Here's something I do: every day, I come to work as a different person. Once I was the Master of Ceremonies at the palace at Versailles. Once I was Mary Poppins. Once I was an altar boy in an Italian cathedral. Once I was a knight, trying to win over all the customers with courtly love.
Today I'm an English butler. Sort of a hybrid of Igor and Oliver Twist and Anthony Hopkins in Remains of the Day. Jane and Sylvie come in in the afternoon and they're the only folks in the place, so I stride over to them and wring my hands and ask them, will it be fucking burgers today, mademoiselles? Jane and Sylvie love that shit, because I am somewhat of a simian performer to them. And they're like, oh, yes, sir. And cheese cubes. And I respond, very good.
Some people don't react. Like, I'm all deferential to the mayor. I use a terrible approximation of an English accent when I serve his pie. Yohh pie iz suhhhved. And he just looks at me and digs in. I mean, does he notice the accent? He has to notice it.
And later into the night, when drunken undergrads start to stagger down Main Street in their parade of newfound excess, a huge chick barges in to the diner demanding to use the restroom. Buy a burger, madam, I say, and the throne shall be yours. And she's like, fuck you. A soda, perhaps, I say. Fuck you, she says, I'm not buying anything. She plants herself between the counter and the booths and the place is so small that nobody can get around her without being sucked in by her gravitational pull. So I say, madam, I shall have to eject you. Miss Otis is unable to lunch today. And I grab her elbow and dance her to the door, her and me spinning this half-drunken waltz between the stools and the booths as people look on, which might be beautiful in some kinds of light. When she's back out on the stoop with her friends I shut the door behind her and return to my post behind the counter. I drape a towel over my arm like a butler would do. And when I look back with a distinguished air she drops trou and squats right on the doorstep, and the view of her ass from the glass door is unparalleled.
As I splash her piss away with bleachy water I think about tomorrow's fresh messes, rancid and shitty and human like this. Who will I be tomorrow?