Darkness

I have a flat in New York City. It eats up two-thirds of my income, and the other third disappears into a black hole called booze. My current job is one that I have, by some miracle, managed to hold on to for the past four years. That’s a personal record, and being a chef for a swanky restaurant is fun. It lets me prep the food for all the fancy rich elites that I was supposed to end up sharing cocktails with, and I’ve gotten pretty damn good at it.

Sorry, did I say that being a chef is fun? My bad. I got fired earlier last night. Customer came in to complain about the steak (it’s always the steak), and then the manager trotted me out, and the guy, one of my old ‘Princeton’ buddies, recognised me. I knew the moment that it happened, too—it was the moment that his lip curled upward into that trademark sneer. Seconds later, he beckoned me to come closer with two fingers. So I did.

I met his eyes. I had my dignity.

I think this was the mistake.

“Well, Najbreit, funny how things change, don’t they? Remember how we used to to laugh at the other Eating Clubs?” It was only ever him that did that. “Guess you were never actually better than then rest of them.”

He dismissed me with a flick of his wrist. I returned to the kitchen, glad that the encounter had been as painless as it was. I cooked him another steak. He must have found it satisfactory enough, because I did not get called out again.

That’s because Sam du Pont had other plans for me. Apparently, he knows the owner of the restaurant. Friend of a friend that became a friend, their kids are enrolled in the same private kindergarten or some crap like that. So thirty minutes after Mr. du Pont walks out of that restaurant, the manager comes to deliver the bad news to me—owner wants me out, and so I get the boot.

Oh, and no severance package or even unemployment benefits. They were going to me to quit on the spot, else the little loan that I’d asked the owner for in a moment of quiet humiliation some weeks back would be called in. I didn’t have that kind of money, and I know how to read a contract; he would take me to court and fuck me five times over.

And so now I sit in my flat in the dark, listening to the rats while I steadily work my way through the cheap cases of beer that take up just about all the free floor space I have. Mercifully, I black out sooner than later, and darkness consumes me.