I

            One First Friday around nine in the evening, Max shuffled into the busy kitchen with an armload of dirty plates and flatware and set them with a little too much force on the stainless steel counter of the dishpit.

            “Watch that shit,” warned Jux as he loaded a sheaf of small plates into the dishwasher.

            Max washed his hands. “Sorry,” he said, his voice weak. “It’s a nightmare out there right now.”

            “Don’t be bringing it back here,” Jux told him.

            After struggling to get the dispenser to sense the motion of his hand, Max dug a finger up into the slot and tugged out a few slivers of brown paper towel with which he could attempt to dry his hands.

            “You’re just going to jam it like that,” Abuse warned from the cold side. He slid a plate containing a huge colorful mound of salad into the window.

            Max pursed his lips and shut his eyes. “I don’t need shit from you guys,” he said as he fumbled a handful of black, false-leather check folders from his apron pocket and began to flip through them. “What the fuck? There was a thirty-five dollar cash tip in here.” He reached back down into the apron pocket and then looked around at the floor, distraught. “Goddamnit. First there’s Packie taking all the prime tops, Teatree keeps mixing the Cosmo with bacon vodka for some reason, some bitch knocked a full glass of water into some other bitch’s purse, there’s a baby that won’t stop crying, and now I’m out thirty-five bucks. I don’t need any shit from any of you.”

            “Take your plates,” Chef Jessup cooed from the hot side. “These are for A41.”

            Max sighed and sorted a few checks into bill folders. “Anyone have a pen I can borrow?”

            “Get your own pens,” Abuse snarled.

            “Aren’t there pens at the bar?” asked Jessup.

            “Packie took them all,” Max said, snapping the folders shut and stowing them in his apron so that he could collect the food for A41. “There’s that, too.” Then he stormed out of the kitchen, garnering a few smirks.

            It was peak season, and the front of the house was, indeed, completely overwhelmed. They were on a forty-minute wait and contemplating extending that to a full hour, and the servers were running around—sometimes literally—in their attempts to get whatever it was that they were trying to get for the guests at table. The early October night was cool and pleasant and those on the waiting list were gathered in clusters outside near and on the sidewalk engaged in discussions about artwork or people they’d seen on the Art Walk. There was so much activity in the low light of the house that it was difficult to look straight at it and take it all in. Hundreds of glasses of wine and water and cocktails shimmered in the light of the elegantly-dim hanging halogens. It was at the point where service staff said nothing to each other in complete sentences; all communication was direct and fragmented and usually accompanied by strong body language. They were saving up their power to forge complete sentences for the seemingly unending onslaught of patrons that would be assessing their service in determination of a gratuity. In sum, the front of the house was a chaos of movement and chatter. Not even the smooth satellite jazz piped into the ceiling speakers could overcome the commotion.

            The back of the house was also busy, attending as it was to the fulfillment of orders, but Abuse’s music had been shut off for hours now and the small kitchen was focused by the sounds of preparation and execution. Edges of steak sizzled to a sear in pans and the oven door slammed shut after several hot flatbreads were removed. The high-pressure stream of water from the dishwasher’s hanging nozzle tore into the sides of pans and the faces of plates while steel ladles drawing from wells of sauce clinked against steel containers and then clicked against the plates where the sauces were spread. The kitchen was loud, but its visual movement, in contrast to the erratic undulations in the front, was more contained. The bodies working in the kitchen were moving with intensity and precision and rarely leaving the spot that they were in. The row of tickets hanging from the clip along the island’s upper shelf was long and the cooks on the line were constantly looking up at them with usually determined and sometimes quizzical faces before setting back to the task of arranging the necessary ingredients and adapting their immediate plans to the new information. Whenever the printer buzzed out a new ticket, despite the constant noise, everyone in the kitchen, including the dishwasher, perked up to hear the callout from the chef.

            When, at one point, the printer did pump out a new ticket to be added to the queue and Chef Jessup turned from the sauté pans and tore it down across the serrated aperture and looked at it for a few seconds, Abuse, working the cold side with his gloved hands manipulating a mass of tossed mixed greens into a pyramid, looked over at him expectantly.

            Jessup squinted at the ticket and didn’t call it out. Instead, he shook his head and stuck both plies of the printout up into Abuse’s queue.

            “Another one from Max for B3,” said the chef, “but it’s the same stuff as the last one. Probably a mistake.”

            Abuse scowled at the ticket and compared it with another a couple tickets ahead. “I’m calling him back here,” he said, reaching up and pressing the appropriate button on the panel above the microwave. “I haven’t got time,” he added, “for this mickeymouse bullshit.” Every time the button was pushed, the server’s pager would vibrate, and Abuse pushed it several times in a row in order to send the right message. Even as he was pushing at the button, however, Max entered from the bar.

            Max was young, but he was also harried and distraught as he scraped scraps of uneaten food from the plates he was carrying into the trash bin near the dish station. “I fucking know it,” he said as he stomped his foot a few times and violently scraped the plates and then set them in a nice neat stack at the end of the dish station like he was expected to do. “That last one was a mistake,” he admitted. “That shit is crazy out there. Packie put me on a couple of drunk tables and they don’t know what they want until they do and then they want it and—”

            Jux, who was working the dishpit, ceased the water flow and looked into Max’s eyes. “Chill out, homeslice,” he said. “They just got an extra ticket, which is the last thing they need, but it’s just an extra ticket.”

            Max pushed his fingers through the curly bush of hair on his head and gripped his skull. “If that fucking baby out there doesn’t stop crying,” he said, widening his eyes and looking at the floor, “I think I’m going to lose it.”

            Abuse looked at Max and then plucked the newest of the tickets from the queue, crumpled it, and tossed it into the trash. “The matter is solved, Sir,” he said. “Time to move on.”

            Max, face dark and subtly grateful, glanced at Abuse and then nodded and looked back down.

            “You talking about Packie?” Chef Jessup asked.

            Max looked up and then tilted his head so that he could see the chef between the upper shelf of the island and the metal counter upon which a number of prepared plates were waiting to be picked up for service. “Packie?” Max asked. “What about him?”

            “He’s a fucking douche,” muttered Abuse, nodding approvingly at his own comment.

            “Didn’t you say something about a crying baby?” asked Jessup as he tonged at some steak.

            Max looked at Abuse and said, pointing a finger, “Yes, Packie is a douche and,” he pointed to the chef, “no, there is a baby somewhere out there and it keeps crying and it is driving me crazy.”

            “A real life baby?” asked Danny from the prep station, where he was pounding, twisting, and stretching dough for pizzas.

            “How am I supposed to know?” asked Max. He exhaled pathetically and looked at Abuse. “We’re good about B3? Only one pâté plate?”

            Abuse nodded. “Both surprises,” he said, “Poivre Noir and au Paysan.”

            Max inhaled and scanned the food ready on the counter. “One of these is mine,” he opined.

            Abuse shook his head. “Two of them are yours,” he said. “Pear salad and a one cheese Lunatic Cringe right here. B1.”

            Max nodded quickly and grabbed the plates and hurried them out of the kitchen.

            “Somebody’s got to get his shit together,” said Jessup as he plated up three servings of filet mignon and fries and set them up into the window and then snatched their respective tickets down and put them there alongside according to temperature.

            “Agreed,” Abuse said, ladling jalapeno ceviche into a ramekin. “This restaurant is no place for the weak. Let’s not forget what happened to Fogarty and McNutt.”

            Chef Jessup sighed as he scored the fatty skin of a duck breast with a nine-inch knife.

            Jux looked over at them. “Who are Fogarty and McNutt?”

            “Servers,” Abuse explained as he stacked crostinis on the plate around the cup of ceviche. “Well, they used to be servers here.”

            Jux grunted. “Sounds like a bluegrass duo,” he said, resuming the scrub he was giving to a ninth pan that had apparently been used to broil cheese. “What happened to them, then?” There was a pause, so Jux turned again. “What?”

            “They fucking killed themselves,” Abuse said. He pantomimed first the firing of a pistol into his mouth and then the tightening of a noose around his neck.

            “Jesus,” Danny said from the pizza station.

            “Seriously?” Jux asked. He looked at the chef.

            “I think that was before my time,” Jessup said.

            “Fogarty worked here last year,” Abuse informed him. “He’s the one you always called ‘dickchin.’”

            “I know, but…” Chef Jessup focused on directing the fatty skin of the duck breast hissing hot into the wavy oil of the pan. Thick fragrant smoke vacuumed right up with the slightest of billow into the vent. “Is there even any lavender syrup?”

            “Damn, bro,” Danny said, shaking his head at the chef. “That’s fucked up.”

            “I didn’t call him that to his face,” Jessup defended. He was also frowning down into the dark space between the range unit and the tall main cooler, a space that was especially difficult to clean.

            “McNutt was a couple years before that, so you weren’t here then,” Abuse continued. “He shot himself in his car in the library parking lot across the street.”

            “Jesus,” Jux was now the one to say.

            “We’re pretty sure it wasn’t exactly because of this place,” Abuse said. “He’d just had a bad breakup and was about to flunk out of college.”

            “Sounds like Max,” Jessup said.

            “Yeah,” Abuse said, “It does. That’s why I agree that he needs to get his shit together.”

            Jux was spraying down plates and Danny was knuckling the pizza dough while Jessup and Abuse completed a few orders. Nobody spoke for a while.

            “Hey,” Chef Jessup then said. “When you sweep up tonight, get right down back in here in case there’s a squeeze back there. Like a bottle, right.”

            Jux nodded, glancing fearfully at the darkness beneath and between the ranges and the oven, where, just beyond along the wall, if you leaned, you could see the edges of the ventilation housing. He wiped his hands on his wet, soiled apron. “So does that mean we shouldn’t give him a hard time?”

            Abuse shrugged. “It’s inescapable in this industry,” he said as he fanned slices of wine-poached pear over a heaping salad while also gesticulating his elbow. “A healthy ribbing builds morale. What can you do?”

            “I wouldn’t worry about Max,” Jessup said.

            “Why’s that?” Jux asked. “He’s obviously a mess.”

            “He doesn’t really need this job,” Abuse explained, “and he doesn’t need to worry about college, either.”

            “And why’s that?” Jux asked.

            Jessup deglazed a hot pan with red wine, causing a small billow of acrid vapor. “You don’t know? His grandpa is the CEO of the power company. He’s a trust fund baby, and he’s only working because it’s required for him to get his monthly allowance. If he flunks out of the university, he’ll probably get shit from his family but they’ll just end up working him into some other university. You watch. If he kills himself, it’ll be because of his family, not this place.”

            Abuse shrugged again. “I don’t know,” he said. “The thing with McNutt wasn’t totally the fault of this place, but I think it was related. He did it across the street right after a shift.”

            “Fuck!” Danny grunted violently.

            “I mean,” Abuse said, “did you know him or something?”

            “No, this fucking state is impossible to make,” Danny said as he examined a pizza fresh out of the oven.

            “Aha,” Abuse said. “Massachusetts night.”

            Danny peered up at the image on the small screen of the smartphone propped against a stack of musty recipe folders on the shelf above the fryer. “It’s just not working, bro,” he said. “I can’t get that fucking little snout to turn out right.”

            “What?” Abuse asked, studying the hot-side tickets.

            “Massy-shu-shits,” Danny said. “Got this fucking snout. Arizona and New Mexico and Utah—a bunch of them—Nebraska—were all good, just tugging here or there. This East Coast shit is wack.”

            “Just make it a rectangle,” Abuse suggested, comparing two tickets and then crumpling them together into a palm before casting the wad into the hot-side garbage can.

            “They’re all rectangle in the end,” Jux said dazedly.

            Danny watched Abuse.

            “No,” Abuse said. “They’re not. Just make it in a way that you can explain to Tati if he shows up and asks about it.”

            Danny nodded. “That’s legit.”

            “I don’t know what we’re going to do when we get to Maryland,” Abuse mentioned. “Goddamned monstrosity.”

            “Yeah, and what’s Rhode Island going to be, an appetizer?” Jux asked.

            Abuse shrugged. “Amuse-bouche?”

            “What the fuck is road island?” Danny asked.

            Jux looked at him. “A state,” he said, “in the United States.”

            Danny shook his head and tried to elbow into the thin curl of pizza dough to make it stay put in representation of Cape Cod. “Fuck you think I don’t know that?” he asked. “I’m just saying that name is dumb as hell.”

            “You know it’s not ‘road’ like something you drive on, right?” Jux asked. “It’s got an ‘h’ in it.”

            “I know,” Danny boomed. “That’s dumb as hell, too. Dumber.”

            “Well, I think making pizzas in the shape of states is dumb as hell,” Jux said, “but, you know, whatever.”

II

            About thirty minutes later, Max came back into the kitchen. He didn’t make eye contact with anyone and had his ears plugged by his fingers. He seemed to be muttering and there was no reason that anyone in the kitchen could immediately see, based on the tickets, for his presence there. Despite the staff’s previous discussion, Max’s emergence from the chaos of the front was subject to immediate ridicule.

            “Are you okay, bro?” asked Danny, grinning back at the island.

            “Irresponsible use of marijuana cigarettes leads to permanent psychosis,” lectured Jux with his hands deep in the murkwater.

            “Dude,” Max said, making eye contact with nobody, “I smoke weed every day, and especially before I come here, and this isn’t my first First Friday, so fuck off.”

            “I’m not qualified,” said Jux, shrugging, “but that’s my diagnosis.”

            “Professor Jux in the house,” Danny said as he punched at a wad of dough.

            “That’s no diagnosis,” said Abuse, frowning as he scattered julienned tomatoes across a spread of salads before him. “That’s horseshit, as the man says.”

            “What man is that?” asked Jux.

            “You know the man of whom I speak,” said Abuse.

            “Limerick O’Hannerly?” Jux asked.

            Abuse shot him a wink.

            “Old LimmHanz,” Jux said, smiling up at the path of ceiling that was brown from water damage. He grinned at Max.

            “I know nothing of that,” Abuse said. He was doing something on the cold side board that involved a log of goat cheese and three knives.

            Max scowled at him. “Am I ‘Limbhands?’” he asked. “Is that what this is supposed to be?”

            “LimmHanz,” Jux said in a bombastic aside to Abuse.

            “Speaking of hands,” Abuse began as he hacked at the log of goat cheese with knives akimbo. He looked briefly up to deliver a look of bewilderment at Max.

            “Are you here for a reason?” Chef Jessup called out.

            “I don’t think he is,” Abuse said.

            “Fuck all of you,” Max said with obvious frustration. “There is a baby out there that has been crying for like two straight hours now and nobody believes me. I can’t take it. Seriously.”

            “Get Packie on it,” said Chef Jessup. “He’s got the nose up Tati’s ass so deep he’ll drop-kick any baby seen on the premises right over the light rail stop.”

            “We don’t have high chairs,” Abuse added, now squeezing globs of goat cheese over the salads, “because children are not welcome here.”

            “There’s one out there, now,” Max insisted, pointing.

            Abuse chucked the diminishing log of goat cheese back into its container on the line and stripped off his food service gloves. “Show me,” he demanded, ticking his head toward the exit to the front.

            Max held out his hands. “I don’t have time for this,” he said. “I have to get drinks from the bar. I think. I always have to get things from the bar.”

            “Just tell us where this baby is,” Chef Jessup said, “so that we can help you kick it out.”

            “Onto the unforgiving streets of the urban jungle,” added Jux.

            “I don’t know where it is,” Max complained. “Have you been out there? You can’t see five feet ahead of you because someone’s always shoving a glass of wine in your face. Fucking First Friday.”

            Chef Jessup was fixing a butter sauce that had broken with a whisk and a handful of ice cubes. “Are those industry clogs?”

            “What?” Max asked, looking around.

            “Your shoes,” Jessup said. “If they’re not industry standard, you might be squeaking over all the shit on the floor out there.”

            “It’s not my shoes,” Max said. “It’s a baby. You think I can’t tell the difference between a crying baby and squeaky shoes?”

            “That’s not what he’s saying,” Abuse said, plucking a few tickets from the strip and impaling them on the spike in the window, which was almost half full of carbon copies.

            “That’s what he’s saying,” Max said.

            “I was saying that,” Jessup admitted.

            “I honestly don’t care,” Abuse said. He executed a little dance that involved hip thrusting and quickly transformed into a caricature of a geriatric wobbling on a cane and clutching his chest.

            Max delivered them all double middle fingers and left the kitchen.

            “You think it’s weed?” Jux asked after a moment. “I mean, I used to smoke weed all the time and, like I think he was getting at, you just get used to it. I’d have to be on acid or something to think I was being tormented by a screeching infant.”

            “The boy isn’t well,” Danny concluded, shaking his head as he spread a thin slice of speck over a pizza as if he were reluctantly placing a parking ticket under a windshield wiper. “I mean, I’ma talk shit to him still, but, you know, just saying.”

III

            Max was deep in the shit, mixing up checks and misdelivering credit cards and losing track of cash tips. As a result of this vertigo, this hammering chaos everywhere during which he was likely to be beckoned from anywhere, he was also neglecting to comply with the best practice of checking up on his tables after two bites or two minutes, which he was aware of and yet temporarily incapable of doing anything about because that fucking baby was crying the whole time and whenever he chanced a glance about to identify its location he was either bumped by the barreling bulk of Packie on the way to a six-top with an armload of hundred-dollar bottles or shouldered out of the way by Crystal or Teatree attending with broom and porter to a shattered glass. At one point, when the glimmering lights and sour-savory smells of the front of the house were careening around him in gyroscopic time-lapse, he even tried to collect a plate containing half a filet mignon, at which the ironically-grizzly-bearded guest responded by literally grabbing the plate back from him and calling him an idiot.

           In the middle of this, Max had also landed three tables at nearly the same time, one three-top, one four-top, and one couple—and while all of them had immediately asked about happy hour menus and he’d had to explain that happy hour ended at six, none of them had given him any pushback, which was nice. Still, he was in the process of caching out a couple of other tables at the same time and, in addition to that fucking baby, wherever the fuck it was, Packie kept rushing by with rippling biceps tenderly clutching fresh bell glasses for a bottle of Napa cab or two or three and Teatree was giggling and shaking his cocktail shakers loudly from the bar and they were out of prepared flatware folds so he had to go wrap that shit up himself at the old defunct and only partially-obscured retail counter while a cadre of patient but irritated waiting guests eyed him from their camps near the entrance and he already was feeling like he was getting the stink-eye from everywhere, even from tables that were not his to service, and the chicken was tough, yes, sorry, we’ll get that taken care of, but who wants tender chicken, you want it, what, medium-rare, you fucking moron, it’s a chicken tender…

           In between bouts of infant wailing, wherever that was coming from, the sound of an enormous fart ripped through the front of the house, its magnitude rippling by way of displaced cheers of wine glasses and spilled crostini-heaps of ceviche. Max stared in the general direction of the fart for a few moments, eyes focused on nothing particularly, cocktails sparkling, clink clink, munches of duck in beurre blanc and herbs de provence, someone pouring messily the remnants of one glass of Bordeaux into another, some skinny skeleton of a boomer pressing a cheese rind against his teeth to simulate dentures, ironically, maybe, what did that mean, and, Max, breathing heavily, ducked back into the server station by the sink to rifle through his billfolds and stuff as much cash as he found into the rear pocket of his trousers, of which there was only one, on the right side, which seemed, to him, at the moment, kind of a slight to those who were not right-handed like he was, but he was fortunate, he knew, he basically understood that, not just because he was right-handed but also because he didn’t really have to deal with any of this shit if he didn’t want to—he could walk the fuck right out of there right now and get a job at the drugstore on the corner or get back to campus and slop books into bags like the pathetic transfers—he could get into that Korean midsize sedan he’d been able to purchase at a cash discount and drive right the fuck out of here this is not ok, this is not fucking ok I won’t be treated like this, I’ll drive the Allegro into a brick fucking wall if I want to—

           You breathe. You take a dark spot behind the cupboards away from the sight of the front and you breathe. You settle.

           But that fucking baby. I will squeeze that fucking baby’s windpipe until it pops.

IV

            Things did, eventually, settle down. Around 1 A.M., the food orders had dwindled to the point that the kitchen set into clearing and cleaning and, for a while, those working the front of the house were focused on closing up their tops. It was about an hour where the kitchen could work its recovery and servers only came through to drag sacks of empty bottles back out to the dumpster.

           Near two in the morning, Abuse and Jux were out back smoking cigarettes in the moonlight, watching through the dock’s gate as oily water pooled from over the berm into the parking lot, when Max came through with a plastic garbage bag of bottles from one of the cans near the bar.

            “You ever find that baby?” Jux asked.

            Max hefted the sack up and tossed it into the dumpster, where it crashed to a rest. “No baby,” he said, smacking his hands across each other. “None of them believe me, either,” he said, generally indicating the restaurant with a tick of the head. “Thanks.”

            Abuse and Jux exchanged looks.

            “Methinks,” Jux advised, “you need to lay off the tokety-toke for a bit. The wacky tobacky. A little too much toughy puffy, aye aye, captain. Cut the puffin muffin?”

            “Eh?” Abuse added, gesturing at Jux with his cigarette.

            Max shook his head. “Not going to happen, my friends.”

            “What about this, though?” Jux asked, thrusting a hand down at his thigh with thumb and forefinger meeting to form a circle and the other three fingers splayed out straight.

            Max glanced down and then closed his eyes with a smile.

            “Six,” Jux said. “It’s only been fifteen minutes and I’ve got you six times.”

            Max shook his head. “What is that, anyway?” he asked.

            Jux tilted his forehead. “What?” he asked. “Do you mean this?” He thrust his hand again down below his waist, leaning over a bit. He waggled the gesture. “This one right here?”

            Max stared Jux in the eyes.

            “This little guy?” Jux added, eyes wide.

            Max finally glanced down and immediately cringed and turned.

            “Seven,” Jux said, shaking his head. “Seven times.”

            “You guys are crazy,” Max said.

            “You’re the one who thought there was a baby when there was no baby,” Jux noted.

            “There was a baby,” Max insisted.

            “You just said there wasn’t,” Abuse said.

            Max gripped his forehead. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he grumbled.

            “What about this?” Abuse asked, looking down at the concrete where he was holding hand down with the finger gesture in place.

            Max looked. “Fuck!”

            Abuse and Jux were laughing.

            “What is that shit, anyway?” Max asked with irritation.

            “This,” Abuse said, displaying a hand forming the finger gesture, “is a game. You look at this when it’s below the waist, like, say, down here, and—gotcha!”

            “Eight times!” Jux hollered. “Eight times in less than half an hour.” He was shaking his head.

            “Fuck First Friday,” Max cried, “and fuck you.” He disappeared back into the restaurant.

            Tires squealed from somewhere blocks away, and Abuse and Jux shared looks.

            “What do you think?” Jux finally asked.

            Abuse pushed a cloud of smoke out of his lungs and flicked the remaining nub of cigarette across the dock toward the repurposed ten-can in the corner, which was thick with ciggy-butt-mush. His addition landed right in the center, a perfect arc, producing an immediate subtle hiss. “I don’t think he killed a baby and then dumped the corpse out here,” he said with raised eyebrows, “if that’s what you’re thinking.”

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