The Chosen

“Good, fatboy, good. You’re learning. Now, finish up whatever fucking around you’ve got in there, and then waddle your fat ass over to my dishwasher and get on the stick. If you’re too fat to squeeze through the door, let me know. I’ll run a buscart into your fat ass and pop you in.”

I don’t have to take this shit from him, do I? Lee asked himself, then paused. Yeah, I guess I do. He’s a manager, and he just caught me drinking on duty. I didn’t come all this way to get canned on my first night on the job. “I’ll be over in ten,” he said.

“Make it five,” Kyle corrected. “And turn off that redneck boom box unless you want me to bust it over your fat head.”

Lee didn’t know how much more of this guy he could take. Kyle retreated back into the RS kitchen. When Lee turned off the boom box, he could hear Kyle yelling at someone back there. “You fuckin’ groaty bitch, what the fuck you doin’ in there!” Lee just shook his head and got to mopping behind the hotline. Boy, I just love working with nice guys like him, he thought.

Then he thought, you’ve got to be shitting me! when he went through the door into the room-service kitchen. He didn’t see Kyle, but he did see one holy hell of a mess. Dishes stacked up till next Easter! I’ll be here all night! And that line Kyle had given him about his dish-man being ragged out? What a load of shit. There’d been no dishman on duty over here at all; the machine wasn’t even turned on; the temp gauge read 50 degrees. They’d done a whole night’s worth of room service orders and hadn’t cleaned a fucking thing!

Boy, am I getting screwed, Lee thought, and lit the Hobart’s pilot. If he thinks I’m gonna clean his dishes every goddamn night, he’s got another thing coming. This was an outrage. There was junk all over the floor, broken plates, food, trash. And if the mountain of dirty plates wasn’t enough, the entire cold line counter was stacked with racks of dirty glasses. “Hey, Kyle!” Lee called out. “I’m not a goddamn machine! What are you trying to pull?”

No response. Where the hell did he go? Lee cranked the heat knob on the Hobart to high, then looked around. Along the aisle wall to the room-service elevators stood the tall steel doors to Kyle’s walk-ins and pantries. There were all locked.

Except for one.

Lee pushed his long hair back off his brow and approached the one door that stood partway open. As he neared, he heard something, a fierce slapping sound.

Slapping?

He peeked in. Stared.

It was a storage room. Another door at the end was closed. And the sound he heard was slapping, all right. Lee couldn’t believe what he was looking at.

One of the room-service staff—the short, fat, doughy woman Lee had seen around—was hunkered down in the corner against several one-hundred-pound sacks of rice. One quarter of a club sandwich lay in pieces on the floor. And towering above was Kyle, his hand a hot blur. He was slapping the living shit out of the woman…

“Fuckin’ fat retard bitch,” Kyle murmured, slapping away at the woman’s face. “How many times I gotta tell you dolts to stay the fuck outa here, huh?” Slap-slap-slap! “Next time I catch you in here I’m gonna bust you up good.” Slap-slap-slap!

Lee was too shocked at first to even react. Tears streaked the woman’s wide, reddened face. Kyle laid his open palm twice more across the side of her head, and she recoiled, whining. “Gonna fuck with me, huh?” Kyle remarked. He roughly grabbed her by the ear, hauled her up, and drew back his fist—

“Cut it out, man!” Lee yelled.