Tag / work

by Alexander Sorondo

April 28

At an upscale pizza joint in South Miami there’s a woman working the door with long blond braids who looks in the candle light to be about thirty. Tell her you’re heading to the bar and she smiles, gestures teh way, and you go. Keep turning to see her walk people to their tables.

Couple weeks ago you saw her at a gas station on Old Cutler in a BMW with her daughter, a kid, wearing matching outfits. Cute. You find yourself glancing at her again and again because you saw her a couple weeks prior to even this

at a bar by herself, Monday night. It’s just past dark and you’re here with a friend. Men keep approaching her and she smiles, engages, sends them away. People by her drinks.

An hour of her sitting by herself and here comes an older guy sitting beside you. Salt and pepper hair, bearded, short and muscular. He orders a beer, gets absorbed in his phone.

She’s looking at him.

A shot of something bourbon-colored gets set beside his beer.

He looks up.

Bar tender points to the woman on the square-shaped bar’s opposite end. With the long blond braids.

He raises his glass to her and she comes over to him. Sits on the next stool.

You’re tipsy and delighted cuz this is gonna be the jackpot of eavesdropping.

Then the fucking Heat game starts and they switch the volume way up so you can’t hear a thing of what these two are saying.

They’re making out by the third quarter.

And a little over a month later you’re having a drink at the bar of an upscale pizza place, waiting to meet your brother, and here she is.

All these people around you. Their lives.

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by Alexander Sorondo

April 20

Use the garage today because it’s pouring rain. You know it’s a bad idea because they charge a weekend surplus but for some reason you go along with it.

At a bar upstairs the notebook comes out and you do a good amount of work in the sapce of two beers. The bill is $6, plus tip. It’s been about two hours. This is fine.

Leaving the garage a twentysomething in the cashiers’ booth tells you the price of your stay was $7. Frustrating. Guilt-inducing. Embarrassing, too, that you can’t go out to do some work over just two cheap beers without then incurring some peripheral expense that throws your supper into question and sets you on this nervous-angry thought track (made worse by the booze) about when you’ll next be paid and how embarrassingly meager a life you’ll have to lead until then.

The machine isn’t working.

Dude in the booth asks if you’d mind backing up 20 feet, changing lanes, and going and paying in another automated register.

Bafflingly, you say, “Yeah, I mind.”

Of course you don’t mind.

This dude with the glasses sighs and then apologizes but says that this is the only way for you to get out.

Of course he’s not sorry.

Two twentysomethings at an agitated standstill not wanting (not being able) to say what’s really got you both here, in this mood.

  1. He’s just doing his job, and embarrassed to be working here.
  2. You’re just broke, and embarrassed to be so.
by Alexander Sorondo

April 16. I remember you.

You’re about to go for a walkthrough at an efficiency in a convenient part of town and, being too excited, you get here an hour early.

Can’t go knocking on the door right now. Gotta be punctual, make a good impression.

So you go to kill time at a bar about five blocks away. Bring a book.

The bar tender walks up to you with this head-tilted squint, and so you start squinting right back at her, and bending your own head. She does seem familiar…

Then she calls it, smiling. For eight or nine months she tended bar at a big corporate chain next door to the nearest movie theater to your house. She saw you every Friday afternoon back when you sustained that six-month habit of catching a show on your day off.

You ask why she left the big chain.

“Got fired.”

(You have to stop asking this.)

She closes her eyes and tilts her head again and shrugs, like no big deal. “It was a shitshow there. Got fired on a technicality. It’s a long story.”

You ask for the story.

She tells it.

You drink two beers in the time it takes her to say that she didn’t card somebody. The customer was clearly of age, maybe mid-thirties, but rules are rules.

“I don’t really mind, though.” Again with the closed eyes and the big shrug. “This place pays me just as good. And we don’t have roaches here.”

by Alexander Sorondo

April 11. Didn’t We All.

The two of them, off now by themselves, came in as a group of six, probably straight from the office, and even though they’re still sitting with the group you can feel how they’ve kinda removed themselves.

The other people in their party have turned inward toward their new grouping of four. It’s the kinda scene where you can tell that the other four have been trying to get these two together. Maybe it’s the whole reason for the happy hour outing.

He’s explaining something to her, longwinded, and at the end of it she seems more curious than impressed when she says, “You know a lot about bars.”

Lifting his beer he says, “Yeah.” Coy in a way that might or might not be sincere.

“Were you a waiter?”

Sets his glass down. Beer from the tap. Pausing to swallow. “That’s the part I actually don’t like to talk about so much.” He clears his throat and makes a gesture with his shoulders like he’s a guy with a troubled past or something. “I actually…” dramatic pause for a weary sigh, “I used to have a business…”

by Alexander Sorondo

April 10. Jazz.

A student comes into the lab where you work cuz her teacher says she has to, she’s your age, and from the moment she walks in you for some reason fall into this comfortable barb-trading, razzing one another’s outfits and haircuts and teeth, and when you sit to help her out with an assignment you get along great, joking and making headway through the work, and if there’s anything flirtatious about the way you guys are joking it’s kept way beneath the surface because, apart from making a mess of the tutor-student thing, she’s involved with somebody, and you’re involved with somebody, both parties happy with those involvements.

She has a son. He’s 6. She collects and repairs and fawns over old cameras and would like to do more of it but for the fact that, as she puts it, she “just had to choose the fucking most expensive hobby, of course, and so…”

She trails off a lot, finishing her points with nimble-fingered gestures and, occasionally, a weight-lifter’s lunge. You go down to the cafeteria with her for a colada one afternoon and she does a pirouette at the register. Says she woulda been a great dancer if her parents had enrolled her.

The two of you meet at a music thing one night after the semester’s done, a couple of mutual friends in the mix. Later she drives you back to your car and in those couple minutes you both get uncharacteristically direct (a few months of casually insulting each other has made this weirdly easy) and the conversation culminates with one or the other saying, “So we’ve got crushes on each other,” and then quiet awkward yeahs.

“Bad timing.”

“Yeah.”

Something just barely mournful to your voices, like it sucks, but also something relaxed and contemplative, because it doesn’t suck.

You’re involved with someone, and happy; she’s involved with someone, and happy.

A relaxed silence between you, like a shrug, and then, smiling, you cheesy fucks talk about moments where one of you swooned at something the other one did. Back when the crush was a secret. That thing you wore, the way you said it, the lighting was just right…

You both laugh about it.

The road’s dark and empty, it’s late, and she drives like a mom with her hands at 10 and 2, her back straight as a board. So much respect for the speed limit.

Grayhaired, comfortable on the porch with a beer, you’re thinking back on old heartthrobs and passions, commitments, dreams.

And then, on a breeze, you catch a tune. Something from your youth. Know that song so well.

Follow it down the street to the gaping door of the old beatdown playhouse and upon walking inside you see a sign for

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