So Comey went before Congress again. And again we got Kabuki Theater. His latest performance, like all the previous appearances, confirms that we, the American people are being duped. We are being duped, and worse, we are being played for suckers.
Then came Clapper and Sally Yates. Now there’s two true bastions of unbiased honesty. More Kabuki Theater!
We have reached a dangerous time in America. There are real external threats like Iran, North Korea and Russia. We are in the midst of a religious war being conducted by Radical Islamist Extremists. If they have their way, they will control us all. They will obliterate Jews, Catholics and Christians and enslave moderate Muslims whose most grave error is not standing up to the radical few who would force them to do that to which they do not ascribe.
But much worse than all of the external threats is that our leaders no longer give us truth. Instead, they present us with Kabuki Theater, a show, folks, and nothing more. The left blames Trump for everything, stooping to unheard of personal lows in its rhetoric. The right is derelict in its duties. It had seven years to write a health care bill and did nothing. It can’t get its own act together and continually proves personal interests supersede the interests of the people it represents.
Make no mistake about it. Follow the money. It is all about money. The lefties fund certain organizations and programs. The righties do too, but their organizations and programs are different ones. With the advent of super pacs and lobbyists, the flow of money and the amounts are more hidden than ever. The amounts are up there in the fortunes, millions, billions. Ask yourself: how much money did Hillary get and spend for her campaign? How much did the Dems raise and where did they get it from? Who are they beholden to? You could ask the same about many of the Republicans in Congress and the Senate. Who are they beholden to? Where did they get their money from?
Then, like the proverbial onion, the layer over all the things that are really going on is the play our leaders continually put on for us. Kabuki Theater. They are all postured and made up and costumed. They go on and on, preaching to us about truth and justice and equality. And we are…being duped.
One of the important lessons in teaching rhetoric is the distinction between observation and inference, which boils down to differentiating between fact and opinion. My computer CPU is running at 59°C. That is a fact based upon the program running that lists the CPU temps. My computer is running hot is an opinion. The fact is undeniable, real, observable. The opinion, the inference in this case, is a judgment, subjective and not a fact.
The Kabuki Theater is dangerous. That’s an opinion, by the way. It is dangerous because it purports to be real but is not and it masks the truth. For example, all that talk about how good and wonderful Obamacare was way back when it was first passed was Kabuki Theater. If Obamacare was so wonderful for us all, why did Congress pass itself the exemption from it (at the very last minute and in the dark of night)?
The point is our leaders have found their way to the stage but they have lost their way to the truth. In losing their way to the truth, they have lost the ability to lead us and to govern us. We are looking at a modern day Clash of the Titans, where the gods of our Senate and Congress are engaged in a power war wreaking destruction upon us, the American People, with total disregard for our safety and well-being, which is the sole reason for which government exists.
Kabuki Theater: Watch it today on any of the fake news media outlets.
(Originally posted May 31, 2017)
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Bill sat up on the counter next to Marie. He offered her a cigarette and put one in his own mouth then he held the match for her to light hers before he lit his own. Marie crossed her feet at the ankles and swung her legs, much like Mary did when she sat up on the counter.
They sat a few minutes in silence, neither one of them talking, both of them smoking and drinking their beer. Bill thought Marie must have been having a moment of self-consciousness because she covered herself by making sure her dress was pulled closed and tucked tight underneath her.
“That grease be melted in a few minutes,” Bill finally said. Then, “Why you hanging around?”
“I ain’t got nothing to go home to, not with the kids not there.”
“Well, what you want from me?”
“I don’t want nothing. Getting high would be nice.”
“That’s easy. Soon as that grease is melted. You could change in the meantime.”
“I’ll wait for you,” Marie said. Then, “How come you don’t like me?” She was finished her cigarette and let herself slide down from the counter. She put the cigarette out with water from Mary’s sink then tossed the butt into the garbage can. The can was empty and had a clean liner in it.
“Who said I don’t like you?”
“It’s not about the words. It’s how you act.”
“How do I act?”
“Well you don’t want me.”
“It isn’t like that. It’s that you’re with Henry Lee.”
“He really don’t care. He told you that.”
“Yeah, but I care. We don’t need any more tension. I already have plenty of that with Bea. You don’t need her on your case either.”
“You know what I got to say about that.” Marie flicked her fingers under her chin in the “f”—it sign.
“Well, we all got to live here, you know.”
“Yeah, we do.” Marie stepped up close to Bill. “Sometimes I just want to be held,” she said. She put her hands in her dress pockets and let the dress slip apart as she stepped close to him. “Just hold me.”
Bill was still sitting on the counter. He took her in his arms and held her to him. The way he was sitting made it so that she could not really touch him with her body except where their chests met. She still had her bra on and her dress closed up there.
“That feels nice,” she said. She reached up and kissed him on the lips. It was a closed-mouth kiss since Bill did not respond except to give that.
“Let me finish up,” Bill said. “Why don’t you meet me in the meat room?”
Marie nodded, picked up her beer and started for the door. “Don’t be too long, please.”
“Won’t be but a few.”
Bill took up his beer and went back to the line. He saw that the cube of grease was all liquid now so he shut down the fryer and slipped a meat tray over it to cover it. The meat tray was actually big enough to cover both fryers and Bill, pretty much finished, checked up and down the entire line, made sure everything was turned off, everything was clean and everything was put away. He went around back again and double-checked Mary’s station then peeked into all the ovens. Ever since he’d burned that rib by cooking it overnight, he never went home without checking the ovens.
The last thing he did before going downstairs was check out the dishwasher area. All the pots were done and all the dishes were put away except for the one rack that needed to be run through the machine in the morning. These were all the dishes that came in after the dishwashers went home.
Downstairs, he stopped at his locker and got a fat joint out. Then he went off to the meat room.
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Marie was about to show Bill exactly what she wanted when Tommy popped his head in the door. Tommy didn’t say anything. He just ran his hand along his neck to say cut it off, that there were no more customers. When he was gone from sight, Marie showed herself to Bill, very explicitly. Bill was about to reach up to scratch her itch, or begin doing so, but the automatic doors opened and Bebe came in. She was carrying two bottles of beer and set them on the serving shelf where the finished dinners ready to serve were placed. That shelf was usually lit in the infrared of the heater lamps. The lamps were switched off a long time now and the shelf was cool.
“I have a few people at the bar,” she said, “so I’m gonna be awhile. Any coffee left?”
Marie turned to face Bebe, the front of the line and the serving self between them so that while her dress was unbuttoned from the waist down, Bebe couldn’t see it.
“It’s old,” said Marie. “It’s drinkable, but if you want it for customers, I can make a fresh pot.”
“Would you?” Bebe asked.
“Sure,” Marie said.
“Great. I’ll be back in a few.”
Marie finished her first beer and sipped the new one. She put Bill’s beer down on the carving shelf of the steam table then started buttoning her dress.
“See,” Bill said. “You should have gone home.”
“Not without getting my itch scratched.”
Bill was finished cleaning out the fryer. Before he went over to the potwasher station with the pots he had, he put the new cube of grease into the fryer and lit the fryer. As soon as the grease was melted, he would turn off the gas and make sure everything was turned off. Meanwhile, he rinsed both pots he had, the sauce pot and the stock pot, making sure not to leave anything dirty for Andy when he came in in the morning. Bill did not have to do this and throughout his career he would discover that most cooks and chefs would never do it. Bill did it because he felt it impolite not to. It seemed a breach of etiquette.
Leaving Andy’s area clean and in order, he went directly to the back of the kitchen where he began wrapping the leftovers to be put into Mary’s walk-in. Marie met him there. She carried over their beer and while Bill put things into the walk-in she took to wrapping what still needed to be wrapped. Then, finally, they were finished. They both leaned against Mary’s stainless steel counter and drank their beer.
“You got pot, right?” Marie asked.
“Yup.”
“Rolled?”
“Yup.”
“Well, let’s go get high.”
“Soon as the grease melts and I can shut down the kitchen.”
“Damn,” Marie said. She hoisted herself up onto Mary’s counter and asked Bill for another cigarette.
Bill had left his cigarettes on the steam table shelf where Marie had set them. He walked over to get them and good thing too because that’s when Bebe came in to get the coffees. She was followed by Lorraine who was closing girl. Lorraine had already changed and was wearing her coat.
“See you tomorrow,” she said. “Maybe we can get to that talk.”
Bill smiled and said goodnight. He watched both of them leave the kitchen. Then he looked to see that the cube of grease was just about completely melted. He knew they still had a few moments, or they could go downstairs and change clothes. He decided to finish his beer and went back to where Marie sat.
“What you talking about?” Marie asked.
“Just stuff. Her kids. My college days. Nothing much.”
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Judging people and things back then by today’s standards is only one disintegration of reasoning and language. There are many. Many! There are many ways our language and reasoning have been and continue to be eroded.
A second major beginning of the breakdown of language and reasoning goes back to the eighties once again. That’s when, so far as generally accepted in the timeline, the gender issue in pronouns became an issue and when the language began shifting, moving into what became a most awkward period. The actual issue of gender consideration in language is much more longstanding. But the changing of the language, that is a serious matter whose effects must be understood in the context of what we end up doing as a people in our history.
Seat belts. When the first seat belt regulations came into play and the first seat belt laws came into effect, we were assured, even promised, that we wouldn’t be ticketed for not wearing a seat belt. Now, some years later, we see that that promise was pure BS.
E-ZPass. The advent of E-ZPass was a great convenience and time saver. But we were afraid electronic tracking would compromise our privacy. So we were assured that E-ZPass records would be kept private, that they would never be used in court. Then along came that first clever lawyer with the great idea of using those supposed-be-to private records to prove marital infidelity, and lo and behold E-ZPass caved to the subpoena. Now E-ZPass records are pretty non-private, or they are easily used in courts.
History shows that first and foremost money talks and BS walks, no credit for that saying taken here. It also shows that government can’t be trusted to stay to where its rightful place is, which is protecting its citizens. The two examples above show the progression of things when left in the hands of our leaders, all of them, but primarily those who adhere to and preach the progressive narratives.
Gender-Specific Pronouns! So in the eighties these became an issue. At first the linguists looked at them in terms of messiness and discomfort. The language no longer had the wherewithal to suit our needs if we wanted to be gender-fair and considerate. Language is our tool, they thought. If it no longer met our needs in regard to gender-specific pronouns, it would fix itself to do so. They thought language would adjust to compensate for equalizing or neutralizing gender references.
But as with the two examples above, that wasn’t quite what happened.
What happened was, like with the seat belt and E-ZPass examples, legislation and regulation. The progression that was supposed to be toward gender equality or gender neutrality in language so as to match what was perceived as happening in our society turned toward control. Or, to be more precise, it turned to control for the purpose of extracting money in the form of fines. Today, in certain states one can be arrested, jailed, fined or all three for incorrect use of gender pronouns.
What has this breakdown in language and reasoning wrought upon us? Or, from what was supposed to have been a move to empower and equalize the genders (he and she), or at the very least to neutralize them within the language and thereby equalize them, what has the erosion of language brought us?
Those same people who have led us at every turn to being controlled through fear of prosecution can now prosecute us for using an incorrect gender reference. And with some thirty-something genders now, another result of the breakdown of our language and reasoning skills, how would one know if one’s gender-pronoun usage is correct?
We have been led to confusion and dis-empowerment because the aim behind the breakdown of language and reasoning as mostly articulated by the progressive narrative is control and domination.
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So who is right, right in the head? The same world was a different place for different people depending upon what their experiences had been and what their circumstances were. Normal: everyone said there was no such thing as normal.
Jim was way out of line and Bill did his best to make sure he did not get a chance to go at Paulie. If he could see it or hear it, he would do his best to find a way to stop it. But Jim needed the job too. They all needed the job and Bill’s experience of desperately needing a job kept him from firing Jim or anyone without real cause. Maybe he should have fired Jim. Maybe it would have been better for everyone.
That first crew. You never forgot your first crew.
Midnight came and Marie was done with her work but she was hanging around. Bill was still busy with the fryers, almost done but not quite. Marie came up to him and asked him for a cigarette. When he could stop what he was doing, he handed her his pack so she could take one.
Marie did not smoke much. Actually she didn’t smoke at all except for an occasional cigarette every now and then. Bill could not understand that. He couldn’t understand how anyone could take just one of anything and leave the rest. No, that was not in his frame of reference and he was fond of saying that God had not given him an off button. If he ate a cookie, he’d eat the whole box. Same for M&Ms and same for beer, drugs, cigarettes or anything. That was why he was the proverbial garbage head.
Marie leaned her skinny butt against the wooden steam table shelf, the shelf that sat right before and attached to the steam table, the shelf where carving was done. Sometimes Bill or Jimmy or whoever was doing the carving would place the object—generally it was the prime rib—there on the board to cut it. She lit the cigarette she’d taken and put the pack down beside her, matches on top of the pack.
“Want a beer?” she asked.
“Why you hanging around?” Bill asked.
“He ain’t home. Probably out with one of his bimbos. The kids is with my mom. I ain’t in no hurry.”
“What you want from me?”
“I want you to scratch my back.”
Having said that, she stood away from the shelf, headed around the broiler side of the line and out of the kitchen through the automatic doors. She returned a moment later carrying two bottles of beer. By this time Bill was nearly done with the second fryer. He was changing the grease tonight and stood up to go empty the old grease into the grease barrel outside.
“Where’s it itch?” he asked.
Marie, a sly smile on her face, lifted her skirt and showed Bill where she itched. No one else was in the kitchen. The van for the dishwashers had come and gone and Bill was just waiting for Tommy or Bebe to pop their head in and tell him there’d be no more customers. Meanwhile, he went out with old grease while Marie settled herself against the shelf again to finish her cigarette and sip the beer.
When Bill returned, she’d unbuttoned most of her dress. She’d also shucked her panties and tucked them in her dress pocket. If he’d looked, Bill could have seen her coochie. But he didn’t look. He sipped his beer, lit a cigarette and went about rinsing out the fryer.
“Thought Henry Lee scratched that itch.”
“Still itches.”
“Show me where again.”
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Go on. Just call me racist up front and get it over with. As was said in And the Winner Is, that word, the R word, is now applied so often and used so callously that its meaning is quickly dissipating. Like the Deplorable label, it becomes a badge of honor when one is called it for saying something true simply because one is speaking about a person or persons of color.
For example, merely saying that Al Sharpton didn’t pay taxes and helped publicly frame Steven Pagones in the Tawana Brawley case would make one a “racist” by today’s standards of the word even though there is no racial implication in the factual statement. That speaks to the breakdown of our language and our reasoning, both of which are different issues altogether though very essential ones and ones of course tied to the bundle of what’s going on with Obama being the big winner and what’s going on in America.
The argument goes like this: why are you picking on Al Sharpton? Lots of whites did a lot worse to blacks. Pick on them! Picking on Al Sharpton is racist. You are a racist.
Similarly, to say anything about Hillary Clinton causes one to be called a misogynist. The argument: Lots of men did a lot worse to women than anything Hillary has done altogether. Pick on them! Picking on Hillary makes you a misogynist. (And we all know that the reason she lost was because of misogyny and chauvinism.) You are a misogynist.
So, a little about the breakdown of our language and reasoning.
Way back (in the eighties), when studying literature in graduate school we were taught that an author who wrote in the forties should not be called a racist in the eighties for referring to a black man as a Negro because that was the correct term of reference at the time the writer wrote. Or, forty years later, in the eighties, calling the author a racist or saying he/she was being derogatory back then is incorrect. It is logically flawed thinking. More important, however, doing so then was indicative of the beginnings of a breakdown in our reasoning and language that was being driven by a progressive narrative.
This type of breakdown in language and reasoning is evidenced all the time now and it leads to the revisionist history we are seeing today. It is the logical progression of that progressive narrative we are being force fed, and it is the danger within America.
As an example, consider slave owners during legal slavery times. Being a slave owner did not necessarily make one a bad person or one who should be erased from our history due to being judged by today’s standards of morality and right or wrong, which in and of themselves are quite questionable.
History shows there were many slave owners back then who were anti-slavery and kept their slaves because they knew that if they freed them other slave owners would gobble them up and mistreat them horribly. These “good” slave owners (I know, by any sensibilities it sounds like a contradiction in terms) treated their slaves humanely. They utilized them as workers, allowed them a decent standard of living, did not abuse or molest them, allowed them marriage of their choice amongst themselves and to stay in the families they themselves created. They did not sell off their children for profits.
As messed up as it may seem today, this was in many circumstances the moral thing to do back then. Not only was it moral, but it was courageous, for those who did it were going against the social and economic norms of the times. If found out, they were ostracized and boycotted economically such that they lost their businesses.
Judging people and things back then by today’s standards is clearly a breakdown in reasoning and language skills, not to mention it being nonsensical. Doing so ignores the concepts of time, context and knowledge, not to mention the differences between the accepted morays of the society back then as compared to now. Furthermore it denies rational logic.
The absence of logic in today’s discourse and the general breakdown of our language and language skills is a true danger to America.
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Our real enemy is not external and our greatest problem is not climate change. Climate change is at best an issue and perhaps a concern. Iran, North Korea, Russia and China are foes, even enemies. But they are not the real danger facing the United States. Even Radical Islamic Terrorism, a danger for sure, isn’t the real danger. The real danger facing us comes from within. It is the willful attempt at destroying a presidency, an attempted coup d’état in the premier free country of the world.
It seems unbelievable, unreal, way out there. An overthrow of our government? To even say it sounds silly, even fantastical. However, all the elements are in place and at play. The government is divided. The country is divided. The media are biased, even controlled. Protests and protesters are paid by anarchists like George Soros and his cronies, and their true goals are couched by their labeling anyone who opposes them as racist.
Division, media control and paid opposition make the perfect storm for toppling not just this presidency, but any presidency.
There’s more. The deep state, as they call it, is actively anti-Trump and remains powerful because Congress is still dilly-dallying in approving Trump nominees. The deep state leaks false stories to the biased media who run with them, true or not. The politically correct, corrupt politicians, more accurately those who are paid off by big money, holding to the whims of their benefactors’ purse strings, dance to the rhythm of the false stories. These politicians are corrupt and even immoral in many instances, no better than the old Communist Politburo we used to abhor and chastise through the Cold War in the fifties and sixties. In fact they are very much the same as them. Some of these politicians, you know who they are, are driven by personal animus toward the man who is president, by simple hatred for him, and they are willing to put their personal feelings ahead of national interest. That is narcissism, even hubris, the very same qualities for which they attack the President.
Worst of all, and a common thread across the camps of those who would undo the presidency, is a willingness to re-write history. In their misguided political correctness they are willing to tear down the statues of our founders and heroes and replace them with icons of socialists we once reviled. Revisionist history alone threatens the presidency, the Constitution and our very existence as a nation.
Yes, our real enemy is within. The first thing a dictator does when in the midst of a coup is seize the media and suppress it completely until the coup is a fait accompli and the new dictator controls them. Here, now, for the most part, our media are already no better than Pravda was. They are biased, controlled and paid for by political foes. They spew pure liberal propaganda spun by presenting nearly incessant anti-Trump news, real or not. Facts and fact-checking are things of the past, replaced by gossip, purposefully incorrect leaks and outright fabrications. Thus the media are, in and of themselves, the greatest of the dangers within.
It’s simply the turnaround at work. See The Turnaround. So the real danger within is our overall erosion from within. Its origins, as stated many times here, emanate from human selfishness and greed. That selfishness and greed have caused our leaders to dumb-down education and brainwash the upcoming generations that have no context for the realities of socialist dictatorships, for their evils and failures. With no context they are easily cajoled into thinking those systems are preferable to our freedom and capitalism and easily led into any other thing the leftists would have them believe.
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So which shoes do you wear? Are you one of those people who see things on social media and don’t bother to check them out? Do you then take them and repost them on your social media outlets? Are you one of those people who actually believe any of the ridiculous things that come from either the left or the right?
Or are you one of those people who checks out everything? Are you one of those people who understands that facts are facts and facts are incontrovertible? There may be different facts formulated by different outlets, so when that’s the case are you one of those people who checks out all the sets of facts and attempts at least to determine which ones are real and which ones are fabricated?
Are you one of those people who believe in suppression? Or are you one of those people who believe in free expression and the exercise of free rights? Are you one of those people who sees beyond the hypocrisy of both the left and the right? Or are you one of those people who subscribe to one side’s hypocrisy?
Well, some of these are pretty hard questions. They’re pretty hard because we all wear different shoes. They’re hard because we all feel different ways about ourselves and each of us have different reasoning capacities and different senses of self-gratification.
Do you really think that putting President Trump’s Supreme Court pick onto the court will really kill millions of women? Do you really believe that the second he’s put on the Supreme Court Roe v Wade will be immediately overturned? Or are you capable of seeing that these are hyperbole and not even responsible hyperbole? In one fell swoop the lefties have gone from pushing grandma over the cliff in a wheelchair, what they’ve accused the Republicans of in the past, to having their Supreme Court nominee kill millions of women. No matter which shoes you wear, it just doesn’t make sense. Furthermore, it’s irresponsible to advance such divisive rhetoric.
It goes on and on and it gets worse and worse. No matter who is put on the Supreme Court, it won’t be the end of the world, as the lefties have already said. Not only will it not be the end of the world, but it won’t be the end of the Constitution or the Republic or the democracy. Those who insist that it will be any of this and do it with a straight face have really jumped off the deep end along with a whole host of the lefties.
That’s not to say that the righties are always right or right about everything or right even most of the time. But they’re not always wrong about everything or maybe even most things. The righties simply wear a different pair of shoes and have their own personal interests.
So the real issue is always what we really want for our country. Do we want a country that suppresses people’s rights in the name of advancing people’s rights? Do we want a country that does not ascribe to its own laws? Do we want a country whose government spends most of its time arguing back and forth on political terms rather than looking for the realities of what’s going on in this country and then looking for solutions to the problems at hand?
These are really hard questions too. They’re hardest because we all wear different shoes. However, no matter which shoes you do wear, we ought to be critical of and ashamed of the Congress we’ve elected. And we ought to check out our minds about how we elect our officials. And we surely ought to be asking ourselves if this is the best we can do.
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Bill would never think he was something. No matter what he did throughout his life, he would never think he was something. Quite to the contrary, he would always think he was less than. He would think he was less than everyone else. Other people he would meet at different times in his life would have done, by any objective standards, so much less than him, but they were infinitely proud of what they’d done and thought of themselves as eminently successful, as something.
Not Bill. He survived jail and would become a top-notch saucier in one of the finest hotels in New York City, that is he would become one of the top three sauciers in the city, and still he would not think he’d accomplished anything. He would not think much of himself. He would not think himself something. He would never think himself something.
So when Jim said to him “You really think you’re something, don’t you,” it couldn’t have been further from the truth. Even though he was the boss, even though he ran things, even though it had come to the point that he made all the line decisions despite Bea still thinking she did, he didn’t think himself anything special. He’d graduated from the university despite their trying to stop him. To do so, he’d survived the most conservative judge and the most conservative English professor and only later did he understand that this was all purposefully designed to get at him, to cause him to quit, to skin the cat a different way.
Judge Shul would bang down the gavel saying “Policemen don’t lie.” Professor Bailey would only offer Bill one deal. Since he had already cut more than half of the final seminar, the seminar all English majors had to take in order to graduate, Bailey offered Bill a “C” but Bill had to ace all the remaining work and make up everything he’d missed. And he couldn’t miss another class, not even, as the professor had said it, with a doctor’s note saying he was dying.
Some deal! Bailey was the sole conservative on the faculty of the Honors College, the college where Bill was enrolled in the university, the college whose Dean, Dean Grey, would come to pick Bill up upon his release from the workhouse. That was a funny story unto itself, the roll-it-up story. So Bill came to think that maybe the professor was a setup as much as his work details in the workhouse were. He was assigned to make bullets for the police, this of course antithetical to why he was in there which was ostensibly for protesting for peace.
The reality was they didn’t know anything about him or about why he was at that protest. But they did know that they’d set him up and framed him then forced him into copping a guilty plea, a heavily coerced guilty plea.
So when Jim picked on Paulie, the ADHD and otherwise challenged kid, Bill knew it was meaner than that guy Ronnie in the workhouse who’d asked to him that first night if he wondered what his wife was doing while he was in there, the implication being who she was with while he was locked up. Meaner than mean.
Truth was at the tender age of twenty Bill already knew the world was filled with meaner than mean. Drenovis was heading that way, or maybe he was just a nasty pig. Jim was surely that way with Paulie, and Ronnie was surely that way.
Bill felt for Paulie and took care of him as much as he could. He felt for all the dishwashers, even Jim, Jim because Bill thought maybe he couldn’t do any better than he was since he wasn’t right anymore.
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Once he’d finished his own cigarette, Bill set about cleaning up the line and starting into his wrapping-up-the-night routine. First thing was to get the soap water, steel wool and brushes. Next was to break down the steam table.
Breaking down the steam table was a simple thing if there were no orders He took everything out of the steam table and set it on Mary’s stainless steel counters in the back. All the inserts needed to be changed, so one by one he spilled the liquids into clean inserts which he got from where the potwasher worked. He took the dirty ones over to Andy, the potwasher. Andy was short and bald. The most striking thing about him was that he had a wandering eye. This did not mean that he was looking at the girls. It meant his eye wandered, so if you were talking to him one of his eyes would be looking at you while the other one roved.
Andy was a happy-go-lucky guy. Most of the dishwashers who were brought in as day labor were. Most were vagrants of some sort. Most were drunks, so they worked a few days and then maybe missed the van in the morning because they’d had enough money to put on a drunk and were sleeping it off somewhere or even still out on it.
Paulie and Jim were different. Paulie was mentally challenged and surely ADHD, but at that time ADD and ADHD were not yet really used in diagnoses. So Paulie wasn’t getting any benefits, as would happen many years later for people like him who were diagnosed. Tommy’s co-manager, Mr. White, was a friend of Paulie’s parents and he had hired Paulie and made sure he kept a job. Even after Mr. White left, which was right after Bill started, Paulie’s job was kept secure by Tommy. If it had been up to Drenovis, Paulie would have been gone posthaste, the first time it was apparent he needed re-directing regularly.
Interestingly, Mickey worked well with Paulie. Mickey was gentle with him and softly but sternly re-directed him whenever it was needed.
Jim had no time for that. He had been someone. He was a horse trainer and he’d had a horse that won the Derby. In lucid moments he remembered those days. He remembered being a celebrity, having things his way, living pretty much first class when the horse was on the road on the way to the top. But something had happened. One night he’d gone to say goodnight to his horse and the horse went wild. Jim was kicked in the head, rescued by the stable boy who was able to drag him out of harm’s way and calm down the horse.
Jim was never the same. Life was never the same. He went off from time to time now and could be dangerous in those moments. He liked to taunt people, to egg them on toward doing things they didn’t really want to do. Bill had seen him egg Mickey on, and he’d seen him riding Andy until he’d turned red in the face and finally threw a pot. Worst was when Jim started in on Paulie. Only then did Bill intercede and he did it by taking Paulie out of the kitchen.
“Hey Paulie,” he would say, “how about helping me carry some stuff up from downstairs?”
Paulie, clearly unhappy from what Jim was doing, every time, was glad to leave the dish machine. Paulie understood what Jim was doing but he was incapable of stopping Jim from doing it. So he was glad to be able to have a break.
Sometimes, if Bill were feeling it enough, he would tell Jim that he ought to be ashamed of himself. Jim’s answer was always the standard answer, “You really think you’re something, don’t you?”
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