Secrets; I Tried To Keep Us Together, You Were Busy Keeping Secrets

Mister Mustache

The other busboy, Cirilo, was already busy setting the tables. Cirilo was never late. He never forgot his employee identification card or arrived with blood all over his white shirt. Plus Cirilo was so fast and efficient he made everyone else seem incompetent. Cirilo already had half the dining room set up. He'd wiped down the tables with a damp towel, spread out the tablecloths, set the salt, pepper and candles. Now he was setting out the side plates. I grabbed a rack of wine glasses. The wine glasses were tricky. Leaving fingerprints meant signing an EDF for mishandling of glassware.

When Cirilo finished the plates, he wheeled a cart full of silverware around the dining room. At each seat he placed two forks, two spoons and two knives. Fine dining meant using extra plates and silverware. Instead of polishing the silverware before he set it, Cirilo somehow palmed all the utensils in a way that left no mark. He shuffled them out like cards, only stopping occasionally to polish ones that weren't shining quite enough. And damn he was fast. Even though he had to place six pieces of silverware for every wineglass, he was still catching up to me. Pretty soon we stood at the same table.

"Buenos dias," I said.

"Hola, amigo," he said. We shook hands with a slide and a snap, and then bumped our fists together. "Amigo," he said, "you do the coffee and iced tea. Do the sopas. I'll do this." He pointed to the rack of wineglasses I held.

"Okay," I said, and went to the rear corner of the dining room. I brewed coffee and iced tea. I brewed some decaf. I ate a package of oyster crackers and sucked on an ice cube. I went into the kitchen and got two soup pots from the cooks, the clam chowder we had every night and salmon bisque, the soup du jour. One of the cooks asked me what happened, pointing to the bandage on my chin. I looked at the cook whose name I didn't know, studying his bushy mustache and the toothpick hanging from the corner of his mouth. I wanted to tell him that I had cut myself because I was distracted by my decision to grow a mustache, but knew any man with such a healthy mustache would never understand.

I shrugged my shoulders. "Muy borracho," I said, and everybody in the kitchen burst out laughing, even the dishwasher with the lazy eye and the broken teeth. I couldn't tell whether they thought I was funny or stupid. I wasn't even sure what I thought myself.

I took the soup pots into the dining room. I filled the bread warmer with a few bags of sourdough rolls, and then took one out and gnawed on a corner of it like a caged rodent. Mr. Spatz suddenly swept into the room, inspecting the table setup and the general appearance of everything. He didn't have his EDF clipboard with him, but I knew it was probably close at hand. I quickly tossed the roll I was eating into the garbage. Eating rolls was grounds for an EDF.

Spatz stalked through the dining room with his hands behind his back and his sharp eye searching for any flaw in the dining aesthetic. He paused and leaned in close at one table in particular. He carefully picked a wine glass up by the stem and held it toward the window. He wanted to know who had set the wine glasses out. Spatz stared me down, and I became painfully aware of the background muzak.

Of course it was one of the wineglasses I'd set out. I wanted to confess my mishandling of glassware, but still had a mouthful of sourdough and could not immediately speak. Cirilo approached Spatz and said that he had set the tables. Spatz set the wineglass back on the table and told him he had done an excellent job. Superb, he said. He patted Cirilo on the shoulder and then looked back at me. He told me he hoped I was taking notes. I didn't know whether to feel relieved that I wasn't in trouble or angry that Cirilo had stolen a tiny piece of praise that could have been mine.

Cirilo carried a bucket of ice over to the rear of the dining room, and poured it into the extra large ice bin next to the ice tea machine. When the ice bin was nearly empty in the morning it was possible to read a warning label attached to the side near the bottom of it. It read this ice chest is not intended to store ice for human consumption. One of our most important jobs as busboys was to keep this ice bin filled, brimming so the label was always covered with the ice we used for waters and ice teas. Not intended to store ice for human consumption. I always felt confused in the face of it, paralyzed by this moral dilemma.