[MERIT]

They actually had more staff than when I usually go there, and the place wasn't very full either, so it was their bad, not mine. Also, I ordered verbatim off the menu, nothing special [the carnitas dinner], and it was my usual; the only thing I've EVER ordered there in 4+ years.


Then don't bitch at me about not tipping for shitty service.

But he has a safe full of cash, so making less than minimum wage [or $80+/hr, whichever he settles on] really is a moot point right now.

Hempcrete is where it's at.

Frownland

"Who's he talking to?" Gene says, and Karen doesn't look up.
"0h," she says. "It's probably just Bubba." Bubba is Frankie's
imaginary playmate.
Gene nods. He goes to the window and looks out. Frankie is
pretending to shoot at something, his thumb and forefinger
cocked into a gun. "Get him! Get him!" Frankie shouts, and Gene
stares out as Frankie dodges behind a tree. Frankie looks nothing
like DJ, but when he pokes his head from behind the hanging foliage
of the willow, Gene feels a little shudder-a flicker, something.
He clenches his jaw.
"This class is really driving me crazy," Karen says. "Every
time I read about a worst-case scenario, I start to worry. It's
strange. The more you know, the less sure you are of anything."
"What did the doctor say this time?" Gene says. He shifts uncomfortably,
still staring out at Frankie, and it seems as if dark
specks circle and bob at the corner of the yard. "He seems okay?"
Karen shrugs. "As far as they can tell." She looks down at her
textbook, shaking her head. "He seems healthy." He puts his
hand gently on the back of her neck and she lolls her head back
and forth against his fingers. "I've never believed that anything
really terrible could happen to me," she once told him, early in
their marriage, and it had scared him. "Don't say that," he'd
whispered, and she laughed.
"You're superstitious," she said. "That's cute."
He can't sleep. The strange presentiment that Mandy and D Jare
dead has lodged heavily in his mind, and he rubs his feet together
underneath the covers, trying to find a comfortable posture. He
can hear the soft ticks of the old electric typewriter as Karen finishes
her paper for school, words rattling out in bursts that remind
him of some sort of insect language. He closes his eyes,
pretending to be asleep when Karen finally comes to bed, but his
mind is ticking with small, scuttling images: his former wife and
son, flashes of the photographs he doesn't own, hasn't kept.
They're dead, a firm voice in his mind says, very distinctly. They
were in afire. And they hurned up. It is not quite his own voice that
speaks to him, and abruptly he can picture the burning house. It's
a trailer, somewhere on the outskirts of a small town, and the
black smoke is pouring out the open door. The plastic window
frames have warped and begun to melt, and the smoke billows
from the trailer into the sky in a way that reminds him of an old
locomotive. He can't see inside, except for crackling bursts of
deep-orange flames, but he's aware that they're in there. For a
second he can see Drs face, flickering, peering steadily from the
window of the burning trailer, his mouth open in a unnatural
circle, as if he's singing.
He opens his eyes. Karen's breathing has steadied, she's sound
asleep, and he carefully gets out of bed, padding restlessly
through the house in his pajamas. They're not dead, he tries to
tell himself, and stands in front of the refrigerator, pouring milk
from the carton into his mouth. It's an old comfort, from back in
the days when he was drying out, when the thick taste of milk
would slightly calm his craving for a drink. But it doesn't help
him now. The dream, the vision, has frightened him badly, and he
sits on the couch with an afghan over his shoulders, staring at
some science program on television. On the program, a lady scientist
is examining a mummy. A child. The thing is bald-almost
a skull but not quite. A membrane of ancient skin is pulled taut
over the eye sockets. The lips are stretched back, and there are
small, chipped, rodentlike teeth. Looking at the thing, he can't
help but think of DJ again, and he looks over his shoulder,
quickly, the way he used to.
The last year that he was together with Mandy, there used to be
times when D Jwould actually give him the creeps-spook him.
D J had been an unusually skinny child, with a head like a baby
bird and long, bony feet, with toes that seemed strangely ex*
tended, as if they were meant for gripping. He can remember the
way the child would slip barefoot through rooms, slinking, sneaking,
watching, Gene had thought, always watching him.
It is a memory that he has almost succeeded in forgetting, a
memory he hates and mistrusts. He was drinking heavily at the
time, and he knows that alcohol grotesquely distorted his perceptions.
But now that it has been dislodged, that old feeling moves
through him like a breath of smoke. Back then, it had seemed to
him that Mandy had turned D] against him, that D] had in some
strange way almost physically transformed into something that
wasn't Gene's real son. Gene can remember how, sometimes, he
would be sitting on the couch, watching TV, and he'd get a funny
feeling. He'd turn his head and D] would be at the edge of the
room, with his bony spine hunched and his long neck craned,
staring with those strangely oversize eyes. Other times, Gene and
Mandy would be arguing and D] would suddenly slide into the
room, creeping up to Mandy and resting his head on her chest,
right in the middle of some important talk. "I'm thirsty," he
would say, in imitation baby-talk. Though he was five years old,
he would playact this little toddler voice. "Mama," he would say.
"I is firsty." And Drs eyes would rest on Gene for a moment,
cold and full of calculating hatred.
Of course, Gene knows now that this was not the reality of
it. He knows: He was a drunk, and D] was just a sad, scared
little kid, trying to deal with a rotten situation. Later, when he
was in detox, these memories of his son made him actually
shudder with shame, and it was not something he could bring
himself to talk about even when he was deep into his twelve
steps. How could he say how repulsed he'd been by the child,
how actually frightened he was. Jesus Christ-D] was a poor
wretched five-year-old kid! But in Gene's memory there was
something malevolent about him, resting his head pettishly on
his mother's chest, talking in that singsong, lisping voice, staring
hard and unblinking at Gene with a little smile. Gene remembers
catching D] by the back of the neck. "If you're going
to talk, talk normal," Gene had whispered through his teeth,
and tightened his fingers. "You're not a baby. You're not fooling
anybody." And D] had actually bared his teeth, making a thin,
hissing whine.
He wakes and he can't breathe. There is a swimming, suffocating
sensation of being stared at, being watched by something that
hates him, and he gasps, choking for air. A lady is bending over
him, and for a moment he expects her to say: "You're very lucky,
young man. You should be dead."
But it's Karen. "What are you doing?" she says. It's morning,
and he struggles to orient himself-he's on the living room floor,
and the television is still going.
"]esus," he says, and coughs. "Oh, ]esus." He is sweating, his
face feels hot, but he tries to calm himself in the face of Karen's
horrified stare. "A bad dream," he says, trying to control his
panting breaths. "]esus," he says, and shakes his head, trying to
smile reassuringly for her. "I got up last night and I couldn't
sleep. I must have passed out while I was watching TV."
But Karen just gazes at him, her expression frightened and uncertain,
as if something about him is transforming. "Gene," she
says. "Are you all right?"
"Sure," he says hoarsely, and a shudder passes over him invol*
untarily. "of course." And then he realizes that he is naked. He
sits up, covering his crotch self-consciously with his hands, and
glances around. He doesn't see his underwear or his pajama bottoms
anywhere nearby. He doesn't even see the afghan, which
he'd had draped over him on the couch while he was watching
the mummies on TV. He starts to stand up, awkwardly, and he
notices that Frankie is standing there in the archway between the
kitchen and the living room, watching him, his arms at his sides
like a cowboy who is ready to draw his holstered guns.
"Mom?" Frankie says. "I'm thirsty."
He drives through his deliveries in a daze. The bees, he thinks.
He remembers what Frankie said a few mornings before, about
bees inside his head, buzzing and bumping against the inside of
his forehead like a windowpane they were tapping against. That's
the feeling he has now. All the things that he doesn't quite remember
are circling and alighting, vibrating their cellophane
wings insistently. He sees himself striking Mandy across the face
with the flat of his hand, knocking her off her chair; he sees his
grip tightening around the back of DJ's thin five-year-old neck,
shaking him as he grimaced and wept; and he is aware that there
are other things, perhaps even worse, if he thought about it hard
enough. All the things he's prayed that Karen would never know
about him.
He was very drunk on the day that he left them, so drunk that
he can barely remember. It is hard to believe that he made it all
the way to Des Moines on the interstate before he went off the
road, tumbling end over end, into darkness. He was laughing, he
thinks, as the car crumpled around him, and he has to pull his van
over to the side of the road, out of fear, as the tickling in his head
intensifies. There is an image of Mandy, sitting on the couch as he
stormed out, with D Jcradled in her arms, one of DJ's eyes swollen
shut and puffy. There is an image of him in the kitchen,
throwing glasses and beer bottles onto the floor, listening to them
shatter.
And whether they are dead or not, he knows that they don't
wish him well. They would not want him to be happy-in love
with his wife and child. His normal, undeserved life.
When he gets home that night, he feels exhausted. He doesn't
want to think anymore, and for a moment, it seems that he will be
allowed a small reprieve. Frankie is in the yard, playing contentedly.
Karen is in the kitchen, making hamburgers and corn on the
cob, and everything seems okay. But when he sits down to take
off his boots, she gives him an angry look.
"Don't do that in the kitchen," she says icily. "please. I've
asked you before."
He looks down at his feet: one shoe unlaced, half off. "Oh,"
he says. "Sorry."
But when he retreats to the living room, to his recliner, she
follows him. She leans against the door frame, her arms folded,
watching as he releases his tired feet from the boots and rubs his
hand over the bottoms of his socks. She frowns heavily.
"What?" he says, and tries on an uncertain smile.
She sighs. "We need to talk about last night," she says. "I need
to know what's going on."
"Nothing," he says, but the stern way she examines him activates
his anxieties all over again. "I couldn't sleep, so 1 went out
to the living room to watch TV. That's all."
She stares at him. "Gene," she says after a moment. "People
don't usually wake up naked on their living room floor, and not
know how they got there. That's just weird, don't you think?"
Ok, please, he thinks. He lifts his hands, shrugging-a posture of
innocence and exasperation, though his insides are trembling. "I
know," he says. "It was weird to me, too. 1 was having nightmares.
I really don't know what happened."
She gazes at him for a long time, her eyes heavy. "I see," she
says, and he can feel the emanation of her disappointment like
waves of heat. "Gene," she says. "All I'm asking is for you to be
honest with me. If you're having problems, if you're drinking
again, or thinking about it. 1 want to help. We can work it out.
But you have to be honest with me."
"I'm not drinking," Gene says firmly. He holds her eyes. "I'm
not thinking about it. I told you when we met, I'm through with
it. Really." But he is aware again of an observant, unfriendly
presence, hidden, moving along the edge of the room. "I don't
understand," he says. "What is it? Why would you think I'd lie
to you?"
She shifts, still trying to read something in his face, still, he
can tell, doubting him. "Listen," she says, at last, and he can tell
she is trying not to cry. "Some guy called you today. A drunk
guy. And he said to tell you that he had a good time hanging out
with you last night, and that he was looking forward to seeing
you again soon." She frowns hard, staring at him as if this last bit
of damning information will show him for the liar he is. A tear
slips out of the corner of her eye and along the bridge of her
nose. Gene feels his chest tighten.
"That's crazy," he says. He tries to sound outraged, but he is
in fact suddenly very frightened. "Who was it?"
She shakes her head sorrowfully. "I don't know," she says.
"Something with a 'B: He was slurring so bad I could hardly
understand him. BB or BJ or ..."
Gene can feel the small hairs on his back prickling. "Was it
DJ?" he says.
And Karen shrugs, lifting a now-teary face to him. "I don't
know!" she says hoarsely. "I don't know. Maybe." And Gene
puts his palms across his face. He is aware of that strange buzzing,
tickling feeling behind his forehead.
"who is DJ?" Karen says. "Gene, you have to tell me what's
. gomg on. "
But he can't. He can't tell her, even now. Especially now, he
thinks, when to admit that he'd been lying to her ever since they
met would confirm all the fears and suspicions she'd been nursing
for-what?--days? weeks?
"He's someone I used to know a long time ago," Gene tells
her. "Not a good person. He's the kind of guy who might ... call
up, and get a kick out of upsetting you."
They sit at the kitchen table, silently watching as Frankie eats
his hamburger and corn on the cob. Gene can't quite get his mind
around it. D J, he thinks, as he presses his finger against his hamburger
bun, but doesn't pick it up. DJ. He would be fifteen by
now. Could he, perhaps, have found them? Maybe stalking them?
Watching the house? Gene tries to fathom how D J might have
24 Stay Awake 25
been causing Frankie's screaming episodes. How he might have
caused what happened last night-snuck up on Gene while he
was sitting there watching TV and drugged him or something. It
seems farfetched.
"Maybe it was just some random drunk," he says at last to
Karen. "Accidentally calling the house. He didn't ask for me by
name, did he?"
"1 don't remember," Karen says. "Gene ..."
And he can't stand the doubtfulness, the lack of trust in her
expression. He strikes his fist hard against the table, and his plate
clatters in a circling echo. "1 did not go out with anybody last
night!" he says. "I did not get drunk! You can either believe me,
or you can ..."

__________________

Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Frownland

They are both staring at him. Frankie's eyes are wide, and he
puts down the corncob he was about to bite into, as if he doesn't
like it anymore. Karen's mouth is pinched.
"Or 1 can what?" she says.
"Nothing," Gene breathes.
There isn't a fight, but a chill spreads through the house, a silence.
She knows that he isn't telling her the truth. She knows
that there's more to it. But what can he say? He stands at the sink,
gently washing the dishes as Karen bathes Frankie and puts him
to bed. He waits, listening to the small sounds of the house at
night. Outside, in the yard, there is the swing set, and the willow
tree--silver-gray and stark in the security light that hangs above
the garage. He waits for a while longer, watching, half expecting
to see DJ emerge from behind the tree as he'd done in Gene's
dream, creeping along, his bony, hunched back, the skin pulled
tight against the skull of his oversize head. There is that smothering,
airless feeling of being watched, and Gene's hands are trembling
as he rinses a plate under the tap.
When he goes upstairs at last, Karen is already in her nightgown,
in bed, reading a book.
"Karen," he says, and she flips a page, deliberately.
"1 don't want to talk to you until you're ready to tell me the
truth," she says. She doesn't look at him. "You can sleep on the
couch, if you don't mind."
"Just tell me," Gene says. "Did he leave a number? To call
him back?"
"No," Karen says. She doesn't look at him. "He just said he'd
see you soon."
He thinks that he will stay up all night. He doesn't even wash up,
or brush his teeth, or get into his bedtime clothes. He just sits there
on the couch, in his uniform and stocking feet, watching television
with the sound turned low, listening. Midnight. One A.M.
He goes upstairs to check on Frankie, but everything is okay.
Frankie is asleep with his mouth open, the covers thrown off.
Gene stands in the doorway, alert for movement, but everything
seems to be in place. Frankie's turtle sits motionless on its rock,
the books are lined up in neat rows, the toys put away. Frankie's
face tightens and untightens as he dreams.
Two A.M. Back on the couch, Gene startles, half-asleep as an
ambulance passes in the distance, and then there is only the sound
of crickets and cicadas. Awake for a moment, he blinks heavily at
a rerun of Bewitched, and flips through channels. Here is some
jewelry for sale. Here is someone performing an autopsy.
In the dream, DJ is older. He looks to be nineteen or twenty,
and he walks into a bar where Gene is hunched on a stool, sipping
a glass of beer. Gene recognizes him right away-his posture,
those thin shoulders, those large eyes. But now, Drs arms are
long and muscular, tattooed. There is a hooded, unpleasant look
on his face as he ambles up to the bar, pressing in next to Gene.
D J orders a shot of Jim Beam-Gene's old favorite.
"I've been thinking about you a lot, ever since I died," DJ
murmurs. He doesn't look at Gene as he says this, but Gene
knows who he is talking to, and his hands are shaky as he takes a
sip of beer.
"I've been looking for you for a long time," DJ murmurs, and
the air is hot and thick. Gene puts a trembly cigarette to his mouth
and breathes on it, choking on the taste. He wants to say, I'm
sorry. Forgiye me. But he can't breathe. DJ shows his small,
crooked teeth, staring at Gene as he gulps for air.
"I know how to hurt you," D J whispers.
Gene opens his eyes, and the room is full of smoke. He sits up,
disoriented: For a second he is still in the bar with DJ before he
realizes that he's in his own house.
There is a fire somewhere: He can hear it. People say that fire
"crackles," but in fact it seems like the amplified sound of tiny
creatures eating, little wet mandibles, thousands and thousands
of them, and then a heavy, whispered wkoofas the fire finds another
pocket of oxygen. He can hear this, even as he chokes
blindly in the smoky air. The living room has a filmy haze over it,
as if it is atomizing, fading away, and when he tries to stand up it
disappears completely. There is a thick membrane of smoke
above him, and he drops again to his hands and knees, gagging
and coughing, a thin line of vomit trickling onto the rug in front
of the still-chattering television.
He has the presence of mind to keep low, crawling on his knees
and elbows underneath the thick, billowing fumes. "Karen!" he
calls. "Frankie!" but his voice is swallowed into the white noise of
diligently licking flame. "Ach," he chokes, meaning to utter their
names.
When he reaches the edge of the stairs he sees only flames and
darkness above him. He puts his hands and knees on the bottom
steps, but the heat pushes him back. He feels one of Frankie's action
figures underneath his palm, the melting plastic adhering to
his skin, and he shakes it away as another bright burst of flame
reaches out of Frankie's bedroom for a moment. At the top of
the stairs, through the curling fog he can see the figure of a child
watching him grimly, hunched there, its face lit and flickering.
Gene cries out, lunging into the heat, crawling his way up the
stairs, to where the bedrooms are. He tries to call to them again,
but instead, he vomits.
There is another burst that covers the image that he thinks is a
child. He can feel his hair and eyebrows shrinking and sizzling
against his skin as the upstairs breathes out a concussion of
sparks. He is aware that there are hot, floating bits of substance in
the air, glowing orange and then winking out, turning to ash. For
some reason he thinks of bees. The air thick with angry buzzing,
and that is all he can hear as he slips, turning end over end down
the stairs, the humming and his own voice, a long vowel wheeling
and echoing as the house spins into a blur.
And then he is lying on the grass. Red lights tick across his opened
eyes in a steady, circling rhythm, and a woman, a paramedic, lifts
her lips up from his. He draws in a long, desperate breath.
"Shhh," she says softly, and passes her hand along his eyes.
"Don't look," she says.
But he does. He sees, off to the side, the long black plastic
sleeping bag, with a strand of Karen's blond hair hanging out
from the top. He sees the blackened, shriveled body of a child,
curled into a fetal position. They place the corpse into the spread,
zippered plastic opening of the body bag, and he can see the
mouth, frozen, calcified, into an oval. A scream.












Think about it.

__________________

Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

[MERIT]

Somebody tl;dr froundland's post for us

The Batlord

So you're a regular at this restaurant for over four years, presumably because you like the place, and yet when the place you like drops the ball once you decide to be a dick? Sounds like it says more about you than it does them. **** happens. Don't be a whiny bitch.


A great retort for criticizing you for criticizing workers who had no power over something you don't even care about.

__________________

The Batlord

Definitely not reading all that.

__________________

Frownland

Well basically, Gene can't escape who he is.

__________________

Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Frownland

I will because it's exciting. What kind of setup are you using?

__________________

Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

[MERIT]

If they aren't skilled enough to bring a fucking drink and plate to a table properly, then they don't deserve to be paid a living wage or compensated extra by me. My aunt owns a restaurant. She lets her grandkids chip in so they can earn extra money. I have nieces that are like 10 who can do their job better than these people.

The Batlord

Is this the one time they ****ed up or do you make a habit of going to sub-par establishments?

__________________