Not a single renovation or repair had graced the faded exterior for all of the time that I had worked there, all three to four years or so of my employment, although the finer details are a bit murky due to a fair amount of negligence on my part and an exemplary amount of backbone on their part. There were always faces that had seemed to stick around throughout the ages and regardless of their frequency, they always were working in a perpetual sense of technicality, and by all rights I wished to be able say the same for myself and know for certain that I would be welcomed back like a wayward son. True to the words of the agreement, in approximately four and a half minutes the cab screeched to a final halt and launched a last assault on the eardrums of the populace, my mentally disregarded chauffeur now satisfied with his gracious offering he drove off into the macadam jungle of busy street corners at a reasonable pace as his muffler just narrowly refused falling to the ground. My eyes were scoping out the place, which much to my surprise actually had been given a once over in the not so distant past, a brand new coat of a lavish red was proudly and vividly inviting people into the restaurant. All hopes taken at face value, it was my best bet to try and find the manager an speak with him directly, although the burley beast most likely wouldn't be immeasurably pleased to see me coming to him. No matter the reasons behind my little visit today, in the back of his mind i'm sure he could put two and two together and rationalize why I might just so happen to be in the neighborhood, but in matters such as these I also knew that I might just have to swallow my pride over the past.
Entering further it was obvious that the entire place had been spruced up just a bit, and where there had been crayon marks sprawling up the length of the walls from inventive youth drug out by their parents in a desperate frenzy for peace and quiet when a babysitter was just out of the question, now a fine layer of patterned red white and framed stock images now hugged the walls. I stood off to the side as to avoid confusion and within minutes I was already being placed and flagged down by women who had been former coworkers of mine, although my memory was a bit fuzzy and for the most part I simply smiled and nodded along with their commentary as politely as I could. It was just my way, with my I had this very visceral mentality towards any place I had ever worked at, it was nothing more to me then a place I came to so many hours a week in order to get the money I needed. Nothing more. And trust me, it's not like some people might claim that I was just unimpressed or disenchanted with my current situation, I've had jobs all across the board and when it came down to it I was the same way...although in hindsight my attitude might have been part of my problem. I've been an usher and concession attendant at a movie theater, a fast food crew member in far too many places to go over fine details, I was a dishwasher in both family and fine dining, I did retail for a short time, and also spent roughly six months doing stock at a local grocery store where most of my job was them paying me to organize boxes. I know, its truly exhilarating work, but it was a job and considering what I had go through at the time I was far from being in a position to judge or be picky about where I was making my money. And they weren't all bad, each new job was a brand new experience and a new Halloween outfit to add to my closet and scare people, my personal favorite is a douse myself in fake blood and don my fast food uniform and just tell people im working in a dead-end job. Hell, at the movie theater I got to intimidate people with a flashlight and got catch a lovely young woman giving her boyfriend a blowjob through the cup holder, I didn't turn them in though...points should be given for the clever technique, and plus the movie fucking sucked enough that it needed a blowjob to make it bearable.
A large mass came out of the back of the kitchen and upon spotting me made his way towards my position, his expression a close stalemate between a victorious grin and a pained look of disappointment, I motioned upward at him with my head and extended my hand for a handshake but instead I was left hanging in the breeze until I retracted it back into my pocket. There was a moment of suffocating silence between the two of us, and in retrospect there wasn't much of a better expectation for how this was going to happen, and for the record I was standing in front of a man who had done much for me completely in the wrong for my own past transgressions. What did I do, exactly? The short, abridged version was that I became blinded by a woman, and the long version is that my duties became a secondary concern to me and I foolishly gave him everything but the middle finger after he stood up for me and stuck his back out for me. I never found myself asking to be an asshole or trying to let him down, after all he had actually a friend of the family as well which only added to the embarrassment, but time makes a fool of us all when we are so stupid to think we can burn a bridge and not have any consequences for it.
"Hey...Markus...how's business been?" I inquired innocently enough, but he didn't back down from his glare, but instead looked at me for a few more seconds before dismissively walking a few steps away and returning to his business.
"Alright, I guess, we're usually slow around this time of year. Is there something I can do for you?" He was peering into my soul, obviously trying to cut through the small talk and pleasantries as quickly as possible. Personally I didn't blame him.
"Listen, Mark, I...its just...i'm sorry for how I acted back when I worked here. I was putting other people in my life above all of my priorities, and because of it I sold out all of you, I just got lost in being a teenager...I thought something meant everything and it only turned out to be nothing. I didn't have the faintest clue about priorities, and as much as I don't expect you to, i'd...like my job back." I gulped loudly as I shakily said the lot of it without having once let my eyes lose sight of his, trying to be as sincere as I could, the memories were flooding in like the levy had broken and now there wasn't any filter to keep me from the things I had tried so hard to erase from my mind. Between hypnotism, copious amounts of meaningless sex, mental reinforcement, and even watching trashy television thinking that if I could damage my brain enough that I would have enough cells to process memory all together: I had done all that I could to keep myself permanently at a distance from my lapses in judgment. But now was the moment of clarity, this is where things were just plain enough, some things wait in the shadows of the subconscious until we can acknowledge them ourselves.
"I heard about what happened to your old man, it's fucked up, it really is. There were also some rumors circulating around you having a trip upstate, some people thought you had lost your fucking mind, they said we'd find you streaking up and down fifth avenue." You could tell from the glassy and glossed over look in his eyes that he was being slightly emotional at the mention of everything that took place, or at least the little that he had heard via osmosis, but from his last comment he managed to relieve the tension with a slight chuckle which I soon matched with a weak smile and a bit of laughter of my own. "I can sit here and yell and scream until i'm blue in the face but I don't think that would do any good, you came in here and had even sense to tell me what you did and something's telling me that you aren't fucking with me. Listen, kid, uh I mean...Brian, can you wait here a sec?"
His full name had been Markus Wilhelm, a man who had spent a vast majority of his life being established as a portly gentleman who was always dealing with his weight going up and down in quick succession, and when he wasn't having to contend with that he would be either out for a surgery to try and correct the problem or he'd be at work making awkward and inappropriate jokes. Or at least they seemed to be jokes from the sound of things, it was almost always hard to tell one way or the other because if they were jokes they never really had a distinguishable punch line, more or less just going for the pure shock factor. When I first started working for him I was a sixteen year old boy who hadn't even stepped out of his comfort zone, nor had I experienced a decent relationship or really any friendships to speak of, and so I stared onward with grandeur and lauded his tact. But as my former boss shuffled away from me with a sense of urgency that men half his size would dream of having, the main fact that was pounding its way into my train of thought was when he took back calling me a kid, even though it was never a derogatory term he had relented and merely called me Brian instead. In that moment Markus had realized something that even I was slow to accept, maybe for the fact that I had let the last year plus of my life go by the wayside without much of a thought to the future, and that fact was that i'm not a kid anymore.
"Hey Travis, it looks like you'll get Sunday's off, after all. You're fired!" He shouted from out of my sights but not far enough away that I could not hear, my jaw dropped at the sound of what he was saying, but then he swung back around and into frame to face me with a stance and expression that looked like he was ready for a victory dance.
"Sir, no offense and all, but I don't particularly feel comfortable getting my job back because you fired someone else." I was tense and to the point, quickly showing in my eyes that I was taken off guard that he had given me back my position, let alone lay someone off just to get me back.
"Don't worry so much, Brian. And besides, I would've fired him sooner or later regardless, he's a useless sack of shit anyway." Markus smiled back at me and gave me a hearty pat to the back in much the same way you might get encouragement from a high school football couch, a disgruntled teenager stormed out from the back of the restaurant with a sheen of acne gracing his face and a clueless expression. There were so many people that I had come across that had that same face, but then again it might have just come with the territory when you spend forty hours in public school just to go to work and have people telling you that you aren't really special. Some would go so far as to describe it as "special snowflake syndrome," where basically society sets you up for failure by not teaching you any real skills to prepare you for the workforce and you just simply sink or swim at a moments notice. But then again, he was young and had a little more time to get another job, I silently wished him the best.