entertainment value

desire & delusion 💊🫘🫛🪽🍣🐂🔑💵

Hello, beautiful people.

I have another chronicle of worldly misadventure for you.

This one picks up where the post “need” left off. A hostess on a double shift at a Manhattan restaurant narrates. The time is around 4pm. She’s taken her “vitamin”, a pill she conveniently assumes is the coenzyme NADH, which a guy named Stefan gave her.

Roughly a third of this writing I’ve saved for behind the paywall. That part features a con man who is not your usual Ponzi schemer or Multi-Level Marketing racketeer.

Also for paid subscribers, I recorded an excerpt from Emmanuel Carrere’s Yoga, “George Langelaan’s Short Story”, translated from French by John Lambert. This passage, told in the closest imaginable third person, follows a man into the afterlife, and then keeps following him. There are funny parts having to do with the measuring of infinite time and space, which remind me of “Break It Down”, the Lydia Davis story I read last time.

🙏✌️

handmade collage with lily

The door swings shut behind Stefan, as the vitamin crosses my blood-brain barrier. Good ole Stefan. Adiós, I give a mental wave, slipping the fresh blister pack into my black mini dress pocket for the safekeeping of loose change and drugs.

The light is changing. The light is pure extra virgin olive oil. Coming in and combining with the mustard walls to whisk everything up in it. The vitamin a bulb illuminating me inside. The Goliath of strollers could lumber in right now, I’d hook it on my pinkie and whoosh, up the stairs I’d go, tossing it into the tangled mass of decommissioned baby chariots like skeletons flaps of thick skin still cling to.

I should’ve timed shit better.

I peek down at the slip of tubercled aluminum, not leapt like a silver treefrog out of my pocket. In case I need an extra boost before the dinner rush hits.

When I look up I see Claudia, the beanpole Jack climbed to heaven. Gliding up the steps, untying her trench. Then she sees me, and her bony shoulders bunch up. I smile weakly and try to make my posture less bad. She crinkles her nose, peeling off her coat. You could cut your finger running it along her clavicle sharply contrasting that rack genetics did not afford her. She had to work for it. We all have our reasons for being here. Claudia is studying to be an architect. Right now she is studying me, running that missing joist through my brain. When she looks at me like this, I get nervous she’s going to make unrealistic demands of me. That’s what she did the other day when I couldn’t set the menus on the tables right. Use logic! she chided. She knows I rely on others for that. Always in my head and with nothing to show for it. This is how I can abide in innocence, have everyone but myself to blame when things go wrong. It’s not my fault Catholic school taught logic like this: God slipped through a loophole in the Virgin’s hymen, then descended as her only son, to save humanity from lust and other sins. That’s why I had no future as a lawyer, which brings us to my reason for being here.

“You smell like my granny,” Claudia says, because I am a white girl who got overly excited slathering on shea butter I bought on a trip to Africa. She moves past me to hang up her coat.

Claudia always arrives early because that is the logical thing to do. She will place her order on her way back to the terrace, where she will consume the calories the restaurant provides in plenty of time for the dinner rush to burn them all off. She likes to eat a salad called the San Pietro, not to be confused with San Pedro, which is not on the menu, or I might start eating again. Instead of fractal visions of phantasmagoric deities, beatific, horned and winged, it comes with sliced baby tomatoes, blackened corn and shrimp.

I need to look like I’m doing something in case she turns around, so I slide open the drawer of the hostess desk. Reservations. I’m supposed to be calling people, confirming shit. Instead I stare at a pad of unlined paper I keep in there, blank as my mind waiting for a profound thought to cross it. I am not afraid of the blank page. I want to be it. Spotless. Feather-light. Paper-thin, with a profile almost invisible. A scrap of unknown knowns. So riveted by it am I that I almost don’t notice the dime bag Fernando’s left among the sundries. Scotch tape, stubby crayons, cocaine. I could put it up my nose, pretend not to have seen it, or put it up my nose, pretending not to have seen it. I consider option three, the all-in-one combo, but this powder has more strings attached to it than a marionette in a hot-air balloon. I start to slide the drawer closed, when a pair of white-sleeved arms shoot out on either side of me, then Fernando’s beefy fingers curl around the desk like a pulpit, his thumbs in the void I meant to eliminate.

“What do we have tonight?” He breathes, in a thick equatorial accent like red-brown earth in my ear.

We pretend to consult a list, of names and numbers I write down when people call. It makes them feel better, taken care of, although Fernando and I know it doesn’t matter much. We don’t hold anything for parties fewer than six. Too many no-shows, tables we could’ve turned, money he could’ve made.

“Got a party of eight coming at six.”

“Send them all to me,” Fernando hisses, leaning in so close he sprays my ear. Like it’s our little secret, not the same coercion he tries every night on whichever hostess is working. Going for the lion’s share.

There’s a vulnerability in his neediness. I hear his command like a confession, but for the life of me, I can’t understand how he’s parlayed it into the currency he has, stretched it as far as my manager’s panties. Maybe the coke is supposed to enlighten me. My manager is a stone-cold sober Bible-thumper. She has the name of a jewel and the face of an angel Ford’s put their money on. I don’t mean the car company. I mean the company banking on the commodification of that which money can’t buy. Camera filters will be created to simulate her perfect skin, but they’ll never get it quite right. She loves Jesus, but that’s not why you think of God in her presence. A face like that will have you praising Him and pronouncing Him dead all at once. Motherfucker, smiling on a select few. So yeah. Slap some logic on that, Claudia. Take your logic to the upper echelons and see how far it gets you. Only thinner the higher you ascend.

I turn to face Fernando, his arms still flanking me. He shows no sign of budging. I could stoop and go under. I fit at least one and a half times inside his width. I look him in the eye, as if any real confrontation could be had under the circumstances. He gazes back, through a pair of cloudy pink lightning storms a mudslide of dewy skin droops between. I want to dab at him with a Kleenex. I’m searching his dramatic brows for evidence he plucks them, when one twitches and I realize, holy shit, it was only this morning I received that fusillade of texts from him, maybe thirty of them before eight, as his night was grinding to a halt. One receptive look I made the mistake of giving him the other day and, in a bad way trying to score, he got to fancying me some kind of supplier. Chasing ecstasy while his girl lay with her halo of soft curls on her pillow, dreaming of better, of that Good Book with its man among men in it, the only one who could fill her every hole, her soul completely.

“How you holding up?” I ask.

Fernando shrugs, managing to keep his arms in place. I watch Jay stride past. He turns to shoot me a sympathetic look. I’m going to bring Jay all the customers.

“Send them all to me,” Fernando admonishes, intruding on my thoughts. Like I didn’t hear him the first time. Or the time before that.

“Alright,” I mumble, watching Jay round the corner to man the unpopular middle section, with neither the ambiance of the Christmas-lighted terrace nor the visibility of the front where Fernando guarantees a spectacle. Jay’s got plans to start his own business, and I’ll help him use all the right words to spell its success. I’m good for that. Someday when he’s hit it big, we’ll reminisce about the time he worked for tips in a glorified pizza parlor I stared vacantly out the window of, conducting field research in a life apart from my real one waiting for me somewhere else.

Thing is, Fernando owes me. I’m in credit for the Arab. Some pimp psychology he’s bringing to that scenario, like he’s owed the customers I give him all night, after he humors them in a game of how much is that doggie in the window? I only got wind of it the other day when he sidled up, a cartoon-villain smile curling up the dark corners of his mouth. I was already shaking my head no before he uttered a word. I could see he stood to gain from some twisted proposition needing my assent. I’m not a total fool. He told me I had an “admirer”, which about equaled Ipecac in its aphrodisiac effects. I imagine the vomitous look on my face influenced him to change tack to groveling. I told you, the man is not afraid to show weakness. It intrigues me. He adopted a prayer mudra, dropping to his knees. I chuckled at him trying to look lowly, small. Only when that failed, he lay his cards on the table so I could see the kickback. This admirer of mine is in good with one of the owners, he admitted. The one who buttons only half of his buttons so his shirt flutters nonchalantly over his chest full of gold chains. Who, with his frizzy mane, was born to play the role of a B-movie Vegas lion tamer. Or Sicilian restaurateur gone wild. I asked Fernando why I should care. He placed his hand over his heart like I’d hung it on tenterhooks. Said do it for him, Fernando.

My admirer hails from one of the Gulf countries, where oil bubbles up from the ground as liquid gold, expressly for spilling on a pile of raw fish for my delectation. You could call me extractive, had it been my idea. He is an elephantine man in his fifties or sixties, who employed a driver to chauffeur us, silent behind tinted windows, down the few blocks to a Midtown sushi restaurant, the kind a concierge might recommend. Each morsel of satiny sashimi I pinched and moved to my mouth like an exercise of Qi Gong with chopsticks, excruciatingly slowly and with my whole focus transferring then to mastication, my gaze still lowered, noticing all of the flavors and textures, blah blah blah, so we didn’t have to find out how little we would’ve had to say to each other, if he even spoke any English. It was not the worst date I ever went on.

Fernando whirls around, lured by a siren. Last night a DJ saved my life! A female vocal wails, exultant over a funky loop. It’s our evening soundtrack someone has cranked the volume of. The kind of worn-out disco scoring high on consumer spending tests, approved by focus groups—just the right mix of sauce and schmaltz for loosening up those tight-fisted high-rollers—that would normally put me in the mood to gun down the entire sound system, the faceless nameless mainstream. But right now I see the current pulsing through Fernando. I back up to close the hostess drawer and drink it in. He is so alive. Strutting. Prancing. Dreams of dinero, sugar-plums and dollar signs dancing in his head. I want to set him down on paper. Corral that snorting bull with the love handles in the china shop of my words. Impossible as I know that would be. It’s a point of contention between us. He says he’s gonna write the story of this place, and I know it’s more his than mine to tell. Trouble is, Fernando could never do Fernando justice. One day I’ll try. I know the words are in me somewhere. I watch him pump his fist in the air. I’m rooting for him, but you already knew that. It’s not so secret. I won’t seat all the customers in Jay’s section. I’ll save some for Fernando, too. Soon they’ll come, a colony of bees throwing up honey, and he’ll open like a flower. Dish up some prime entertainment for them like it’s on the house. I used to feel bad seeing them point and snicker, but that was before I saw things clearly, back when I thought they were laughing at his expense. Now I see it’s not that way at all. I see it’s some form of hypnosis he puts them under. Swinging his corpulent hips. Swinging more than that were it not for those pants cutting circulation but never the eternal optimist in him off, the magical thinker who can eat all the garlic bread he wants and make the calories disappear. Another negroni, Sir? And for you, angel? He’ll weave deftly among them. Ideally he’ll get them tipsy even before he announces the specials (for ample leeway inventing them on the fly). This is why the show is not really free, not at all really, but subject to “market pricing” set according to a complex equation balancing Fernando’s caprices with an educated guess of what he’ll be able to get away with on a given night. So the customers can eat their hearts out, jeer all they want, but Fernando will be the one laughing when the check rolls around, tabulating some obscene total they’ll be too sloshed and too proud to protest. They can handle his fat tip, too. Sometimes I wonder if they don’t come to get a little roughed up, have a few tier points knocked off of their black-card-clutching status. And Fernando will scoop up the bill presenter, holding it triumphantly aloft before snapping it shut so its metal corners click ostentatiously over the din. Over and over, for every table he turns, so he’ll never, ever lose our attention.

I sweep my hand furtively over my pocket, registering the vitamin pack. Still there, none of its blisters yet popped. This NADH makes things so much better it must really be bad for me, must really be ravaging my innards on the sly. But there’s something missing. Something else I’m feeling around for. It’s those pebbles I put in my shoes, like precious stones my soles incorporate as calluses. That self-prescribed pain the pills took away.