Unorthodox Angles/Andrew Gramling

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Tales Across Time: The Devil Lurks in the Darkest Places Part 3

The streets in Florida weren’t too kind, and Ryan’s continued not to be such a kind place either. It’s strange how things continued to get done in a place where people displayed open hostility towards each other on such an intense level. Bruno and Steve continued their beef.

“I’ll f****** slam his a**! Steve don’t want none of theese! Steve don’t want none of theese!” Bruno would say to himself while carrying a stack of plates or a tray of silverware across the dish room as I was passing through.

One afternoon as I was working the carving bar I saw Steve sitting on his stool with arms crossed as usual out near the mega bar and Bruno came up from behind him and said something. Steve got a look on his face like, “I don’t know about this,” with his eyes wide open in one of the rare times he would change his facial expression.

I wasn’t sure what was said, but Scott came up to me a minute later.

“Did you see that?? Bruno just asked Steve to go outside and he didn’t go!”

Ryan’s is the only place I’ve ever worked where you could ask your boss to step outside and not lose your job, though sometimes you could, like what happened to Nadar. There was always tension in the air, like someone could go into a heated explosion at any time, or someone was plotting against you in some way. Looking larger, Florida seemed to be like that in general. There was a thick blanket of unspoken hostility looking for anyone susceptible enough to suffocate with its influence. It was something very sadistic and menacing, almost like it was a living entity. I could feel it most of the time and not act on it unconsciously, but it was not easy. For the people who knew nothing but that way, it probably wasn’t so easy for them to resist in a lot of cases because that’s just how things were to them.

While I wasn’t actively trying to make anyone’s life more complicated, I wasn’t ignorant to the fact that in a kill or be killed kind of environment, if you weren’t a killer, then you were a target. But was I really so innocent and pure? I always convinced myself that I was.

Pokie began to speak strangely to me.

“Some people…they’re quiet and they come in and do a good job, but they crazy,” he said.

He didn’t have to mention any names for me to know who he was talking about. I tried to keep to myself most of the time. Ironically, I had a lot of mistrust for people, but I could still be quite naive at times. It was the more talkative people who usually drew out conversation from me. I just thought I’d be safer if I didn’t reveal too much about myself, which kept people wondering at times.

“There’s something hidden about you, like there’s another side to you,” Candace, one of the young hosts said to me.

“Sometimes that’s not good,” I said.

“Yeah, but I know in your case it’s not like that,” she said.

Candace was a sweet girl. There was something slightly dreamy about her. She was very unafraid of me and always held long eye-contact with me. Her eyes had a slightly glazed over and detached look but also sparkled with curiosity and understanding. I wasn’t sure how she managed to remain that way in a place like this. Some people get left alone. A lot of other people do not.

Another dishwasher, a middle-aged man named Larry, was also curious about me and suspected there was more to me than just being a 21-year-old restaurant cook.

“Something happened to you, didn’t it…to make you the way you are?” he asked.

I just nodded my head and left it right there. Some things are too much to go into. I already had enough people talking about me and wasn’t interested in adding to it myself by trying to explain my story.

Larry seemed very religious, and said to me basically that it was all meaningless without the spirit of God. But then another time, he told me not to touch one of the mega bar cooks named Joanne. I touched her arm purposely.

“Imma go home and get my nine!” he said.

“Why you joking with him like that?” Verne, the meat cutter stuck up for me.

I was one of the youngest in the place, so that led to a number of perceptions about me, sometimes helpful, and sometimes not.

Pokie continued with what I thought was unwarranted suspicion.

“You got those eyes,” he said while implying something suspicious was going on with me.

Very ironic, because I thought all these guys had “those eyes.” Why was Pokie saying that about me? I had no intentions of harming anyone. I started playing into it, though. I saw Pokie carrying a box of food back into the cooler with the door open and called his name. When he stuck his head out of the cooler, I did the “I’m watching you” hand gesture.

“You trippin’ now!!” he said.

In about the second week of July, Bruno’s birthday had come. The bosses were planning a little birthday celebration for him in the banquet room. They bought him a cake, and all the staff were invited to gather there in the early evening. For whatever reason, I was tasked with the duty of getting him to go there. I was told to tell him that Steve wanted to talk to him about something.

When it was time, I went to Bruno in the dish room as everyone else tiptoed into the banquet room.

“Bruno! Steve wants to talk to you about something in the banquet room!” I said.

“What for? What for? he asked.

I decided to add my own improvised twist to it.

“I don’t know. I think he said something about slamming you.”

“F*** that s***! F*** that s***!” Bruno said.

Oops. I realized I might’ve spoiled the surprise.

“No, no, I’m just kidding! Just go talk to him,” I said.

Bruno had a “Yeah, whatever” side eye look going on .

I joined the others in the banquet room and Bruno came in a couple minutes later. The cake had candles and everything. We sang for him and he blew out the candles. We all had a slice and chatted a bit, then got back to work.

After the brief celebration, I was walking through the back mega bar kitchen area, and Steve was coming my way. I stopped him for a second.

“Hey, Steve! Bruno almost didn’t come into the banquet room. I told him you were waiting for him and said something about slamming him.”

Steve shrugged his shoulders casually.

“He don’t want nunna this,” he said like it was the only obvious answer and passed by me.

I thought it was hilarious because both giants were saying the same exact thing about each other behind their backs.

Because of our size difference, Steve said if I ever hit him he would just walk away.

“You need to concentrate on fighting people your size,” he said to me.

What choice did I ever have? Ever since I can remember, giants have been coming after me. I thought anything was better than letting them push me around without a fight. Steve would occasionally try with his words, but I often had a counter for him. He seemed to resent me at times and appreciate me at others. In such an unstable and volatile environment I had to make sure I was ready in case things popped off.

Though I was shorter than most and kind of skinny, I would sometimes test my own strength by doing something extra. In the dish room area where the sinks were was where cooks would stack trays with foil-covered baked potatoes and bring them into the kitchen to put them on a rack. I wanted to get a mental and physical workout in, so I grabbed about 8 trays at once, each one weighing at least 10 pounds.

“You’re gonna hurt yourself! You’re gonna HURT YOURSELF!” one of the servers who was attending to silverware in the sink next to mine shouted.

“I’ll be OK,” I said.

James, Scott’s cousin and one of the mega bar cooks followed behind me with wide eyes as I went back to the kitchen. Dennis, the senior manager just under the GM just happened to show up. There were some racks in the way preventing me from entering the kitchen.

“You alright?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, struggling to maintain my composure and not sound desperate, though I was being severely tested.

Dennis slowly and carefully moved the rack for me.

After I slammed the potato trays down on the steel kitchen table, Dennis looked at me with a very annoyed look.

“Don’t be a hero,” he said sternly.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. That felt good!” I said, trying to speak carefully because Dennis looked about one step away from sending me home.

“I don’t know where you get all that energy from,” James said as he continued to look slack-jawed.

James was kind of goofy, talked with a southern accent, and smoked a lot. He and Nadar talked often in the banquet room during break before he got fired. Sometimes he would talk silly to me, bordering on being offensive. He wasn’t doing that tonight. He might’ve realized he underestimated me and my size. When you’re small and have large people coming after you all the time, you don’t have any choice but to have strength. I don’t hate any of the bullies that came after me in grade school. They helped teach me about fighting and what to do against overwhelming factors.

“What do you do for workouts?” Scott asked me while he and Pokie were standing in the kitchen window talking to me while I was walking through the mega bar area.

“I just be standing in the mirror like ‘BWAHH! BWAHH! BWAHH (doing full-body tenses)!”

“Man, he always be jokin’ like that,” Pokie said.

I never had any definite plans for how long I would stay in Florida, but roughly speaking, it was in my mind to leave around August, making my total stay in Florida about five months. As the time came nearer, leaving sounded more like a good idea. I wasn’t sure if I continued to stay much longer if I would end up like one of these violent and emotionally turbulent guys armed with a pistol. Steve and Eric made it quite clear they had guns, but I wasn’t sure about some of the others.

“You’re splittin’ up the team,” Greg said after I put in my two week’s notice towards the end of July.

What a turnaround. We went from that explosive cursing war in the kitchen to him expressing regret that I was leaving. Despite getting in a couple of those with Scott as well, he also seemed disappointed that I was leaving.

“You always come back to Polk County,” Eric said when I expressed uncertainty if I would ever return.

“NOOOOOO!!! WHYYYYYY!! You complete me!” Steve said jokingly when he realized I was about to leave. There was some truth in his words, though. Steve and I had a certain respect for each other, not in the usual sense. We both respected each other as equal but opposite, like Batman and the Joker. In Tim Burton’s interpretation, Batman wouldn’t even exist without the Joker, and in The Animated Series, the Joker became discontented with life when he thought Batman died. There were times when we hated each other, times when we laughed together, times when we wanted to fight each other, but there was something undeniable about us. We were each other’s opposite number in life, more than anyone else on earth could be for us.

I considered him to be my greatest nemesis, both equally strong as he was intelligent, while it’s hard to know exactly what role I played in his life, but there’s no doubt I had some kind of influence on him during our many conversations and exchanges. If I could describe him in an unusual way, I’d say he was like my dark side, blown up, exaggerated, and given form so I would have no way but to notice what I’ve been denying about myself for so long.

Steve had a god-complex. I’ve also struggled with thinking I was the source before. His ego was immense. I once told him his ego was bigger than my whole family, and responded by saying, “There’s a reason for that.” He did get humbled in front of me once, though. His server ally Allen who was also alright with me was the one who did it. Steve and I had a small argument in the kitchen, and both of us went up to Allen as he was dumping silverware in the dish room.

“Who’s the MAN, Allen?” Steve demanded to know.

Allen took only one second to think about it, pointed towards me, then walked off. Steve looked like his ego left him out in the rain as his mouth opened up and his eyes reflected despair. Maybe that was justice for when he left his date on the Saint Petersburg bridge, or at least a start.

Steve was intense, magnetic, and had penetrating eyes. People were also saying that about me. Steve liked to mess with people. So did I, but I felt like he often went too far with it. How were we so similar but so different at the same time? He did have some important characteristics that I lacked, like the ability to focus on any one thing intensely at a time. This ability I did have, but it only came out at certain times, like when I was painting. It’s hard for me to believe that working at Ryan’s was left to a game of chance. My next door neighbor Diana told me about the job when I first arrived in Florida, and it was too easy to get hired. Such a difficult but purposeful and powerful encounter comes only once in life.

About a week before I left, a small group of us from Ryan’s decided to go out. This wasn’t my first time going out with a group of people from Ryan’s. Allen, his girlfriend Stacey who was also a server, another server named Marina and I started a night out at Applebee’s and ended up at a place called Shooters which was way out somewhere. I was completely in the passenger seat because I didn’t know Florida or any of the places we were going to. This time we decided to go to a bar not so far away.

I overheard some of the servers talking before we headed out.

“Steve said he doesn’t want us treating him like the boss when we’re at the bar. I was like, ‘We don’t treat you like the boss even when we’re AT work!’”

I was one of the first to arrive at the bar. I saw them all come in through the front door one after the other, and Greg had this walk like he was invincible and, “The king has arrived” look while he was smoking a cigar. I never saw him try so hard before.

We all had some drinks, some people danced, then somehow Steve and I ended up playing against each other in pool. It was a long match that came down to the last ball. Anyone could’ve taken it, but I managed to sink my last ball, and then the 8. All my coworkers cheered for me. Everyone knew Steve was the villain, but nobody could deny his presence at all. Instead of showing me contempt, Steve actually shook my hand in his cool and emotionless way.

“You’re welcome to come back,” Steve said as he shook my hand again near the front entrance to Ryan’s on my last day.

“Come back and I’ll make you a manager,” Sue, the GM said.

It was a very interesting stay in Florida for the last five months. It was my first time to leave home, but soon I would be back. Not sure what exactly my next move would be, I got in my car and headed back to Wisconsin.

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