Process of Elimination
Someone must have been telling lies about me because when I came in for my shift this morning, I found out I was going to be fired for stealing the tip jar.
“That’s what they’re saying,” Melissa told me.
“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked.
She didn’t know. She was speaking under her breath, trying not to make eye contact, trying to look busy arranging muffins in the display case while the video camera stared down at us.
It just so happened that exactly a month had passed since the tip jar had gone missing, and next week it would be a month since a terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon, two states away, had killed three people and injured hundreds more. These events were, of course, unrelated.
What was not unrelated, at least for me, was that I shared the same first name, by sheer coincidence, with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who, along with his younger brother, had carried out the deadly bombing. Other than the name, though, we had nothing whatsoever in common, including the fact that he had been born in the Soviet Union and pronounced dead in a Boston hospital after a four-day manhunt, while I, Tamerlan Thompson, was a blond-haired, blue-eyed lifelong New Englander with an uneventful backstory, named after my great-grandfather on my mother’s side (or was it my father’s?), whom I had never met, and who had immigrated to the United States from what was then Turkestan and is now Uzbekistan, and which, either way, I would be hard pressed to locate on a map.
Read an interview with the author for the story behind the story.
Now I was wiping down tables with five minutes to go before the coffee shop opened for the day, my future employment hanging in the balance as we neared the end of the spring semester. Sunshine streamed through the big bay window that was partially covered by an American flag, tinting everything red, white, and blue, behind which I could see the silhouettes of a dozen students waiting for Melissa to unlock the front door. She had been the one to train me as a barista, demonstrating how to operate the industrial-sized espresso machine, almost as big as a dishwasher, which had a built-in grinder, a dual-boiler system, and P.I.D. temperature control, whatever that was. “Don’t worry,” she’d told me. “It’s not rocket science.” Soon I would begin serving that everlasting line of undergrads, with their backpacks and their prospects, ordering mocha this and latte that, swiping their prepaid dining cards that never reached zero. Occasionally, one of them would drop a coin in the tip jar that had replaced the tip jar that I was apparently going to be fired for having stolen.
If Melissa knew anything more about who had said what about what, she wasn’t telling me, and I couldn’t blame her; she’d been working here a year, and if she worked here another year she’d be eligible to enroll in college courses, which was one of the perks of working in a coffee shop on a college campus when you’d never been to college. As for me, I’d been here only six weeks, the first of which had been spent in the basement, surrounded by dust motes, with the sound of the Red Hot Chili Peppers filtering through the ceiling, as I checked inventory and stacked boxes, my solitude interrupted only when the owner came downstairs asking for cups, lids, sundries. He called me “boss,” which on the surface sounded chummy, but I already had the sense that he didn’t like me for some reason. “I need cups, boss,” he would say. “I need straws, boss.” By the time evening arrived, he’d be sweating from the exertion of climbing up and down the stairs, and from the razor-thin profit margins, and from the fear that Starbucks might be planning to open a store somewhere in the vicinity.
There was usually only about twenty dollars in the tip jar, if we were lucky, mostly change, to spread out on the counter and split four ways, sometimes five. Walking home across campus after my shift, my pockets would jingle with every step I took, the sound helping to distract me from the pain in my feet from standing all day. “You’ll get used to it,” Melissa had told me. I would pass the nineteenth-century architecture, even more dramatic in the twilight, and the groups of students on the lawn discussing their big ideas, the sound in my pants helping to distract me from the reality that I was earning two hundred dollars a week before taxes. The night the tip jar went missing, we assumed that it had been stolen by a student, or maybe a professor—an adjunct—who had taken it when we weren’t looking. At any rate, this was a crime that ranked no higher than a moral misdemeanor, and we had found the intrigue entertaining—a whodunnit in a coffee shop that had given us something to gossip about while we served coffee for eight hours straight. In other words, no one had appeared to suspect me at the time, even though I was the new hire from the basement who had been working as a barista for less than a week.
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Listen to Saïd Sayrafiezadeh read “Process of Elimination.”
And then the bombing occurred and we forgot all about the tip jar, occupied now solely with the carnage in Boston, everyone in the country feeling uneasy and patriotic, but doubly so for us, because we were New Englanders, first and foremost, living on the periphery of the great city, albeit two states away. We had crowded into the owner’s office to watch the coverage on his TV: the smoke, the debris, the endless scroll at the bottom of the screen, and, of course, the lack of a known culprit. The owner had sat at his desk, his head bent, his hands clasped on top of a green spiral notebook with the word “Management” scrawled in marker on the cover, which was where he logged the week’s sales revenue and net profits. Beside him was a stack of business books—“Strategies for Success,” “Principles of Marketing”—along with pictures of his family at the pool, at the playground, at the Red Sox game, these images now forever imbued with an indelible sense of innocence and loss. We had stood behind him, five baristas in red aprons, shaking our heads, asking, Why?, How?, and the owner had said something about Al Qaeda or ISIS or Iran, and we had agreed. And then he had told us to go home because we were closing early, and I had walked across campus, the lawns empty, the nineteenth-century buildings shuttered, and the sun still high in the sky.
By the following afternoon, the owner had hung an American flag in the big bay window, and he had special-ordered six boxes of red-white-and-blue coffee cups, which arrived via FedEx. He had also installed a video camera above the register to make everyone feel safe. We were slower than usual that day, five baristas with nothing to do, the mood subdued, the music off. In order to keep ourselves busy and our minds occupied, we did things like reorganize the bottles of flavored syrups—vanilla, chocolate, açai—and deep-clean the espresso machine. Later, we sat around the empty tables as if we were at a campfire, taking turns sharing our personal reminiscences about Boston, which were bittersweet in hindsight. One of the baristas talked about visiting the Museum of Fine Arts with her father when she was a little girl, and Melissa told us how she’d kayaked down the Charles River, and everyone had something to say about the Red Sox. But I had no stories to share, because I had never been to Boston, despite living two states away my whole life. Instead, I patched together some of what had been mentioned by the others, tweaking it a bit to make it my own—beginning with the time I visited the Museum of Fine Arts and ending with the time I saw the Red Sox beat the Yankees in the playoffs—and all of it so vivid in my mind that I felt I might actually have done what I said I did.
It was a little later that same afternoon when we learned that it had been pressure cookers, of all things, filled with gunpowder and ball bearings, that had caused so much death and destruction at the marathon.
“What’s a pressure cooker?” Melissa had asked.
“I don’t know,” the other baristas had responded.
In fact, my parents had cooked with one when I was growing up, making, in fifteen minutes or less, recipes handed down through the generations—chicken, beef, you name it. But this I did not say aloud.
I was off the next two days, my weekend falling midweek, and I slept late both days, eventually waking to music coming from the frat house down the block. “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Back in the U.S.A.,” “Party in the U.S.A.”—variations on a theme, and the price I paid for living close to campus in cheap housing. As for the news out of Boston, nothing had changed; the trains were stopped, the planes were rerouted, the citizens were sheltering in place, and “1-800-CALL-FBI” was running on a loop at the bottom of the TV screen because there was still no known suspect. And so I spent my weekend with the TV off, preferring instead to succumb to the unremitting soundtrack from Sigma Sigma Something.
When I interviewed for the job, I had made a point of mentioning to the owner my proximity to campus. But he had seemed unimpressed. “I expect everyone to be here on time,” he’d said, which was what first gave me the sense that he might not like me for some reason. I remember that we were sitting across from each other at a table in a corner of the coffee shop, next to the milk and sugar. Apparently, this was where he preferred to conduct his interviews, never mind the commotion. “I can keep my eye on everything,” he told me, making me lean in to hear him. I had been surprised by how shabby he looked, dressed in a polyester shirt, with sweat stains and coffee stains, his stomach pressing against the middle buttons, his hair thinning and uncombed. Without knowing the context, a customer might have mistaken me for the owner, overdressed as I was in a suit and tie, because I had wanted to make a good first impression as someone who had potential. In the background, I could see the baristas working non-stop, no motion superfluous, no drop spilled—“Next guest,” “Next guest,” “Next guest” was the refrain—and every so often a few coins would be dropped into the tip jar.
Meanwhile, the owner had been studying my résumé, which detailed ten years of “prior experience in the retail industry,” and then he opened his green spiral notebook with the word “Management” on the cover and began to read off a checklist of standard questions I had heard so many times before, asking me if I was a self-starter, asking me if I was a problem solver, asking me if I was a team player. I said yes to everything. I said no to nothing. He was curious as to whether I would be interested in taking college courses for free—in two years—given that I had listed only a high-school diploma under “prior education.”
“Yes,” I said. “I would be interested.”
By the time I returned to work on Friday, four days had passed since the bombing, and everything had changed for the better, thanks to the F.B.I., which had finally identified two suspects: Suspect One and Suspect Two. Suspect One was dead and Suspect Two was on the run. We knew that it was only a matter of time before Suspect Two was caught, and so we spent the afternoon drifting in and out of the owner’s office, watching the coverage of Boston on lockdown, the voices of the newscasters hushed and hopeful, the neighborhoods empty and still—Back Bay, Beacon Hill, South End—like a ghost town. And, of course, there were the police officers, going from house to house, their rifles at the ready, their fingers on the triggers, dressed as if they were soldiers in Iraq, if Iraq were comprised mostly of stately brownstones. Every once in a while, the TV would display the now ubiquitous images of Suspect One and Suspect Two, who had been caught by surveillance cameras, wearing backpacks and strolling near the finish line moments before the explosions. They could have been college students on their way to class, but they were terrorists. Their backpacks could have held books, but they held pressure cookers.
At some point, Faneuil Hall Marketplace happened to flash across the screen, with its pizzerias and seafood counters and eighteenth-century architecture—everything empty, except for the police—and the owner began to tell us about the time he had gone there when he was first trying to get his start in the coffee business. It was a funny story, the way he told it, describing how everything that could go wrong had gone wrong: the train was delayed, the motel had lost his reservation, the fact that he was getting a late start at being an entrepreneur at the age of thirty-five—but no matter, it had all worked out in the end for him. “Look how far I’ve come,” he had said, holding out his arms in their coffee-stained sleeves, and suddenly everyone was smiling and laughing, because now there was life after tragedy. We were slowly finding that equilibrium between heartbreak and levity. Melissa told her story once more about kayaking down the Charles River, and the baristas followed one by one, just as they had the other day, until it was my turn.
“What about you, boss?” the owner had said, turning to me.
So I jumped right in, beginning with the Museum of Fine Arts and ending with Fenway Park, and this time I included Faneuil Hall Marketplace, because why not? No, I had never been to any of those places, but I could have and eventually I would. When I finished, the owner was staring at me, as if something had finally been confirmed. He seemed to know I was lying.
And it was in that moment, between deceitfulness and discovery, that I first heard my name coming from the TV—the first of many times—thanks to the F.B.I., which had confirmed the identity of Suspect One.
“Tamerlan,” the newscaster said.
The office was silent. The small talk was over. The laughter was gone. I felt a rush of heat to my face. I felt I was back in sixth grade, when I was the new boy in class, singled out for having a strange name amid the Mikes, the Marks, and, yes, the Melissas. They had wanted to know what my name meant. They had wanted to know where I was from. “You should be proud,” my mother had said, but that was only in theory. Tambourine, the boys and girls had called me. Timberland. Wonderland. Overland. The permutations were limitless. One afternoon, I could take no more and I fled the classroom, running through the hallways and out onto the playground. Thirty minutes later, my teacher found me hiding behind the jungle gym. He knelt down. He tousled my hair. “Words can’t hurt you,” he said. We sat on the swing set, side by side, while he shared stories from his own difficult childhood, growing up with a single mom. “We all have something to overcome,” he said in conclusion. It was a warm New England day, the sky cloudless, the breeze gentle, and we swung slowly back and forth in rhythm, finding common ground on social problems.
“Have you ever thought about changing your name to Tommy?” he asked me.
But today I was twenty-six years old and three hours into what was possibly my final shift at the coffee shop, having spent the past weeks feeling like Public Enemy No. 1, cringing every time I heard my name spoken aloud. “Would you mind doing this, Tamerlan?” “Would you mind doing that, Tamerlan?” It was almost noon, but the owner had not come in yet, and it was generally understood that if the owner had not come in by noon, he would not be coming in at all. More important, if I was going to be fired, it wasn’t going to be today. Without any workplace oversight, the baristas did the obvious, padding their breaks by ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. When it was my turn, I did the same thing, taking a seat at a coffee table, my apron off, the soft sound of acoustic music coming from the speaker that was next to the video camera. Perhaps the owner’s unexpected absence was an indication that the rumors about my imminent demise were wrong and that things were not so certain. I was even beginning to get used to the job—it wasn’t so bad, all things considered. As Melissa had predicted, my feet didn’t hurt as much from standing for eight hours, and, if I managed to work here long enough, I would be able to take college classes, and the college classes I would take would be business classes, because then I would be able to open my own coffee shop one day, just like the owner, who, at the age of thirty-five, had taken that fateful trip to Boston to visit Faneuil Hall Marketplace and had come back home inspired.
By three o’clock, our lawlessness had caught up with us; the line of students was long and our supplies were low. Cups, lids, whatnot. I was engulfed by the steam coming out of the state-of-the-art espresso machine, making me grope my way through a coffee-scented fog. I could hear the barista calling out “Next guest, next guest” with urgency in her voice, trying to scale the mountain, and Melissa was suddenly standing next to me in the mist, standing very close, speaking under her breath, asking if I wouldn’t mind going downstairs to get a box of napkins. “Would you mind doing that, Tamerlan?” Of course I wouldn’t mind, team player that I was, problem solver that I was. When the door clicked behind me, Hootie & the Blowfish faded into the background, the dust motes appeared, and the basement was exactly as I remembered it from six weeks before, except now the owner was waiting for me.
“I’m here for the napkins,” I said, but I knew I hadn’t come here for the napkins.
He was leaning against a box of straws that read “3,000 COUNT,” his shirt damp, his green spiral notebook open.
“We’re going to make today your last day,” he said without preamble. Apparently, he preferred to interview people upstairs and then fire them in the basement.
“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked.
“What?” he said.
“What’s the premise?” I said. I had somehow instinctively shifted into what sounded to me like legalese. It seemed the proper approach to take for this type of occasion.
The owner looked at me as if to say, You already know what premise. Instead, he said, “No premise needed.”
“I know my rights,” I said.
He was confused by this. “What rights are those?” But he didn’t wait for the answer. He closed his green spiral notebook to indicate that the meeting was officially over, the word “Management” facing me upside down.
I walked across campus, passing the nineteenth-century architecture in the spring sunshine and the groups of students sitting on the lawn, still discussing their big ideas. I wanted to tell them not to waste their time with any of their grand theories about society. Whatever principles of right and wrong they developed over their four years here would cease being applicable the day they graduated. They were in for an unwelcome surprise. They would find out the hard way.
Two weeks later, I hadn’t heard back from any of the local retail businesses where I had put in applications, so I went downtown to file for unemployment. As many times as I had passed the brick building, one story tall and windowless, with a sign that read “Department of Labor,” I had never once been inside. I might as well have entered a bus depot, with low murmuring voices and high fluorescent lights and the feeling that everyone had already been waiting for a very long time. Next stops: welfare and Section 8 housing. There were about fifty chairs, almost every one of them filled, even though the economy was supposed to be good, and behind a bank of government-issued PCs were a half-dozen civil servants, who looked as if they were doing the best they could under the circumstances. When I took my number—ninety-three—from the ticket dispenser, it was apparent that I would be waiting for a very long time, too, but I was not going to be dissuaded from trying to recoup some of the tax money that had been cutting my paychecks in half since I was sixteen years old and working at a supermarket.
I filled out the required form with my place of residence, my employment history, and my reason for leaving. “Unlawful termination,” I wrote, which I hoped might make it sound as if I had received legal counsel. And then I watched from the back row as the numbers slowly inched upward on the L.E.D. display: forty-one . . . forty-two . . . forty-three. . . . I wondered if the coffee shop was busy this afternoon. I wondered if the owner had hired someone to take my place. I wondered who had stolen the tip jar.
Subsumed within the general malaise of the unemployment agency, I began to form an alternate narrative in my mind, at first dreamlike and then self-evident, in which it was no longer a coincidence that I had been suspected, that I had been fired, and that I shared a name with a man who had killed three and injured hundreds more. Where events had once seemed to me random and unrelated, they now followed a logical sequence, the outcome of which had been determined the moment I was hired by an owner who did not like me for some unknown reason. I did not know if this narrative was true; I knew only that it was possible. And I knew that I was now going to exact my retribution by way of a government-issued check, once a week for the next twenty-six weeks.
When it was finally ninety-three’s turn, I took my seat across from a civil servant, who had ink on her fingers and circles under her eyes. In this scenario, she was the barista working eight hours and I was the customer ready to place my order. But, before I could offer her my proof of residency, my employment history, and my reason for leaving, she was handing the form back to me, her expression filled with sympathy and regret.
“Honey, you didn’t work there long enough to qualify.”
Two weeks after that, I still hadn’t heard back from any of the local retail businesses where I had put in applications, so I went downtown to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to file a complaint for unlawful termination. As many times as I had passed the Art Deco building, twenty stories and covered in bas-reliefs, I had never suspected that there might be government offices inside. The lobby had the quality of a library, sombre and contemplative, with a high ceiling, muted footsteps, and an elevator that rose slowly, chiming with each floor it passed, and in which I had time to consider how I was rising, too, so to speak, slowly ascending from state to federal, from wronged to revenge.
I was not going to be waiting long today. Indeed, I had an appointment with a case counsellor who was ready to see me when I arrived. He was wearing a tie, no jacket, his sleeves rolled up as if he meant business. I was impressed by his efficiency. His office was spare and no nonsense, with a poster from OSHA about the importance of keeping farmworkers hydrated. The case counsellor shook my hand. He looked me in the eye. “I know this isn’t easy,” he said. I hadn’t yet told him anything, but he already seemed to have empathy for me. I was impressed by this, too. He could have been my teacher from sixth grade, giving life lessons on the swing beside me.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” he said.
So I started with Day One, down in the basement of the coffee shop, stacking boxes with the dust motes. I told him everything. I told him everything from my point of view. I used phrases like “in my opinion” or “as I see it.” I could tell he had heard some version of this story before, many times before, and that he knew the ending, but he listened without impatience, without concern for time, while typing his notes into his computer. Occasionally, he would interrupt me to make sure he had the chronology correct or that he understood who had said what to whom when. As I made my way through those six weeks of employment, the narrative became firmer, the chain of events more certain, and I stopped bothering to include “in my opinion.” If this was speculation, it was speculation supported by evidence. An hour later, I had arrived at my final day in the coffee shop, back in the basement, about to be fired by the owner. “What’s the premise?” I had asked him. “No premise needed,” the owner had answered.
Then I waited while the case counsellor finished typing the last of his notes, his fingers clacking over the keyboard, the OSHA poster in my line of vision. I wanted to ask him if he thought I had a chance for justice. I wanted to ask him what form he thought justice might take. More to the point, I wanted to ask him how much justice might be worth. But before we could talk about that, there were steps that had to be taken, and this is where efficiency ended and bureaucracy began. The commission was backlogged. Never mind that the case counsellor appeared to have no other clients except for me. Justice would be coming, yes, but justice would be slow.
“I know this isn’t easy,” he said.
It was now more than two months since I had been fired. It was more than three months since the bombing. I still had not yet heard back from any of the local retail businesses where I had put in an application. As for Tamerlan’s younger brother, Dzhokhar, his case was making its way through the courts. Eventually, he would be given a fair trial by a jury of his peers. After which he would be sentenced to death.
Meanwhile, my savings dwindled. In the morning, I would be woken by music emanating from the frat house down the block. The occupants had moved on from patriotism and returned to hip-hop at full volume. “No one man should have all that power,” went the lyrics. “The clock’s ticking, I just count the hours.” As apt a sentiment as any for my present condition.
Then one afternoon I received a message from an assistant manager of a Starbucks, saying that a store was opening in the neighborhood, right off campus, full staff needed, and would I be interested in coming in for an interview tomorrow, not a moment too soon. And the next day I showed up bright and early, full of cautious optimism, wearing my suit and tie, and carrying a copy of my résumé that detailed ten years of “prior experience in the retail industry.” I was surprised by how young the assistant manager was, maybe only a year or two older than me, but so much further along in her career. She was dressed in slacks and sensible shoes and a coveted green apron. We sat across from each other at a table in the corner, next to the milk and sugar, just as I had done for my job interview at the other coffee shop, except now everything was new, and the bay window was bigger. She told me that there was health care, and paid time off, and a 401(k). These were the perks of working for a multinational corporation. I told her that I lived in the vicinity. She liked that I lived in the vicinity. I told her that I had experience with P.I.D. technology. She didn’t know what that was. I asked her if I would have to start off in the basement. “We don’t have a basement,” she said. What she had was a clear path for advancement. What she had was an H.R. department.
I started the following week with five other baristas. Business was slow. Business picked up. Business was booming. Then the fall semester began and the line went out the door and around the corner, the refrain of “next guest” was endless, and the steam from the industrial-strength espresso machine engulfed me in its coffee-scented fog. If it weren’t for the green apron and the twentysomething assistant manager and the fact that tip jars were not permitted, I could have been right back where I had been in April. “We don’t want students to feel obligated,” the assistant manager told us, meaning tip jars, which was probably for the best. And less than three months into my tenure I was promoted to shift supervisor—no higher education required. After shift supervisor would come shift manager, followed by assistant manager, followed by manager, district manager. That was the trajectory. And then came the start of the spring semester and a message from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, telling me that my case had finally wound its way through the government bureaucracy and it was time to come back downtown and receive justice.
It was almost seven months since I had been fired. It was almost eight months since the bombing. The coffee shop seemed so long ago now, so far away, as if something out of a dream. But here was the case counsellor shaking my hand firmly, taking me into his office, saying again, “I know this isn’t easy.” He told me that the other party was already there, in another room, and that soon we would meet and discuss what had happened. After which the case counsellor would weigh the facts and make his decision. But, before that, he wanted me to read a letter that he had received in advance. It was two pages long, written in cursive, in blue ink, and torn from that spiral notebook that the owner carried everywhere.
“His side of the story,” the case counsellor said.
“To whom it may concern,” the letter began, and, sure enough, the first paragraph was full of an alternate narrative to compete with my alternate narrative, ultimately impossible for me to ever disprove, about how the owner had liked me, had always liked me, had hired me because he thought I was a “promising young man”—his words—but that soon it went south, for reasons that he could never fully figure out, but were entirely my fault. “I tried my best to work with him,” he wrote, “and to make him feel as if he was a part of the family that we strive to have at our coffee shop.” But, according to the owner, I had not wanted to belong and I had chosen to remain an outsider from the beginning. The baristas had felt the same. The baristas would be willing to testify to this.
That was paragraph one, the preamble, background, and context. It was not until the second paragraph that the claim of my unlawful termination was taken up, and which, apparently, had nothing whatsoever do with the tip jar being stolen, even though, yes, it had been stolen shortly after I had begun working as a barista—but that was beside the point. “I would never falsely accuse anyone of anything,” the owner wrote. The truth was that it had been the end of the school year, plain and simple, and the students were going home for the summer. “This is seasonal work,” he wrote. If the owner had decided to keep me employed, it would’ve meant having to cut the hours for his longtime staff members who were hoping to enroll in college classes. “I would never stand in the way of someone’s dream,” he explained. As to whether I had been fired because I shared a name with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, he was hurt that this was even being suggested. He said that he was sorry that I had the misfortune of being associated with terrorists, but there was nothing he could do about that. No, he did not harbor prejudice toward anyone. No, he did not call me “boss” because he had an aversion to saying my name aloud. He denied everything. He admitted nothing. By the way, he wondered why I had lied about visiting Boston. He also wondered, by the way, why I had not seemed more distraught after the news of the bombing broke. In conclusion, the owner had only care and compassion for everyone who worked for him, and the baristas would be willing to testify to this.
When I was done reading, I handed the letter back to the case counsellor.
“He said, he said,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
The case counsellor nodded. He folded the letter and put it back in the envelope with the coffee shop’s return address. Maybe Melissa would be willing to testify on my behalf, never mind that she was hoping to enroll in college classes, and I would be able to add “she said.”
But the case counsellor told me that he had already considered both sides of the story and, much to my surprise and relief, he agreed with my version of events. “I believe you,” he said. His advice now was that we should try to resolve this without any sort of formal hearing. “Let’s see if we can take care of this today,” he told me. Considering that I had received no severance, he would ask the owner if he would be willing to pay me four hundred dollars to settle the matter—four hundred dollars being the equivalent of two weeks’ pay.
“I can’t promise,” the case counsellor said, “but I’ll try my best.”
Then he left me alone in his office with nothing to do except stare up at the poster about the importance of letting farmworkers drink water. “The work can’t get done without them,” it read.
When the case counsellor returned, he had even better news: the coffee shop was willing to pay me eight hundred dollars. Would I agree to eight hundred dollars? Would I agree to eight hundred dollars and an apology? I said yes to everything. I said no to nothing. And I was led into a conference room to sit across the table from the owner whom I had not seen in more than seven months, and who was as dishevelled as ever. He had chosen to wear a suit and tie for the occasion, but his suit was baggy, his tie was tight, and his hair was even thinner. Sitting beside him was a man I had never seen before, tall and trim, half the owner’s age and weight, and whom the case counsellor introduced to me as the owner of the coffee shop. Here was a third narrative, to compete with the narratives that had come before: the man who I had thought was the owner was only the manager, and now here was the actual owner, who had no idea who I was, and, moreover, appeared flummoxed as to how we had arrived at this situation. No longer in the context of the coffee shop, the manager looked uncomfortable and out of place, his power diminished, an average guy in a bad suit, who had had to take time off from his job to come downtown to a federal office in an Art Deco building.
He had brought his notebook with him, of course, “Management” written on the cover. He was not the outsized entrepreneur that I had always thought him to be, but, rather, one of those fortunate employees who had worked long enough at the coffee shop to qualify to enroll in college courses. I suddenly felt a sharp sense of remorse for having caused this ordeal in what I had considered the pursuit of justice, and I felt sorry for the manager, who, no thanks to me, had certainly not curried any favor with the real owner. I wondered if the eight hundred dollars would be coming out of the manager’s pocket. I wondered if he would be fired. But there was no turning back now, and nothing left to do except for everyone to sign the forms in triplicate saying that we were in agreement with the outcome.
And when that was done, the manager turned to me, his hands folded in front of him on the conference table, barely able to make eye contact, mumbling his compulsory apology, as if we were children in the schoolyard.
“Sorry for the misunderstanding,” he said. None of it mattered, of course. Starbucks was coming. Starbucks was going to swallow everything.
Then the case counsellor handed me the check for eight hundred dollars.
“We hope this will make you whole,” he said. ♦