alex miller

THE WORST CHINESE RESTAURANT IN DETROIT
The bitch at table three growled something nasty because I hadn’t refilled her Coke. I recognized her. She came in last week. Stiffed me on the tip even though I treated her nice as apple fucking pie.

The bitch shook her glass impatiently. I smoothed a hair out of my face. I disappeared into the kitchen.

Ryan reached into the meatbag and pulled out a  handful of frozen beef chips for the skillet. Most of our ingredients came off a Sysco truck on Tuesdays. All but the meatbag. Only Mr. Wong knew the origin of the meatbag.

“Need more meat,” Ryan said.

“Use some broccoli,” Mr. Wong said. He owned the place. He treated the staff like dogs but in front of customers was all charm, like a jolly Chinese saint. He’d be like, “You want Mongol beef? Is good, yes? Is very good.”

Mr. Wong was Puerto Rican and spoke perfect English with a Midwest accent. Nobody in the kitchen called him Mr. Wong. We called him General Tojo.

I grabbed a relatively clean plate and covered it with gray rice and a scoop of yesterday’s moo shu pork from a vat beneath a heat lamp. I poked it in the center.

“This is cold,” I said.

“Bullshit,” Ryan said.

He grabbed the plate and stuck it in the microwave for forty-five seconds. I took the steaming mess and a big smile to table five.

Out in the dining room the bitch tried to flag me down, called out “excuse me, Miss?” but by then I was already taking another order. General Tso’s chicken, which we didn’t serve, but if I brought him a plate of sweet and sour he probably wouldn’t know the difference.

I avoided table three on the way back to the kitchen. A small victory, but I couldn’t go on winning forever. 

Sooner or later I’d refill her goddamned Coke because pissing her off wasn’t worth losing a lousy three-dollar-an-hour job. Not with my landlord breathing down my neck. The bitch at table three owned me same as everybody owned me.

Ryan wasn’t in the kitchen, so I gave the order to one of the Asian girls. She nodded but didn’t say anything. The Asians never spoke or looked at me. They were right off the boat, probably some indentured servitude bullshit. I didn’t know anything about it and hoped to keep it that way.

I found Ryan out the backdoor smoking a joint.

“Give me that,” I said, snatching it from his fingers. Ryan always let me smoke for free because he wanted to bang me. I took a long toke, held the smoke in my lungs until they felt ready to pop.

“There’s more where that came from,” he said. “You should come over after work.”

He smiled at my tits with his serial-killer grin. Ryan stood at the tail end of a long line of people trying to own me. He wanted to ram me with his diseased cock, in my cunt and ass and mouth. I smoked his joint and said nothing.

Ryan went in to check on the sweet and sour. I stayed outside to finish the roach. I leaned against the brick wall, looked out at the city. Beyond all the blight and post-industrial bullshit I saw the skyscrapers downtown, the GM building and the rest. They looked chrome and crystal, rising to pierce the heavens, beautiful and perfect and far away. They might as well have stood on the surface of Mars, because they weren’t built for people like me. Sometimes I think the people who work in those towers are a different species, some new kind of human with diplomas from private colleges, people who sip Kettle One vodka martinis at fashionable bars while discussing character arcs from shows on HBO.

In another minute or two I was back in the dining room delivering the sweet and sour. I saw General Tojo talking to the bitch at table three.

“Cuntfucker,” I said, all quiet-like under my breath.

“We so sorry,” he said in his fake pidgin English. “So very, very sorry.” He looked like he might commit seppuku right there in the dining room. Instead he snapped at me.

“You! You go! Get Coke cola!”

I lowered my eyes and tried to look abashed. I knew the game well enough to play along. Because when somebody owns you—like the bitch did, like General Tojo did—you do what they tell you. You refill their fucking Coke. It’s the proper order of things. So I served her a fresh one. Smiled big, apologized cloyingly, bowed my head as if to a queen.

Maybe I spit in it and maybe I didn’t.

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alex miller moved to hawaii last year.  he's never going back.  his fiction has been published in fifth wednesday journal, whiskeypaper and new wave vomit.  he tweets stuff @mannerism77.

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