Fight Club

That Tyler knows how a meringue will absorb odor.

At cockroach level, we can hear the captive harpist make music as the titans lift forks of butterflied lamb chop, each bite the size of a whole pig, each mouth a tearing Stonehenge of ivory.

I say, go already.

Tyler says, "I can't."

If the soup gets cold, they'll send it back.

The giants, they'll send something back to the kitchen for no reason at all. They just want to see you run around for their money. A di

I say, Niagara Falls. The Nile River. In school, we all thought if you put somebody's hand in a bowl of warm water while they slept, they'd wet the bed.

Tyler says, "Oh." Behind me, Tyler says, "Oh, yeah. Oh, I'm doing it. Oh, yeah. Yes."

Past half-open doors in the ballrooms off the service corridor swish gold and black and red skirts as tall as the gold velvet curtain at the

Old Broadway Theatre. Now and again there are pairs of Cadillac sedans in black leather with shoelaces where the windshields should be. Above the cars move a city of office towers in red cummerbunds.

Not too much, I say.

Tyler and me, we've turned into the guerrilla terrorists of the service industry. Di

Tyler, he did a di

In the kitchen, it's Tyler and Albert and Len and Jerry rinsing and stacking the plates and a prep cook, Leslie, basting garlic butter on the artichoke hearts stuffed with shrimp and escargot.

"We're not supposed to go in that part of the house," Tyler says.

We come in through the garage. All we're supposed to see is the garage, the kitchen, and the dining room.

The host comes in behind his wife in the kitchen doorway and takes the scrap of paper out of her shaking hand. "This will be alright," he says.

"How can I face those people," Madam says, "unless I know who did this?"

The host puts a flat open hand against the back of her silky white party dress that matches her house and Madam straightens up, her shoulders squared, and is all of a sudden quiet. "They are your guests," he says. "And this party is very important."

This looks in a really fu

Albert says, "What's it say?"

Len goes out to start clearing the fish course.

Leslie slides the tray of artichoke hearts back into the oven and says, "What's it say, already?"

Tyler looks right at Leslie and says, without even picking up the note, " `I have passed an amount of urine into at least one of your many elegant fragrances."'

Albert smiles. "You pissed in her perfume?"

No, Tyler says. He just left the note stuck between the bottles. She's got about a hundred bottles sitting on a mirror counter in her bathroom.

Leslie smiles. "So you didn't, really?"

"No," Tyler says, "but she doesn't know that."

The whole rest of the night in that white and glass di

They were washing up after the guests had left, loading the coolers and the china back into the hotel van, when the host came in the kitchen and asked, would Albert please come help him with something heavy?

Leslie says, maybe Tyler went too far.

Loud and fast, Tyler says how they kill whales, Tyler says, to make that perfume that costs more than gold per ounce. Most people have never seen a whale. Leslie has two kids in an apartment next to the freeway and Madam hostess has more bucks than we'll make in a year in bottles on her bathroom counter.

Albert comes back from helping the host and dials 9-1-1 on the phone. Albert puts a hand over the mouth part and says, man, Tyler shouldn't have left that note.

Tyler says, "So, tell the banquet manager. Get me fired. I'm not married to this chickenshit job."

Everybody looks at their feet.

"Getting fired," Tyler says, "is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we'd quit treading water and do something with our lives."

Albert says into the phone that we need an ambulance and the address. Waiting on the line, Albert says the hostess is a real mess right now. Albert had to pick her up from next to the toilet. The host couldn't pick her up because Madam says he's the one who peed in her perfume bottles, and she says he's trying to drive her crazy by having an affair with one of the women guests, tonight, and she's tired, tired of all the people they call their friends.

The host can't pick her up because Madam's fallen down behind the toilet in her white dress and she's waving around half a broken perfume bottle. Madam says she'll cut his throat, he even tries to touch her.

Tyler says, "Cool."

And Albert stinks. Leslie says, "Albert, honey, you stink."

There's no way you could come out of that bathroom not stinking, Albert says. Every bottle of perfume is broken on the floor and the toilet is piled full of the other bottles. They look like ice, Albert says, like at the fanciest hotel parties where we have to fill the urinals with crushed ice. The bathroom stinks and the floor is gritty with slivers of ice that won't melt, and when Albert helps Madam to her feet, her white dress wet with yellow stains, Madam swings the broken bottle at the host, slips in the perfume and broken glass, and lands on her palms.

She's crying and bleeding, curled against the toilet. Oh, and it stings, she says. "Oh, Walter, it stings. It's stinging," Madam says.

The perfume, all those dead whales in the cuts in her hands, it stings.

The host pulls Madam to her feet against him, Madam holding her hands up as if she were praying but with her hands an inch apart and blood ru

And the host, he says, "It will be alright, Nina."

"My hands, Walter," Madam says.

"It will be alright."

Madam says, "Who would do this to me? Who could hate me this much?"

The host says, to Albert, "Would you call an ambulance?"

That was Tyler's first mission as a service industry terrorist. Guerrilla waiter. Minimum-wage despoiler. Tyler's been doing this for years, but he says everything is more fun as a shared activity.