Panorama City by Antoine Wilson Page A

only reason he’d shown me the video was so I could sign a paper saying I’d seen the video, after which he could finally give me my uniform, which he said would be paid for out of my first check. I drew my circle and scribble and he handed me my uniform, which was a shirt, an apron, and a hat. The apron had a pocket in front that was perfect for my compact binoculars. Roger said that now I was one of the troops. I thought it was interesting that he called us troops and said so. He said we were at war. I had no idea. I asked him with who? He said the customer.
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    I started as a floater. I did whatever needed to get done, it suited me, I have always liked having a variety of jobs, every day brings a new challenge. On that first day I cleaned upa grease spill that was not my fault and I swept the floor all around the restaurant, but my main job was to take the trays from the top of the trash cans to the back, where I fed them into a giant dishwashing machine, Francis showed me how, he demonstrated that each tray had to be lined up right so it would get clean the first time, and while he showed me he seemed almost like he was falling asleep, behind his big glasses his eyes fluttered, he showed me specifically how to line up the trays but shortly afterward he stopped lining them up right, he started sticking them in willy-nilly. When I pointed this out, he said, Fuck it, they’re fucking trays, who gives a fuck, why the fuck are you smiling, what the fuck do you have to be smiling about? I said that I was honored to be learning from someone who knew the ropes around here, as they say, from someone who seemed to have mastered the ins and outs of dishwashers. Now his eyes were wide open behind his glasses. The ropes? he said. Dishwashers? he said. He picked a tray off the rack, before it went into the dishwashing machine, he picked up a tray and threw it across the room, it wasn’t a big room, the tray hit the wall before it hit the floor, it made a huge clattering sound. He said that he was meant to be a filmmaker, not a dishwasher, and he could only ignore the indignity, his word, so much longer before he exploded, he had to work here in order to rent a video camera so that he could make a film so that he could go to film school so that he wouldn’t have to work here anymore. He threw another tray, and could I not smile while I worked, it made him crazy, he said, throwing a third tray, it made him crazy to see my teeth and my eyebrows, he could tell the difference between a real smile and a fake one, and he could see that my smile was real, and if it had been fake he could have tolerated it, but he could imagine nothing more depressing, in these circumstances, nothing more suicide-ideation-inducing, his words, than someone actually genuinely smiling his way through this, he held up a tray and threw it. Roger the manager came in and said, What the Samhain, his word, is going on back here? And Francis said, I’m throwing trays at the wall. And Roger said, Stop it. And Francis said, I’m going on smoke break, and he walked out the back door. And Roger asked me whether Francis had shown me how to use the dishwasher, and I said yes, and he said, Hop to it then.
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    After washing the trays I returned them to the counter, where I watched my fellow employees work with the customers on whatever it was they wanted to eat, I saw no signs of war, I saw people who were trying to listen to their stomachs while they tried to read the menu, which was elevated above everyone and everything and which had pictures of most of the food and numbers you could choose from. I’ve never been much of a reader, but numbers I know, if you don’t know your numbers you’ll get into a mess of trouble, your grandfather’s words. I did a circuit around the dining area to retrieve the trays from the top of the trash cans, for the first time I found myself among the people of Panorama City. They looked like they