Miss Fortune by Lauren Weedman Read Free Book Online

Mikhas. A story about learning to listen and Muslim values.
    Before I start, let me tell you that having a threesome is not what you think it’s going to be.
    It’s not sexy.
    For me, having a threesome was like living in New York. When I lived in New York, I was always having to tell myself, “I mean, look at you. You’re in NYC!” A cab could drive by and splash gutter water into my mouth and I’d say, “Sure it’s disgusting, but look at me! I’m in New York City.”
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    My threesome was not planned. At least
I
didn’t plan on it.
    Once upon a time, I was a twenty-one-year-old American living in Amsterdam with the low self-esteem and poor personal boundaries that only a cult leader could love. My Dutch boyfriend and I broke up, I wanted to go back home but didn’t have enough money for a plane ticket, so I stayed. After a few years of doing experimental theater and learning important acting techniques, like how to breathe in through my vagina and out through my asshole while reciting William Blake, I had a regular job at a five-star hotel called the Pulitzer, a converted seventeenth-century canal house.
    Initially, I was hired on to work room service, but since I’d learned how to say things like “I’m sorry, junkie, but you can’t hide in the linen closet” in Dutch I’d been promoted to the café. The café wasn’t as fancy as the hotel’s formal dining room, the Sun Flower, where Swiss royals drank thousand-dollar bottles of wine and ate elk. But it wasn’t considered as rough as what happened in the hotel’s Breakfast Buffet. The Breakfast Buffet was a tiny eatery crammed into the hotel’s attic space.
    The café people and the Breakfast Buffet people rarely interacted. The Breakfast Buffet had its own little sad space, and its Anne Frank tiny attic working conditions meant they had to hunch over for most of their shifts so they wouldn’t bang their heads on thelow-hanging ceiling. Meanwhile, the café staff would complain if they had to actually wait on a table. “I have to have a cigarette before I work. I’m not an animal.” The Buffet Boys, who were all, with the exception of Mikhas the Greek manager, Middle Eastern, started their shift at four A.M. and ended five hours later, whistling, winking, and throwing plates up into the air and catching them behind their backs. “Ha-ha!” My theory was that they loved their jobs. My coworker Yolanda’s theory was that they partied until the clubs shut down and came to work to get free coffee and sober up before they went home to their families.
    She was probably right, since there were many days when they started their shift sweaty, bleary-eyed, and reeking of hashish.
    They could hardly keep a grip on the coffeepots, yet they still found the energy to hit on every single hotel guest who showed up for breakfast. The womanizing ways of the Breakfast Buffet Boys were infamous.
    â€œGood morning, beautiful woman. Normally I’m not aroused so early in the day, but hello there. Coffee?”
    The daily job of setting up for lunch in the café always included checking to see what the Breakfast Buffet Boys had stolen. Instead of walking all the way down to the supply closet in the hotel’s basement, they usually made the shorter trip to the café and grabbed what they needed from us.
    My hand was always the first one up when Steffan the café manager asked, “Who wants to go up to the Breakfast Buffet and retrieve the coffee cups, sugar packs, and whatever else you notice doesn’t belong to them?”
    Nobody else liked having to traipse up three flights of stairs, but even if there had been an elevator I would have volunteered, because only buying a jumbo box of tampons made me feel as solidly female as being sexually harassed by the Buffet Boys.
    Being sexually harassed was something