They were being handed burgers fresh off the grill, asking customers how they wanted them garnished. That’s when I spotted Paul, standing at the grill, flipping burgers, living his life’s dream.
“Hey,” I said.
He didn’t hear me the first time, so focused was he on his job. He had a huge apron, which years ago might have been white, tied around his waist, a white cap pulled down over his hair.
“Hey!” I said, again, and Paul looked over, and his eyes went wide and his mouth opened.
“Dad?”
I just smiled and waved. He was working, and I didn’t want to interrupt him. I just wanted him to know that I was there.
He didn’t look at all happy to see me. But that’s the way it is with kids. They’re always embarrassed when their parents show up. Make an appearance at their place of employment, and they want the ground to open up and swallow them whole. I thought it was too bad I hadn’t worn something stupid, maybe a ball cap on backwards, to make Paul’s humiliation complete.
One of the twins had grabbed a cheese-covered patty off the grill and slipped it into a bun. “Whatcha want on it?” she asked me.
I started pointing to toppings. “Hold the onion,” I said.
“Peppers?”
“Sure, a couple.”
I watched her pile everything on, then put the burger, with some fries, into a takeout Styrofoam container.
“Dad, what are you doing here?” Paul was standing next to me, up very close.
“Jeez, hi,” I said. I looked to see who was on the grill. Another kid about Paul’s age had filled in for him. “So how’s it going?”
“Why are you here?” he asked again.
“I’m getting some dinner, okay? Is that a problem?”
“Dad, you can’t eat here.”
I shook my head. “What, did I embarrass you? All I said was ‘Hey.’ If they had a drive-through window, I’d do that, you wouldn’t even have to know I was here at all.”
“Dad, just…” He pulled me aside, away from the counter and toward the door. “Just don’t eat here.”
“What is your problem?” I said, shaking his arm off me. “I just wanted to show an interest, for Christ’s sake.”
“No, Dad, you don’t get it,” he whispered. “You can’t eat here. You can’t eat this stuff.”
I glanced down at my foam box and then back at him. “What, you’re watching my diet for me now? If I want to have fast food once in a while, I’ll have it. I had a cholesterol test six months ago and I’m fine, thanks for asking.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Paul whispered. “This place is a fucking death trap. The meat’s bad. I’ve been burning everyone’s burger all day, making sure it’s really cooked, just in case.”
“The meat’s bad? What, why?”
“You know that big thunderstorm last night? Well, the power went off here, and the freezer was off for hours, didn’t even come back on till, like, just before lunchtime, I guess, and everything had thawed out. The burgers had been at room temp for ages.”
I swallowed. “Are you serious?”
Paul looked over my shoulder. “You could get, like, cheeseburger disease from eating this. I can’t talk to you anymore. They might figure out what I’m telling you. Just don’t eat this, Dad. I don’t want you to fucking die on me.” He paused a moment. “I think the fries are okay, though. They’re actually pretty good.”
He turned to go back to his post and this time I grabbed his arm. “Wait a second. Are you telling me, all these people here, they’re eating potentially contaminated food?”
Paul shrugged. “Yeah, they are. But they’re not my dad.”
“Paul, cheeseburg—hamburger disease can kill people. It’s that E. coli virus or whatever. You can’t mess around with that. If these people are eating this stuff, they’ve got to be told. Has anyone been sick yet?”
“Some guy came in a while ago, said he got a bad burger at lunch, felt like he was gonna puke. He talked to Conan over there,” he nodded toward the woman on the register, “and she practically threw him out the door. She’s a fucking linebacker.”
I swallowed hard. My mouth was starting to feel very dry. Paul could see that I was pondering what to do.
“What?” he said. “What are you thinking?”
There was an elderly couple at one table, cutting a burger in half with a plastic knife. At the next table, a guy who looked like some sort of city worker, orange vest and jeans, hard hat on the seat next to him, chowing down on a double burger. And then, two tables over from him, a mother with two small children. She was unwrapping the foil covering on burgers for each of them.
“Kids,” I said, to myself as much as to Paul.
He looked around. “What?” he said.
“Kids can die,” I said. “They can die from hamburger disease. It can cause kidney failure.”
Paul’s eyes were getting wild with panic. “Jesus, Dad, what are you going to do?”
I was feeling pretty panicked myself. What, exactly, was I planning to do?
And then I just acted, without even thinking. I took a few steps over to the mother feeding her kids, bent down, and said to her quietly, “Don’t give them that.”
She looked at me, pulled back in surprise. “Excuse me?”
Paul, behind me, said, “Dad, what the hell are you—”
“The burgers,” I said, ignoring him. “Don’t let them eat the burgers. They had a power failure here. There might be a risk of E. coli and—”
“Oh my God,” she said, reaching across the table and grabbing the burgers out of her children’s hands.
“Mouuum!” one whimpered angrily.
The guy in the orange vest turned around, looked at me. “What did you say?”
“I just, I heard, the burgers, they may not be safe to eat,” I whispered urgently.
“Fuck,” he said.
The mother whirled around. “Do you mind?” She nodded toward her small children.
The guy in the vest turned around and tapped the older woman, the one sharing a burger with her elderly husband, and whispered something to her. He pointed at me, and when the woman caught my eye, I nodded.
“Dad,” Paul said.
“Thank you so much for telling me,” the mother said. “We come here all the time, although the kids usually want to go to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal and—”
“Dad,” Paul said.
“You see,” I told her, “my son just got a job here, and he was telling me that—”
“Dad,” Paul said.
Finally I turned around. The woman from behind the register was standing there, glowering at me.
“What you saying?” she asked. I noticed that, hanging from her right arm, was a baseball bat.
“What’s wrong, Ma?” asked the twin who’d put the toppings on my burger.
I tried to remain calm, nonconfrontational. “I had heard, I understand that your freezer went out. For several hours.” Tried not to make it sound like an accusation, more like a statement of fact.
“What you know about my freezer?”
“It’s just that, if the meat had been thawed for some time, there’s a risk that it could be contaminated. And I understand there’s already been one man who’d eaten here at lunch—”
She raised the bat. “Where you hear this?” She turned those black eyes on Paul. “You tell him this?”
Paul’s voice squeaked. “This is my dad.”
Eyes back to me. “You get out.” She brought up the bat, ready to swing, just as her two daughters started coming around the counter.
“I’ll have to call the health department,” I said, trying to stand my ground but knowing I was a moment away from bolting.
“Go ahead and fucking call them,” said the twin. “See what happens, Mr. Big Asshole.”
There wasn’t anyone in the restaurant who couldn’t hear what was going on. No one was eating. People were getting up, leaving their unfinished burgers on th
eir trays, not bothering to dump them into the trash.
Ma’s eyes bored into mine. “You go or I smash your fucking head in.” And then, to Paul, “You, you fired.”
He peeled off his hat, untied his apron, and tossed them over the back of a swivel chair. We both backed our way out and said nothing to each other until we were safely in the car and driving down the street. Blood was pounding in my ears.
“Way to go, Dad,” Paul said. “You just lost me my first job.”
Eldon wasn’t like the others. The others, well, they were like her father. Pigs, basically. Always with the jokes. Tit jokes. Ass jokes. Any kind of sex joke. You’re a stripper, people can say whatever they want to you. Even if you’re not a whore, you’re a whore. Grabbing your butt when they walked by, pressing themselves up against you at the bar, all hard under their jeans, even when you’re back in your regular clothes. What did she expect, exactly? The place was run by a bunch of biker types. You wanted a bunch of gentlemen? Go work someplace else, lady.
Eldon, he was one of them, but he wasn’t one of them. Didn’t even have an actual motorcycle. Had this old Toyota, the guys made jokes about him. He always treated Miranda, eighteen now, like a lady. Thought her name was Candace, though. He was the only one called her that. Everyone else called her Candy. Let’s have a lick of Candy, they said. I’d love to eat Candy, they said.
So dumb, she thought, coming up with a name like that. Thought it sounded like a good name for a stripper when she applied for the job. Stupid.
But Eldon, he called her Candace, talked to her like a person. Asked what she wanted to do with her life, like he knew she was destined for something better than wrapping herself around a pole for a bunch of horny drunks.
“I like numbers,” she said. “Maybe, like, something financial. Planning, or accounting, doing people’s books for them. I look around here, they’re wasting so much money. They could be saving a lot.”
“No shit?” he said.
“They have a course, at the college?” she said. “I’m going to see if I can take it, learn more stuff. I don’t like the dancing.”
“Yeah, you’re good though. You bring the people in.”
“They’d come in and watch anyone does what I do.”
“You should do what you want to do. You’re smart. No offense, but you’re too smart to be up there doing that, you know?”
She told him that Gary, the guy who ran the Kickstart, he kept pushing her to work upstairs, where lots of the other dancers made extra money on their backs, or their knees.
“That’s not right, him pushing you like that,” Eldon said. “Not right at all.”
He had a nice smile. Not huge. Just the corners of his mouth coming up, like he wasn’t just smiling, but he was thinking about why he was smiling. He did odd jobs for Gary, dope runs up from the city, upkeep on the Kickstart. The heavy-duty stuff, like when someone from the other gang in town started cutting in on your territory, and you had to go out and teach somebody a lesson, beat the shit out of somebody, blow up a car, that kind of thing, Eldon gave that a pass. Let Zane do it. Or Eldridge. They were fucking crazy. They were made for that kind of work.
Eldon thought it was great that Candace was going to take a course to better herself. “You got a car? If you don’t, I could drive you up to the college in my Toyota, you could check it out, this financial stuff. On days that you have a class, I could take you there, bring you back, we could get something to eat after.”
So he drove her up. She didn’t have the marks, or the money, to enroll full-time, but she was able to take a couple of courses. She was a natural. She’d dress real plain, bulky sweaters, try to look like someone else, in case some of the male students recognized her from stripping at the Kickstart. Eldon would come by when her course was over and drive her home. “Stop here,” she’d say along the way. “I gotta go in and buy the new issue of Money.”
She said to Gary—they called him Pick behind his back sometimes but not to his face—he could save some money by changing around some of the bartending shifts, he had too many people during the slow parts of the day, she could draw up a better schedule?
“The fuck you talking about?” he said. She explained it to him. He said, “Shit, you’re right.”
She had other suggestions for him, how he could negotiate better deals with his restaurant suppliers, how the girls upstairs could charge more for certain things some guys really liked. What the hell, as long as she didn’t have to do it. She told him how he could be putting his money from prostitution, and the cash from dispensing dope, in legit investments, make it look like it came through the Kickstart legally.
“How you know all this shit?” Gary wanted to know.
She shrugged. “I like this stuff.”
“Math,” Gary said, shaking his head. “I don’t get it.”
And he didn’t. Miranda figured that if he had to rely on profits from a legitimate business, he’d go tits up in no time. It was only because the markup on drugs was so high, the profits on prostitution so huge, that he managed to keep his head above water.
“You’re amazing,” Eldon said. “I’m gonna talk to Gary, see if he’ll put you in the office full-time, you won’t have to take your clothes off anymore.”
She took them off for him, though. He wasn’t the first man she’d ever slept with. But he was the first she slept with more than once. Was this what it was like for her sister and Don? How many men were there out there who weren’t total assholes? Had she and Claire found the only two?
Claire phoned her. Their dad had come out of a bar, looked the wrong way crossing the street, got flattened by a tractor-trailer hauling pigs to a plant where they’d be turned into bacon.
No shit. She had to laugh.
10
WHEN WE GOT HOME, I went straight for the phone book, hunting down the number for the city health department. I was rattled and having a hard time finding which section of the book it would be in.
“I just want it on the record,” Paul said, “that I did actually get a job, and that I lost it through no fault of my own. Okay?”
I found it under the listings for municipal government departments, then dialed the number. And got a recording. The offices were closed for the day. So who did you call when a health emergency occurred after business hours?
“So, like, do you expect me to get another job now? Are you and Mom going to gang up on me again?”
The fire department? The police?
“And what do you want me to do with this?” Paul asked. He was holding the Styrofoam container that contained my cheeseburger and fries. When I didn’t immediately answer him, he opened the cabinet door under the kitchen sink, where we keep the garbage bin.
“No!” I shouted. “We may need it for, I don’t know, evidence, to give the health department. Put it in the fridge.”
Paul screwed up his face. “What if somebody eats it?”
I opened the kitchen drawer where we keep all the odds and ends we didn’t know what to do with, like keys to unknown locks, bread bag clips, and batteries we aren’t sure are dead or still have a bit of juice in them, and picked out a thick-point Sharpie marker. I tossed it to Paul and said, “Put a note on it.”
I watched him write on the top of the white box, in big capital letters, “EAT THIS AND DIE—PAUL.” Then he put it on a middle shelf of the fridge, near the back.
I found a nonemergency number for the police, not wanting to tie up a 911 line with a call about a potential food hazard that might keep a call about a house fire from getting through. I was bounced from desk to desk, getting the same message at every stop. Not our job. Call the health inspection office in the morning.
“Shit,” I said.
Paul said, “What’s for dinner?”
I didn’t tell Sarah about the episode at Burger Crisp. I was responsible for enough chaos that she already knew about, I couldn’t see the sense in piling it on. I asked Paul if he’d mind keeping his mother out of the loop,
at least for now, about what had transpired, or how, exactly, he lost his job. “If your mother asks why you’re not going to work,” I said, “just tell her they hired somebody else instead.” Paul knew Sarah was mad at me, and he didn’t want to make things any more tense around the house, so he said okay. His conscience wasn’t the slightest bit disturbed by participating in a lie. This was troubling, but given the circumstances, I was also grateful.
“But that place,” he said, “it was really weird to work there. There were these people dropping by, at the back door, and they weren’t dropping off buns or meat or frozen fries or any shit like that. They’d drop off packages, and then later, someone else would come by and pick up the packages. And Mrs. Gorkin, the lady who ran the place? She didn’t think this was weird or anything.”
It sounded as though I’d gotten him out of there just in time.
The following morning, after another frosty evening with Sarah, I put in a call to the city’s health inspection department from my desk in the Home! section. I got, much to my surprise and in clear violation of my preconceptions about civil servants, a woman who said if I gave her enough details, she could probably find the health inspector responsible for the part of the city where Burger Crisp was located. I waited, hearing her tap away on a keyboard in the background, and then, “That would be Brian Sandler. Let me put you through to his extension.”
A few seconds, a ring, and then, “Sandler.”
I identified myself, told him I was calling from the Metropolitan but left it a bit murky as to whether this was a personal call or he was being interviewed for a story, and quickly told him what had transpired the evening before. Said at least one person, according to my son, who worked there, had come back to the restaurant complaining of food poisoning. That the owner, and her daughters, were not particularly open to discussing any possible problems with the menu. There was the matter of the baseball bat, for example.