A Christmas Gift For You Continued.....

I had been working at the restaurant for a few months successfully maintaining a healthy level of anonymity which was just fine with me. I don't know who told Jerry about our neighborly relationship. I knew I had never mentioned it to Jerry, or anyone else for that matter. If I had to make an educated guess on just who had spilled the beans my money would have been on my best friend Chuck. I am sure Chuck derived endless pleasure from the sight of Jerry and I having one awkward conversation after another while the dirty dishes piled up at my dish washing station. In all actuality the majority of the awkwardness fell upon Jerry's shoulders much more than it did on mine. Once Jerry found out that I had grown up in our neighborhood he felt compelled to ask questions about all of the other neighbors in hopes of getting to know them without ever having to talk to any of them. Somewhere about this time my parents came in to the restaurant to have dinner and were introduced to Jerry, probably by Chuck once again. This just complicated my situation with Jerry even more because now when Jerry passed through the kitchen every night he must have felt some kind of obligation to stop by the dish washing station and make small talk about the neighborhood. The only problem was there was little conversation to be made since Jerry was rarely around the neighborhood and didn't really know any of his neighbors. This did lead to moments of tremendously awkward silence, a circumstance that I would later find out was common place when trying to carry on a conversation with Jerry. The other kitchen workers were now all aware of the new found relationship between Jerry and I. They all loved this new dynamic in the kitchen and how uncomfortable it made Jerry feel. Up until this point Jerry had hardly ever acknowledged any of the kitchen workers, other than the kitchen manager, much less attempted to engage in conversation with them. To me it didn't matter either way if Jerry stopped and talked to me or passed right by. When you're washing two to three hundred dishes of half eaten food a night it wouldn't make a difference if Moses himself came down from Mt. Sinai just to stop in and say hello. Jerry was there night after night stumbling through what could only be described as an exercise in verbal futility, all the while out of the corner of my eye I could see all the prep cooks holding back their laughter as they chopped vegetables for the next days soup. I ended up with the last laugh though because Jerry would have to walk by those same prep cooks ever night and eventually he must have felt obligated to speak to them as well. The only difference was that they weren't Jerry's neighbors so they had even less to converse about, and most of them had worked there long enough to acquire a healthy dislike for him. So up until this point they were all happy to have no interaction with Jerry at all. It was then my turn to stand at the dish washing station and watch with bemusement as Jerry and his other employees tried in vain to become a little bit more human.