The Fiddleback

fiction by A. M. Taureau

 

MANDY starts it when she throws a quarter into a customer’s lap. Since the price changes we’ve all been getting a lot of twenty-five cent tips. “Keep the change,” they say, and we don’t even need to do the math. We know. We also know that not since 1950 has that phrase meant actual change. It’s grown men, too. On dates. We look at the women who sit next to these chumps and wonder what the hell they see in them, with their bad shoes and their fried fish breath. Mandy wasn’t even having a bad night; it was just one of those urges we get. She’d had a couple of drinks, of course—we all do. After a couple years of playing it straight we’d finally call it a day and start drinking the large vodka and sodas—so large nobody would doubt our wide-eyed claims that they are, really, large Sprites. Even as we grow louder, looser. Splashing drinks on the smelly men and their hapless dates as the nights stretch on.

#

Burns flirts with the women customers. He tells them, “This round’s on me,” and he winks at them. They go for it, surprisingly often. He especially prefers tables of two women in their early thirties, just two friends out for a harmless, pleasant evening at a comedy club, because it doubles his odds. That’s what he says, “doubling my odds,” as though fucking customers was a Vegas game of chance.

#

We pretend our customers are attractive movie stars in order that we may conjure up enthusiasm for their presence and the opportunity we’ve been given to serve them. Burns and Annalisa—who often flip through Burns’ Hollywood gossip magazines before shifts—were initially the most enthusiastic, seeing as their frame of celebrity reference was much wider than ours. As time has passed, however, we have begun to find our own footing, the celebrities who suit our own interests. Even Darcy, who thinks only of surfing, now finds resemblances to familiar surf commentators buried within the faces of bloated, middle-aged women. “Hey!” she says, beaming brightly, expectantly, as though she’s been waiting for them to turn up. “I’m Darcy!”

#

We have gotten bored with the celebrity game and have opted to go in another direction, which is ignoring them. Some of our repeat customers, the ones who can’t get enough comedy, are confused by the change. These patrons, who were previously our revered Paul Newmans and Kelly Slaters, now find themselves inexplicably disregarded.  They come up to the bar in the back and try to ask us for drinks. “Shh,” we say, pointing at the stage. “There’s a show going on.”

#

Burns brought in a mixed CD to play before the shows. “Just play it,” he told us when we tried to pump him for details. It reveals itself to be Vietnamese chanting music, which disconcerts the customers. We play it at full volume, on a loop.

#

We talk about going out together, maybe sometime during the day. Even as we make these plans, we are coming up with excuses not to go. We shudder at the idea of seeing each other in clear light. We have no desire to see the ruined teeth and sallow skin; we are all older than we have realized. The nighttime lights allow us to accept each other and to laugh together. We are all more beautiful when we are at work.

#

We have been testing the limits of our all-black dress code lately. Burns added a vest, which prompts others to try jeans. Dark, or at least darkish, clothing becomes acceptable. Darcy, who is in general a rule follower, has opted for all-black pajamas. The floodgates of our imagination—of the possibilities—however, do not open until Mandy starts with the wigs.

#

The cricket noises we have been making for so long during substandard shows have begun to seem stale and lifeless to us. We give Annalisa money to buy real crickets from a pet store, in an effort to liven things up. While the crickets were eaten by the rats fairly quickly, we did feel that the process of collecting money brought us together, in a way unusual for us, and we informed the corporate office that we have been engaging in team-building exercises together. We are hoping to appear more proactive since the state of our morale is a concern they often voice. We are also vaguely hoping to be rewarded for our efforts.

#

Mandy likes to complete the comics’ punch lines, just before they say them. At first she did this under her breath, but that—like so many other things—has grown boring, so she has decided to become louder. Occasionally she is louder than the comedian. The audiences bob their heads back and forth between the stage and Mandy, moving around the floor with her tray, as though they are watching a particularly entrancing tennis match. We clap for Mandy at the end of her set.

#

A customer comes in whom we all find attractive. Doug says she is as beautiful as a painting by someone famous, and we all nod. All of us, both boys and girls, gather around her, pushing her friends to the outskirts of our circle, touching her.

#

We lie to one another about the amount of our tips. Sometimes, in our lies, the amount of our tips exceeds the amount of our sales. “It’s because we are so beloved,” we tell each other. “It’s because they care. Too much.”

#

Burns has been fucking customers in the bathroom, after shows. We don’t have a problem with this in general—why would we?—except that he prefers the ladies’ room, with its three roomy stalls to choose from. The girls do not like this. Everyone knows that women take longer—in the bathroom, we mean—and sometimes this creates an excessively protracted wait for the ladies’ room. Also his fucking causes awkwardness among the women’s boyfriends, who have to lurk gracelessly—and sometimes angrily—outside the bathroom door, waiting for Burns to finish.

#

Annalisa has quit, through a letter she pieced together from one of Burns’ magazines, as though she were composing a ransom note. “Fuck you all,” it began, using letters clipped from a story about Ryan Seacrest. By the end of the note we believe she had become tired of cutting out so many individual characters. “I’m really appreciative of the opportunities I’ve been given,” it told us. “I owe a lot to Simon.” We wonder if Annalisa was perhaps deeper than we gave her credit for, but it is hard to know for sure, in retrospect.

#

Recently Mandy deposited one of her boobs—the left, not-so-perky one—on a table of three middle-aged women. “They kept talking,” she told us afterwards. “I said hi, how you doing tonight, and they never even looked at me.” We nodded; we’ve all been there. “So I just dropped it on their table. Just to let them know how I felt.”

“Did you get it back?” the new girl, Kitty, wanted to know. We all ignored her, because she would never last, and it was a moot question anyway. It had been the left one—the underachiever—but it had obviously found its way back to Mandy’s chest, despite itself.

#

Doug has brought in a bunch of coupons for his brother’s towing business, which we have decided to give as change to customers who pay with cash. At first some customers complained, until we gave the bouncer $100—in cash, not coupons—and now he speaks to the more persistent complainers outside. We are finding that giving the bouncer $100 solves many of our problems.

#

Burns has won the lottery and quit. It wasn’t enough to live on; he later told Mandy it was just $5 on a scratcher ticket, but as Burns said, “If not now, then when?” and we understood.

#

We are having one of those good nights, where all our favorite comedians turn up. We give them many hugs, and the night seems magical and way too short. We love them and each other. We don’t mind the all-black dress code. “Who is that? Who is that?” the new girl, Kitty, keeps asking, but nobody is willing to stop hugging long enough to perform introductions.

#

We have opted to abandon entirely the all-black uniform. We have the bouncer notify the corporate office.

#

Darcy has been tickling the customers lately. “You look like you need a tickle,” she says, setting down her tray. She’s a hard tickler, though, and sometimes the customers’ laughs are mixed with cries of pain. No one has complained yet, that we know of, so it’s possible that she is right—that our customers are in need of a good tickle. None of us have been stirred, though, to test this theory out ourselves. In general we are reluctant to touch our customers, so we have decided to persist in our belief that they are more in need of alcohol than physical contact or laughter.

#

Kitty cries through an entire shift. We almost ask why, but after considerable whispering we decide not to. We surmise that she will not last long, and it would probably be a long story.

#

The bouncer has quit. We have grave concerns about his replacement.

#

Doug has apparently bought something. He won’t specify exactly what it is, even when we press him, but he will tell us it has something to do with greatly reducing the number of customers. He raises his eyebrows suggestively when he says this. We wonder if this is the best place for Doug.

#

Kitty has quit. On her final night she circles the room, hugging each of us very genuinely, very tenderly. She says, “I can’t believe how fast the past four years have flown by.” We look around at one another, disbelieving. Four years? We wonder if perhaps we should have bought her a card, or told her our secrets.

#

Mandy walks out in the middle of her shift. We’ve heard she has become a Hollywood movie star and receives letters from many admirers every day, but this is impossible to confirm in the absence of Burns’ magazines. We assume it is true, however, and reminisce to each other about her now famous breasts.

#

It has become clear that the replacement bouncer talks to the corporate office about us, not in a good way. When we ask to speak to him he takes us outside, where we are shown all that happens there.

#

We cry through our entire shift tonight. We have decided not to ask why.

 

 

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A.M. Taureau