i guess this is still chapter 1
Nov. 2nd, 2003 04:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smackenzieThe other problem with having a motorcycle and not a car, Laurie mused later that day, was that when you worked in a fancy-ass, vaguely pretentious restaurant, and your uniform consisted of pressed black pants and a crisp white shirt, you could either wear your work clothes to work and arrive all wrinkled, or carry your work clothes to work and have to take the bus.
So he was riding the bus for the third time that day, watching it still rain, standing with his garment bag slung over his shoulder because it was easier than sitting. He was working a lunch shift tomorrow so he'd put two shirts in it, so he could leave them at the restaurant tonight, so he could ride his bike to work tomorrow and not have to worry about the wrinkle factor. Sometimes you had to think ahead.
The restaurant was called Calla and served a fairly well-reviewed menu of what it called "American fusion," with the occasional Asian, Middle Eastern, Indian, or Russian touch, if the chef was feeling particularly contrary and adventurous. And since the chef was the owner's brother, he could be as contrary and adventurous as he liked.
The pastry chef was a diva of epic proportions (and the desserts, while dramatic and delicious, seemed like they came from an entirely different restaurant), and they ran through hostesses like the poor girls came off an assembly line, and the menu was sometimes too pretentious and incomprehensible for the wait staff, and the weekday lunch and dinner crowds were a study in expense accounts, and the place itself was riding partly on the fumes of its own self-importance, but the pay was decent and sometimes the tips were enough to make Laurie wonder why more people didn't wait tables for a living.
And he liked most of his fellow servers, and the bartenders weren't too obnoxious, and while there was tension with the kitchen, Laurie hadn't worked in a restaurant where there WASN'T tension between the kitchen and the wait staff. The waiters got blamed for things that weren't their fault, and the cooks didn't work for tips and thus had less incentive to make everything perfect and pleasing to the diners, and there was always some little drama bubbling just under the surface. Add to that the fact that half the wait staff seemed to be actors, actresses, singers, or musicians just waiting for their big break, and it was like a soap opera that Laurie got to participate in every week. Part of him liked it, and part of him thought everyone was being ridiculous. Privately he thought they should all save the drama shit for their auditions.
Aside from that they were fine to work with, and his work hours fit pretty well with his band hours, and the tips sometimes really were fabulous, and Laurie had been working in restaurants since high school and was good at it. He accepted the butt-pinching with aplomb, he didn't bitch out the bartenders for not pouring drinks fast enough or the busboys for not clearing fast enough, he made small talk with diners, he tried his damnedest to work around their weird food allergies and diets and issues. He didn't yell at the kitchen (much), or complain to the hostess that she wasn't seating enough people in his section. He smiled and nodded and did his job, and at the end of the day he counted out his tips, and if working in a high-class restaurant wasn't exactly making his tastebuds more sophisticated, he was learning a lot about good (and fancy) food.
Before Calla Laurie had waited tables in a brewpub called the Shire, which was close enough to the university to attract a lot of students. The tips there weren't as fantastic, but the table turnover was a little higher, and on more than one night after closing, one of the bartenders had gone down on him behind the bar. The bartender's name was Michel and he had curly brown hair and pouty lips and almost no gag reflex, and he was a good guy on top of that, but he seemed to think a couple of blowjobs and some rubbing off after work constituted a relationship. Laurie tried to disentangle himself gracefully, but Michel made a scene (fortunately not at the brewpub), and for another few months, until he got the job at Calla, it was really uncomfortable working there. Laurie had since made it a rule to never get involved in any way with anyone from work.
He'd kissed one of the waitresses at Calla, but that was a special case - he'd found her almost hysterical in the break room one night because she'd found out that day that her boyfriend of three years had been sleeping with one of her friends for five months. Laurie let her rant and rave and then she kissed him and he let her. He figured she was just upset, and she knew he was gay, so it wasn't like she wanted to go out with him next. She did insinuate that he might just need a good fuck from a woman to turn him straight, but this time he did manage to extricate himself gracefully. The next time she saw him she apologized. He said it was no big deal. And that was the sum total of his extracurricular involvement with other staff at the restaurant.
Her name was Julie, the girl Laurie kissed, and when he got to Calla at four and took his garment bag into the break room, she was just buttoning up her white cotton shirt. She paused with her hands on the middle button and grinned at him.
"Like what you see?" she teased.
"Nice shirt," he said. She stuck her tongue out at him. "Don't stick that out at me, I don't know where it's been, or who it's been in."
"Ha. The last thing my tongue touched was a strawberry yogurt with granola." She finished buttoning her shirt, fluffed out her blonde hair, pulled it back with a rubber band, and fluffed her bangs. "Rumor has it Angelina quit." Angelina was the latest hostess. "So seating's going to be a little weird tonight."
"Ok." Laurie hung his garment bag in a locker, pulled out the pants and a shirt, and started changing his clothes. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Julie watching him, still grinning. He hadn't particularly liked Angelina - she thought being a hostess gave her more power than it actually did, and she fawned embarrassingly over wealthy-looking diners - so he didn't mind that she was gone, and he'd dealt with enough restaurant weirdness in his life to be able to weather a little seating insanity. As long as his wasn't the only empty section he didn't especially care.
Laurie had learned a couple of things in his years waiting tables, and one of those was that losing a hostess was not the worst thing. He'd learned that just because someone was feeding a table of people on an expense account didn't mean he was going to get a decent tip. He'd learned he could run his ass off for 10%, and do practically nothing for 25%. He'd learned a smile was your best weapon and patience the only real virtue. He'd learned that nothing guaranteed a decent tip, that foreign diners were bad tippers because they weren't used to it, and that even that wasn't always true. (There was an older South African gentleman who always came in at 7:30 on Friday night, sometimes with a female companion and sometimes not, and who always tipped his server at least 20%, more if she was female and brunette.)
And Laurie had learned that after a full Friday night shift, all he wanted to do when he was done was go home and collapse. Sometimes he wondered how he'd ever managed to get it up for Michel the Shire bartender. Tonight he'd had the nice South African gentleman, whose dining companion was a dyed-brunette woman who looked like his sister. He'd gotten a party of five girls celebrating someone's birthday - they'd ordered appetizers and salads and a lot of margaritas, had half-assedly come on to him, and had left a large and drunken tip. He'd had a nervous couple who ordered a bottle of California merlot and didn't drink any of it. He'd had a demanding family, all of whom were either on that Atkins diet or had a difficult food allergy. He had a party of suits who asked him for a calculator so they could divide up the bill among them. He had a young man who was probably his age, who was eating with a silver-haired elegant woman who was old enough to be his grandmother. They were very polite diners, and the guy was cute - slightly tousled sandy hair, wire-rimmed glasses, dress shirt and bow tie. Normally Laurie thought bow ties were silly and gay (in the uncomplimentary sense of the word, not the sexual-orientation sense), but this guy wore it well.
Laurie took a cab home, surprising himself by thinking of the guy in the bow tie and wire-rims as the cab slooshed through the rain and puddles. Both the guy and his grandmother had had kind of an old-money look to them, but Laurie wasn't a class snob and they were perfectly nice, and he took his cute guys where he could find them.
Tomorrow he'd ride his bike to work and then... fuck, he had band practice. He'd have to remember to take his guitar to the restaurant and lock it in a locker. He'd also have to remember to bring a lock.
"I'm gonna have to write that down," he said to himself as he unlocked his apartment door and went in. "What the fuck...? Danny?"
His half brother was sitting on the couch watching TV. Laurie looked at his watch. Why the hell wasn't the kid home? Or out with his girlfriend? Or anywhere besides here?
"Hey," Danny said, turning on the couch to look at Laurie.
"What are you doing here? How'd you get in?"
"Borrowed Mom's spare key."
"Why?" Laurie dropped his umbrella by the door and shrugged out of his jacket, which he threw on a chair. "Do she and Jeremy know you're here?" Not that they'd mind, he didn't think, but Danny had never made a habit of randomly appearing in Laurie's apartment before. There was an outside chance they didn't know he'd done it now, and if they were expecting him to be home they might be a little worried.
"Me and Briana broke up."
"Oh. Why?" Laurie toed off his shoes, left them in the middle of the room, and walked around to sit on the couch. Danny shrugged at him.
"I dunno. She's cute and all, and I still kinda like her, but... I dunno."
"Mom and Jeremy don't know you're here, do they. How long've you been sitting on my couch?"
"I told them Dal was having people over for like a party, nothing really big, and I might be home really late or I might just stay over. I was gonna go see Briana anyway, her parents were out so we were just gonna fool around, maybe watch a movie, and we broke up instead."
"Damn." What did you say to that? Laurie liked Briana - she was cute and seemed pretty smart, and she liked the same kinds of things Danny did, namely loud guitars and skateboarding and stupid movies. "You don't sound too broken up about it."
"I'm not. I'm kind of relieved."
"I get that." Maybe not the best thing to suggest to your seventeen-year-old half brother, that being single and playing the field is better than having a cute, smart, interested girlfriend, but Laurie really didn't know what to say. He wasn't an authority on breakups or really how to deal with them.
They sat in silence for another minute or two, and just as Laurie was about to tell Danny he could stay the night, Danny looked at him and asked "Laurie - how'd you know you were gay?"
words: 2039
total words: 4474
So he was riding the bus for the third time that day, watching it still rain, standing with his garment bag slung over his shoulder because it was easier than sitting. He was working a lunch shift tomorrow so he'd put two shirts in it, so he could leave them at the restaurant tonight, so he could ride his bike to work tomorrow and not have to worry about the wrinkle factor. Sometimes you had to think ahead.
The restaurant was called Calla and served a fairly well-reviewed menu of what it called "American fusion," with the occasional Asian, Middle Eastern, Indian, or Russian touch, if the chef was feeling particularly contrary and adventurous. And since the chef was the owner's brother, he could be as contrary and adventurous as he liked.
The pastry chef was a diva of epic proportions (and the desserts, while dramatic and delicious, seemed like they came from an entirely different restaurant), and they ran through hostesses like the poor girls came off an assembly line, and the menu was sometimes too pretentious and incomprehensible for the wait staff, and the weekday lunch and dinner crowds were a study in expense accounts, and the place itself was riding partly on the fumes of its own self-importance, but the pay was decent and sometimes the tips were enough to make Laurie wonder why more people didn't wait tables for a living.
And he liked most of his fellow servers, and the bartenders weren't too obnoxious, and while there was tension with the kitchen, Laurie hadn't worked in a restaurant where there WASN'T tension between the kitchen and the wait staff. The waiters got blamed for things that weren't their fault, and the cooks didn't work for tips and thus had less incentive to make everything perfect and pleasing to the diners, and there was always some little drama bubbling just under the surface. Add to that the fact that half the wait staff seemed to be actors, actresses, singers, or musicians just waiting for their big break, and it was like a soap opera that Laurie got to participate in every week. Part of him liked it, and part of him thought everyone was being ridiculous. Privately he thought they should all save the drama shit for their auditions.
Aside from that they were fine to work with, and his work hours fit pretty well with his band hours, and the tips sometimes really were fabulous, and Laurie had been working in restaurants since high school and was good at it. He accepted the butt-pinching with aplomb, he didn't bitch out the bartenders for not pouring drinks fast enough or the busboys for not clearing fast enough, he made small talk with diners, he tried his damnedest to work around their weird food allergies and diets and issues. He didn't yell at the kitchen (much), or complain to the hostess that she wasn't seating enough people in his section. He smiled and nodded and did his job, and at the end of the day he counted out his tips, and if working in a high-class restaurant wasn't exactly making his tastebuds more sophisticated, he was learning a lot about good (and fancy) food.
Before Calla Laurie had waited tables in a brewpub called the Shire, which was close enough to the university to attract a lot of students. The tips there weren't as fantastic, but the table turnover was a little higher, and on more than one night after closing, one of the bartenders had gone down on him behind the bar. The bartender's name was Michel and he had curly brown hair and pouty lips and almost no gag reflex, and he was a good guy on top of that, but he seemed to think a couple of blowjobs and some rubbing off after work constituted a relationship. Laurie tried to disentangle himself gracefully, but Michel made a scene (fortunately not at the brewpub), and for another few months, until he got the job at Calla, it was really uncomfortable working there. Laurie had since made it a rule to never get involved in any way with anyone from work.
He'd kissed one of the waitresses at Calla, but that was a special case - he'd found her almost hysterical in the break room one night because she'd found out that day that her boyfriend of three years had been sleeping with one of her friends for five months. Laurie let her rant and rave and then she kissed him and he let her. He figured she was just upset, and she knew he was gay, so it wasn't like she wanted to go out with him next. She did insinuate that he might just need a good fuck from a woman to turn him straight, but this time he did manage to extricate himself gracefully. The next time she saw him she apologized. He said it was no big deal. And that was the sum total of his extracurricular involvement with other staff at the restaurant.
Her name was Julie, the girl Laurie kissed, and when he got to Calla at four and took his garment bag into the break room, she was just buttoning up her white cotton shirt. She paused with her hands on the middle button and grinned at him.
"Like what you see?" she teased.
"Nice shirt," he said. She stuck her tongue out at him. "Don't stick that out at me, I don't know where it's been, or who it's been in."
"Ha. The last thing my tongue touched was a strawberry yogurt with granola." She finished buttoning her shirt, fluffed out her blonde hair, pulled it back with a rubber band, and fluffed her bangs. "Rumor has it Angelina quit." Angelina was the latest hostess. "So seating's going to be a little weird tonight."
"Ok." Laurie hung his garment bag in a locker, pulled out the pants and a shirt, and started changing his clothes. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Julie watching him, still grinning. He hadn't particularly liked Angelina - she thought being a hostess gave her more power than it actually did, and she fawned embarrassingly over wealthy-looking diners - so he didn't mind that she was gone, and he'd dealt with enough restaurant weirdness in his life to be able to weather a little seating insanity. As long as his wasn't the only empty section he didn't especially care.
Laurie had learned a couple of things in his years waiting tables, and one of those was that losing a hostess was not the worst thing. He'd learned that just because someone was feeding a table of people on an expense account didn't mean he was going to get a decent tip. He'd learned he could run his ass off for 10%, and do practically nothing for 25%. He'd learned a smile was your best weapon and patience the only real virtue. He'd learned that nothing guaranteed a decent tip, that foreign diners were bad tippers because they weren't used to it, and that even that wasn't always true. (There was an older South African gentleman who always came in at 7:30 on Friday night, sometimes with a female companion and sometimes not, and who always tipped his server at least 20%, more if she was female and brunette.)
And Laurie had learned that after a full Friday night shift, all he wanted to do when he was done was go home and collapse. Sometimes he wondered how he'd ever managed to get it up for Michel the Shire bartender. Tonight he'd had the nice South African gentleman, whose dining companion was a dyed-brunette woman who looked like his sister. He'd gotten a party of five girls celebrating someone's birthday - they'd ordered appetizers and salads and a lot of margaritas, had half-assedly come on to him, and had left a large and drunken tip. He'd had a nervous couple who ordered a bottle of California merlot and didn't drink any of it. He'd had a demanding family, all of whom were either on that Atkins diet or had a difficult food allergy. He had a party of suits who asked him for a calculator so they could divide up the bill among them. He had a young man who was probably his age, who was eating with a silver-haired elegant woman who was old enough to be his grandmother. They were very polite diners, and the guy was cute - slightly tousled sandy hair, wire-rimmed glasses, dress shirt and bow tie. Normally Laurie thought bow ties were silly and gay (in the uncomplimentary sense of the word, not the sexual-orientation sense), but this guy wore it well.
Laurie took a cab home, surprising himself by thinking of the guy in the bow tie and wire-rims as the cab slooshed through the rain and puddles. Both the guy and his grandmother had had kind of an old-money look to them, but Laurie wasn't a class snob and they were perfectly nice, and he took his cute guys where he could find them.
Tomorrow he'd ride his bike to work and then... fuck, he had band practice. He'd have to remember to take his guitar to the restaurant and lock it in a locker. He'd also have to remember to bring a lock.
"I'm gonna have to write that down," he said to himself as he unlocked his apartment door and went in. "What the fuck...? Danny?"
His half brother was sitting on the couch watching TV. Laurie looked at his watch. Why the hell wasn't the kid home? Or out with his girlfriend? Or anywhere besides here?
"Hey," Danny said, turning on the couch to look at Laurie.
"What are you doing here? How'd you get in?"
"Borrowed Mom's spare key."
"Why?" Laurie dropped his umbrella by the door and shrugged out of his jacket, which he threw on a chair. "Do she and Jeremy know you're here?" Not that they'd mind, he didn't think, but Danny had never made a habit of randomly appearing in Laurie's apartment before. There was an outside chance they didn't know he'd done it now, and if they were expecting him to be home they might be a little worried.
"Me and Briana broke up."
"Oh. Why?" Laurie toed off his shoes, left them in the middle of the room, and walked around to sit on the couch. Danny shrugged at him.
"I dunno. She's cute and all, and I still kinda like her, but... I dunno."
"Mom and Jeremy don't know you're here, do they. How long've you been sitting on my couch?"
"I told them Dal was having people over for like a party, nothing really big, and I might be home really late or I might just stay over. I was gonna go see Briana anyway, her parents were out so we were just gonna fool around, maybe watch a movie, and we broke up instead."
"Damn." What did you say to that? Laurie liked Briana - she was cute and seemed pretty smart, and she liked the same kinds of things Danny did, namely loud guitars and skateboarding and stupid movies. "You don't sound too broken up about it."
"I'm not. I'm kind of relieved."
"I get that." Maybe not the best thing to suggest to your seventeen-year-old half brother, that being single and playing the field is better than having a cute, smart, interested girlfriend, but Laurie really didn't know what to say. He wasn't an authority on breakups or really how to deal with them.
They sat in silence for another minute or two, and just as Laurie was about to tell Danny he could stay the night, Danny looked at him and asked "Laurie - how'd you know you were gay?"
words: 2039
total words: 4474
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Date: 2003-11-02 01:35 pm (UTC)and his half brother! heee!