Above their uniforms, which are tuxedos, they’re turned out in yarmulkes; they’ve grown silken beards to complement their payos, like thin and greasy noodles: it’s as if they’ve been waiting to wait upon an opportunity such as this, any service that might serve them a customer, any customer as they’re always right, as is the custom of their abject gratuity; as the evening’s third and last seating has long turned over (the earlybird special tonight was young Szechuan duck, which’ll find its way into tomorrow’s soup), and since then they’ve been bored, staring their slits at the blank quartz clock over the desk of the cashier; sitting at twotops after having finished their own meals as their fortunes have finished them, unsettlingly sated and tired with little or nothing left to do: some smoke opium from pipes as long as nightmare, extensive stems of bamboo, fitted for the drug with the bowls they’d use for tea or rice; others toke hashish imported from Palestein, rolled tightly in their surplus of outdated menus: with their slick, quick tongues they lick to let the bones burn slower; then flick their ash at the murmur of the fountain, its pool lined in plaster stones and shards of broken china, pennies without wish; a few play dead with those delicious porcelain dogs: fetch the chopstick isn’t working. In the kitchen, busgoys wash to their wrists, then rub the Buddha’s belly for luck with the nightly splitting of their tips: wishful thinking, they’re lucky to still have any hands to wait on. The last few straggling regulars having unfurled their fortunes as wide and as whitepure as napkins with which to wipe their lips, then scurried out the door, with menus held over their faces, praying to avoid the eyes of their employers’ spies, their family’s informants. What’s more, the latenight takeout rush hasn’t delivered on any hope of late, not fast enough at least, ever since this block went and zoned itself for imminent conversion; it’s natural, where more Affiliated than here, their historic home, once upon a time. The new laws aren’t the problem, though, not their most pressing (hahaha: a few of the waiters are planning to open a laundry), it’s inadvertent, effect — it’s business, it’s cash. And the intolerance, the discrimination, terrorism even: a week ago — and this after a moon of threats from who exactly you think they’re dumb enough to name; they’d run up a tab, then walked them through how it was going to go down — their windows’d been smashed in and so they had to shutter their other place, sell off the appliances for scrap as it was all already treyfed up, porktainted. Trash had been set on fire. A waiter smacked around. Another week as empty as this and they’ll have to go kosher or else, shut it down.
Excited, apologetic (don’t they recognize Him, how could they; they’re not allowed to, and anyway, that’s another’s ghetto), with an entire menu’s worth of the derisive servile, the whole industry’s trade of humble bows and modest blinks, the waiters serve Him warm inside. The youngest busgoy, hoping to make cashier or heaven by dint of his good deeds, dashes out again to retrieve the half left of B’s blackboard, a chipped length remaining from His chalk. His slime to stain the doorjamb, Him to track His incoherent trail atop their priceless rugs, dizzying in their symmetry, in the intricate integrity of their patterns; to destroy, then, their wonder in the wander of His mad — don’t worry, they assure Him, it’s fine by them, they were thinking of remodeling. In fluent Affiliated accent they insist on messaging His wife, on phoning His son or daughter, that they should pick Him up. Have a meal here, or three. Halfoff, or that of two for one. How nextdoor, too, there’s this shvitzbad staffed by nominal Slavs: present them with your check and they’ll beat your back with tiny trees at cost. He rises from the chair where He’d been seated, goes to retrieve from the table adjacent that sharp shard of board and hint of chalk.
I have none, I write.
No wife? they ask.
Just me.
What’s He waiting for they want to know — us, too.
Dim Sum, the maître d’, the only one with a black cummerbund (all the others are in red), and matching vest shiny with appetites of wear, disappears into the kitchen, returns with a pot steaming, then with three fingers holds open His mouth and shut His nose to ply Him with the potion, pours cup after scalding, soured cup down B’s throat, says, Swarrow!
As if to say, thisee will’a help you…one Wan Lo takes it upon himself to finish the sentiment: it should stop the dlopping, then bows wan and low to his boss and guest.
All He can think to thank them with’s an old joke, that Taste my soup! routine…remembering, though, that nothing’s ever funny when you have to spell it out, screeching chalk on board.
One hundred apologies, Dim Sum says, but this will not help stop His dlopping…
What? which B, His board cleared for the pot, spells atop the table in an artful arrangement of six pairs of chopsticks.
