It Feels So Good When I Stop Read Free Page B

showing a veteran waiter the “real” right way to do something.
    Rita wiped the bar in front of us with her Cain and Abel arms, then disappeared back into the kitchen.
    “Man,” I whispered, “what’s up with her arms?”
    “Arms, nothing.” Richie leaned over the bar to make sure Rita wasn’t kneeling down just out of sight. “I swear to God, her bush is so big and dense. It’s like she’s wearing gorilla panties.”
    I cracked up.
    “It’s like an enormous crown of black broccoli. No, shit, some topiary guy should shape that thing into some low-income fucking housing.” Richie rattled off another few hilarious suggestions for what should be done with Rita’s pubic hair. He was killing me.
    Rita’s head appeared through a window in the swinging kitchen doors.
    “Chill,” Richie said. “She’d be bummed if she heard us.”
    “Really?”
    Rita started restocking the beer fridge. She poked her head over the bar. She could sense something was up. “What the fuck did you do?”
    Richie smiled like a guilty schoolboy whose tracks were pretty well covered. “What are you talking about?”
    “Exactly,” she accused. “With that grin on your face? You must have done something.”
    “You’re paranoid is what you are.”
    “You’d better steer clear of this one,” she said to me.
    “Just do your job,” Richie barked.
    Rita flipped him off, then refilled our drinks when the coast was clear.
    A few of the frazzled waitstaff were reorganizing the dining room at high speed. Patti Smith’s “Frederick” was coming over the sound system. A chubby, middle-aged waiter named Dennis was fitting a matchbook under the leg of a table with polio.
    Richie called over to him. “Hey, Menace. You know the band Anal Cunt?”
    “Sounds yummy,” Dennis said, camping it up for us. He had nico-tinted, thinning blond hair and acne scars on his temples.
    Richie and Dennis were friends. They were big basketball fans and used to go watch UMass games together before the team got good and tickets scarce. I hated basketball. Too much contact with other people’s sweat.
    “They have a tune called ‘Pepe, the Gay Waiter.’ I think you might like it.”
    “Tape it for me.” Dennis meant it. Richie meant it when he said he would. Dennis pushed on the table to gauge whether it had been cured.
    “You think Camby’s gonna go pro?” Richie asked.
    “I would. Why risk millions for a degree from UMass? What if Dr. J had stayed and blown a knee or something?”
    “Bet you’ve blown a few knees in your day, huh, Menace?”
    Dennis chortled, then moved to the next table, also checking it for wobbliness. It was after midnight, just about that time when restaurant people want to get the fuck home, get the fuck drunk, get the fuck fucked, or any combination of the three. Richie took a stolen langos tino from his breast pocket and popped into his mouth.
    “Yeah, you can’t quit yet,” he said. “Stick around. Make a little scratch and rob that fat fuck blind.” He spit out a speck of shellfish, which I could still feel minutes after I’d wiped it from my cheek. “You know anyone who needs to rent a room?”
     
    A MONTH LATER Richie and I were sharing the second-floor apartment in a melting Victorian on Amity Street. A few more years of student tenants, and the whole house would need to be gutted or demolished.
    When I moved in, my room smelled like a Habitrail cage. The windowsills were coated with a gritty plaque that made my nails black. The light fixture on the ceiling was full of roasted bugs. There was a poster of three shapely women in bathing suits—their six breasts abreast to form the Budweiser symbol—tacked up, alarmingly, at a height corresponding to that of an average man’s crotch. I removed the poster—carefully—revealing a series of steel-toed-boot holes. When I asked Richie if he knew what it was all about, he said the previous tenant, Gary, was trying to hide the booze-inspired damage so that he