A tale of two waiters

This old trope.

“Let me give you some advice,” he said. “If you’re ever in jail, the first thing you should do is go up to the biggest motherfucker there and tell him to give you a cigarette. When he says no, look in his eyes and push him and tell him again. When he pushes you back and says, no, motherfucker — and now you have the attention of everyone in the room — pick up the nearest chair and try to bash him over the head. He and his friends will beat the shit out of you. But nobody will fuck with you after that, especially if you do it one more time. They’ll think you’re fucking crazy.”

David was on parole and an active heroin addict. He’d grown up in Highland Park, his father a doctor and his mother a nurse. But the black kids thought he was Spanish and the Spanish kids thought he was black and none of the white kids would have anything to do with him.  There were exactly ten other black kids in his school and he wasn’t friends with any of them. His home was formal — he had to wear a shirt and tie to dinner, which was exactly at six o’clock every evening — but the cognitive dissonance between home and school was too much for him.

“The first nights in jail, you don’t sleep. You’re in a room with a hundred guys who haven’t seen a woman in who knows how long. You fall asleep and they’ll be on you like flies on shit. You learn to sleep in the daytime. There’s fags in there that have been doing nothing for five years but working out every day. And the worst thing you can do is try to be friends with someone. If you’re friendly to someone, they’ll think you’re a pushover. Someone wants a cigarette, don’t give it to them. Even if you don’t smoke, don’t give it to them. You never give anything to anybody when you’re on the inside. You do, and you’re dead.”

One day at work, we needed to get into a storage closet that was padlocked shut and the boss couldn’t find the key. He asked me to get the boltcutter and cut the lock off the door. But even when I stood on a chair to try for some leverage, I couldn’t do it. I thought there was no way the boltcutters could get through the lock. Another co-worker tried, and then my boss, both of whom are bigger and more muscular than me. David came over, took the boltcutters and braced himself against the door. He squeezed and pushed and veins popped up from his forehead. He pressed and  twisted and there was a sick snapping sound as the lock broke free and fell to the floor. He smirked in his usual manner to discourage any thanks or compliments. 

He shrugged at me and turned away. “I used to do this for a living.”

Steven stood on the side watching the whole thing. He didn’t drink, smoke or do drugs and was openly hostile to David. “Bullshit,” he said later. “I spent 19 years inside and I never saw anything like that. That’s gangster movie crap. In real life, they’ll kill you.” We all knew Steven had murdered his lover with a frying pan, although we didn’t know how we knew.

At the team meeting, David’s eyes rolled back as he came up. His fluttering eyelids centered on Steven. “You’re a dumb racist,” he said, as his final assessment, and nodded out just as the boss started his speech.