The new hire
cook looked like a miniature,
dollar store Frank Zappa,
without the glint of warped genius
in his eyes or his sense of humor,
though inevitable, he would play
a guitar in a bad heavy metal band.
The only glint in his eyes I could see
was a barely suppressed tendency
towards crazy. Two minutes into
our meet and greet, he’s asking me
to lend him twenty bucks. His whole,
brief employment history to be
flashed before my eyes. I’d lend him
the twenty until his first pay check.
Then two weeks after that it would
be another twenty and he’d pay
those two borrows back before escalating
to thirty, then forty. and excuses for
not being able to pay back would become
less convincing like, “It’s my girlfriend’s
birthday and I want to buy her something
special.” Which would probably be a better
grade of drug than the one she was used
to taking. And I could envision what
she looked like: A female version of him,
without the soul patch and moustache, but
low hanging bangs that mostly covered her
spaced out eyes. Their tattoos would be
cheap and visible, and there would be way
to many of them but since neither one
of them would ever be capable of holding
a job where the public would see them, so who cared?
He’d be fired roughly five months from now,
on general principles, as the more you got to know
him, the less you trusted him around, knives,
fire and food. Yeah, it would go like that
with a few minor variations because that’s
the way guys like him always ended up owing
their last paychecks to someone he worked with
and he would try and pick it up on the QT.
I told him, “No, I won’t lend you twenty,
I don’t even know you.” But I did now him
all too well.
Alan Catlin worked for the better part of 34 years in his unchosen profession as a barman in and around the greater Albany, NY area. He has published dozens of chapbooks and full-length books focusing on his work and the people he met while laboring in the trenches of bar warfare. Alan is the editor at Misfit Magazine.
