"Lawrence Watt-Evans - Why I left Harry's All night Hamburger" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

hissed at me, "Don't bother the guy!"
I took the hint, and went back to sweeping until the burger was up, and as I was handing the plate to the
guy there was a sound out front like a shotgun going off, and this green light flashed in through the
window, so I nearly dropped the thing, but I couldn't go look because the customer was digging through
his pockets for money, to pay for the burger.

"You can pay after you've eaten, sir," I said.

"I will pay first," he said, real formal. "I may need to depart quickly. My money may not be good here."

The guy hadn't got any accent, but with that about the money I figured he was a foreigner, so I waited,
and he hauled out a handful of weird coins, and I told him, "I'll need to check with the manager." He gave
me the coins, and while I was taking them back to Harry and trying to see out the window, through the
curtain, to see where that green light came from, the door opened and these three women come in, and
where the first guy was all wrapped up like an Eskimo, these people weren't wearing anything but jeans.
Women, remember, and it was only April.

Hey, I was just sixteen, so I tried real hard not to stare and I went running back to the kitchen and tried
to tell Harry what was going on, but the money and the green light and the half-naked women all got
tangled up and I didn't make much sense.

"I _told_ you I get some strange customers, kid," he said, "Let's see the money." So I gave him the coins,
and he said, "Yeah, we'll take these," and made change -- I don't know how, because the writing on the
coins looked like Russian to me, and I couldn't figure out what any of them were. He gave me the
change, and then looked me in the eye and says, "Can you handle those women, boy? It's part of the job;
I wasn't expecting them tonight, but we get strange people in here, I told you that. You think you can
handle it without losing me any customers, or do you want to call it a night and find another job?"

I really wanted that paycheck; I gritted my teeth and said, "No problem!"

When you were sixteen, did you ever try to wait tables with six bare boobs right there in front of you?
Those three were laughing and joking in some foreign language I never heard before, and I think only one
of them spoke English, because she did all the ordering. I managed somehow, and by the time they left
Harry was almost smiling at me.

Around four things slowed down again, and around four-thirty or five the breakfast crowd began to
trickle in, but between two and four there were about half a dozen customers, I guess; I don't remember
who they all were any more, most of them weren't that strange, but that first little guy and the three
women, them I remember. Maybe some of the others were pretty strange, too, maybe stranger than the
first guy, but he was the _first_, which makes a difference, and then those women -- well, that's gonna
really make an impression on a sixteen-year-old, y'know? It's not that they were particularly beautiful or
anything, because they weren't, they were just women, and I wasn't used to seeing women with no
shirts.

When I got off at seven thirty, I was all mixed up; I didn't know what the hell was going on. I was
beginning to think maybe I imagined it all.

I went home and changed clothes and caught the bus to school, and what with not really having adjusted
to working nights, and being tired, and having to think about schoolwork, I was pretty much convinced
that the whole thing had been some weird dream. So I came home, slept through until about eleven, then