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A and P Smile

 











“Willa! Where the hell is my roast pan?” Kenny shouts.

 

“Keep your fucking shirt on!” I say, handing a clean pan to him across a passthrough from the white tiled room where I wash the dishes, to the kitchen where he dirties them. 

 

The restaurant, Peaches, is open 24 hours and renowned for its potato “wedgies.” In the early morning hours, when the bars close, the place is packed with drunken assholes who line up out the door looking for starchy food to soak up the alcohol in their bellies.

 

That’s my shift. Overnights. Scrape. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

 

The restaurant is always short on pots and pans. I don’t know how Diego does it, but when his shift ends and mine begins, there are never any leftover pots to scrub or glasses to stack. Diego the Spanish Dish Washer. Capitalized because it might as well be his full name. He works the evening shift and is so popular and handsome that the regulars know him by name. He is a dishwashing legend. 

 

I stay in the back. The owners don’t want me bussing tables because I’m so ugly they fear I’ll scare the customers away. Its my teeth. The two front ones’ cross over each other like an X. My dad used to call it an “A and P smile” because one tooth pointed to the Atlantic and the other to the Pacific. My dad made me feel so special. Now I know I’m just a freak.

 

I get along well with Kenny and Julian in the kitchen. We keep the radio tuned to rock and roll and sing all night. Tonight, there is an extra bounce in our step as they cook, and I scrape and scrub. We won’t be working at Peaches much longer. We’ve formed a band, Raging Angels, and a record producer asked us (asked us!) to audition for him on Saturday night. 

 

Kenny has wanted to be a drummer for as long as I’ve known him, which is since we were little kids. Even in kindergarten, he was tapping his fingers on his little desk. Now, he’ll use anything – drumsticks, spoons, knives – whatever is in his hand usually winds up banging out a rhythm on a nearby surface. 

 

Julian, I’m not so sure about. He’s intense and hard to read. The only time I ever see his expression change is when he’s playing his guitar. Ecstasy. The rest of the time, his face might as well be carved from granite.

 

I think back to earlier today. Sweat and tension built up in the basement rental space where we rehearsed. When our two hours was up, we headed for nearby Trinity Bellwoods Park, stopping at a convenience store for some Mr. Freezes and a People magazine with the cast of Star Wars on the cover. We sat in the shade, ripping the frozen plastic tubes with our teeth, turning our tongues blue and purple, to cool off. Kenny rolled a spliff. Mark, the base player and fourth member of the band, pulled out some coke and used the magazine as a flat surface to cut it, leaving Harrison Ford with a snowy beard and Carrie Fisher with a halo.

 

Julian took his turn with the spliff, but I could tell he wasn't happy about the coke. Mark and I have progressed to semi-regular users, after what started as a couple of toots to get over the stage fright. With my face, I had to be convinced to even join the band. Who wants to stand on a stage in front of people when you have two front teeth that cross in a perfect X? But after Julian heard me singing along to the radio, he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Said it doesn’t matter what my mouth looks like, only what comes out of it. And what comes out of it, he thinks, is gold.

 

Julian is the unelected leader of our band. What he says goes, and the rest of us are too grateful or lazy to put up much of a fuss.

 

“We have a gig at Grossman’s on Saturday night,” he announced, exhaling and passing the joint to me.

 

This was big news. All the up and coming acts played at Grossman’s. 

 

“But wait. There’s more!” He put on a goofy infomercial voice, waiting until he had our full attention. “Jack du Maurier is going to be there.” A legend in the Toronto music scene. Kenny actually clapped his hands at the news. 

 

“How do you know?” I asked.

 

Julian smiled, his granite cheeks cracking with glee.

 

“The word is out, my friends. People have been talking about our sound. Remember that gig in Scarborough last month? Jack du Maurier was sitting at the bar.”

 

We were stunned. “He called me and wants to hear us again. Wants to meet us. Called me,” he repeats for emphasis. We hooted and hollered at the news, generally carrying on until we re-membered the drugs and thought better of calling so much attention to ourselves in a public park. With jobs to get to, we gathered up our stuff and drifted happily off.

 

I have a rickety old bike that I found by a dumpster and use as my primary source of transportation. It could have been the coke, or it could have been the high from knowing we are about to be “discovered,” but I floated home on that bike. I sat straight and didn’t touch the handlebars for most of the way, even on busy Queen Street. I’d never tried riding hands-free before, but I was on top of the world, impervious to danger.

 

At 18 years old, I knew joy for the first time since childhood. My beloved father died before I turned six and my mother might as well have died too. She had just enough life in her to bring a boyfriend into the picture before she faded into her chair in the front room with a jug of “special water” at her side. Life was hard for my brother and me. Probably harder still for him when I took off three years ago, after one too many smacks from Mom’s boyfriend.

 

All that is behind me tonight. I’m positively glowing, here in my greasy room at Peaches. I can’t stop grinning at Kenny and Julian as they bop around the kitchen. They grin back. We’re convinced we won’t be scraping dishes, flipping burgers or chopping potatoes much longer.

 

Switching to Glide comes on the radio. Julian cranks up the sound and we start belting out, “… this beat goes on[1].”  Kenny has a heavy cleaver in his hand and smacks it against the counter in time as we sing, “… on and on and on and on...” 

 

There is a thunderous rippling sound coming from the ceiling. I look up. Kenny leans forward. Julian reaches toward the radio. The ceiling tiles give way. Mouldy saucepans and steel pots heavy with caked on crud fall to the floor. 

 

The mystery of Peaches’ perpetual shortage of cookware is solved. Diego the Spanish Dish Washer isn’t the legend he claimed to be. When he fell behind on the dishes, he simply hid the dirty pots and pans in the suspended ceiling. The cheap pressed-fibre tiles weren’t meant to carry that weight and they all come crashing down. 

 

On my face.

 

We were on the cusp of rock and roll greatness, but I won’t be singing for a while. My two front teeth, now perfectly straight and symmetrical, smile at me from a puddle of grease three feet away.  


[1] Songwriters: Aryan Zero / David Warren Broadbent. Lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music Inc.

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