"Mr. Tetch, would you like some more tea?" I asked. It was nearly 9:00, and he was my last customer, not counting Parker and his friends. I wasn't going to ask him to leave, but I was really looking forward to locking the door.
He had been drinking tea for hours. I couldn't believe he was still sitting there, not squirming.
The door opened one more time, and I resisted the urge to just walk out.
In walked a tall, thin man in a suit and funny-looking glasses, nothing special at all in Gotham City, but I knew him..
The Clock King (of course the Clock King, why not the Clock King) tipped his bowler to the Mad Hatter and then managed to look down his nose at me while he ran a gloved finger across the countertop. The results didn't please him.
I hate that type.
But he turned out to be an all right guy. We have some things in common. I may not be time-obsessed, but I do have a healthy respect for accuracy and efficiency. That, by the way, was not a trait that served me well in food service.
"Good evening," I said. The time was 8:55. "How can I help you?"
"You close at 9:00," he said stiffly. "What will be ready by then?"
Oh, so that's how it was going to be.
"Well, as you can see, we have rice and soup already on the buffet table. Wontons take about two minutes to cook, egg rolls take three, and Sweet and Sour Chicken takes just a little longer. If you want something else, Mongolian Chicken tends to come up pretty quickly. Just don't order dumplings or Teriyaki Chicken; they take the longest. But whatever you order, we won't kick you out if it's not ready by 9:00 on the dot." Much as I might have enjoyed doing so with the business end of a broom, some days.
"I would prefer to be gone by then." (Then come earlier next time, I thought. But I knew I wasn't being charitable. At least he wasn't trying to make me stay late.)
"I appreciate that," I said with a smile. "Sweet and Sour Chicken, then?"
"Yes. With white rice."
Twitch.
"Steamed rice," I said. He gave me a curious look. "The correct term is steamed rice." He nodded, and I could see that he understood me perfectly. Woot, finally. Good to have a customer who gets it, even if I did have to become Waitress to the Crazies to find him. (Side note: as a cashier, I never actually came out from behind the counter except to clean the tables, and they didn't even make me do that unless I judged it was safe.) "Would you like anything to drink with that?"
"Do you serve coffee here?"
"That would be perfect," I said. "But, no. We have tea, though. It takes three to five minutes to brew, so it should be ready about the same time as your food."
"Hmm," he said with a bit of a sneer.
"We also have soft drinks," I said, although he struck me as a little sophisticated for Mountain Dew. He looked at the drink machine behind me, and then at the sign above my head, which proclaimed 'PEPSI' in big, bold letters against a vivid blue background, and I knew that no matter what he ordered, he was not going to be one of the idiot-types who asked for a 'Coke.'
"I'll have a lemonade," he said.
"Oh." ('Oh' of surprise!) "Good choice." I lived off the lemonade at Waffle House before I got myself addicted to coffee, although of course that was a different brand. "Sweet and Sour Chicken, steamed rice, and one lemonade. Do you need anything else?"
I recognized the look on his face—I had been working there long enough to recognize a supervillain about to start on a major tirade—so I started pressing buttons on the cash register, almost at random, before he could start speaking.
"That'll be $6.63," I said cheerfully.
He paid cash. They always paid cash. That was good, of course, but it totally threw me off my rhythm.
In the weeks before the Joker noticed me (and I suspect that's how I'll always divide my life, Before and After the Joker) I developed a nearly flawless system like an easy dance. Easy in that I fell into it without a thought, and in a dreadfully mundane sort of way, it made me graceful. I would ring up the customer and say the price. Then when Mr. Customer was digging through his wallet, I would turn around and put a scoop of ice in the cup, then glance up at my dear friend, who by this time hopefully would have come up with some form of payment. If cash, I would simply smile and fill up the cup with whatever liquid Mr. Customer desired before taking the cash and making change. If credit, I would take the card and swipe it through the machine, which was quite elderly and probably on its last legs. While the machine was dialing, processing, and printing, I would fill the cup. Then, leaving the filled cup to catch the last drip-drops of carbonated water, I would turn around and retrieve the credit card and receipt and hand them to Mr. Customer. Then, to give him enough time to realize that I wanted him to sign the credit card receipt and give it back to me, I would turn back around, fill that last little bit of empty space where the drink had fizzed and died down, and put a lid on the cup if the order was to go. And if they still didn't get it, I could hold the drink hostage until I was paid.
Huzzah. A nearly flawless system. Only very rarely did someone manage to avoid being bludgeoned to death by my subtle hints. Only rarely did I have to tell a customer who had been waiting twenty minutes that, yes, that drink had been there literally the entire time, and only rarely did I end up printing a duplicate credit card receipt and signing it myself because I was fed up with trying to explain what I wanted.
The lack of credit cards threw me off quite a bit.
But the Clock King turned out not to be an idiot of Biblical proportions. He actually waited for me to make his drink and then, wonder of wonders, he took it and sat down. If all my customers were like him, I would have been as good an employee at Lai Lai as I was at the Awful Waffle. I wouldn't have been quite so scared of them if they had all been uptight jerks and not total lunatics.
Unfortunately, the lunatics outnumbered the jerks by a wide margin. And I was getting to the point where I could hardly keep straight who was likely to shoot me if I smiled, and who was likely to shoot me if I didn't.
I don't know what I would have done without Parker and his friends to keep me sane. When they dropped me off at my dorm that night, I told them that they were all my heroes. The time was 10:38.