The Front of the Freeway Read online

  The Front of the Freeway

  By Logan Noblin

  Copyright 2012 by Logan Noblin

  Cover Copyright 2012 by Joey Everett and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  The Front of the Freeway

  By Logan Noblin

  When I was a kid, I thought there was a front of the freeway—that somewhere way up in front of all the cars, in front of all the lights, someone was in first. Someone was winning. Someone had to be. And I always thought that, if we could just drive a little bit faster, just pass a few more cars, I would win. I could be in front of everybody, the glowing pearl eyes of a thousand headlights falling back over the horizon in the rear-view mirror. I knew that, if I drove fast enough, nobody would ever catch me. But that’s when I was a kid.

  By high school, my wrestling coach told me just how big the world was. “There’s always somebody out there better than you,” he’d say, “and probably somebody worse.” But to be honest, he spent a lot more time talking about the ones who were better. Mr. Stevens, my counselor, a sagging, empty frown in a pressed beige sweater-vest, called me into his office to tell me that, with my grades, a four-year college was out of the question, but if I worked hard, I could graduate JC, and then at least I wouldn’t be one of those community college dropouts. Then my father told me to start paying rent or start sleeping at the park, so I sort of fell behind the community college track and into the back of Romeo’s Deli. I mean all the way in the back, washing dishes and learning Spanish. My first three months there I thought my Spanish name was Gringo.

  It’s not like I was the only English voice in the building, though. Out behind the deli, Tony, the lanky black sandwich boy with a cocaine white smile, took orders from strangers because everybody liked Tony, and Tony seemed to like everybody. You’d get the feeling Tony knew a thing or two more than you about just about everything, and I always thought he was remarkably well informed for a sandwich boy and a high school dropout. Eventually, Tony taught me two very important lessons. First, that I was wrong. Nobody’s winning this race. We’re just a bunch of little cars passing each other and falling behind, and some of us are just limping between lanes with a busted taillight and a flat tire. But the second thing he taught me was how to get out of it. And I’d come to owe him for that, because if not for Tony, I would have stayed in Romeo’s Prison taking Romeo’s Orders becoming Romeo’s Bitch.

  The laws of God, the laws of man

  He may keep that will and can

  Not I: Let God and man decree

  Laws for themselves and not for me.

  —A. E. Housman

  Deep breath.

  Every morning I tell myself the same thing, take a deep breath. It’s December, and it’s 6:00 in the morning. Even in Southern California the air is frozen stiff. An hour bus ride through the dark, biting cold isn’t the worst, even on the clotted artery of a congested Los Angeles freeway, but when the air is frozen stiff, the ground is frozen, too, all the way down to the frostbitten metal pipes pumping ice-water under the city’s skin like so many cold metal veins. The dish soap isn’t any better, a slender tube of chilled yellow slime, so every morning before I plunge my hands into a sink full of numbing, 32.01 degree dishwater, I tell myself the same thing.

  Deep breath.

  The water could be scalding, the burn’s the same, at first, a thousand needles pricking and cutting like two fish-hook gloves, but whether the hours of quick, clockwise scrubbing warms my hands, or if the nerves simply lose feeling, either way, the first plunge is always the worst. Rodrigo won’t turn the water heater on until he staggers into the deli for 9:00 opening, so for now the shiny red ring wrapped around the hot water nozzle is an open, laughing mouth with a cold metal tongue. I grab the tongue and twist hard to the right, but the slick silver faucet spits only ice into the frothing antibacterial swamp.

  6:45.

  A tall sheet of zinc slaps hard against a frail tin frame as the new sandwich boys clamber through the back door fifteen minutes early. The old sandwich boys will file in fifteen minute late, and by 7:30 the wet musk of mayonnaise, vinegar, processed cheese, fish oil, gas, and ammonia-based cleaner will invade the washroom and choke the cramped plaster cell. Even as the kitchen groans from the cold and empty quiet of early morning to the hot and jarring loud of opening hours, my cell is empty, nothing but sloshing dishwater, the stench of the kitchen, and me. The cooks scramble between ovens and boiling pots in the kitchen as an endless line of customers paces anxiously behind a long glass counter out front, but that’s all on the outside. Even the bus boys don’t come back here if they can help it, because I don’t speak Spanish so, as far as they know, I’m a mute. There’s no TV, no radio, and no employee of the month plaque, either. There’s mold on the walls and a big metal sink…and soap, there’s always plenty of soap.

  It’s Tuesday, I think.

  I’ve never liked Tuesdays. The improbable optimism of the weekend—your friend’s shitty house party, a beer on the beach, whatever it is—it drowned in the sink early Monday morning, and Saturday’s a short eternity away. This isn’t a day job, either. I got over that notion a year ago. This isn’t temporary, and this isn’t going away. There are no incentives, no promotions, no mobility, no escape. There’s one check every two weeks, and it’s never quite enough to get to the next one. This is ten hours a day, every week, so for now it’s soap, scrub, rinse. Soap, scrub, rinse.

  “Hulian!” It’s 12:00 and Rodrigo’s yelling. “Hulian! Why you didn’t finish the saucepans first, huh? Sabes que, clean the saucepans, then the dishes. Come on, gringo!”

  Soap, scrub, rinse.

  For the next ten hours, I won’t clean a single dish. For every plate I wash, for every bowl I scrub, another grease-swabbed, crumb-crusted stack of platters appears on the cold metal counter beside me like plastic mitosis. If I have to see Rodrigo’s enormous Ecuadorian mouth flapping through the washroom door one more time, I might gut him with the chef’s carving knife.

  Soap, scrub, rinse.

  It’s 12:00, so I’ve got exactly two hours until my unpaid thirty-minute lunch break. Despite spending most of my shift with my hands submerged in a tank of bubbling yellow disinfectant, it is strict company policy that I wash my hands for a full thirty seconds before and after my break. And if I clock out two minutes early or two minutes late, or if I extend my break by more than two minutes of the time allotted, then I’m going to be in strict violation of some shit I really don’t care about.

  “Aqui.” A bus boy drops a stack of grime and plastic onto the stainless steel tray next to the counter. First the saucepans, then the dishes. Then my head might just explode, and between the blood and brain, I’ll have to clean the silverware all over again.

  It’s 2:00, and I’m allowed to eat. I report to the punch clock, salute, and drop my timecard through a narrow slit in the machine’s plastic skull. Whir, click, punch. The ma
chine hiccups the timecard back into my hand, time and date faintly branded across the top of the pale white paper.

  Usually, I slip into the walk-in freezer for lunch and dig up an expired, but free, egg or tuna salad, resting for a few quiet minutes under the placid monotone of an industrial fan droning in cyclical indifference. Stepping into the walk-in feels something like falling into the Arctic. The cold wind, the failing light, the solitude—an oasis of frost and metal separated by twelve steel inches from the heat and hurry of the kitchen. I tug hard on the heavy iron door, and it gives, a cool mist seeping out from around the frame. But heaving the thick iron door ajar, I glance up and realize that, today, I’m not alone. Two shadows melded together in the corner speak quickly in hushed tongues. More Spanish.

  “Eres un ladron, hombre.”

  “Quizas, pero soy tu mejor amigo si quieres más de esa, chico.” Like a reverse pick-pocket, one shadow slips a folded wad into his jeans, coolly, precisely, but not quickly enough to escape my attention. The other unfolds from the wall and materializes in the dim light, his hands buried deep in his cargo-shorts pockets. But before I can edge from the room, the shade glances up, and I’m snared in a wild, petrified stare. Martín the bus boy freezes, mouth agape, his face twisted in bewilderment like a deer caught in a bear trap. His slender figure trembles slightly in the dark, his nervous, skittish eyes pacing frantically across his face at about my chest height, and neither of us says a word. I always liked Martín. He’s as mute as I am around here, scrambling silently between dirty tables like the house rat, and if I’m on the outside of some great joke, it’s a small comfort knowing he’s out with me. But for now we just watch each other until my gaze sinks and a muttered apology dies somewhere in the back of my throat. Martín’s head snaps around, grasping for a cue from the shadow still blanketed in darkness.

  “Esta bien, vete.” With that, Martín scurries from the tundra like a startled mouse, leaving me alone with a voice charming enough to eclipse the groaning industrial fan. “What’s going on JT?”

  “Hey, what’s up, Tony?”

  “Just chillin’, man. Just chillin’.” Nobody hangs out in a 38 degree metal locker except frozen lasagnas and employees hiding from something. We both know that, but I don’t mention it. I just nod and mutter something and grapple for an exit line. “You like working here, JT?” I hate working here. I hate every dirty dish, every bitching customer, and every accented word out of Rodrigo’s incessant, nattering mouth. We both know that, too. But I know better than to breathe a word against it.

  “Yeah, it’s alright, you know.” The slick black coils of Tony’s snakeskin watch glisten against his charcoal skin in the dark. I always thought he looked remarkably well dressed for a sandwich boy and a high school dropout, but I don’t mention that, either.

  “You’re a liar, JT.” Tony’s laughing now, a song that echoes and dances about the industrial ice cavern. “This place is a prison.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s work.”

  “Yeah, man,” he laughs. “It’s work.” Tony’s breath condenses in the frostbitten air and rises, a cool ring of mist floating gently to his forehead and dispersing. “I want to show you something, JT. Tonight.” Tonight? I couldn’t have mumbled more than five words at the guy in the last two years and now he wants to take me a on a field trip.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ll pick you up out front Grand Central Liquor at twelve. And don’t even start with the bullshit; it’s Tuesday night and I know you don’t have anything better to do.” Before I can fumble over an alibi and dumbly breathe uuhhh…, Rodrigo tears the sealed door open and a cascade of light floods through the gaping iron wound.

  “Oye, Tony, we need you out front.” Tony smirks and stares I’ll be there when I get to it into the open doorway, but after a second he gives, kicking himself from the wall and striking up in hummed sarcasm the melody of an old slave spiritual. With the compressed thud of the closing steel door, the light and Tony’s song vanish, leaving me standing alone and confused in the solitude of my little Antarctica.

  “Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.”

  —Dion Boucicault

  Tony’s right. It’s Tuesday night, and I don’t have anything better to do. I never do. Go to work, make dinner, go to bed. If my dad passes out on the couch and I can steal the remote for the night, it’s a blessing, because that’s part of his routine. Go to work, make dinner, watch TV. He’ll probably finish a fifth of Jack Daniels in there somewhere, but I guess that’s because of work, so it all fits the schedule.

  My dad’s a cop. If there’s anything worse than being twenty-one and living alone with your father, it’s being twenty-one and living with a cop. Cigarettes, friends, girls, whatever—not under his roof. Mom was more reasonable, which isn’t saying a whole lot, but I guess that’s why she bugged out. Dad called her a loose cannon and a bottle of tequila, the type that can’t stay still for too long. He hated that about her. She cried for the first few months and yelled for the last few, creeping in at 4:00 every morning while Dad snored at the TV, the History Channel still flickering important nothings at him across a dark living room. He loves the History Channel. Every night at 8:00 he sits down to watch important people live their lives while he loses his in front of the television. But it’s all part of the schedule, so at least he’s always on time.

  The door’s locked, but I know he’s in there; he always is. I don’t know if paranoia is a job requirement or something he picked up in training, but he keeps the house locked down like a four-room stucco jail cell. I slide the tip of the smooth brass key around the rusted keyhole, fumbling over the lock, the spring-loaded screen door shoving impatiently into my back. Inside, I can hear a dreary Harvard voice actor mocking me from the living room. In 1837, the fusion of automatic calculation with programmability produced the first recognizable computers… I like to think the narrator’s out there, somewhere, with a meth addiction and a penchant for prostitutes; it makes the programs more human. Finally, the key slides in, and I yank the door open.

  “Hey, Dad.” I don’t have to look up. I know his eyes are fixed on the flashing black box on the shelf, his hand glued to a fork in a bowl of spaghetti. There will be a shot glass somewhere on the table, too.

  “Hey, Julian.” The fork bounces off the hard plastic bowl with a metallic clank as he shovels more pasta into his mouth. His cheeks narrow to a thick, strong jaw, a sharp, diagonal frame to his sharp, bony face, all peppered with short grey hairs, his carved chin spotted with smears of scarlet tomato sauce. That jaw used to mean more to him when he was in sales, but gambling on products and personality was a risky way to live, and my father was never much of one for taking risks. It didn’t take him long to trade in his tie, coat, and smile for a badge, a paycheck, and a little bit of security. I don’t know if that’s my fault or his, or nobody’s at all. He wipes his chin and tips a foaming tin beer can against his lips for a couple seconds.

  “You take out the trash this morning?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Do all the dishes?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Get to work on time?”

  “Yes, Sir.” He loves that word, Sir. It’s short, Germanic—all military rigidness in a stiff oral spasm. That’s sort of how we communicate: stiff, predictable, straight to the point. I think we’re related less by blood and more by straight, tidy bones. “How was work?”

  He sets the bowl down with a soft clatter and turns his eyes on me for the first time, two dark chestnut stones sagging in his wrinkled, tired cheeks. Mine are more like Mom’s.

  “You know, it’s work.” Believe me, I know. If we have anything in common, it’s that we hate our work, but there’s a fundamental difference between a shitty day job and a miserable, endless career. “Miller made sergeant today,” he starts, tipping the brown, crystal nose of his Jack Daniels into a slender, clear shot glass next to the spaghetti. “After two years, he makes sergeant. And you know what, go
od for him. He’s a good kid, and I’m sure he’ll do well. But I’ve been there twenty-four years, Julian, and the Lieutenant still has me working the same beat. I’ve got enough trouble with the mortgage on this place, I don’t know how much longer I can hand out speeding tickets. ‘Sergeant Eddy Miller’…give me a fucking break.” Dad punctuates the toast with a raised shot glass and throws the whiskey back in a single, fluid stroke. He shoves a mouthful of pasta in after it, his regular Tuesday night chaser, and turns back to the TV, noodles hanging from his lips like a limp yellow beard. “But you know, Lieutenant Allan’s an old man, so who knows? Maybe he’ll retire or kick the bucket soon, if I’m lucky, you know. No one else has been there as long as me, so maybe, maybe there’s hope for me yet.” There’s a lot of waiting in my father’s line of work. It’s like climbing some massive tower, always waiting for someone above you to fall off so you can slot in. It’s all very neat, very systematic. I could never do that. But then again, I wash dishes, so what do I know? “What about you, Son, when are you going to get yourself together? Get back to school, get another job?”

  “I don’t know, Dad. Not tonight. I got work again in the morning.” I have work again every morning. He doesn’t understand, that is my structure. It’s the blueprint and the scaffolds and the woodwork framing my static existence. Wake up, wash dishes, sleep, and repeat. I come home dizzy every night from chasing my tail every day, but there’s no slowing down. I walk to my room and toss my shirt in the corner, another soap-stained linen mountain hiding the dirt-stained mustard carpet. Then I hurdle a few piles of old notebooks and overdue library books, falling face first into my bed, an icy pool of chilled fabric washing against my bare skin, still simmering from Romeo’s oven. You work up a sweat running in place all day. But that’s why I’m going to go see Tony tonight. It’s something different, something off the schedule, and maybe it’s time to pull the scaffolding down and see if the walls cave in or if this cell was built to last.

  “It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”