Flings Read Online Free Page A

from across the street. Now I’ll grant you, a guy wearing a full-body fur mushroom suit to promote an organic vegetarian pizza pub is arguably the whitest thing to have occurred in the history of whiteness, but it’s not as though it’s going to rub off on them. It’s not like it’s contagious, like breathing the air around me will result in sudden loss of pigmentation, cravings for old Friends episodes, and, I don’t know, a Dave Matthews box set. On the other hand, it’s only fair to admit that if such a disease existed, and if it were airborne (as indeed mushroom spores are), then I am exactly the person who would be carrying it—patient zero, Typhoid Whitey—so maybe they’re wise to play it safe.
    Okay, you’ve got the picture: this is a shitty job. But not everything about it’s shitty. In fact there are many perks. I’ll tell you.
    First, I get paid under the table. As far as the federal government’s concerned, I haven’t earned a taxable dime in three years. Second, I get a free shift meal every day I work, plus whatever I can steal, which is plenty. I mean it’s not just food and booze. Ethan is a terrible businessman, the worst I’ve ever encountered: a blackout alcoholic and probably bipolar, though he’s also a cokehead and smokehound, so maybe his emotional swerves are side effects—or, rather, the intended effects—of the way he paces his days. What I’m trying to put across here is that Ethan’s the perfect boss. He is reason number three or, really, all the reasons. Whenever I see a light on in the restaurant after hours, I knock on the kitchen window, find him rolling blunts at the salad station or deep-throating the spigot on the Jagerator, a medium quattro formaggi in the oven and him without anyone to share it with. He unlocks the back door for me, and forty-five minutes later I’m shit-faced, fed, and getting another raise.
    Ethan is a self-sabotaging trust fund maniac whose folks set him up with this franchise for his thirtieth birthday, mostly, I think, so he’d have somewhere other than the grounds of the family estate—a former plantation, it could have gone without saying—to play “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” at blowout volume a dozen times a day. As long as he keeps his annual losses in the mid five figures they’ll keep him in business. So he has his clubhouse—with its audiophile-grade sound system, bulk alcohol purchase orders, and Showtime After Dark–grade waitstaff—and the family is spared both the Allman Brothers and the train wreck, if that’s not too redundant to say. The college, for its part, inducts a freshman class every single year. (I myself was in it once, and look at me now!)
    These kids, like I did, come from towns where the vegetable on the menu—when there is one—is either Jell-O or tuna fish salad, so organic mozzarella cheese is a legitimate thrill. The girls we hire cut deep Vs into the necks of their uniform tie-dye T-shirts, which is technically a violation of the terms of our franchise agreement, but so far nobody’s complained. I don’t know who started this tradition. I also don’t know why an eighteen-year-old girl—a girl who’s been in town all of four days; who decides to try our restaurant for lunch because there was a 20-percent-off coupon in her dormitory welcome packet and we’re on the only off-campus street she can name; who walks over here, comes in, sits down, has to shout over the strains of “Melissa” or “Jessica” to give her order to a server who for her part is probably named Melissa or Jessica, wearing tell-all jeans shorts and a shirt that’s essentially confetti; who is charged $8.95 for two pieces of pizza and a Sprite (that’s with the coupon, mind you, and before tip)—stands up at the end of her dining experience, brushes the cornmeal off her skirt,