Ronnie

Ronnie flips burgers for a living

The hours are long and the pay is minimum wage.

Ronnie sweats over a hot griddle.

Flippin burgers.

Ronnie was once told that the guy that flips the burgers
gets to poke the girls on the till. For def. Ronnie has
discovered this is far from true. The black dudes with
the cornrow hairstyles get to poke the girls on the tills,
the guys that wear do-rags and look like they want to be
gangsters fromdowntown LA, they get to poke the girls
on the tills.

Pretty much everyone smokes weed out the back by the
cardboard compactor. No one seems to mind this.

Ronnie stares at the grill for minutes at a time. The
burgers burn a little bit. Sweat drops onto the hotplate
with a hiss.

The utensil Ronnie uses to flip the burgers is a wallpaper
scraper. It has been used as a wallpaper scraper and has
flecks of paint on it.

Ronnie happens to know the meat content in the burgers is
not as high as the customers are lead to believe. Ronnie
happens to know a guy who worked in a slaughter house.
The guy that Ronnie knows says that the last thing you ever
want to eat is a sausage or a burger that you haven’t made
yourself. Allsorts go into these things. Bones, eyelids and
ball sacks, sawdust, spit and gristle. There's Spine, offal,
hoof, cock.

Ronnie still eats a burger every lunchtime.

Last Night

- It’s really just perfume. Sarah points out to me.

I had been daydreaming up to that point and had missed the earlier part of what she had been saying

- Errm? I say, unconvincingly. Proving I had not been listening.

Errm? is not a definitive statement, errm? is not a reply, a satisfactory answer or a question pertaining to the previous statement. Nor is Hello, Hello is a greeting but I always ask Hello . . .? when I answer the phone, as if there may not be someone there, on the other end of the line.

- Aftershave. Sarah’s tone suggests a hint of exhaustion, as if talking to me was a Herculean effort of will. I don’t like this tone of hers but I fail to take exception to it before she’s off again. - Eau de toilette, it’s the same as perfume, men, wearing perfume.

I want to point out that I don’t wear aftershave, that I never have nor, I firmly believe but cannot prove, will I ever wear aftershave, eau de whatever or even deodorant. I want to point out that Sarah’s hair is dry and brittle and that I’m bored bored bored but something tells me to keep this information to myself. The easy life, that’s the one for me.

Sarah likes watching TV, even the adverts. Sarah eats raw carrot sticks and stares at the box.

I watch her crunching the carrot sticks and try to imagine it is bugs bunny on the sofa, you know, when he used to dress up like a woman and put lipstick on and that. I try to imagine Sarah as Bugs Bunny, administering hairy rabbit faced kisses to me dressed as Elmer Fudd, shot gun and all. But for some reason I keep imagining myself as a small boy and Sarah as a grotesque over-sized decrepit Bugs Bunny transvestite with rotten teeth and yellow eyes that look at me hungrily.

I try to watch the programme.

The programme (a long winded and surprisingly fact light documentary on channel 4 about Naomi Klein) finishes and Sarah hands me the remote, I don’t want it, decisions were never my strong point and I don’t want to watch tv anyway.

Sarah is in the bedroom, tidying.

I turn the tv off and go and hide in the kitchen. Or wait in the kitchen, there is nowhere to hide. I don’t want to hoover or dust or clean or scrape. I don’t want to paint the bathroom, I don’t want to choose the paint or buy any paintbrushes. I’ve tried to tell Sarah that it's all fine and I like the bathroom and the bedroom the way they are. Sarah made me paint the living room before we moved in and I fell off a chair and ruined the carpet whilst reaching for a difficult corner.

Eventually she leaves me to finish the ‘washing up’ whilst she ‘does’ the living room. Sarah’s idea of cleaning is to make me do it, then she breezes in and takes all the glory by making everything look neat and tidy. I do all the hard work and all she really does is straighten up the CD’s or put the pens in a neat line. Sometimes I feel like she is my supervisor, like she's there not to do any of the work, but to make sure the work is done.