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psychologists term a “flow state,” where signals pass from the sense organs directly to the muscles, bypassing the cerebral cortex, and a Zen-like emptiness sets in. I'm on a 2:00-10:00 P.M. shift now, and a male server from the morning shift tells me about the time he “pulled a triple”—three shifts in a row, all the way around the clock—and then got off and had a drink and met this girl, and maybe he shouldn't tell me this, but they had sex right then and there and it was like beautiful.
    But there's another capacity of the neuromuscular system, which is pain. I start tossing back drugstore-brand ibuprofens as if they were vitamin C, four before each shift, because an old mouse-related repetitive-stress injury in my upper back has come back to full-spasm strength, thanks to the tray carrying. In my ordinary life, this level of disability might justify a day of ice packs and stretching. Here I comfort myself with the Aleve commercial where the cute blue-collar guy asks: If you quit after working four hours, what would your boss say? And the not-so-cute blue-collar guy, who's lugging a metal beam on his back, answers: He'd fire me, that's what. But fortunately, the commercial tells us, we workers can exert the same kind of authority over our painkillers that our bosses exert over us. If Tylenol doesn't want to work for more than four hours, you just fire its Ass and switch to Aleve.
    True, I take occasional breaks from this life, going home now and then to catch up on e-mail and for conjugal visits (though I am careful to “pay” for everything I eat here, at $5 for a dinner, which I put in a jar), seeing The Truman Show with friends and letting them buy my ticket. And I still have those what-am-I-doing-here moments at work, when I get so homesick for the printed word that I obsessively reread the six-page menu. But as the days go by, my old life is beginning to look exceedingly strange. The e-mails and phone messages addressed to my former self come from a distant race of people with exotic concerns and far too much time on their hands. The neighborly market I used to cruise for produce now looks forbiddingly like a Manhattan yuppie emporium. And when I sit down one morning in my real home to pay bills from my past life, I am dazzled by the two- and three-figure sums owed to outfits like Club Body Tech and Amazon.com.
    Management at Jerry's is generally calmer and more “professional” than at the
Hearthside, with two exceptions. One is Joy, a plump, blowsy woman in her early
thirties who once kindly devoted several minutes of her time to instructing
me in the correct one-handed method of tray carrying but whose moods change
disconcertingly from shift to shift and even within one. The other is B.J.,
aka B.J. the Bitch, whose contribution is to stand by the kitchen counter and
yell, “Nita, your order's up, move it!” or “Barbara, didn't you see you've got
another table out there? Come on, girl!” Among other things, she is hated for
having replaced the whipped cream squirt cans with big plastic whipped-cream-filled
baggies that have to be squeezed with both hands-because, reportedly, she saw
or thought she saw employees trying to inhale the propellant gas from the squirt
cans, in the hope that it might be nitrous oxide. On my third night, she pulls
me aside abruptly and brings her face so close that it looks like she's planning
to butt me with her forehead. But instead of saying “You're fired,” she says,
“You're doing fine.” The only trouble is I'm spending time chatting with customers:
“That's how they're getting you.” Furthermore I am letting them “run me,” which
means harassment by sequential demands: you bring the catsup and they decide
they want extra Thousand Island; you bring that and they announce they now need
a side of fries, and so on into distraction. Finally she tells me not to take
her wrong. She tries to say things in a nice way, but “you get into a