Learning How And About At Clancy's Restaurant Poem by Christopher Keller

Being twelve and coming from a father who worked
through most holidays in a man hole,
and a mother whose calloused hands were from working
large planters of flowers to sell,
and a sister who could already afford a year of college
at age sixteen, I saw the implied message to work,
and did, at a restaurant where we ate fish fry's every Friday night.

On Friday nights the hall resembled a cafeteria of unsupervised kids,
where the smell of brown bags and honey on bread
made everyone's stomach ill.
In the restaurant it was the smell of grease and warm coleslaw
that stuck in the air as well as the tiles beyond the kitchen doors,
where I would walk through with plates of chewed food
and half drained ponds of ketchup.

The waitresses loved me, at least from four to ten p.m.,
I think they loved me because they could tell me what to do,
and would do, like a good Lutheran boy.
I knew some of the waitresses went home to husbands
that asked for things with closed hands.

After three weeks the kitchen help began speaking to me,
they were mostly illegal Mexicans, except for a Russian
who slept on the red tiles of the basement floor
beneath the unused letters and numbers of the marquee.

On Saturday mornings I would change the marquee
to a thoughtless saying like; Love is Bill and Jenny,
then clean the hall with a guy who was in a local gang,
who would make chocolate milk for himself and hide in the kitchen.
I liked working alone though, handling everything that was thick
with steel and particle board and suffering to move it,
till weeks later its weight felt like that of a few stacked plates.

I usually arranged the hall for weddings,
and hoped my wife and I could afford a place
that didn't position their tables in relationship to the gum stains
and scratches on the floor.

And again on Sunday I would clean the hall of half empty beer cans
and saw where the women had sat because of their lipstick,
red and burgundy on the wine glasses,
and wondered if the napkins with pieces of wedding cake in them
were forgotten because of drunkenness or horniness or both.

After three months, Rita, with weight as her intimidation,
scheduled me to work in the dining room opposite the hall.
There was a dull yellow lighting in the air
from the drab lampshades, glass balls and candleholders,
it was what I thought dance clubs looked like in the seventies.
It smelled like brown and sounded like a small lake exiting
the calm at dawn.

I liked being the only busboy in the room, though
I needed three to four packets of sugar in my water to stay awake.
And when my shift ended at eleven p.m.
I would hear Guy Goodlad begin to finger the restaurant's piano
and hear the wrinkles of old smiles stretch.

The hostess in the dining room was a freshman in college.
Her black hair was never styled or combed, but still sexy,
and she always wore a white shirt beneath her buttoned up dress
that had a hamburger on it saying, "the big cheese."
She always flirted with me, and I was scared of girls who flirted with me.

One night, she took me home after a late shift
and in the car I tried adjusting myself into an uncomfortable,
dominate pose, while smelling like grease and sweat and nervousness.
Pulling into my parent's driveway she leaned over
and began kissing me, and being as inexperienced as I was,
kissed back without any rhythm or sign of lustful promise.

And after leaving her car and barely speaking to her again,
because of wanting to kiss her all over again,
I went to lie near the forest edge
at the furthest point from my parent's home,
three acres away, and looked past the power cables
that stretched from tower to tower in the night sky,
and wondered how to have a good time with another
on a Friday night like that one.