JAMIE ALLEN

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The song is over, obviously. Everyone's watching, stunned, quiet, muddled in the disgusting sound of a dying guitar. My bass player hurls his electric bass somewhere. My drummer begins kicking his drum set to pieces. I dry-hump what's left of my guitar, while working the wha-wha peddle with a free hand. Then, I get up, and we, The Inkompetent Fools for Kurt Cobain, walk off the stage, never to be seen in those parts again. "Every candidate has secret intentions," Erica said. "Most of the time, theirs are worse and more selfish than wanting to take over and help a dying planet. Most of the time, the candidates simply want power. And in the process they are willing to sell out and do little things that inevitably lead to the death of the planet -- letting some company drill for oil, letting some gun go off in a child's hand, refusing to treat sick and contagious people because of what amounts to paperwork. These things negatively effect the Planet Karma and make things a little worse, a little closer to darkness." I had never before given a second of my time to someone who used terms like "Planet Karma." But Erica was different. The times were different, suddenly shifted and altogether promising and spacey. Arriving at the bookstore, George still had red lipstick smeared across his mouth. The thin hair on his head was messy from the ardent encounter at the bar. He felt famous, with a young woman on his arm and revolution at hand. The matches were in the right-front pocket of his khakis. Remember when you wrote TruLuv4Ever on my notebook? Remember when I gave you that note that was stream-of-conscious musings about jelly donuts and the smell of scotch tape on CHristmAsmoRningsofLimpidyOuThandhowiThoughtyoumightbEfIlledwithSweetjellyandwrappedwithtapewithbellSalsohangingPrettilyfrOmyourhairaNdinThAtnoteialsomaNagEdtOcapitalizeinslightlyUnorthodoxfaShion the letters that spelled CHARLOTTE IS SPONTANEOUS? In the morning meeting, my boss -- 40, with sane hair -- is rambling on about something or other. I’m drawing pictures of cavemen and cavewomen on my pad of paper. My hair is talking about moving to Alaska. “I hear it’s nice there,” my hair says. “It’s wild and free.” “Hair,” I say privately, teasing, “you are so crazy. Get a grip. You can’t move to Alaska.” “No,” my hair says, “I can move to Alaska. You’re the one that’s holding me up. You’re so not crazy.” “Wait a minute,” I say privately. “I’m the one that messed you up in the first place.” “So,” my hair says. “Move with me to Alaska.” You're slumping, with your haggard left arm draped over the orange water cooler, which gets a visit now and then from a sweaty, smelly, bulky, doltish hitter. Your legs are crossed like a debutante's, and you're wearing running shoes with your red stirrups wrinkled low around your ankles. You have a small chew in your mouth, though you don't normally chew, and some of the brown from one of your spits -- a misfire that failed to hit the ant that was crawling across the dirty cement floor -- has stained a part of your home-white pants next to where you might normally see the bulge from your cup. But you're not wearing your cup tonight, just like you're not wearing spikes, just like you have no idea what inning it is, because you pitched yesterday and you threw a complete game and struck out 11 while giving up just one hit and more or less totally dominating the navy blue team from up north, their northern skin red tonight from yesterday's sunburn or maybe from the heat of your pitches. It was a frantic race. Coming around the final turn, with Easy Goer in the lead, his mane flapping like copper wings, Sunday Silence’s dark countenance appeared on the outside. A two-horse duel. For the entire stretch run, with the other horses struggling to keep up, Sunday Silence and Easy Goer ran side by side along the rail. Easy Goer led, by a nostril, for much of it, but with a hundred yards left Sunday Silence, ears pinned, eye-to-eye with his rival, with Valenzuela’s pale yellow silks rattling like a flag in a storm, refused to give. With two steps to the finish, he pulled his nose in front. It was the closest Preakness finish in history. In the late-afternoon quiet before the dining crowds howled, every soul in Adeline’s worked, contemplated, daydreamed. Luc organized the bar before he went back in the kitchen to help Adeline with last-minute preps. He thought about Cherie and whether or not she had shaved her legs. Her pale blue dress – the color of a thin cloud with the sky behind it – landed just above her knees and brought out a shadow on her calves. Or maybe he imagined it. He could ask her. But it was Luc’s experience that when you said to a woman, “You didn’t shave your legs, did you?” what she heard was, “You are a terrible waste of a human being.” The reality – Luc’s reality, anyway – was that he actually liked it when a woman skipped shaving. The stubble provided an extra grip. Though he felt his curiosity and sentiments came from a good place, Luc was certain that he would at the very least offend Cherie with this talk. He didn’t feel like riling her today, so he quietly wondered and stole glances at her calves when he could. Cherie perfected each table’s station with fresh flowers, and she wondered if anyone could smell her. Working every day and night was wearing her down. She slept late this morning. She got off twice – her libido had once again awoken. Then she skipped a shower, tying her hair in a weird and sloppy bun, and she slipped on an old dress that had not been laundered in three shifts at Adeline’s. What could you do some days but just keep moving forward? She didn’t care if Adeline smelled her, and anyway it would take some work for her smell to break through Adeline’s atmosphere of personal odors. But there were the guests to consider. And she should set a good example for Krissy. And of course, Luc. She had a strange dual thought here – wanting to keep him from smelling her and also wanting him to smell her, to get a real whiff of the woman she was, from armpit on down. She glanced at him; he looked away. Krissy rolled set-ups. She had almost made it through a whole week at Adeline’s. She thought of her father and mother and how much she didn’t want to disappoint them. They were expecting her to get a “real job” soon and saw the work at Adeline’s as temporary, fun, and something a talented, self-respecting person eventually left behind. But Krissy had done something she regretted. No, she didn’t regret it. She did it because it was exactly what she wanted to do, and now she had to deal with the consequences. She had performed a solo act on one of those webcam sites. Twice. Okay, three times. It was a big turn-on, truthfully. She had, however, underestimated how many people would see and share the videos. This had unfolded after graduation. Sure, she had a marketing degree with a minor in social media studies, and the videos could, in some ways, serve as proof of her talents in these subjects. But she now had no desire to work for companies that would perform a background check on her. She also realized – with and without irony – that maybe she didn’t have an interest in marketing. Maybe she wasn’t meant for Adeline’s either. But she got the feeling the people here weren’t ones to troll the Internet for employee sex-cam histories, or even care if one did such a thing. They simply accepted her. She liked food. Cherie wanted her to start waiting tables, and Krissy wanted to learn to cook. An argument with her parents clouded the horizon. In the kitchen, Adeline prepared the ingredients for the French Pizza. She thought about the broken promise Detective Odunewu made: “I’ll be back,” he had said. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a promise. But he hadn't been back since that first night. Adeline had prepared a little dish for him Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, and the detective hadn’t shown. Luc and Cherie knew about this. Adeline vowed she would not make a dish for him tonight. Not that she wanted him to come back; she had already promised herself she would stay away from him. But it was frustrating to actively brace oneself for a resistance that wasn’t there. Had Adeline lost her pull, even on middle-aged men? Was her food fun to taste in the moment, but the moment it/she was out of sight, it/she was forgotten? The boy climbed out of the pool, his plaid boxers peeking out from soaked, baggy shorts. He dripped all over the place, as he retrieved his shirt and flip-flops, full of pride—until he saw us sneering at him. His father turned away from the scene, perhaps so he wouldn’t throttle his heir. His sisters tried not to giggle. Security arrived, and when the boy attempted to hand his dry shirt to his mother, she held up her hands to him, the universal sign of all mothers everywhere: I hereby disown you. He was escorted off the premises. What sandwich would taste good in this blazing sun, or in the blackness of an afternoon thunderstorm? What dish would one serve to downtown bankers and lawyers that would also mingle with chicken and yellow rice, garbanzo bean soup, plantains, or papa rellenas? What goes well with both Gulf saltwater and Central Florida swampland, spring’s sweet orange blossoms, and Ybor’s cigar-smoke bouquet? Manual labor isn’t bad for the imaginative mind. There’s something mesmerizing about standing in the same place for hours, sweating, watching hot water run off steel and earth. It’s the fodder for daydreams, and — contrary to my dad’s efforts to persuade me to enjoy school — I was cultivating a fantasy about me as Blue-Collar Guy. I was reinventing myself into a life away from classes that make you type to classical music. Forget professional baseball, or whatever else it was that I thought I might get out of college. To me, steam-cleaning wasn’t a bad life. It was simple and relaxing.