Oddly, Scott told me Gregg said that he thought I was going to beat him down that night. Gregg was a big guy and seemed pretty intimidating, so I thought Scott was just trying to get my head pumped up so I’d make a fool of myself. Scott was not anyone to trust at all. Manager Steve’s policy towards Gregg was, “Just don’t make him mad,” and said to me, ”So what do you want me to do after I get done pulling Gregg off you?” I just laughed.

One of the other daytime cooks, Eric, was just a couple years older than me and was from Tampa. Lakeland was conveniently located almost perfectly in the center between Tampa and Orlando. I had a lot of fun in those cities as a child, and I was planning to get back to them soon to see what was currently going on in those places.

Eric was a couple of inches taller than me, was about 30 lbs. more than me, had a buzzed hairstyle and a thin mustache and goatee. He walked around like his head and his arms were the heaviest parts of him. The most noticeable thing about him was his eyes. He had those stone-cold blue eyes that were intense but emotionless and seemed to glaze over everything without changing expression. I call them “shark eyes,” and a lot of people in Florida seemed to have them. Steve was also from the Tampa Bay area, and by far had the most penetrating gaze I’ve ever seen. When he would come to the kitchen window to ask for something, it was like he was looking straight through me, not at me, and I couldn’t possibly keep anything from him.

Eric was one of those guys who seemed country with an ounce of hood in him. He had several ways of greeting me, all of which were unnecessary.

“Imma killa!” sometimes he would say.

I’ve seen two types of killers, the kind that have a permanent look of regret on their faces, and the kind that are almost empowered by it. With those eyes, I wouldn’t doubt he did something to someone somewhere before, but he was also kind of a joke to me. He wanted to be taken seriously most of the time, but he jabbered so much that he often just sounded like a fool. Manager Steve called Eric and Scott, “The Talking Twins,” because most of the time they talked but never did anything. Steve actually told me Scott called him out back to fight once, and Steve said, “Do you have anything to say before you get smacked?” He then said Scott turned around and went back inside. Steve was a pretty intimidating guy. You just didn’t know what was inside of his mind. His facial expression rarely showed it, though his presence was impossible to ignore.

Another greeting Eric had for me was, “Lill *****!” I would say back to him, “Medium-sized *****!” He wasn’t much bigger than me, but it would be pretty lame if I said the exact same thing back to him, not that what I said was super exciting or funny. It just made the point that I wasn’t taking his garbage. Sometimes he’d say, “Mutha*****! That’s that mutha*****! He’d also say, “You ain’t in Wisconsin no more,” and call me a “****** Yankee.”

One day Eric walked into the kitchen and kept his eyes on me longer than usual as he walked by me with almost an evil grin on his face.

“Why are you looking at me like you’re gonna pull out a .45 on my ***?” I asked.

“You just had to say .45, didn’t you?” Eric said as he laughed. “I got one of them!”

I was definitely swimming with the sharks here in Florida. It seemed like they all collectively decided I was a fish in distress, but I’m not sure where they got that idea from. Maybe I was too kind, and it stood out. “You can’t be nice here. You’re in big bad Florida now,” Scott said to me.

Just about the only one in the kitchen who wasn’t out to get me was a man in his early thirties named Pokie. Pokie had a very round body type that seemed to be neither fat nor muscle. He had a shaved head, a single earring, and a couple of gold teeth in his mouth. His eyes were kind of googly, but there was an intensity to them underneath. He had mentioned that he studied grappling and looked quite strong. He talked about having an arm wrestling match with Steve and said he’d put him through the wall, but it never happened. Pokie was never mean or threatening to me and usually had a smile on his face, but sometimes he would take his little jabs at me.

“I heard you and Gregg done kissed and made up,” he said.

Then he started making smooching sounds and puckering up his lips with his eyes closed. Pokie was goofy most of the time, sliding around on the grease on the kitchen floor unfazed by it and talking and laughing with other employees during rushes when I was trying to keep from drowning on the other side of the kitchen, but like most people, he had another side to him.

One afternoon, Pokie and a few servers and I were in the banquet room that we used as a break room when it wasn’t occupied, which was at least 90 percent of the time.

“I don’t know why people are always talking about Andrew. I never see him do anything,” one of the female servers said.

I felt slightly relieved that someone else said it and it wasn’t just in my thoughts.

“There IS a devil in him, though,” Pokie said as he pointed at me.

I raised one eyebrow. “What did he mean by that?” I thought.

Then Pokie went on to talk about himself a bit. Pokie smiled a big toothy grin and pointed to his mouth with both hands.

“When I get mad, you see this? IT AIN”T GON’ BE LIKE THIS!” he said with his slightly raspy voice that was like a less exaggerated version of rapper Ja Rule’s voice, but the two looked completely opposite.

On Saturday mornings, I was expected to make bread dough, put it on trays in little globs, cut fruit, tie up rotisserie chickens, and handle truck deliveries all at the same time. To make it worse, the deliverer would drop off all the boxes on the kitchen floor, which was already small enough.

“You know you’re supposed to put this stuff away, Andrew,” Pokie said.

“I know,” I replied.

After a while I finished some of my other tasks, then put the boxes of food and supplies away. The next time I saw Pokie, I was proud to announce that I put everything away.

“Man, you shoulda BEEN had that stuff put away!” Pokie said.

“Come on, you’re a big dude! All you have to do is go ‘BWAHH! BWAHH! BWAHH!’(making thrusting actions), and the stuff just flies out your way!” I said.

Pokie squinted his eyes and shook his head.

“Whatever, man…” he said with complete disgust.

That was the most irritated I had seen him so far. I guess he wasn’t having jokes in the morning, but it was still angelic compared to my interactions with the other guys.

One afternoon as Pokie was getting ready to head home, Steve came up to him in the kitchen window and asked him to stay and cut up the cooked lemon-pepper rotisserie chickens for the mega bar. After Steve went away, Pokie shook his head and looked seriously disgruntled.

“Nah, man! Imma bout to SHOOT HIS ***!!!” Pokie said.

“Come on, man. Just go home. I’ll cut the chickens,” I said.

Pokie didn’t verbally acknowledge what I said, but he slowly walked out of the kitchen glancing back at me with a look of bewilderment on his face.

Steve and I had kind of a strange relationship dynamic. My first impression of him was that he would try to kill me someday, but I couldn’t help but admire some of his traits. The intensity and singular focus he had was in a class of its own. “Stick with me and you’ll be fine!” sometimes he would say with his extra loud and slightly high-pitched voice. He would occasionally put me through physical challenges, like holding a large bag of raw chicken straight in front of me in the air and lifting two large boxes of yams stacked on top of each other up over my head. Because everyone was after me, sometimes I would have to do a little talking, so Steve would call me out on it and I’d do my best to perform.

“You know, you wouldn’t be half bad with my advice. Right now you’re hanging from a cliff. Scott already fell off the cliff, but you’re still hanging on,” he said.

There was almost a big brother-little brother theme to it, and he did call me little brother one time. The biggest problem with Steve, however, was his ego. My next-door neighbor Deana who got me the job a month or more earlier complained about how he would silently expect everyone to get out of his way, and he actually said something to her that got her boyfriend José fired up. He came to Ryan’s one day and confronted Steve about it, which he did apologize for.

“A guy like that will go down real easy,” José said.

I was imagining how that was possible, because Steve was a pretty big guy, practiced martial arts, and just didn’t look like someone you wanted to mess with. At times he barely even seemed human, and I was pretty sure he might’ve killed someone before or at least had been responsible for someone’s death. Since José himself was a martial arts veteran, I suppose he could make that call.

Steve would often say to people, “You wanna be like me.” He walked and spoke with supreme confidence. One time he said that to me as well.

“You’re always saying that to people,” I said.

“Everyone wants to be like me. Everyone wants to be like something,” he said.

“And who do you want to be like?” I asked.

“In the end it’s only me,” he said.

He even called himself God before and didn’t appear to be laughing.

One afternoon Pokie came into the kitchen and told us that someone stole his car.

“What kind of car is it?” I asked.

“It’s a green Mustang convertible,” he replied.

“OK,” I said.

I’m not sure why, but for some reason, something within me told me I could find his car, even before the police. The next day was a Saturday, and I set out for a cruise around Lakeland to find Pokie’s stolen car. I barely knew the city at all, but that didn’t matter to me. I was determined.