Here I am again. I spend most of my waking hours here. ‘What do you do for a living?’ I serve sugar to fat people. I make obese humans bigger. I make sick people sicker. I make sad people sadder. It pays the bills.
His face looked like a crumpled ball of paper thrown into the wind. Nobody cared. Dave went in the back and clocked in. He stepped out of the office, tied his apron, and looked to his right to see Riley pulling sandwiches. The store kept feedstock in the freezers and ‘pulled’ it to the fridges to thaw the day before they would need more. Every day, they needed more. More, more, more, thought Dave.
“What’s up, man?” he asked with a tired and quiet voice.
“Well, the ice machine is broken, we’re out of white chocolate, we’re running out of large flat lids, we’re out of a bunch of pastries, one of the espresso machines is broken, and our order got split between the other stores in town, so we’re not getting one until next week,” she said.
“Bummer,” said Dave like he didn’t care, like it didn’t matter. Why does everything here go to shit all the damn time? he thought with contrary cynical outrage. These petty things kept clawing at him, slicing away his sanity. By now, he was too tired to show outrage. Letting it all bother me is a waste of time. When I take a crap, I flush it down the toilet and walk away. This place is just another crap. Whether or not Dave cared was irrelevant. Caring, in fact, was futile; his job was still synthesized from the same chemicals, and he still had to drink that poison. Now, there was just a little more to sip on.
“Where’m I at today?”
“Go ahead and hop on bar. Send Jess on her ten.”
“Cool.” Thank you, God; I don’t have to take orders.
If the steam wand was working well, it took about fifteen seconds to steam sixteen ounces of milk. Dave figured it was taking at least twenty-five seconds, which is about how long it should take to pull a shot of espresso. His first shot took fourteen seconds and sat getting cold while he waited for the milk to finish getting hot.
The shot ‘died.’ A dead shot happened ten seconds after it was pulled if no milk or water was added to it, and there were two kinds of people in the world; those who believed and those who didn’t. The believers could taste the difference. The non-believers could not. Customer opinion was irrelevant; they had never said anything.
At one point, Dave researched the topic, but he never found anything concerning this magical decomposing of coffee. None of his supervisors or the “coffee masters” he worked with could explain it to him. He thought he could taste a difference, but he also thought critically that his imagination might have played a role here.
The one piece of evidence he discovered was that some cafés venerated the quality of ‘hot’ above all other qualities because hot coffee is difficult to taste. Bad coffee, poorly made coffee is better when you can’t taste it. Serving it exceptionally hot was sweeping the foul taste under the rug. If it went cold and tasted bad, then it was your fault for not drinking it sooner.
Dave came to the conclusion that the problem of dead shots was only a factor if the espresso became colder than the milk or water you were adding; everyone knows you can’t reheat coffee. It caramelizes on a micro level or something. Then, it tastes burnt or sour. He stopped concerning himself with the matter when he realized no one complained.
Nonetheless, dead shots had been a belief practiced by many, including those who were paid more than Dave. His trainers had told him to re-pull the espresso if it ever sat for more than ten seconds. He’d watched people pull new shots because they’d let theirs sit for more than ten seconds, usually waiting on milk or because they forgot about them while they were off making other drinks.
This myth was intended to increase speed, but in practice Dave only saw it add another twenty seconds to an order. There was no reason shots should sit if you were following a the proper routine. That said, no one could agree on the order of proper routine. It’s funny how lies backfire. It’s funny how a businessman who has never made a latté thinks he can improve efficiency with falsity; he thinks it’s better lie than trust a wage worker. He thinks I’m dumb enough to believe it. He thinks I’m dumb enough to care.
It isn’t difficult to steam milk; the machine Dave used had a thermometer that stopped automatically at one hundred and fifty-five degrees. You just had to aerate it for two or three seconds, otherwise it would scream. You wanted the milk to whisper. You wanted it to whisper for twelve seconds after you aerated it. It took Dave five to ten seconds to aerate with this steam wand, and this was the machine they said worked.
While the milk steamed and the shots pulled, Dave had fifteen or twenty seconds to start the next drink. He ran over to the cold bar, pumped the instant coffee they used for blended drinks into the clear cup, poured whole milk to the bottom line of said cup, and poured those contents into a blender pitcher. If they’re so concerned with speed, put the measurements on the sides of the pitcher, not the cup. He added a medium scoop of ice and left the pitcher on the counter, heading back to the hot bar.
Some people advised to start the blending before you went back to your first drink; some people said going back first was faster. None of these people had taken a stopwatch to the matter.
Dave reasoned that it all depended on which order each drink was on. He reasoned that your ultimate goal was to keep the line moving, so if an entire order needed to be finished to make the car at the window move, then you focused your efforts on the entirety of that order. He also reasoned that it didn’t really matter; either way, the drinks would get made, the cars would move, they would be back again tomorrow, and he would still only make eight dollars an hour and his coworkers would still bicker over how to do things. Fat gets fatter. Dumb gets dumber. Rich gets richer. Poor gets… No. Dave body grew tense but flowed with a quick fury. I refuse the victimhood. I’m doing this to myself; I am in part a consequence of my own actions. He developed a line of completed drinks to his right. I don’t care enough to stop. That has to change. Just grab hold of something. Grab hold, and cling to life.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Dave looked at the line of cups to his left as he poured steamed milk. Today, I will be a machine. He flipped a whipped cream bottle over in his hand, dispensing it neatly while he reached for a lid. I will produce. That is my purpose. His arms moved faster, looking for something to grab hold of and cling to.
He turned to the screen behind him. The timer was red. Dave was at forty-seven percent. I’m putting that above eighty. He kept his new pace and kept it steady, his face strained with focus like an athlete about to break loose. He silently hummed “Anvil of Crom,” drums pounding in his head beneath the resound of trumpets.
“We just had a callout,” said Tom before opening the window to hand out a drink. “You know what that means?”
“No one to cover our lunches.”
“Yep.”
We’ll have almost two hours of two people on the floor.
“Looks like we’re leaving late tonight. This is gonna suck,” said Tom.
“No one will care what time we leave or what time we got here. They won’t care what our times looked like. No. All that will matter is that today, three stood against many. Either way, we still get paid.” To Hell with this place. To Hell with these customers. To Hell with this business model.
Dave kept his mouth shut the next few minutes; it was easier to work faster if you weren’t busy talking. There was a meditation in the fury; his mind was clear, focused only on his violent speed. A nasty world stayed locked behind an iron jaw, taut with contempt. The words were lost and formless; his hate took form in steaming, pumping, scooping, and blending. He poured and splashed from one drink to another. His body became a violent scream.
I hate this place. I hate what I let it make me. C’est la vie: bullshit. I’m not the hero; I’m the demon. They tell me my kind is the worst, the gangrene of society? Well, let them be right. They tell me I’m only here because I don’t work hard enough? Let them be wrong. Let Hell have me when it wants me, but God, let me bite and claw my way there, he thought, sliding a drink to the window like loosing a single arrow into a crowd. He was supposed to be just another archer on the ramparts; he was the only archer on the ramparts. Tom fought back the ladders and Riley held the gate. Today, with slow fury and hidden contempt, three stood against many in a broken keep with broken supply lines.
It was midnight. The store closed at ten-thirty, and Dave just started pulling out of the parking lot. It had taken an hour and a half to close; the three workers had been swallowed by the holiday swarm.
What a wild stupid world.
He went home and wrote about it.
Writhe ~ The Wolf
The snake ( t h e y , t h e p e o p l e )
she wrapped around her.
Wrapped around the City
in a violent stranglehold.
With life the City writhed,
parading the revolution,
the death of the great and
innocent.
Terror began to rain
over the city.
Wash it clean
with a bath of blood
and fire.
The baptism of the new ruler
or the old one. Whichever.
Regimes are like dogmas, caught
in the winds of time.
Yeah.
The City writhed.
The python of people snapped
the bones of buildings
within their grasp.
They came from doors and windows
and houses and stores.
They came to kill
in the name of the leader.
They shuffled and waddled and
hoped they could
throttle
the man in the big house, for
he was the bringer of madness. ( d e a t h )
They worshipped him once
on their screens. Now,
he was the nightmare at the end of the dream.
Madly, when you
wake from the dream
nothing has happened.
The dream has no will of its own, but
the nightmare always comes at the end.
The end of the line, it ends with a scream of
mad fear like the rabid dog. The people
came like rabid dogs.
The people came to kill.
The people kept on coming.
They sought to make the Dancer
queen,
but nowhere could they find her.
He was already mad ( t h e k i l l e r )
long before the throng awoke.
I saw him;
walked out of the padded room
where his thoughts had all
been strewn like old shirts, stale
with sweat, lined white
with its salt. Damp and moldy,
never dry.
For sometime, anytime, the lifetime of a god,
he’d been in that room. The one
which was many. Many rooms at once.
He marched along with the serpent,
Got danger in he eyes.
H e e y e s a i n ’ t h i s
he says
a i n ’ t n o t h i n ’ h i s .
I know better. I’ve
heard his kind before,
heard their cries railing
for the genocide of being, needing
a new world born
in their ideal. But,
the dream has no will of its own.
He got death, and he got danger.
He don’t take; he give.
He just give what he got.
They can’t pass it up.
The snake The animal
wrapped around her. ( t h e c i t y )
—It can dance. It dance with him.
Snake drinks deep of his dangerous poison.
He share it all. He tell it all.
They worship then they take a sip.
Whose blood is whose?
We bleed sad, long, hard, and weep.
I saw him walk on out the padded house,
and into the world.
Into the City.
Occurrence ~ The Killer
Strange…
I am not this body;
I am in this body.
My face is a mask;
I live past the mask.
My eyes are holes;
In the mask are holes.
The holes are my eyes,
and they see the lies.
Strange…
S h a d o w s on the wall
Dance up and d o w n the hall.
We are the BRICKS!
A morgue made of BRICKS!
Each other we kill.
Everyone we kill.
Put them in the tomb;
We are in the tomb.
Strange…
No more fun
for anyone.
Load the gun.
Cannot run.
Chamber spun.
The bullet bites the back of the head.
Now all of the children are dead.
____
I wonder if anyone will ever read these things. Wonder if they’ll say it was worth it, he thought as he laid back, taking in the dark of night. His wife was out cold next to him. The same street light glowed outside the window, behind the cheap blackout curtain. I’m just ready to go to sleep.