Reed and I were going to fuck up Chef Greg’s Porsche with sugar.
The discussion got started because Reed and I were sitting around in our apartment drinking beers and I got a call from Chef Greg. And two minutes later I was laid off.
It was a cold, heartless phone call. And I pretended to be super pissed off about it. Even though really I felt happy because I didn’t want to work the next day and now I didn’t have to.
We talked about how fucked up it was and how Chef Greg and his wife who together had employed me at their restaurant for the past year and a half were bad people.
Reed worked at a different restaurant that was in the same high-end restaurant group as mine.
His phone rang. He picked it up, looked at me darkly.
“Manager?” I said.
He nodded, answered the call. Walked out of the room.
“Fuck. You too.” I said.
He walked back into the room shaking his head. Went to the mini fridge by the tv.
“You too?”
“Both in the same hour,” he said. He tossed me a Rainier.
“Fucked,” I said. Cracked it. “Yours didn’t pretend to cry did they?”
“Nope. She said the restaurants’ closing for Covid and everyone’s fired and she told me good luck.”
“Jesus. What a bitch. We wish her the best.”
“Wait Greg really pretended to cry?”
“Yes dude, it was kinda disgusting. He pretended to get all broken up. You know that motherfucker has never even pretended to care about anyone who works at the place.”
“We should fuck up his car.”
“Ah, vigilanteism. Reclaiming justice for the common man. You think we could get away with it?”
“Don’t you remember Josh’s foolproof revenge scheme? The sugar in the gas tank thing.”
“I do remember that. Wasn’t Josh talking about that shit when he was intentionally overdosing himself on that pine pollen tincture he made to up his testosterone? Wasn’t he gonna do it to his boss and the dean of the college?”
“Uh, yeah. That all sounds right. Still a good idea though.”
“Why didn’t he do it again?”
“If I remember correctly he stopped taking the pine pollen because it was making him too angry all the time and then he started taking a lot of mushrooms and got really chill.”
“Right….You think the sugar thing would really work?”
“I think it would definitely work.”
“Yeah fuck it. Let’s do it. Fuck Chef Greg. That guy’s a piece of shit.”
Reed gasped loudly at something on his phone. “Yo. You know the bartender at St. Jack, Steve? He just hit me up. Said he’ll give us as many free drinks as we want if we come through now.”
“Are you serious?”
Steve had been laid off while on the job.
We went over to get wasted.
Right when we got there we saw there was a big email chain with all the restaurant group employees. Someone had asked about this stipulation under the government declared state of emergency lay-off section on the Oregon.gov website which stated that employees were entitled to being paid out on their PTO if they were laid off because of a government declared state of emergency. And the HR guy was dumb enough to tell everyone that the understanding of the restaurant group management was that if they laid everybody off before the government actually declared a state of emergency then they would not be answerable to any PTO claims. They laid us off about five hours early.
Reed and I read the emails at the same time. A lot of employees were going ballistic in their emails. The people who had mortgages and kids and stuff like that and really needed every cent they could get right then. And the single twenty-somethings like us who needed to buy enough weed and cocaine and liquor to last through the pandemic apocalypse were pretty upset too.
“What the fuck, man,” I said.
“So fucked up,” Reed said.
We went over to the bar. “Yo Steve, you see this shit?” Showed the email to the bartender.
“Oh what the fuck,” Steve said. He turned around and grabbed a bottle of Scotch off the top shelf and poured three deep shots. Pappy something. “To never working in service again,” he lifted his glass.
We cheersed and downed the shots, which weren’t that good for being the most expensive scotch they had. Then he refilled our glasses and Reed and I went back to our seats.
“You know where Greg and Gabby live right?” Reed say.
“Yeah, I been to their house before. It’s so fuckin nice.”
The Chef’s had a super fancy house with a hot tub and a putting green in the back and hundred thousand dollar cars in the front. It was oozing with all the money that wasn’t my minimum wage. I went there one time for a drink right before I worked a catering event with Chef Greg and Chef Gabby. At the event Chef Greg would yell at me so bad that some random cook working at the event for another restaurant ran over and said, hey man, I don’t know what he did, but I know it wasn’t that bad.
“Let’s go fuck up their cars.” Reed said.
“Right now?” I said.
“Yeah. Fuck it. Let’s do it.”
“Alright, fuck it.”
“Sugar. Sugar. Sugar,” he chanted.
We were about to get up when these two waitresses came over and sat down with us. They had drinks. I didn’t know them.
“Aren’t you guys in the middle of your shift?” Reed said.
“We decided we’d be done now,” one of them said. She held her hand at me, “I’m Blair. This is Steph.” They seemed cool.
I shook their hands.
We got another round.
Steph said, “this sucks. I don’t want to not see you guys anymore.”
“We’ll still see each other a lot. What else will we do?” Blair said. They hugged.
“But seriously,” Blair said, “what are we going to do? I won’t know what to do with myself without a job.”
Reed and I looked at each other, and then back at Blair.
“Drink.”
They laughed.
I was happy to lose my job. It felt like something worth celebrating. Life felt suddenly exciting again. Like who knew what would happen tomorrow.
“Alright,” Reed said, “so we’re trying to go over to the owners of Ox’s place and, uh, fuck up their cars.”
“What? Why?”
“Because they’re pieces of shit. Greg pretended to cry when he laid him off,” he pointed at me. “And the PTO shit. Did you see that? And they’re monsters anyway. Everybody in Portland knows that.”
“Wait what PTO shit?” Steph said.
We showed her.
“Oh my god that’s so fucked up. What the fuck,” Steph said.
“We’re down,” Blair said, “fuck them. Let’s do a shot.”
. . .
We were out on the streets in the bright summer night in South East Portland with big bags of sugar in our hands looking for the Porsche. It was dark, and I was pretty wasted. I thought I’d found the right house, and it did have some fancy German cars out front, but I wasn’t certain.
Steph and Blair were tired. “Can’t we just go back to your guy’s place and drink more?” Steph said.
“We have to do this first,” Reed said. Tunnel vision.
“I’m pretty sure this is it,” I said. I was staring at the license plate on this big Porsche like I was trying to do a two-step verification. “I think this is it.”
I opened up the tank door. It wasn’t locked. Out came the plug and then there was me looking into the little darkness. “We need a stick or something to open it, I think.”
Reed picked up a stick and handed it to me.
I opened it up with the stick. I was about to pour the whole bag of sugar in. I was really going to do it. I had the bag all opened and ready to pour and everything. I was going to destroy a car that was worth more than my whole life. In so many different ways this car was worth more than my life.
It was worth more than I was.
I stopped.
As much as I wanted to do it, there was no way for me to do to them what they had done to me.
“Fuuuuck.” I poured the sugar all over the side of the car.
Reed sighed and closed the gas tank.
“Seriously?” Blair said.
“So lame,” Steph said.
We covered the Porsche in sugar crystals. It looked like it was encased in sap.
Then we went back to me and Reed’s place and then I don’t know what we did.
I woke up in my bed alone with an outrageous headache. I walked out into the main room. There were pistols and shotguns lying at odd angles on the couches. There were probably five guns all in all.
Reed walked out in his underwear and rubbed his face. “Fuck man, brutal,” he said.
“What’s up with all these guns?”
“What guns?” he said. I pointed at the couches.
“Huh,” he said.
“I know.”
“Where’d Blair and Steph go?”
“I kinda thought they were with you.”
“Huh,” he said.
“Huh,” I said.
I had to sit down. I moved a shotgun over and sat on the couch. Reed got a glass of water. “I feel fucking horrible,” I said. I put my head in my hands.
“Yeah man, not good.”
“I lowkey blacked out all night,” I said.
“I was kinda embarrassed to say so but I did too, dog,” he said. “I don’t remember anything.”
“Whose guns are these?”
“I have no fuckin’ idea homie.”
“Fuuuuck, you better ask Blair and Steph what happened,” I said.
“Daaaamn, soo embarrassing,” he said.
I looked at the photos on my phone from the night before. There were tons of videos of me and Reed and Blair and Steph dancing and posing with the guns, videos of Reed and me laying on the couches looking like animated corpses holding shotguns in the air and pulling the triggers over and over.
“Holy shit, this is pretty bad. Check it out.” I showed Reed the videos.
“Awwww maaaaayyn. That’s not a good look at all.”
“Do you think we went back to my Chef’s house?” I said.
Reed stood up and looked a little translucent. He hustled down the hall to the bathroom.
I imagined newscasts and helicopter searches and texts from coworkers—yo you hear the chef’s cars got shot up?
Reed came back a few minutes later. He looked like shit. “The girls are coming over, they say don’t remember anything either,” he said.
Blair and Steph came over. They were also treacherously hungover.
We all sat around on the couches in me and Reed’s place. We’d moved the guns onto the coffee table in a big pile and were sitting around it in a circle so that it looked like we were planning a robbery or something like that.
There was beautiful bright summer sunshine blasting yellow at us through the big bay windows in the place. It was the worst kind of weather to be hungover in. There’s an additional guilt associated with being so hungover on such a beautiful day. It made you hate the sun. Which made you feel like a piece of shit. I wondered how this nice yellow afternoon light would look on bullet holes in the side of a grey Porsche.
“Ughhh, I feel so bad,” Steph said.
“I almost went to the hospital,” Blair said.
They said they thought we’d roofied them.
We assured them that we hadn’t because if we had we’d also roofied ourselves and we all agreed that that wasn’t really the point of roofying somebody.
“What happened last night? What the fuck did we drink? No one remembers anything?” Blair said.
“I guess I changed my outfit like four different times because there were four different sets of clothes on the floor of my room this morning,” Reed said.
“Hmm, are they good fits?” Steph said.
“No,” Reed said.
We reached a consensus that nobody remembered anything.
I asked if anybody else had weird videos on their phones. Blair and Steph checked their phones. Blair had videos of us pouring a bag of sugar into a tequila bottle and doing body shots off each other.
“Ahhhhh,” we all said together.
“That’d do it,” Reed said.
“Why do cooks and servers always get so trashy when they drink together?” Blair said.
“Wait, why did you ask about weird videos? Do you have weird videos?” Steph asked me.
I showed her the videos of all of us dancing with the guns.
They were appalled.
“Whose guns are those?” Steph said.
“Why am I dancing with a gun between my legs like I’m riding a horse?” Blaire said.
Reed and I tried not to laugh.
“We don’t know,” we said.
“Huh,” we all said together.
“Why were we playing with guns?” Blair said.
“It does seem a little concerning doesn’t it?” I said. “Especially when you think about how the night started. Let’s get drunk and vandalize my bosses car turns into blacking out and waking up with a bunch of guns.
Reed looked at me, rubbed his hand across his face.
We sat down on the couches that no longer had any guns on them and Reed started playing some Lou Reed, some of the really chill stuff. The girls laid down on the couches next to us and both fell asleep immediately. I leaned back, laid my dirty hungover hair across the back of the couch and wondered about where the idea of doing the right thing ever came from in the first place.
We sat there listening to mellow Lou Reed songs with our hands on our empty heads.
“Man, I’m just happy I don’t have to worry about getting yelled at anymore,” I said.
“That was a fucked up place to work, bro. The Deaton’s are bad people,” he said.
“Yeah, they’re bad people,” I said.
“Maybe it’d be best if we shot their shit up,” Reed said.
We stared at patches on the floor between our knees.
“If we didn’t shoot them and their cars up last night how should we get them back?”
“I dunno,” he said. “We could release lice in their house.”
“That would be a start,” I said.
We sat with our heads in our hands feeling sick and foolish with the bright summer sun shining down through the windows on our tender eyes. I covered mine with my palms. Reed put a blanket over his head.
And then we disappeared from the earth.