so…
I was living on a caribbean island, which was very conducive to making bad decisions. I’m sure you’re going to hear a lot about it here. Anyway, I had always loved Leroy from Fame. You remember Leroy, don’t you? He was the hot, angry dancer who ran down the hall in the high school for the performing arts breaking stuff. Anyway…I was a hostess, busser, and barback at Hard Rock Cafe and one of the line cooks looked like Leroy. So it stood to reason that at some point we would hook up, restaurant people are always hooking up and this restaurant was no different.
We had a professional cleaning crew that came in and did the stuff nobody else wanted to do (shine the brass, wash the floors, etc.) It was 3 guys, two of them cousins, from Atlanta. They were fun guys (the criteria for friendship is different when all you’re doing is partying) and most of us were friendly with them. One day the two cousins were coming from the back room arguing and suddenly one of them was staggering down the steps into the restaurant (past the line cooks) spurting blood. I remember so vividly that he stumbled past the framed Kid Galahad robe that hung there, now streaked with blood. He seemed to be batting at his neck, like there was a mosquito there. As I ran over to him I realized he was bleeding from his neck. Someone must have tried to stop the bleeding as I sat next to him and begged him not to die, to hang on until the paramedics got there. I didn’t know then that his cousin had slashed his jugular. Not much could have been done to save him, even if the paramedics had gotten there immediately. When they did come he must have been dead already, though nobody told me and I couldn’t understand why nobody was working to help him. They didn’t even put a blanket over him, that I would have understood.
In the next day or two the company brought in grief counselors, we had group sessions and individual sessions were available. But what do you say about grief for a lost life where witnessing the loss of it affects you much more than the live person ever had? Trevor and I had been making out after work in his car for a week or two when this happened. I was in college at the time and our dorms didn’t allow men in the rooms, so I voiced a desire for a place to hang out (for some reason it was clear to both of us but unsaid that he would not be bringing me to his mom’s house, where he lived). I said it would be nice to get a hotel room for a few hours just to relax and unwind. What I got was a whole other thing.
We drove through the projects to get there. The projects in the Virgin Islands are intense in a way that I haven’t experienced here (I’ve seen my share, I spent a summer driving in every neighborhood of Chicago inspecting trees). And when we got there…again, I’ve seen some pretty fleabitten motels in my life, but this one was serious–right out of a dystopian movie. It was dark, dirty, polyester. Over the door of every room was the name of a caribbean island, which lead me to believe that at a different time of the day you could get your room complete with a lady from whichever island your room advertised. Trevor told me he had paid for an hour (I don’t remember clearly, he may have asked me to chip in, even). And it became clear that we were there for one thing, so we got down to it. Maybe because he was conscious of how little time we had, or how icky the room was, or maybe it was the norm for him, but the man never took his sneakers off. I will be kind and say that it wasn’t as enjoyable for me as it was for him, but I remember thinking “cross this off of the list of things I can’t say I’ve done”–as in, once for novelty but never again. We never really got together again but somehow I found out he had a girlfriend and at least once a shift I would just walk by the pickup counter and say “liar liar pants on fire.”
I had these two girlfriends who were model slim, tall, and drop dead beautiful, one of whom you will hear a story about at some time. About a week after I had confided this story to them we were playing gin rummy and I announced “gin.” Without skipping a beat she looked at me and said, “Whatever, you screwed Trevor.”
It quickly became a catchphrase for doing something particularly boneheaded. If we saw someone in a bad outfit or doing something stupid, we would proclaim in unison “He screwed Trevor.” And erupt into gales of laughter.
