By Joshua Ryan
Chapter 23: Your Next Career Move
I don’t know how many times I got punished during the next few months—so many times that I felt incomplete, at the end of the day, if I hadn’t been slapped around or casually put across the knee of a waiter to get my butt spanked. They loved to do that. And it was true—I was a bad busboy. I was surly. I stumbled. I broke things. Like any other servant, I deserved to be punished.
Then one morning I was lined up with the other slaps to spend 12 more hours pulling dirty plates into the kitchen, when Dev caught me by the arm and said, “Not you. You been sold.”
“Sold?”
“Yeah, I know, mon. Who’d wanta buy you? But the truck is comin.”
So that’s it, I thought. The fields. The fields where I’ll spend the rest of my life chopping dirt.
“Report to Boss Derek’s desk,” he said, with no attempt at the usual camp. “Good luck, mon.” You’ve really fucked up, I thought, when Dev wishes you good luck.
I shuffled to the desk, and there was Boss Derek, looking angry that he had to spend time dealing with me. “Bend down,” he said, and he took the King George dog tag off my collar and did something with his laptop to unlimit my distances. It was like being drummed out of the Foreign Legion. Then he said something weird. “You don’t know how lucky you are, slappie.”
