I AM PRONEK. WHEN PEOPLE (certain nation in particular) COMPLAIN ABOUT STUPID SHIT:
“Pronek got fired the day he saw a picture, framed with the red edges of the Time magazine front page, of a man in a Serbian concentration camp: the man stood behind three thin lines of barbed wire, skin tautly stretched across his rib cage, facial hair eating his face away. He was not looking at the camera and the reader behind it, Pronek thought, not knowing whether being in the picture would save him or kill him.
Pronek mumbled his way through the Boudin French Sourdough Bakery kitchen, to his locker, while a surge of heat kept pushing his eyeballs out. He put on his red Boudin apron and a little beret (“Don’t wear it like a baseball hat,” Dawn said in passing. “It’s a beret”) and went to empty the waiting trays.
He was listlessly piling up trays on the top of the bin, when a man in a grass-green shirt, with a golfer-shade swinging a golf club in its coronary area said: “Young man, would you please come here!” Pronek obediently walked to the man’s table and stood there, as vague hatred brewed in his muscles. The man had nicely combed blond hair, and Pronek could see the immaculate line disappearing into the pate. The man pointed at the croissant on his plate — there was a monstrous golden seal ring on his pinkie — and said: “I wanted romaine lettuce on my Turkey Dijon. Excuse me, but this is not romaine lettuce. This is iceberg lettuce. What do you have to say about that?”
Pronek was about to go and tell the sandwich person about the problem, but then, abruptly overwhelmed with a desire not to be there at the moment, said: “Nothing.”
“I’d like my Turkey Dijon with romaine lettuce please,” the man said.
“What’s difference?” Pronek said.
“Excuse me,” the man raised his voice, his double chin doubly corrugated in disbelief.
“Romaine lettuce, iceberg lettuce, what’s difference?” Pronek said, with a sudden vision of stuffing the lettuce leaf into the man’s mouth.
“May I talk to someone who can speak English, please?” the man said and pushed his tray away with resolve, as the croissant shuddered and slid to the edge of the plate. Pronek felt pain climbing up his calves, passing his pelvis, to settle in his stomach as a cramp. He wanted to say something, something clever that would smash the man, but could not think of any English words that could convey the magnitude of the absurdity, other than: “Romaine lettuce, iceberg lettuce, what’s difference?” He kept mumbling it to himself, like a magic word that would make him fly, and wobbled away in a vain hope that the man might just give it up.
But the man, naturally, did not give it up, for he demanded — and rightly so — full and responsible service for his hard-earned money.
Pronek kept cleaning the trays maniacally, filling up the bins with eviscerated bread-bowls, shriveled croissants, pizza edges, jagged watermelon slices, salad tidbits, slimy nonfat yogurt, jumbo-gumbo slough, filling up garbage bags, as if filling them up would stop the flow of time and stop Dawn from coming over to him with the man. As Dawn was walking toward him with the livid man in tow, Hemon looked at him askance, dragging a bag cadaver, as if trying to understand what might have possessed him to disobey. Pronek wanted to tell him, but Hemon, of course, would not have understood.
Thus, Pronek stood facing the man, as he ranted, pointing in the general direction of his croissant, while Dawn stood alternately looking at the tips of her blue shoes and glancing at Pronek, trying to place him as the main character of the man’s story. When the man stopped his recitation, and looked at Dawn expecting her to come to the verdict, Pronek whimpered: “Romaine, iceberg, all same.”
“I’m sorry,” Dawn said. “But we have to let you go.”
