Metal Deep: Infinite - Damsels in Distress: Episode 1

“REAL” LIFE

The Aussies call it a walkabout. I called it getting away from my boring life. I had to have a change, and waiting for change to find me was a fool’s dream. So it was on a rainy evening after finishing a shift slinging steaks to ungrateful rednecks at the local steakhouse when I decided it was time to grab life by its testicular fortitude, and rip myself a new beginning. Well, I felt that way until I got home and realized it had been about a month and a half since I cleaned. I then spent the rest of my night and wee-morning hours sipping on coffee while I cleaned dishes, sorted laundry, and mucked up something that appeared to have come alive from that small dark corner often gone unnoticed between my commode and bathtub.

Get away? Who was I kidding? This was my life: Server Boy.

Six nights a week you could find me at Steerhouse Steakhouse where I catered to John Q. Public’s voracious need for half-cooked meat. My existence was pretty much terrible, I stayed lonely, and I was always broke. How could this be? Allow me to rant it out for you:

What people don’t realize about the outstanding citizens in my line of work is that most of us don’t get regular paychecks. The company gives us a barely-enough hourly stipend to cover what Uncle Sam demands. So, if I am going to eat, fix my little brown beater of a car, or help keep the lights on at home, then it’s going to come from that all important gratuity.

I bust my overworked-bum to see it hit around twenty percent of a check total. I’m lucky if I get fifteen.

For my little tips I smile when I’d rather tell someone to piss off, and I run around like a headless chicken as five different tables all need ten different things at the exact same time. It’s amazing how oblivious people are. Every table can be filled to capacity, the waiting area will be overflowing, and in fact, there will be children literally hanging from windows sills as people wait up to two hours to come have me bring them some kind of magical-meat that apparently cannot be found at the local food-mart. When did cooking become a lost art? Here’s the kicker, every table wants their meal as quickly as possible. They all demand that my service be to them first, everyone else in the restaurant be damned.

It’s a glamorous life. Let me tell you. Everything you own starts to reek of restaurant. And it’s not that romantic woodsy smell one gets after grilling some steaks on the barby. It’s an offensive odor likened to some forms of sewer sludge. This post-work funk separates you from the rest of the civilized world. -A world who, after using you as their food-bitch, forgets your name.

When you’re a restaurant server, people treat you as if you’re some kind of drop out. They assume you spend your days cooking meth and living off welfare when you’re not expecting “charity” (AKA the tip) after lavishing, what is essentially, a luxury service. I admit, there are plenty of us servers who do abuse drugs, stay drunk at most hours of the day, and treat each baby as a new tax or child support check, but I’ve got some banker, lawyer, and doctor stories that will make you shake your head and weep for the species as well. I’m just thankful I was taught to be responsible. Dad raised me right.

I have to admit, it’s not all bad. Serving tables is a lot like a game. Every new guest that sits down is a challenge and a roll of the dice. I have come across just as many good patrons as I have bad ones, and there are still some generous people out there, but sometimes it’s them who really make what I do so hard.

I barely have a hundred bucks to my name after bills. I would like nothing better than to sit down somewhere and make some single, hardworking mom’s night by dropping a couple of the other “Bills” (Bill is server speak for a hundred dollars) as payment for her hard work, but if serving tables paid that well, everybody would be doing it. It’s hard to care about people, and then not have any kind of resource to do anything about
anything
. I’m learning that if you don’t have an outlet for the kindness you want to show, that kindness tends to backlog inside, and then is starts to sour. Unfortunately, I have soured.

All that complaining to say: I want to get out. No, I have to get out. I believe that I was created for more than just making sure some hick’s steak has just the right amount of red in the center while I kept his tea glass full. Meanwhile the world spins deeper into turmoil, and I can’t lift a finger to do anything about it. If only the great tales were true…

I grew up hearing some crazy stories. They were the great tales about a world that was so much bigger than most would ever take the time to see. It was said that our planet could be a place where our dreams lived and our imaginations could be turned into reality. I never really knew what that meant, but the longer I lived this life of the work-to-home-to-work merry-go-round, I knew that my dreams were anything but living. Of course, it would help if I knew what my dreams were. At least I could pay them proper respects as I pass their dusting corpses on my way out to my dead end job. I laid the dreams to the side long ago, and every time I came close to picking one back up, Life pimp slapped it right out of my weak hands.

But isn’t that Life’s job? Everyone needs an adversary, and while most of us don’t have to contend with arch rivals like our favorite heroes in the comic books do, each of us has that nagging whore called Life who keeps taking far more than she puts out, and she is always ready to thwart the latest and greatest plan we have for success. Yeah, she’s a
damn
wench.

Once, when I was young, my father, as the credits rolled after an awesome science fiction movie, told me that what we had just watched was a true story. I, being too young to realize that my dad was incapable of telling the truth when a joke could be made at my I expense, laughed but shuttered when I imagined those supermodel space-traveling vampires standing outside our door asking for permission to come in and eat us. If we said no, they’d use their spaceships to vaporize the walls so there would be no magical threshold law to keep them out. Having gotten lost in his thought, almost regretful he had told me that, he returned to the present with a long gulp of diet cola before bursting into uncontrollable light hearted guffaws. He pointed at my face and screamed, “Gotcha!”

And that was what we did. Growing up it was just the two of us. There was the occasional family member around to help every now and then as my father worked, but he always made sure that we had time together, and I loved him for it. We would go to traveling museum exhibits and he would show me an old Viking helmet that he claimed could make the wearer invisible, or a diamond that was supposedly a unicorn dropping. We would look at maps and he would point to the North Pole and say, “Fire Elves kicked out Santa centuries ago, and instead of toys, they now develop weapons for the military.” At the time I thought it was cool, but in retrospect I ask myself: Who tells their kid that?

With that there were more than a half dozen other sites with just as many fantastic claims involving werewolves, robotic people, warring pirates and ninjas, and my favorite, the ever elusive nomadic aliens. There were so many, I could never remember them all. Every time we went somewhere it was always something: Tree bark that could be magically turned into metal, hidden bases on the moon, actual superpower-creating properties of moonlight. Maybe that’s why I liked working at night? I hated daytime. He did too. Most of all staring at the moon reminded me of him and all the fun times we had during late night dreaming sessions over hot chocolate and marshmallows to questions like: “If you could be a superhero, what powers would you have?”

He made up fantastic stories all the time, and I always wanted to believe him, and there was part of me that felt like he wanted me to as well, but it was always the same outcome. There would be a few seconds we’d share in the moment, and then he would either claim it was a joke or he would simply change the subject to something more practical. It was left to me to assume the prank had lived and died, and it was time to return to reality.

I’m about two years out of high school. The nice part is Dad and I still lived together. The sad part is we hardly ever talk anymore. I went through an angry phase that started about midway through my teen years. He says I’m still in it. When he says that it does make me mad, and then I argue that I’m not, which then starts an epic “chicken or the egg” discussion about when and why my anger arrived. Frustration continues to abound.

Angry or not, I did stop listening to the stories. They only made me long for what could never be. When you hear about greater things, beyond the proverbial reality of death and taxes, it makes you hope, and when you’re a wide-eyed hormone-raging teenager who longs to stand on top of the world as throngs of girls squeal to touch your buffness, the cold reality of small Christmases, crappy second hand clothes, and decade old “new” electronics, brings you down into the pains of “what is” pretty quickly. And “what is” was that we were nobody, and my janitor father and I were always going to be that way. Since then it’s been something I’ve wrestled to accept every single day of my life, and I hate feeling that way, but it’s there.

Do I believe his stories? Not a chance. Do they make me want to get outside this little Alabama town and see for myself? You bet it does. Not to go looking for gryphon feathers or living computers, but to see what the world looks like through eyes that aren’t always constantly making up some line of fantastical bullbutter to entertain children. As the man said, “I want the truth.”

But sometimes I hear Life sniggering behind me aptly replying, “You can’t handle it.”