Derek Essays - Derek, , Term Papers, Research Papers

Derek Derek lifted the large plastic tub, which he had just filled with ice, level with the counter, dumped the ice into the stainless steel container, and sighed. He looked at his watch: 10:25, it said; almost mid-morning, and five eternal minutes left until his fifteen minute coffee break. Fuck it, he thought, I'll take it now. He bent down low with a much-practiced 'bowling' motion and sent the plastic tub whizzing down the tiled corridor into the dish room where it hit the surly dishwasher on the ankles. "'Bowling For Busboys'!" he yelled (out of habit, mostly, since it had been a while since he had found the consequences of that action really amusing), and paced off to the staff room. "I'll bowl ya!" he heard the irate dishwasher yell, but the dishwasher always yelled that, and Derek had long since ceased to notice: he was already reaching for his cigarette pack. With quick, practiced movements he withdrew one of the long tubes from the cardboard package. With one hand he placed it in a precise position in his lips while the other hand was occupied with first replacing the package to his shirt pocket, then digging out a half used pack of matches from his too tight jeans. He was extremely conscious of the fluidity of his movements; lighting the cigarette with the match was the hard part, and he wanted to look as cool as possible, smooth and flowing, for all the eyes he perceived to be on him. He managed to execute the task to his satisfaction as he entered the staff room above the restaurant, but only Karen was there, finishing a butt of her own. He didn't give a shit about Karen and there was no one else around. He felt a frustration welling up inside that seemed incomprehensible. He thrust himself into one of the tattered chairs which his employers had so graciously donated to facilitate his comfort, and blew out a long stream of smoke from his lips, like a visible sigh. Karen eyed him with wary curiousity, but Derek was busy inspecting the floor. He could hear the clank and clatter of dishes from the dishroom, and the slamming of doors and calling of orders as the waiters and waitresses bounced off of and around each other like atoms in a solution. He realized he had to go back out there and face that frantic pace again in only fifteen minutes. Unconsciously he looked at his watch and saw that five of those minutes had already passed. "Fuck," he said, without thinking about it. "Whatsa matter?" asked Karen as she cracked her gum. She could stand the silence no longer; it made her uncomfortable. "Nuthin'," Derek lied, but it wasn't anything he could have spoken to her about. It was a subject which seemed to be most on his mind but least on his lips, and when he tried to articulate these things he simply stopped talking: there were too many things he wanted to say, all of them at once, and he couldn't decide where to start. That seemed important: deciding where to start. He feared that if he started in the wrong place his listener might get the wrong idea, or make the wrong conclusions about himself. It seemed like everything he wanted to say needed to be qualified. So he said nothing, or very little. "I dunno, just restless, I quess. Don't really want to be here either." He chuckled, but there was no humor in it. "Yeah, I know what ya mean. There's a good movie on T.V. I'm missing," said Karen, cracking her gum again, and chewing enthusiastically. That's not what I meant, bitch, he thought. Derek hated the tube. To him the T.V. was an insidious invention: it was far too powerful a tool in the wrong hands, and too easy an excuse for not doing anything yourself. Derek thought that "The Glass Teat" was a perfect name for it. Still, there was a good side to it: it helped tie together the world in a network of communication, which was valuable, provided the communicators were trustworthy. But Derek felt that most of them weren't. Most of T.V. was blatant propaganda, and people like Karen just lapped it all up, like kittens to milk, or junkies to junk. But he didn't feel like explaining all that to Karen just now. Most of those thoughts were coded as symbols in his brain, and drumming up sentences to clothe those symbols with meaningful dress was too much like work. So he