The last party I worked was a gallery opening. That was hard. When the clientele was close to my age, when young men and women I wouldn't look at on the street demanded a refill of wine, an extra cajun battered shrimp, some more of the olive tapanade on garlic toast, I had a hard time. They were my peers and I cannot serve peers with dignity. I'm no The Remains of the Day butler. He was a quiet Englishman content with his lot in life. He had no slash between his work and his desires and in that there is calm.
            I wasn't cut out for subservient work. But I made a living at it. Food service became what I did and so I did it. Nine to fives are fine but not when you hate fluorescent lights, suits and ties, getting up to the sound of an alarm clock five days a week. That life wasn't for me. Not that I was cut out to offer people hors d'oeuvres on silver trays. To make sure that the piece of cilantro stuck out of the capanata tartlet at a pretty angle. To stand behind a chafing dish and serve up medallions of veal. To arrange the lemon peel garnish so that it didn't touch the snap peas. To listen to the anal compulsive orders of catering captains who spent so much time discussing napkin folds that they lost track of the big picture, to get the food out as quickly as possible. Still, the money was relatively easy and, at least at first, it gave me the illusion that I was free to do as I pleased.
            I didn't fit into the catering world. For one thing, I was straight. How many straight New York cater waiters does it take to screw in a light bulb? Both of them. It was almost true. There was me and sometimes another straight cater waiter, sometimes two. At the big functions, the celebrity weddings and fund raising parties, there were sometimes more and even a couple of women sometimes. If it was a new job where no one really knew each other, the straight guy would inevitably approach me. Not that I wear my sexuality on my sleeve. Not completely. I do walk with a strut. I do wear a Ringside hat pulled low over my forehead when I'm up early, haven't showered, just want a cup of coffee and eggs over anonymously. I do talk with a hard voice when I talk to strangers, giving nothing but always polite. But the straight guys would almost always approach me, test the water, say something about baseball or football or point out one of the female customers, dressed up in a slit skirt or low cut blouse. I gave them nothing back. If they were that worried about being straight then they were in the wrong business. The gay guys tested me too, in their own way, checking to see if I was possible. They figured out I wasn't pretty quickly.
            After the guy told the joke about straight cater waiters, he caught my eye, smiled, and then kept going with his comedy routine. When I think back on it I wonder if his smile was to acknowledge that I was straight and that he meant no offense if any was taken. Or if it was more. If he smiled because he knew it was time for me to get out. I thought about that smile sometimes, a peaceful and knowing and kind smile as if he was offering a benediction, a blessing for a safe and happy departure.
            What was I? What the fuck was I? A question I asked myself and asked myself out loud sometimes as I stumbled back to my apartment, tux bag in hand, beat up from a night's work, drunk from having healed my subservient wounds with beer and bourbon. What I was and what I wanted to be were two separate things, pulling me like two separate magnets and, like magnets, the two never touched. Like most of Manhattan's food service employees, I too had a slash between the waiter and the art of choice. My slash was not apparent in constricting bow tie, starched white shirt, dry cleaned tux, stiff black shoes. Even I was surprised sometimes when I caught myself in the mirror after I'd taken a shit, careful not to wash my hands for the customers, a very conscious choice. Me, I wanted to write. I'd written some stories. Had one published two years ago. I even had a novel in the works about a baseball player who wanted to break into the majors but couldn't hit the inside fast ball. The parallel was pretty clear. And baseball could sell, at least that's what I was counting on. What I wanted to do.
            What I did was cater. It was a job. It paid well. It gave me some free time during the days to do some writing if I wasn't too hung over or too tired from picking up a woman in a bar, going back to her place, sweating out that food sweat with a cleaner sweat which was another way I healed the wounds of subservience. Catering paid the rent, the food, the copying fees, the postage, the ink for my printer. I worked as a cater waiter to keep my slash going, the part of the slash I wanted to become and was not. I had stopped browsing the bookstores. It hurt to flip the dust jackets and see pictures of men and women smiling at the camera, justified in their work and justified in their life, immortalized as writers and calm, as calm as a butler who is happy to be a butler. Calm because there was a throughline to their lives. More and more of the pictures were of men and women younger than I was and that wasn't very pleasing. Ten long years in the food service industry. A whole decade. How many napkins folded? How many pieces of silver set? How many entrees served? Coffee cups filled? Crumbs crumbed? Desserts cleared, some half eaten and some completely, plates scraped clean, prong marks across a smudge of butter cream icing the only sign that something sweet had been there? The answer to all of these questions was easy. Too fucking many. I was in the last stage of my food career. Busing to waiting to bartending to french serving people at Park Avenue weddings while I wore my tuxedo, cummerbund, white gloves when the client requested them. White gloves that looked neat, kept the germs away, made your hands sweat so your nails were a bluish white for half an hour after the party was over and the guests had long taken their taxis home.
            There were too many young people in the art gallery that last evening. It would have been easier if they hadn't been so young. It was a basic Soho opening. On Greene Street. Champagne. Wine. Bottled Water. Passed Hors D'oeuvres. Basket of Crudite. Basket of Cheese. Three Chafing Dishes. A Slicing Station for Filet Mignon. I looked around the gallery. At the real faces and not the images of faces hanging on the walls. Most of these young people probably worked shit jobs themselves but here, out on the town, able to discuss art without lugging racks of wineglasses around, here they took full advantage of their slashless moment.
            They were a demanding group. The kitchen was having a hard time keeping up with the food, filling up the doily laced trays of hors d'oeuvres. The captain, a good looking man with wire rimmed glasses and a little mascara on his eyes, told me to go out and bus for a while. I walked through the crowd to the far end of the room where there was a little more space.
            I picked up a crumpled napkin with a half chewed radish in it, put it on the tray. I looked at the photographs of famous people on all the walls. Some of the photographs I had seen before. Covers of Rolling Stone. Selections from a Mapplethorpe exhibit. Annie Lebowitz shots. The one of Meryl Streep taking off a facial, shedding a layer of fake skin to reveal her own. The actress at work, shedding a created layer for the real layer. I too wanted to shed my skin. My tuxedo was on too securely. My bow tie too tight even if it was a clip-on. My sleeve buttons digging into my wrists. I would burn my tux one day. It was the common fantasy of all cater waiters. I would throw a party and burn it and ask the other cater waiters at the party to do the same, toss tux upon tux into a pile and from the pile a Phoenix would rise that would be as smooth and clean as the perfect skin of Ms. Streep and that Phoenix was freedom, or at least freedom from subservience, or at least freedom from serving, or at least freedom from picking up crumpled napkins with half eaten food hidden inside. Freedom from working with food, food smells that permeated your skin, that, unconsumed, took your energy instead of giving you energy. Freedom to do the work I wanted to do. I squared my shoulders and walked towards an empty wineglass placed in the corner of the gallery. I was in no mood. Beware the lackey.
            A woman dressed in black stood in front of a photograph of Jack Nicholson. Black motorcycle boots. Tight black mini skirt. A black T shirt she kept untucked, that came down to the top of her perfectly rounded ass. I liked the way she stood, very casual, her weight on one leg, her thin hip pushed slightly out, away from the wall, not trying too hard to be Soho cool to make up for whatever slash she was into but not fulfilling. She seemed to be really looking at the photograph. In the photograph, Jack Nicholson had his smile going, his wild eyes lit up. I slowed to look at the woman and my eyes were on her face just at the moment that she turned from the photograph and she looked at me, held my eyes, kept her eyes open and accessible and just when I expected her to harden them she only made them more open and smiled a smile that was like the one in the Nicholson photograph behind her. It was a prettier smile but it had some of the same dangerous confidence and I liked that. I kept my eyes hard, my way of showing danger. The woman took a step toward me.
            "Hi," she said.
            "Hello."
            "This party must not be very fun for you."
            "You're right. The clientele is much too young."
            "I used to hate that."
            "When was this?"
            She pulled her hand through her dark hair.
            "Before. Are you an actor?"
            "No."
            "You look like one. In a good way."
            "As long as it's in a good way."
            "I like your face," she said.
            "Thanks."
            She smiled. I looked at her eyes and she tilted her head to the left. I stayed on her eyes and her eyes stayed open and I kept my eyes on hers and started to recognize what was there. I had seen such eyes before. In certain people wandering the streets late at night. In some of the people at Bellevue where I'd gone one early morning to visit an aunt who had lost it one night. Where Nicholson put on a show, this woman in black was not acting at all. She was off. There was a distance in her eyes that did not fit with her easy manner or maybe that was where the easy manner came from. She kept her head tilted to the left. She kept her eyes open.
            "I like your face," she said.
            "What about you?" I said. "You an artist?"
            "I like to go to galleries."
            She came closer to me. I could smell the conditioner she used on her hair. There were strawberries in it. I stayed where I was. She was a beautiful woman and her distant eyes were clear and green with small explosions of gray.
            "Don't be angry," she said.
            She kissed me on the mouth and slipped the tip of her tongue between my lips. Then she moved back.
            "Please don't be angry," she said.
            I started to imagine the history of this woman as I looked at her, her head tilted again to the left, her smile more in her eyebrows than in her mouth now. Was she the insane daughter of some rich Park Avenue family, able to cruise the city without working? Was she an escaped patient from an upscale home, well versed in the art world from her younger days when she was free? Was she a Quaalude addict, spending someone's money to keep the warm buzz going on and on? Was she looking at the photograph of Jack Nicholson just to look at something or was she interested in his eyes, the way they could go close to the edge of crazy that was good for the movies but not always true to life? I started mapping out a plot. I would make her fall in love with me, bring her back to sanity, but in so doing her eyes would begin to cloud over with workaday worries and petty concerns. She would lose that which made her truly beautiful. No. That wouldn't be good. I stopped the split second story lines from coming into my head. I forced myself to just keep my eyes on her eyes, beyond using the moment for some story, beyond using her as some character. She seemed to see it when my eyes were used for just looking. Her smile came out in her mouth again.
            "I like your face too," I said.
            I felt a hand on my shoulder. The noise of the crowded gallery behind me came back. I turned from the dark woman in black and faced another woman in black but she was not comfortable in the color and her black stretch pants looked too tight, too rehearsed. She had short blonde hair, was pretty in an empty sort of way, soft features, light blue eyes. She was definitely younger than I was and she didn't seem very happy. She didn't seem to like my face at all.
            "Are you busy?" this new woman said.
            "Busy enough."
            "Obviously not."
            "What was that?"
            "Get me a glass of wine," she said.
            I looked back at my crazy beauty. She didn't seem concerned, her head tilted a little to the left.
            "Get you a glass of wine," I said to the blonde woman.
            "White wine. I like white."
            "Good. Then you'll know what to order when you walk across the room and go up to the bar."
            "Does that mean you're not going to get it for me?"
            "That seems like a pretty fair interpretation."
            "What's your name?"
            "Why?"
            "I work here," she said. "As a matter of fact, I'm the one who's going to make out the check for your catering company."
            "It's not my catering company. I just work for them."
            "Not for long," she said.
            I didn't bother watching her walk crisply across the gallery's wooden floor, her thick heels hitting the polished blonde wood with authority. No, I was looking at the dark woman with her head tilted to the left. I looked at her eyes and started to come up with more plot, her plot, her open eyes telling me of other spaces, not small galleries in this tight city but of real spaces, wide open spaces, deserts and oceans and wild plains where one could move freely.
            "Are you going to stick around?" I said.
            "Would you like me to?"
            "I'd love you to," I said.
            "You're sweet," she said and smiled and then she became very serious looking and I touched her arm and told her not to worry. I told her I was going to bus the room for a while, then see what happened. She said she would stay right here. I looked behind her, at Jack Nicholson, at his fake crazy eyes. I looked at his mouth. His smile was real. He had made it. He was having fun.
            "Believe me. It's nothing," I said.
            "You're not in great trouble?"
            "Not at all. This is going to be fun. You'll see."
            I circled the gallery. The place was pretty packed and I saw the two bartenders working furiously to stay with the demands for free champagne and wine and sparkling water. Always a demand when things were free. When my tray was full of empty glasses I went to the back room. The blonde woman was there. The captain was there. I readied myself for whatever confrontation he wanted to have. He was standing very straight, his lips tight. He was nodding his head every few seconds. I ignored them and went about my job, walked to the far corner where we'd set up the bus station. I took each glass on my tray, dumped its left over contents into a bucket, fit the glass into the appropriate rack.
            I have left other jobs. My father says it is my way of asserting myself, of putting myself in control because I have so little control in my life, so little control working for the bosses of the restaurant business. A definitely motley lot. A bunch of little people with a little bit of power. I have left other jobs with panache only my flourish is not just verbal as Cyrano's, at least not as verbal until the time he pulls his sword. l am not as eloquent. Even my writing is not as eloquent. In my manuscript about the ball player that can't hit the inside fast ball, my prose is simple. My character is a quiet hitter, he speaks with his bat when he can and when he can't he speaks a little more haltingly. I have spoken to past bosses. But I have accentuated my words with my hands. I have cornered my ex-employers, put them against walls, held them by their shirt collars. I once poured hot candle wax down a boss's pants when he criticized me in front of customers for not replacing the candles on time. I once took a boss into the kitchen, pressed his face close to a meat slicer and threatened to cut his nose off in pepperoni thin pieces if he didn't apologize to me for his arrogant behavior. He said he was sorry. I once waited outside on the street for a boss, a full eight hours after I quit. I was drunk, it's true, had gone out drinking to celebrate my new freedom from another rotten food service job. That ex-boss wasn't as happy to see me as I was to see him. I picked him up and dropped him in a dumpster on top of the grease from a fryolater, the bones from chickens and steaks and chops, uneaten vegetables congealed with cold butter. But I had always returned to the business I hated. It was easy money. Catering was the easiest money of all. But even easy money can become hard. I had promised myself that when my time ran out in the catering business, here at the pinnacle of success in my own private food service world, my resume from dishwasher to white gloved mannequin as complete as I wanted it to get, I promised myself I would never go back. I was too old for this. I was ready. I dumped the last glass, put it into the champagne rack, smiled a crazy smile just for me but it wasn't really crazy at all because it was just for me and I knew it.
            The captain called my name. I turned around, silver tray at my side.
            "Yes," I said.
            I would play the dummy, listen to what he had to say. I didn't hate this captain as I hated my bosses of the past. There the hate was part of a longer relationship. I had never worked under this guy before although I had worked under his type many times. Customer was king for him, as customer should be, and the customer in this case was a complaining blonde woman with a bug up her ass, responsible for footing the bill.
            "Ms. Malard says you were rude to her," the captain said.
            "Is that what Ms. Malard told you?"
            "That's what happened," the blonde woman said.
            "I was just talking to one of the women enjoying the party."
            "You weren't doing your job."
            "You're wrong there, Ms. Malard. I was doing my job. I served hors d'oeuvres earlier. I was busing empty glasses. I've been carrying around a silver tray." I lifted the tray for her to see and then let it rest at my side. The captain looked confused. Maybe he was new to his high position.
            "I'm paying a lot of money for this and I don't like his attitude," Ms. Malard said to the captain.
            "I had no attitude," I said.
            "I asked you for a glass of white wine and you didn't get it for me."
            "I was busy doing something else."
            "You were busy talking."
            "Is that true?" the captain said.
            "I think Ms. Malard is a little jealous," I said. "I think she was upset because the woman I was talking to was so beautiful and intelligent and Ms. Malard strikes me as the kind of bitter, insecure woman that gets upset when she sees women in a higher league."
            "I suggest you relieve this pig of his duties," Ms. Malard said to the captain.
            I watched the captain. The indecision made his faintly mascarad eyes blink nervously. I held the silver tray at my side, waited for the verdict.
            "I'm going to have to ask you to leave," the captain finally said.
            "Are you relieving me of my duties, sir?"
            In The Remains of the Day the old time butler saw dignity and integrity in his job, and that was fine, but times had changed and my goal in life was not to be a butler. Besides, that butler had cried at the end of the book and I wanted to go out laughing. What did Auden say? Something about it being harder to write about joy? I was feeling pretty joyful. I was plotting joy in my head. I handed the tray to my now ex-captain with panache.
            "Since I'm done here," I said, "I think I'll enjoy the party."
            "Since you're done here, I suggest you leave my gallery," Ms. Malard said.
            "Is that so, Ms. Malard. Or is it really pronounced Mallard? Have you ever fucked a duck Ms. Mallard? Has a duck ever fucked you? It might loosen you up a little."
            "If you don't get this man out of here I'll call the police," Ms. Malard said.
            "You better leave," the captain said. He was blinking pretty hard.
            "Captain, my captain. Have you ever wanted to just say fuck it to this whole catering business?"
            That stopped him but not his eyes.
            "I think I'll have a glass of that white wine you suggested," I said to Ms. Malard. "Do you want to get it for me? No? Don't bother, I'll get it myself."
            I turned around. Ms. Malard started yelling about calling the police but I kept walking. I squeezed through the bodies lined up for drinks and went behind the bar and grabbed a bottle of champagne from the ice. I popped the cork and let the bubbles splash down my arm, all over the sleeve of my tuxedo.
            "Cheers," I said to the two frenetic bartenders.
            I drank down half the bottle. I picked up another bottle, uncorked it, and went in search of my dark woman. I wanted to see her eyes, the explosions of gray, the open smile. We would drink to the end of my career. We would drink to freedom. I walked past Ms. Malard and her threats and through the crowd of people, the caterers in their black and whites moving around inconspicuously, as good caterers should. I saw my dark woman standing just where she said she would be. Her back was to me. She was looking at Jack Nicholson. I touched her shoulder. She turned around.
            "There you are," she said. She smiled.
            "Here," I said and gave her the bottle of champagne.
            "What do I do?"
            "Cheers," I said. "Drink up. We're going to celebrate tonight."
            "What are we celebrating?"
            "The end of an era."
            I hit my bottle against hers and she took a drink and I finished another quarter of my bottle, wiped the back of my mouth with my already wet sleeve.
            "I missed you," she said.
            "I missed you too."
            "I'm glad. Will you love me forever?" the woman said.
            "I can't promise that. I won't lie to you."
            "Don't lie to me," she said and her mouth turned sad.
            "I won't. But I can love you right now. That's the best I can do."
            "Right now is good," the dark woman said and the smile came back to her mouth.
            I traced a line from her ear, across her cheek, up to her eye. I moved my face close to hers and started to kiss her. Her lips were soft and her tongue was smooth and she kissed me like we had all the time in the world. I looked at her and she smiled and I drank the rest of my champagne and started on her bottle and I started to kiss her again and while we kissed I took off my tuxedo jacket. I fished around the front pocket until I came up with a pack of matches. There were old beverage napkins in the pocket and some leftover business cards from some of the catering companies I had worked for. All good kindling. I moved my face away from the woman's.
            She smiled, tilted her head to the left.
            I lit a match and put it into the pocket and it caught pretty quickly. The jacket started to smoke and then the flames picked up and I held the tux away from my body so the flames could reach high and high. I tossed the jacket to the side. It slid along the floor and stopped and the flames took it over, charring the black material blacker. A burnt offering to commemorate my freedom. All that was trivial and anal and subservient was going up in flames. People were flush against the walls, looking on. Ms. Malard, the gallery woman no longer paying my bill, was probably making her phone call. But I didn't care. The cops could come. Of them I wasn't afraid. A few days in jail was nothing. This was art for art's sake. We were in a gallery after all. I had catered too long, a defense as sure as any insanity plea.
            Some of the people started to applaud. I looked up. It was the other cater waiters. They were having a good time, holding their silver trays at their sides, watching what they had all thought of at least once. The cater waiter who had told the light bulb joke came to mind but here we were all united, beyond sexual preference. We were the French Servers. The Workers in Black and White. The ones who were forced to smile at the inane questions of customers who were supposed to be kings. This would be a story they would tell on the subways traveling downtown from uptown penthouses, in the large banquet rooms as they placed the silver, folded the napkins, watered the glasses. I was giving them something to remember. Another tale in the lore of cater waiters who had lost it. If nothing else, I was giving them a break from their duties.
            I went back to my dark woman. I kissed her. For the moment. Like I loved her now, right now. I could feel the heat from the burning jacket to my side and I could feel the heat of her mouth as she kissed me back, offering her love to me, not caring that there was a crowd around or a burning tuxedo. I looked at her face and she was smiling, a real smile and not one that was forced. Her eyes were open, her pupils large, pressing against the gray explosions in her green eyes. I smiled at her. There was smoke and applause in the background and Ms. Malard was yelling at us and so was the captain of the job but most of the calls were encouraging and I went back to kissing her in the middle of the gallery. It was like the last scene in a Hollywood movie but this wasn't Hollywood and my slash wasn't acting. I would go home and write. I would cut back on food, find a smaller place down on the lower Lower East Side, keep my jeans and T shirt on at all times. I would cut out one of the slashes, cut out the slash. I smelled the smoke and I heard a siren and I heard the crowd, all in the background, and I looked at the dark woman in front of me. She was smiling and I smiled back at her and she knew I loved her right now and I started laughing, laughing for myself and for her and for freedom, waiting for the Phoenix to rise from tuxedo ashes so I could fly on out of here.

                        Originally published in Mobius