Activity

They’re all finishing their desserts so we’re clearing the last of the plates but they’re still drinking hard. Lushie is on his seventh or eighth whiskey and he’s guzzling the wine too. The goal seems to be not so much pleasure as obliteration. Somebody puts his arm around my waist, a liberty taken…

Back in the room I’m clearing the hors d’oeuvres and getting everybody cleaned up and ready for the salad course when the boss stands and starts telling jokes. The boss is the one DeMarcus spoke to at the beginning about the wine, the one who ordered the vegetables—he’ll be paying the tab and appar…

That was the summer Cal would come over to my apartment after he got off from the bank, before we had to be in at The Restaurant. Those were warm afternoons, my apartment toasting the Texas sun through big old perfect windows. I moved into that place when I saw the money I was making at The Restaur…

We take the order, DeMarcus on one side of the table and I on the other. We have an unspoken rivalry about who can get from position one to position fifteen the fastest. The pros get the order taking down to a call-and-response that reads each guest’s mind and draws out his selections for three cou…

Tonight they’ve put me on thirty men in The Private Room. The men are all white, fat, and over fifty. Sometimes parties like this will show up all at once on a hotel bus or in a drove of limos, if they’re in town for a convention and everything is organized. But these guys trickle in, and by the ti…