would have been illegal for him to pay me less
. If you lasted, every four weeks he doled out five-or ten-cent raises. How much you got was determined not by competence but by charisma, how much he valued your company. You can guess which schedule I was on.
The nickels added up, but it cannot be said that cash was our true compensation, especially if one considers with a cold and sober eye the hazards of the job. No, our actual reward came in the form of a much more ephemeral tender: we ate ice cream. As much as we wanted. Every shift. Whatever we could cram down our gullets. Chocolate ice cream for breakfast and lunch if I had a day shift, chocolate ice cream for lunch and dinner if I had a night shift. Whatever flavor we desired, washed down with as much soda as we could stand. The soda machine was stingy with the carbonation, making everything into a kind of syrup, but this was only appropriate, in keeping with the consistency of everything else we sold. We were apprentices of ooze, specializing in things that melted out of a solid state into a sticky liquid or otherwise flowed slowly, like the soft ice cream we lever-dispensed from a humming metal box, and the chocolate fudge and strawberry sauce we ladled on with gusto. There was all this candy stacked up in the back of the store—Heath bars, Reese's Pieces, Gummi Bear knockoffs that perspired rainbows on hot afternoons—that we jabbed into the ice cream as toppings. This was fair game as well. If we sold it at Jonni Waffle, you could eat it. In theory, if you had a fetish for wafer cones, this was your chance at wafer-cone-eating nirvana, and you were free to chomp your way through whole boxes, stack after stack, when the compulsion seized.
But wafer cones are not central to this chronicle. It was all aboutthe waffle in there, the new-fangled Belgian waffle cone. There was no escaping it. The dust of the waffle mixture swirled in the air like asbestos in the guts of a condemned factory, roosted in the soft warrens of the lungs, clung to hair like sweet dandruff, commingled with sweat and congealed into salty concoctions unreckoned by the makers of the secret recipe. When you worked the waffle grills, the steam of the cooking cones became a localized atmosphere, the tar-pit exhalations of an ancient, stunted planet. You learned not to pick at the soft stuff if you noticed it on your arm—sometimes it was a drop of batter, sure, but sometimes what appeared to be batter was actually your melted skin, accidentally burned while trying to maintain the crazy hustle of the irons, and what you were actually peeling off was a bit of yourself.
ONE AFTERNOON , not long after I joined the Jonni Waffle family, I was practically cocooned in the stuff. The electricity in the house was out, so we didn't have any hot water, which meant I hadn't taken a shower and my every pore was still plugged up and battered down from the previous night's shift. I'd forgotten to wash my spare Jonni Waffle shirt (Martine, with some ceremony, presented you with two Jonni Waffle T-shirts on the day of your first shift) so I had to wear it even though it was soiled, covered with batter and befudged from a sundae mishap. I dabbed at Peanut Butter Chunk stains with a wet sock and crossed my fingers that by the time I got to work they'd dry into invisibility. It was going to be a smelly couple of hours. I prayed that my waffle musk would be camouflaged by the greater, wafflized environment of the store.
Reggie came in and told me about the electricity that morning. It was my turn in our parents' bed—we switched off sleeping in our parents' room when they were in the city. As soon as they pulled out of the driveway, whoever's turn it was blurted out, “I got their bed,” to lay claim, to head off any argument over who had dibs.
Which was ridiculous. Dibs was dibs, we didn't have to call it. Ever since we were born, we'd lived according to the rough frontierjustice of even Stephen, and even Stephen
. If you lasted, every four weeks he doled out five-or ten-cent raises. How much you got was determined not by competence but by charisma, how much he valued your company. You can guess which schedule I was on.
The nickels added up, but it cannot be said that cash was our true compensation, especially if one considers with a cold and sober eye the hazards of the job. No, our actual reward came in the form of a much more ephemeral tender: we ate ice cream. As much as we wanted. Every shift. Whatever we could cram down our gullets. Chocolate ice cream for breakfast and lunch if I had a day shift, chocolate ice cream for lunch and dinner if I had a night shift. Whatever flavor we desired, washed down with as much soda as we could stand. The soda machine was stingy with the carbonation, making everything into a kind of syrup, but this was only appropriate, in keeping with the consistency of everything else we sold. We were apprentices of ooze, specializing in things that melted out of a solid state into a sticky liquid or otherwise flowed slowly, like the soft ice cream we lever-dispensed from a humming metal box, and the chocolate fudge and strawberry sauce we ladled on with gusto. There was all this candy stacked up in the back of the store—Heath bars, Reese's Pieces, Gummi Bear knockoffs that perspired rainbows on hot afternoons—that we jabbed into the ice cream as toppings. This was fair game as well. If we sold it at Jonni Waffle, you could eat it. In theory, if you had a fetish for wafer cones, this was your chance at wafer-cone-eating nirvana, and you were free to chomp your way through whole boxes, stack after stack, when the compulsion seized.
But wafer cones are not central to this chronicle. It was all aboutthe waffle in there, the new-fangled Belgian waffle cone. There was no escaping it. The dust of the waffle mixture swirled in the air like asbestos in the guts of a condemned factory, roosted in the soft warrens of the lungs, clung to hair like sweet dandruff, commingled with sweat and congealed into salty concoctions unreckoned by the makers of the secret recipe. When you worked the waffle grills, the steam of the cooking cones became a localized atmosphere, the tar-pit exhalations of an ancient, stunted planet. You learned not to pick at the soft stuff if you noticed it on your arm—sometimes it was a drop of batter, sure, but sometimes what appeared to be batter was actually your melted skin, accidentally burned while trying to maintain the crazy hustle of the irons, and what you were actually peeling off was a bit of yourself.
ONE AFTERNOON , not long after I joined the Jonni Waffle family, I was practically cocooned in the stuff. The electricity in the house was out, so we didn't have any hot water, which meant I hadn't taken a shower and my every pore was still plugged up and battered down from the previous night's shift. I'd forgotten to wash my spare Jonni Waffle shirt (Martine, with some ceremony, presented you with two Jonni Waffle T-shirts on the day of your first shift) so I had to wear it even though it was soiled, covered with batter and befudged from a sundae mishap. I dabbed at Peanut Butter Chunk stains with a wet sock and crossed my fingers that by the time I got to work they'd dry into invisibility. It was going to be a smelly couple of hours. I prayed that my waffle musk would be camouflaged by the greater, wafflized environment of the store.
Reggie came in and told me about the electricity that morning. It was my turn in our parents' bed—we switched off sleeping in our parents' room when they were in the city. As soon as they pulled out of the driveway, whoever's turn it was blurted out, “I got their bed,” to lay claim, to head off any argument over who had dibs.
Which was ridiculous. Dibs was dibs, we didn't have to call it. Ever since we were born, we'd lived according to the rough frontierjustice of even Stephen, and even Stephen
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