Fight Club

the elevator stops, the soup bowls stacked on the buffet cart stop rattling, and steam mushrooms up to the elevator ceiling as Tyler takes the lid off the soup tureen.
    Tyler starts to take himself out and says, "Don’t look at me, or I can’t go.”
    The soup’s a sweet tomato bisque with cilantro and clams. Between the two, nobody will smell anything else we put in.
    I say, hurry up, and I look back over my shoulder at Tyler with his last half inch hanging in the soup. This looks in a really funny way like a tall elephant in a waiter’s white shirt and bow tie drinking soup through its little trunk.
    Tyler says, "I said, ‘Don’t look.’”
    The elevator door in front of me has a little face-sized window that lets me look out into the banquet service corridor. With the elevator stopped between floors, my view is about a cockroach above the green linoleum, and from here at cockroach level the green corridor stretches toward the vanishing point, past half-open doors where titans and their gigantic wives drink barrels of champagne and bellow at each other wearing diamonds bigger than I feel.
    Last week, I tell Tyler, when the Empire State Lawyers were here for their Christmas party, I got mine hard and stuck it in all their orange mousses.
    Last week, Tyler says, he stopped the elevator and farted on a whole cart of Boccone Dolce for the Junior League tea.
    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 dinner like this, these banquet parties, they know the tip is already included in the bill so they treat you like dirt. We don’t really take anything back to the kitchen. Move the Pommes Parisienne and the Asperges Hollandaise around the plate a little, serve it to someone else, and all of a sudden it’s fine.
    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. Dinner party saboteurs. The hotel caters dinner parties, and when somebody wants the food they get the food and the wine and the china and glassware and the waiters. They get the works, all on one bill. And because they know they can’t threaten you with the tip, to them you’re just a cockroach.
    Tyler, he did a dinner party one time. This was when Tyler turned into a renegade waiter. That first dinner party, Tyler was serving the fish course in this white and glass cloud of a house that seemed to float over the city on steel legs attached to a hillside. Part of the way through the fish course, while Tyler’s rinsing plates from the pasta course, the hostess comes in the kitchen holding a scrap of paper that flaps like a flag, her hand is shaking so much. Through her clenched teeth, Madam wants to know did the waiters see any of the guests go down the hallway that leads to the bedroom part of the house? Especially any of the women guests? Or the host?
    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