The
alarm clock beep beep beep's it's way into my
brain like a white-hot awl around noon. Even
half-asleep I have enough sense to know that I'll just hit that big plastic
snooze button a
zillion times before I
wake up. So I shut the little
fucker off and
make some more Z's, oblivious to any
secular concerns. I wake up at 2:50 and work starts at four. It takes me an hour to get there.
No problem. I have about 25 minutes (
slacker math) to relax, eat an
eggo with no syrup and wonder my roommate insists on never buying syrup for his eggos. (I've given up on buying groceries. They always
rot from being
attention starved.) I collect my
stuff, filling my
pockets with as many
pens as a I can find laying around on the floor and run out the
door. (no
rhyme intended)
Unlike the
TV commercials my
roommate fails to persue me shouting,
Leggo my eggo! (Sounds like an ancient
language. "Give me back my
fucking food, you
son of a bitch!" in
Latin, maybe.)
An hour of riding through the baby
corn and I'm at
the Riverview, fifteen minutes late. This doesn't seem to bother anyone since we don't really get any tables in the
smoking section until about five, so I wouldn't have anything to do, anyway. I
bullshit with the other
servers for a while and then finally I've got a table, and another and then
Friday night sets in and I'm a blur between the kitchen and the patrons with my
kung-fu waiting style.
As
business quiets down, every other
server gets to leave except me. I get the
honor of closing that night, which basically means that I don't get any tables, but I stick around just in case someone comes in and I do a lot of
extra work for 3.90 per hr.
I sit in the
bar and watch it fill up as the
dining room empties. It's
karaoke night! But,
unfortunately, the
girl who usually does
karaoke is not there. She's taken a day off, apparently. Since she usually goads the people into singing early on by doing it herself,(she's an excellent singer) the
manager, who's running the show tonight, has a problem, since he can't sing. (At least, I assume not. It's a
hypothesis I'd care not to follow up on.) So he figures I'm getting paid for doing nothing and makes me pick out a
song, then another and another, and soon, I've become a
professional. That's right, I thought I was a
waiter, but now I'm being paid to sing, not by a
cheesy record executive with
oily hair, quick
hands, and
evil in his
heart, but by the
manager of a bar who wants to keep his patrons
interested.
"What do you do for a living?"
"I get paid 3.90 an hour to sing
Beatles songs with very bad instrumental reproductions. It
ain't hard. I don't gotta remember them words none. They got a
screen with 'em words on it and I can read sum."
Come
closing time, I collect my
free beer, sit around for about an hour watching other people
sing and ride off into the
moonlit night.