Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

WORKING PUSHOUT

I don’t trust my dreams anymore; I don’t believe they’re mine. A busy lunch with customers lined up outside the door and me sliding my hip down the aluminum prep counter’s rounded edge, bagging burgers and fries, grabbing drinks and pushing them out, that’s real. I can trust a lunch rush but not these dreams. Not the stuff inside my head.

Lunch is over. Two o’clock to three-thirty. Orders will pick up after this until we’re into the dinner crowd. Of course, I’ll be home. That’s Howard Fisk’s shift. I’m sitting in back by the newly delivered produce talking to VJ. The green smell from hundreds of heads of freshly cut lettuce overpowers the old burger grease and detergent odors. He’s sipping coffee that he sweetened with half a dozen packs of sugar. I offered to pay for it. As always, he said, “Put it on the Visa,” pulled from his frayed overcoat a card that’s held together with masking tape, and put it on the table between us. I’m listening to the orders through my earphone in case they need me up front: “Ten Bigs down, please,” says someone. The reception is tinny; voices indistinguishable. “Four with cheese.” Someone else says, “Six cokes, two diet, one no ice.” A long pause. The dead air hisses quietly. Then, “Carter’s a hog.” I grimace. Seven employees have transmitters. Four of them come from Lincoln High where I taught history last year. I can’t tell who said it.

VJ says, “Voices in your brain, Carter?” He hunches his right shoulder up and rests his ear on it. A gray-streaked lock of hair hangs over his eyes.

“Always,” I say. He may be a bum, but I can tell him anything. What will it matter? He listens. Lots of times he asks questions, too. Always interesting ones. Nothing about how many sixteen ounce cups I’ll need for the next week, or how many gallons of fry oil. Most of the street people I give coffee to are good listeners.

I tell him about Howard Fisk, about how much I hate him. I tell him about the stuff inside my head.

VJ asked me about the dreams before I ever mentioned them. A month ago, right after they hired Howard, VJ said, “What’d you dream last night?” And that was kind of funny, because I never dream, but when he asked I remembered that I had dreamed that night. I’ve dreamed regularly since then, too.

In the dream I am sitting by the cases of lettuce, like I am now, doing preinventory, marking my sheet with a pencil, which Howard Fisk will erase before he writes his count in pen, and then I’ll signature each total in ink after I’ve confirmed his work. Triple check. I purposely miscount sometimes to find out if Howard actually does his job. Only, in the dream, I’m seeing myself rather than being myself. My hair is thinning on top. My shoulders are brutish, hands fat, fingers grossly squat, belly sagging onto my lap, white shirt greasy, black pants greasy, black shoes greasy. A funhouse mirror version of myself. A troll me. In real life I’m… husky, not like this vision.

I hit the dream me with the lyepit pole, a heavy steel rod with a hooked end we use to pull the broiler parts out of the lye each morning. My head wraps around the pole. No blood but lots of hamburger grease. I strike myself again and again, pounding myself into a flat, slickly shining blob.

I woke up, my T-shirt bunched under my armpits, my blankets tangled around my feet. I went into the bathroom and toweled the sweat off my chest and back. I put baby powder between my legs to keep them from sticking together.

I told VJ about the dream, and he said, “Tell me something mean about yourself.” I thought about it for a while, then said, “The nice thing about managing a Burger Land is I can fire sixteen-year-olds for being immature.”

I learned about sixteen-year-old immaturity in my brief teaching career. “You’ve got to learn from the past,” is what I said my first day in American History at Lincoln. I was wearing a suit that I’d bought just for teaching. Thirty-two sophomores sitting at their desks stared right through me. That was my best day at the school. At the end of the third week, someone had written my name under the hugely fat caricature of Boss Tweed on the bulletin board. The principal asked me to quit at the end of the year.

I fired my first employee the third day after I took the day manager’s job. Her name was Femi and her parents were Nigerian. She had burned a basket of fries.

“But, Mr. Carter, you told me to fill the napkins.” Her huge lower lip trembled. Her hair net pulled kinky hair tight away from her forehead. Her dark skin looked dusty to me. She would be a junior at Lincoln High in the fall. I’d seen this act before, the quivering voice, the sincerity, the dropping of the head. All high school students adopt it when they blow a responsibility.

“Food in the fryer comes first,” I said. We went back and forth for a couple of minutes, then she got belligerent. That’s step two in the immature person’s repertoire of tactics.

She shouted, “You tell me to do one thing and I’m doing another. Am I supposed to be telepathic?”

Some of the lunch crew on break were watching us. Howard Fisk had come in to pick up his paycheck. He held his little woman, hands up to his mouth, and looked pained. There’s got to be respect. I fired her.

She said, “I hope you can’t sleep at night,” and flipped me off when she stomped out the back door.

In the summer the day crew has thirty to thirty-five teenagers working. I fired one every four or five days. At the time, nights were great.

VJ says, “How is your wife?” His face is dirty, but the coffee has cleaned his top lip, which is red and chapped. I tell him.

Tillie and I don’t make love. She shares an apartment with a nurse, and I see her twice a month when she picks up her check at the end of my shift. I’ll see her tonight. I’m tense, thinking about seeing her. I check my fly all the time, as if I’m afraid she’ll come in and I’ll be exposed. Usually she comes through the employee door, doesn’t smile, talks in monosyllables, wears nice clothes I didn’t buy her. She’s lost weight since we separated.

Last time we talked I said, “How are you doing, Tillie?”

“Fine.”

“Car running okay?”

“Yes.”

“I was thinking of taking some graduate courses at the university. Maybe something towards an M.B.A.”

“Good for you.”

“Do you want a burger?”

“No. Thanks.”

She went out through the dining room, talked to Howard Fisk, who was eating his dinner before the night crew came in. She always talks to Howard. I watched her through the one-way mirror in my office. She ate one of his onion rings. He didn’t look at her. Kept his head down. When she went out the front door, he smiled at her and half-waved. She smiled back. She hasn’t smiled at me for years.

VJ says, “I stay away from women.”

Despite the almost palpable odor of lettuce, and the underlying hints of lye, cooking meat, old grease, soaps, Styrofoam, cardboard and plastics, VJ smells like an alley, a reminder of trashcans, a wetgutter. I think the women stay away from him.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” I say, and I go up front to see how they are doing.

The secret to running a fast food franchise is knowing what the customer wants before he can think to ask you for it. Most of the time I work pushout. The rush adrenalizes me. People lined up out the door. Green-screened television monitors filled with orders. Voices whispering in my earphone. My hands flying. Burgers out from under the heat lamps and into the bags (mayonnaise makes the waxy paper wrappings slick). Fries fresh from the vats hot enough to blister if I held them that long. Drinks all in order, all in a row.

I’ll say something like, “That’s two quarter pound Burger Land burgers, three small fries, a small coke, a small lemonade and a coffee.” I’ll place the two bags on the counter. The order might have flickered onto the monitor eleven seconds ago. I’ve timed myself. During the rush I average fourteen seconds an order.

I’ll say, “Would you like some ketchup with those fries?” I throw a package in. Some people want the condiments, some don’t. I’ve got a feel for condiments. Hardly anyone asks me for something before I ask them if they want it. The owner, Mr. White, told me that I’d have to read their minds if I was going to be good. In the rush, when I’m on automatic and my analytical side has shut down, I can. I’m good at clearing my mind.

I walk behind Ashmid, a scrawny seventeen-year-old with hairy arms. He’s dropping raw, red patties onto the broiler belt.

“Broil dem burgers, yeah, yeah,” he sings over and over under his breath.

If I say, “Go wash the tables, Ashmid,” he’ll say, “Yasuh, boss.”

“Tote that bale,” I say.

“Yasuh, boss.”

Janet Sims, staring absently into an empty fry bag, stands next to the shake machine.

“How’s the dining room?” I ask.

“Fine, sir.”

“Straw dispensers?”

“Filled, sir.”

A large mustard stain shaped like a breast discolors her uniform pant’s blue and white pinstripes.

“Go clean something,” I say.

“Yes, sir.”

For the moment the lobby and parking lot are empty. I send two of the boys out to sweep the sidewalks.

VJ says when I sit back down, “How tight’s the ship?”

“Tight. Lazy day.”

“So, tell me another dream.”

“I don’t want to,” I say. “Tell me one of yours.”

“I know what my dreams mean.”

“So do I.”

“No, you don’t.”

VJ is like this. He tells me I’m wrong, and I don’t get mad.

“Okay.” I remember another dream.

This one starts where I’m driving a bus in the fog and I see myself walking down a street, Orchard Avenue. The steering wheel is huge and horizontal. I lean over it and crank hard to steer up the hard bump of the sidewalk. The bus snaps off parking meters; slams aside parked cars. The me on the sidewalk looks up, turns, lumbers away, thighs too fat to run. Dead end. The me on the sidewalk turns, covers his face. I squash me into a blue dumpster. Big splash of hamburger grease on the windshield, just my hands visible at the bottom of the glass, like five-tentacled octopi.

I start laughing, and then someone touches my shoulder. It’s Tillie. She takes my hand and leads me down the aisle; the sun breaks through the fog and slants through the windows. Dust motes circle slowly. She stops at a huge bench seat, schoolbus green vinyl, sits down, lays back, pulls her skirt up. Her pubic hair is black, straight and vast, like a porcupine has curled up between her legs. But Tillie’s real hair is tightly curled and thin. I told her once she ought to just shave, for all there is.

She says, “Climb on the bus, sailor.”

VJ says, “Climb on the bus?”

“Yeah.”

“Then what else happens?”

“That’s it. That’s the end of the dream.”

“And that’s what’s bothering you?” He tilts his head off his right shoulder, moves in a complicated convulsion that switches his head tilt from the right to the left shoulder, a mirror image of his former position.

“Yeah. Sort of.” I can’t tell him about the other stuff that’s started happening when I’m awake. I mean, most people have dreams, but this other stuff seems crazy. Most people believe street people like VJ are insane, because they dress weird or they’re dirty or they mumble to themselves, but I’ve found them to be just like anybody else. I don’t want him thinking I’ve flipped.

He starts humming the Burger Land theme song. “You deserve a dream today,” he sings. I pour him some more coffee. A wind blows the back door shut with a loud squeak and rain splatters against the roof. “How come you don’t have Burger Land dreams?”

That’s scary that he would ask that, because Burger Land is part of what I can’t tell him about. So I say, “You don’t dream what you do. You dream what you want.”

“Exactly.”

“You think I want to kill myself and make love to a woman who looks like my wife but isn’t anatomically correct?”

“Maybe. What do you want?”

I think about Howard Fisk.

Howard Fisk took the night managing job when Mr. White promoted me. The night job is really a split shift and I was glad to give it up. Howard Fisk comes in every morning at nine and inventories produce. Takes an hour. Then we have a meeting and I go over the last night’s receipts with him and he takes the money to the bank. Sometimes he has to exchange cash for change and he brings that back. At four he comes in, eats dinner and starts his shift at four-thirty. I don’t know what he does in the middle of the day.

“Why aren’t our dinners bigger, Howard?” I asked once.

“The kids work hard.” He wouldn’t look up at me.

“Lunch was huge yesterday. Twenty-two hundred bucks. Biggest of the five stores, but you brought in eight hundred for the rest of the day.”

He shrugged his shoulders and hung his head. He’s a little guy, thirty-five, my age. Single. Ex-Navy man. He’ll never be day manager though. Too wimpy. Afraid of everyone.

I tried to get him fired.

“Look at this, Mr. White.” I held up a chart with a night receipts graph that looked like a pyramid starting at the bottom when I took over the nightshift, peaking the week before I changed to days, and dropping off since Howard Fisk took over. “We’re losing money.”

He said, “You’re not losing a thing.” I shut up about Howard Fisk. Mr. White will figure it out eventually.

Above the door into the back room, just out of the customers’ sight, a sign says NO PERSONAL MUSIC PLAYERS IN THE PREP AREA. That’s my rule, but I know Howard lets the night crew use them anyway.

Howard Fisk is a doormat. He makes me queasy. He looks at me when I’m not paying attention, but I’ve never caught him at it.

I pushed him into a corner. He tried to stand up straight, but I kept bouncing my hands off his chest. I’ve got this problem with physical confrontations. I mean, I like them. So I go to a group counseling session once a week. It’s part of my separation agreement.

“Howard,” I said, “if you don’t enforce this rule, then what will the employees think?”

“I don’t know.” He tried to sidle away from me. I pushed him again. I must outweigh him by a hundred pounds.

“They’ll think I’m a fool, Howard. We don’t want that, do we?”

“No,” he said.

I wanted to hit him, I mean really belt him, over and over, but I backed off. “Good,” I said.

VJ’s waiting for me to answer.

“Oh, you know, the usual stuff: make a million dollars, get laid a lot, kill Howard Fisk,” I say.

“What does Howard Fisk want?” he says.

“Who cares?”

“What does he dream about?”

I don’t know how to answer that. He finishes his coffee.

VJ says, “I’ve got to go now. It’s almost four o’clock.” If he’s not at the shelter by nightfall, they won’t let him in. I fill a thermos with coffee for him. He fills his pockets with sugar and ketchup packets.

Howard comes in and orders dinner. I see him talking to Rideth at the register. Rather than saying anything to him, I inventory the walk-in freezer. Wisps of steam waterfall off the sides of the fifty pound boxes of fries. I’m hot, and the cool air feels good. In the semidark I start a daydream, which is what I wasn’t able to tell VJ about. My vision doubles, like a migraine, and then I hallucinate.

I’m sitting in the dining room and I can see my hands cradling a burger. I’m bringing it up to my mouth. My fingers are skinny, bony and small, like a child’s. I know that I’m really in the freezer, but I’m also eating a burger. The red checkered print on the Formica table top picks up the red in the molded plastic bench seats. In my hallucination the dining room is empty. I’m thinking about Burger Land’s latest television commercial. The camera pans the walls of a cluttered apartment kitchen where a middle-aged man works on a blueprint of a house, his house, on a tiny table. His pregnant wife tiptoes in behind him carrying a Burger Land takeout tray with two Styrofoam Big Burger boxes and two drinks on it. The camera cuts to the blueprint where the man is penciling in a word, “nursery,” on one of the rooms. The wife looks over his shoulder and sighs. She puts down the tray and they embrace. The focus softens and “Let our dream be your dream” scrolls on the screen.

In my hallucination I think, “People who can’t dream deserve this.” I look up from my burger and my tiny hands and into the rainstorm that is pelting the darkened parking lot. My face is reflected in the glass. It’s Howard Fisk’s face.

I’ve been dreaming Howard Fisk’s dreams.

I shake my head and fall backward against the wall of the freezer. My shirt sticks for a second, pulling out of my pants, as I slide down to sit on the woodslat floor. I toss my clipboard away from me. I shiver, then roll onto my hands and knees and retch loudly once. Nothing comes up. My cheek presses against the frosted wood. In my earphone someone says, “Two Big Cheeses, two large fries and an apple pie to go.” My elbow is pushed up against a cardboard box stiff enough that when I move away it crackles. My breath fogs the air each time I exhale. I imagine my body stiffening, so much meat.

I’m really cold. The employee door creaks open and I hear Tillie ask in the prep area, “Have you seen Carter?”

I push myself up, tuck my shirt in, check my fly. This stuff that’s inside my head, I’ve got to deal with it. It means something.

I’ll go into the dining room and have some onion rings with Howard. Tillie can find me there. Maybe the three of us can talk. I’m not very likable—I know that now—but that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person.