies’ plates with untouched frites, I stashed them near the dishwasher to eat in secret. I asked Jacqui what aioli was.
“It’s rich people code for mayo,” Jacqui said.
A few weeks later, when I got that first beige envelope full of cash, I thought my life was going to change. At night, before bed, I ran through the table numbers in my head.
A week passed after the punch. The cops never did show up and drag me from my apartment in handcuffs. By the end of the week, I was walking past the bloodstain on the asphalt to go buy beer like it was nothing. Just like I did growing up, I’d started packing certain moments away, as if they had never actually happened.
Then, one night, while I flirted with Erica at the hostess station during a lull in service, I heard a voice behind me.
“Clarissa!” the voice said. “You lovely bitch!”
The bar had gotten a happy hour pop, then died out, and we were getting ready for the next wave of dinner covers. I turned to look at a group of new arrivals, a shockwave passing through me. The voice belonged to a well-dressed man hugging a woman in a fur coat at B1, the back corner table, the one we reserved for celebrities and politicians and millionaires. I couldn’t get a good look at his face with his back to me, but I recognized the voice from somewhere. The well-dressed man’s shirt and slacks were fitted and tight; the face of his watch sparkled in the bar light as he talked. He was smaller than I remembered the man from that night, but I knew his voice was the same one that had been yelling at me that night. Finally, the well-dressed man turned and revealed a thick line of stitches that extended back to his hairline, splitting his eyebrow.
“See a ghost?” Erica said.
The telephone rang in her hand. She answered it before I could respond.
I darted back to the bar through the dining room, avoiding him seeing me on the bar floor, hoping Jason wouldn’t stop me for another lecture on the correct way to maneuver around the restaurant.
“How many seats is the B3?” Kelly said.
I couldn’t remember. I hadn’t even asked Erica. I made something up.
The well-dressed man sat next to a woman who kept her sunglasses on indoors. He sat with his back to the rest of the bar. A drink ticket popped up for the table after Jacqui took their order. Manhattan, French 75, prosecco, mojito. I put the cocktail glassware on the rail for Kelly, then had it corrected for me. I kept my head down as I worked.
“Don’t worry,” Jacqui said, holding three glasses of water in one hand. “I’m just over here doing your job.”
* * *
Within three weeks of being at the restaurant, I was able to fix the carburetor on my truck and stop riding the bicycle I’d bought at the UT police auction. I went and bought my first pair of dress shoes from one of the boutiques on Congress. I finally made a payment on my student loans. I had friends at work to go out with, and I’d met Erica. I was working behind the bar at one of the fanciest and most expensive restaurants in Texas. A confidence was growing inside me. After struggling through that first year of the recession, I was finally making things happen. I hadn’t moved to Texas to work in a bar or restaurant, but I was convinced that I wasn’t going to be working in the service industry for the rest of my life. And although I wasn’t acting or writing my screenplay or finding any work on films, I told myself that I had time, that I’d get back to it when I’d saved up a little more money, paid off a little more debt. Working at the restaurant would allow me to find film work. I was learning a skill: how to be a bartender. I could work anywhere in the world. I could walk home every night with cash. “Bartending is the last job that’ll get replaced by robots,” I overheard Kelly tell somebody once.
Dinner covers flooded in. The restaurant was packed. Erica had left the hostess stand to help manage the crowd trying to get tables in the bar. Jacqui maneuvered from table to table taking drink orders. Kelly shook a cocktail with one hand, stirred two more with his other hand. I tried responding to both of their commands, all while rushing racks of glasses back and forth from the dishwasher.
“Drop these for me,” Jacqui said, giving me a tray of cocktails.
Usually, I didn’t drop drinks. I looked at the drinks on the tray. I knew all the cocktails but not the wines. Kelly’s constant drilling of drink recipes had paid off, but I was still a barback. They were going to B1.
“I don’t know—,” I started saying.
“Shut up. I know you know. The guy has the prosecco. This is the Malbec for the woman at position two. It’s here on the ticket. Remember: clockwise. Go,” Jacqui said.
I held the tray with one hand, the double bar in the other. The seat numbers and drink knowledge faded from my brain. As soon as the tray was secured on the double bar, all I could think was: does he remember me? No one at the table acknowledged my presence. Their conversation flowed around me, a minor disturbance, as I set their drinks down, avoiding eye contact with the well-dressed man as I placed his glass of prosecco on the bar napkin in front of him.
“Hold on,” the well-dressed man said, almost dipping his nose into the glass. “Is this actually the Avissi?”
The well-dressed man was handsome in a soft way, his skin tan and smooth and moisturized. His teeth were veneered and deep white. He had green eyes, and his eyebrows looked like they had been manicured. The stitches above the eyebrow that I’d punched glistened with some kind of gel.
“I’ll have to ask the bartender,” I said.
“You’re not a bartender?” the well-dressed man said, grinning across the table.
“I’m just a barback,” I said.
“I see,” he said. “How long have you worked here?”
“Only a few months,” I said.
The woman wearing the sunglasses laughed. She said, “Marshall, you’re going to scare him away.”
“He can take it,” the well-dressed man said. He reached out and took hold of my bicep and gave it a squeeze. “Look at how muscular he is.”
His eyes scanned me then, head to toe. There were dried food stains on my black pants. My belt was a faded brown, mismatched. Loose threads hung from the cuff of my dress shirt. He smirked, let go of my arm.
“I’ll ask the bartender about the prosecco for you,” I said.
When I came back from the table, Erica was behind the bar filling her water bottle with the soda gun.
“Did someone throw a drink in your face?” she asked.
“I’m hungover,” I said, wiping sweat from my forehead. My dress shirt was pitted.
“You should probably toughen up,” she said. “We’re not even halfway through the covers.”
Tables turned over as the night went on. But B1 took their time, eating and drinking slowly. Whenever I bussed dishes from B1, the well-dressed man would ask me questions that I couldn’t answer about the wine or the food. I kept telling him I’d have to ask the bartender, knowing all that mattered, really, was being polite to the rich people. Near the end of their meal, with crème brûlée on the table, the well-dressed man waved me over again, grinning.
“I’m so sorry,” the well-dressed man said, now buzzed. The stitches looked like they were weighing down his eyelid, but it could have been the drinks. “Oops. I forgot what I was going to ask. Come back and I’ll remember.”
“Marshall!” the sunglasses woman said. “You’re so bad! He’s not a dog!”
“He might need to ask the bartender to make sure he’s not,” the well-dressed man said.
The table erupted. I felt so small then, felt put in my place.
The well-dressed man laughed. And as I turned to walk back to the bar, he shot me a little wink with the eye I’d punched. All I could do was smile back politely, plates in hand.