IL COVENO

Noah got me the job at the restaurant because he said my uniform made him dry heave.

I told him he never even saw me in the uniform.

But he said the knowledge alone conjured an image so grotesque it made him want to un-alive himself.

“You’re a good looking dude, Seb.”

“Um, thanks.”

“But nobody’s gonna know it if you wear that uniform.”

“Oh. Ok.”

And, yeah, at the sandwich shop, I had to wear a branded hat and tee shirt.

And, yeah, they were a kind of muddy yellow that didn’t exactly flatter my features.

And Noah said this was capitalist erasure.

And I nodded because, sure, but also a job is a job and I was glad to have one.

And it wasn’t like he was doing something super noble.

Noah was a back waiter at one of those very cool restaurants that people don’t even call a restaurant but call it, like, a spot and is on a lot of check this place out kind of lists and is sunken downtown on a forgotten block with nothing else but a tire shop and a permanently closed nail salon.

The kind of place I chain smoked outside of whenever he told me to come grab a drink at the bar while he finished up because I was too afraid to go in.

So, I shook my head, no.

But he said, “Dude, the owners will love you. They’ll think you’re so cute.”

And apparently that mattered because the owners hired anyone they thought was a vibe and wanted to be their friend.

And so it was ok that I didn’t have any restaurant experience.

And the hat and tee shirt were definitely embarrassing.

And maybe my soul was being erased.

And so I shrugged and said ok and had him set up an interview.

-

Il Coveno was dark.

The front facade was a charcoal-stained wooden wall covered in tiny slanted holes meant to look like for holding the necks of wine bottles.

From the outside, they gave the impression you could almost peek in, but if you tried, they trapped your sight.

Sitting on the inside of it during the day was like experiencing sunshine from under an avalanche.

I sat at the bar like a patron while Fallyn and Shay stood across from me like they were tending.

They asked relevant questions.

And I answered.

But I think the answers they were actually seeking existed somewhere beyond or beneath my words.

I felt their eyes traveling along the unruly spirals of my hair.

Perceiving my collar bone beneath my sweater.

Assessing the strength of my rib cage.

The dexterity of my fingers.

And, in general, I guess, like, sensing my aura or something.

And they didn’t talk to each other.

Or look at each other.

Just me.

But sometimes I caught them passing their in between thoughts.

Like Fallyn would sort of tilt her head toward Shay’s and I could see words falling from her brain into the other.

Or Shay would lift her chin in Fallyn’s direction and her closed lips would float a message into Fallyn’s ear.

And this silent conversation got me a new job.

And so I quit the sandwich shop and became a back waiter at Il Coveno.

-

Noah and I lived in a factory loft off Jefferson that our friend Savannah single and bare-handedly converted from a cinder block square into something semi-habitable.

There was no heat or AC and the windowless bedrooms had a ceiling height of up to my sternum, but there was hot water and electricity and WiFi, so I was plenty comfy.

Noah’s ex-girlfriend Olivia also lived there.

And Olivia’s new girlfriend, Peach.

And Atticus, an installation artist we knew from school.

And a stray cat Noah found in Cooper Park called Malaria because even on her best day she was on the brink of death.

When I told Savannah I’d be working with Noah at Il Coveno, she was her usual brand of quiet inscrutability.

“What about the sandwich shop?” She asked, maybe concerned or maybe apathetic.

“I quit.”

“Hm.”

And she held up a finger, like, wait here. And I did. And she went up to her room and came back holding a little piece of torn out graph paper with a little hand drawn heart on it that she folded up and placed in my palm and then she nodded to herself and continued making her oatmeal.

And I watched the silky robe on her slender back as she mixed the pot on the stove and sprinkled in some homemade blend of spices.

And I wanted to ask her, but I think I also didn’t want to know.

So I just walked over and hugged her from the side and she leaned into me.

“I love you, Savannah.”

“Be careful, Seb.”

-

Noah and I took the J into the city on my first day of training even though he didn’t actually have to work because Saturday was the only day with two back waiters and this was Thursday.

He said he was like a proud parent dropping their kid off on the first day of school and he gave a me a pat on the back and handed me a brown bag lunch. I opened it, incredulous, to find a fresh pouch of Drum. I laughed and hugged him again and felt grateful for my best friend.

And then he ran off to do whatever Noah does when I’m not around.

And I entered the dungeon wall of Il Coveno.

-

After training, at family meal, when I didn’t take anything and reluctantly revealed I was a vegan, I was met with the requisite stares of shock and bemusement.

“Oh. Sorry, man.” Tommy, the sous chef, grunted insincerely. Tommy was a hipster string bean with long, greasy hair and a narwhal tattoo on his forearm.

“I can make you something.” Ricardo, a line cook, said with more compassion. Ricardo was a smoldery beefcake with curly black hair inching out from the front and back of his shirt collar.

“No, please. I’m fine. I ate before I got here.” This was a lie, but I preferred cigarettes and coffee to food, anyway, so I didn’t care.

“Don’t be silly.” Fallyn, who acted as both owner and executive chef, cooed breathily. She lifted her Morticia locks into a wrist-held elastic as she stood up to go make me a salad.

And I felt my body slowly dying.

“Sorry, Sebastian, Noah didn’t mention it,” Shay, owner and Front-of-House Manager, shook her head like it was a diagnosis my guardian was supposed to disclose to the school nurse, but forgot.

“No - I’m sorry. I really don’t like to make a thing of it.”

“Babe. Stop apologizing.” Trish. A server. Bleach blonde with mahogany roots. Covered in isolated, artsy tattoos. Barely 5 feet and the single most intimidating human presence I had ever encountered.

“Yeah, honey, no. It’s actually totally your vibe. We should’ve known.” Nella. A server. The kind of casual, but unrealistic pretty you’d find in an Abercrombie catalog, if Abercrombie liked non-white people. She had a stoner glaze in her eyes and her syrupy speech, but with an air of stormy sincerity.

“I’m even more obsessed with you now.” Gayatri. A server. She whispered it, just to me, as she fanned her many-ringed, un-manicured finger tips onto my forearm and breathed into them as she gripped it. She meant it, too. Her honeycomb eyes and her undercut and her septum piercing were not likely to kid around.

None of them were.

These were very cool girls.

They didn’t have to pretend.

And I felt like maybe they wanted to adore me.

And I had never felt so desperate to be adored.

-

My first shift was hell.

I went from basking in the glow of these impossibly cool girls, to clang and rush and ding and sizzle and scrape and shout and ding and Sleigh Bells on the aux and excuse me and behind and corner and ding.

And Seb, Table 2.

And Seb, Seat 5 at the bar.

And Seb, reset 16.

And Seb, grissini at the bar.

And Sebastian, ice run.

And Seb and Seb and Seb.

And ding and ding and ding.

And Fallyn in the pass dropping hot plates onto my bare skin whether I’m ready or not and mumbling table and seat numbers and me trying to see the map in my brain.

And my skin throbbing and my brain leaking and tears welling up behind my eyes.

And Gayatri’s hand at my lower back, guiding me in the right direction.

And Nella whispering correct seat numbers in my ear.

And Trish handing me a bouquet of silverware at the next bell, “I got this one, babe. Just polish.”

And Shay hovering while I clear Table 5, the longest one with it’s seven seats.

And me trying to remember the puzzle of which plates to grab when and instead of it being an empty table full of empty plates like during training it’s a table full of people reaching and talking and looking and perceiving.

And I see the plate I should have grabbed first, but didn’t.

And the bowl that should be in my palm, but isn’t.

And it won’t balance on top of the others.

And so I’ll need to grab it with my left hand after I clear the silverware.

But the last thing my left hand is supposed to grab is the grissini basket.

And so I won’t be able to do that.

And so I’ll have to make a second trip.

And that’s, like, so tacky.

And so not Il Coveno.

And Shay sees it, too.

And so she grabs the grissini basket for me and slips off to the kitchen and whispers something to Fallyn in the pass.

And it’s over.

And I never thought I’d be someone who got fired on their first day.

And I already quit my job at the sandwich shop.

And I’m still standing there.

And I haven’t even grabbed the last bowl yet.

But I’m not totally sure I can move because I’m starting to shake and I’ll either drop everything or cry.

Or both.

Probably both.

And the man at the head of the table says, “Are you not working or hardly working?”

And with my right arm full of all but one of their vessels of post-mastication, I chirp a broken, one and a half syllable, “Huh?”

“We need wine,” he says to this idiot that is me. And he looks at his not entirely empty glass and then to the carafe of wine on the other side of me at the lip of the garde-manger station, which is where we place the open bottles and carafes of wine.

But I was specifically told not to pour wine.

Back waiters don’t pour wine.

Only servers pour wine.

So, I can’t pour this carafe of wine that I see and that he sees me seeing and not just because my only free hand must grab that last bowl and finish clearing this impossible Table.

And he hates that.

And he hates me.

And he shows me with his eyes.

-

And finally, I’m rolling a cigarette outside Il Coveno’s pretentious facade with its purposeless holes.

And there’s snow on the sidewalk that hasn’t finished melting.

But I didn’t grab my cardigan because I couldn’t put another second in between me and this cigarette.

And my fingers fumble with the lighter in the icy air, but the inevitable inhale hushes the chill.

And I almost sink into a place of mellow.

But the door opens and ignites my just acquired PTSD.

And of course it’s him.

The man from Table 5.

And he turns as he’s holding the door for his party and he sees me -

Well, not really sees me, but sees what he thinks of me.

And he sneers.

And I hate him. And his bland face. And his ill-fitting dress slacks. And his puffed out chest. And his financial district camel coat.

And he whispers something snide to his useless, condescending wife with her ugly fur and smudgy, wrong color lipstick.

And she looks at me and says, “Well, what do you expect?”

And if her face could still laugh, it would.

And I watch the group of them.

These people that make money look cheap.

And I roll my eyes away and inhale again and I notice the puddle that the melting snow has created in the gutter and it’s so perfectly huge and deceptively deep and a treacherous mix of slush and water and I imagine this horrible man falling into it and I let the smoke release from my lungs and I smile.

And his hilarious wife shouts for the neighborhood’s ears, “Do cabs even come down here?”

And they all laugh, but they’re also terrified that maybe they don’t.

But this very New York man is not deterred by anything and he lifts up his arm to prove he can get a cab anywhere.

And because he’s not paying attention to what’s beneath him, he’s only seeking the tops of cabs, he actually does step directly from the sidewalk into that magnificent puddle.

And he looks down to yell at it for daring to exist within his world and ruin his leather oxfords, but it’s a deceptively deep puddle and his other foot remains up on the still melting curb and he is so full of red wine, so his balance isn’t awesome, and he falls with his whole body, head first, into this most generous of puddles.

And my eyes widen is karmic amazement.

And my cigarette pauses before my gaping mouth.

And for a moment, magic is real.

And I feel a smile about to form in my numbing cheeks.

But, then, in a misguided effort to save himself, the man from Table 5 has kind of skipped and skidded too far forward, and instead of flailing, or reaching, it’s like his arms suddenly go limp at his side, and its his chin that first makes contact with the pavement beyond the puddle, and, like, shockingly hard.

Like, even my unsympathetic face goes from almost smiling to - oof.

And then a car runs over his head.

-

“Why aren’t you doing something?” his wife is screaming in my face after my world stops being blank.

And, admittedly, I’m not.

Instead of jumping into action, I am still leaning against Il Coveno smoking a cigarette while a mans head just became roadkill.

“Are you not working or hardly working?” I hear his voice and see his former face taunting my periphery.

I manage to stammer from my shivering lips, “I don’t have my phone.”

And it’s true. I wouldn’t have dared on my first day. And I don’t know what else she expects from me.

“Mom, come on, let’s go inside.”

Her son, maybe, is beckoning her away from me. Though, he doesn’t actually look at me, which is not different from how he behaved during dinner. He’s a clone of a man who could almost achieve handsomeness, in a state school JFK Jr. sort of way, if he wasn’t so tragically uptight. But I guess that’s inherited and maybe not entirely his fault.

Her daughter, maybe, or daughter in law - straight couples of this ilk do tend to keep close to the herd - is behind them on the phone, pacing and gesturing and speaking with emphatic exposition, so I assume she’s called 911. She’s also not unattractive, but in a corporate sort of way that feels forced and threatening collapse. She was the nicest of them all at dinner. Her please and thank you’s almost felt like cries for help.

The wife doesn’t break eye contact with me as her maybe son guides her back into Il Coveno.

“Fuck you.” She says.

And she spits in my face.

Except, no, she doesn’t say or do that.

But she wants to.

And I accept it.

Her husband did just get squashed.

So, I nod, apologetically.

And I look away.

And I see the man from Table 5’s gutted up head on the street.

And I take a drag, compulsively, as I ponder it.

Because I guess I thought maybe it’d be like a pancake.

Like my childhood brain assumed it would still be his face, but flat.

But it’s more a face that popped.

Attached to a body still stuffed with straw.

And then I feel my cardigan being placed around my shoulders.

And there they are.

Trish. Nella. Gayatri. And Callie, the pastry chef.

And Trish pulls out a Parliament. And lights it with a match from one of the Il Coveno matchbooks guests can keep as a souvenir.

And then Trish hands the matches to Nella, who lights up a spliff she made with my rolling papers after family.

And then Nella passes them to Gayatri, who lights an American Spirit Blue.

And then Gayatri passes them to Callie, still in her apron, tied tight over a black sports bra and matching leggings. She’s about the same height as Trish, with burlesque curves and an intricate tattoo that starts somewhere under her right armpit and travels the side of her torso to somewhere below her waist band. What Trish exudes in gritty ferocity, Callie matches in jovial delight. As she strikes the match to light her Newport, she lets out a tiny giggle of thrill at the spark and the fire it makes.

“Gruesome.” Trish says.

“Ouch.” Nella says.

“Sad.” Gayatri says.

“Yucky.” Callie says.

And they’re assessing the scene with a kind of measured calm.

And it weirdly has the energy of like they’re revisiting it.

Like they are ghosts of Christmas past observing what they already know happened in someone else’s memory.

-

“What did he say to you?” Trish had asked when I all but crashed into the kitchen to hand off the plates from Table 5 to Eddie, the dishwasher.

She had effortlessly snatched the last bowl and rescued me from the scene.

“Are you not working or hardly working?”

“Fuck him,“ she spat with venom and stormed out the swinging doors.

Eddie, boyish and chubby and many levels of cute, gave me a sitcom shrug and stuck out his tongue all goofy like it was his armor against the many dramas of Il Coveno.

I might have even smiled back before returning to my waking nightmare.

As I stepped, head hung low, from the long center hallway into the dining room again, Gayatri took my hand to walk me past Table 5, like she was my bodyguard.

“Come on, doll,” she said, as we strode through like popular girls on a playground.

I heard Nella at the table apologizing as she poured wine and offered complimentary gelato.

“It’s house made,” she said. “On us.”

Callie was over at the service station with Trish, nodding intently, rapt in serious conversation that halted when Gayatri and I approached.

“Soignee dessert. Table 5. Seat 4.” Trish was confirming with Callie.

“Salted caramel?”

“Duh.”

Callie nodded at Trish with a cheerful smile, but when she looked at me, her face dropped into a My Little Pony frown, and even though we hadn’t really talked yet, she hugged me like I was her Teddy Bear and it was a really hard day.

And that’s when I started to cry.

I didn’t mean to.

I was disarmed.

And Trish grabbed my shoulders and looked at me like she was going to yell in my face, but said with composed reassurance, “There’s no excuse for anyone to talk to you like that.” And her eyes asked me if I understood.

And I nodded.

And then Shay was at my back, with a hand on my shoulder, and instead of firing me, she said, “Well done tonight, Sebastian. Nobody comes that close to clearing Table 5 on their first day. Noah still can’t do it.”

And it made me almost laugh and I felt almost proud, but wasn’t totally sure it outweighed the horrors of the night.

And then she said, maybe acknowledging, but ultimately unfazed by or preferring to avoid my tears, “Um. Sorry about that asshole. Polish the rest of these glasses. Then go have a smoke or shoot up or something, I don’t know what your jam is. The girls can close out Table 5.”

And she allowed the severity of her perfectly porcelain face to offer a smile.

And it was something sinister.

But, like, a cozy kind of sinister.

Like we were in it together.

And I noticed the girls were matching it.

And I’d never felt so taken care of.

-

And, so, I wonder.

Slipping my arms into the sleeves of my cardigan, swapping what’s left of my cigarette from one hand to the other.

Sirens.

And police lights.

And a crowd forming.

And I wonder.

And Trish nudges my side, like, so casual.

Like - hey babe, you ok?

Or, even - hey babe, isn’t this fun?

And I wonder.

And I see the man from Table 5 eating his little scoop of salted caramel gelato with the pretzel chunks.

And drinking the rest of his wine.

And him and his family seeming so happy with themselves.

And so satisfied.

And the girls watching from the service station, polishing knives and stemware and smiling and seeming so happy with themselves.

And so satisfied.

And I wonder.

And I bring my cigarette to my mouth, but there’s nothing left and the paper just unravels on my frozen lips and I spit out the shag and pull out the stray pieces from my tongue.

And they laugh.

Trish. Nella. Gayatri. Callie.

But not, like, at me.

They laugh like - omg Seb, you are so adorable.

We so adore you.

And Trish slips me a Parliament.

And I hate filtered cigarettes, but of course I take it.

And Callie passes the matchbook back down the line.

And Trish strikes the match.

And our eyes meet through the flame.

And I inhale.

And I’m lit.