Waiter Rant

by Steve Dublanica

  On some level, most restaurant owners are control freaks. If they aren’t, then they hire someone who is. But Fluvio’s controlling behavior is less about quality control and more about fear. He’s always on the lookout for people trying to rip him off. When he first installed the cameras, I was furious. I knew something about the effects of larceny and corruption while working for the Church and in the business world. I take a strange pride in the fact that the restaurant workers I have known have a better-developed sense of ethics and honor than many of my former colleagues. I told Fluvio I’d understand the cameras if we had a security problem, but since we didn’t, I felt like the surveillance was a slap in the face to the people who had given him long and honest service. His response was a simplistic, “Why you worried? You stealing from me? You got something to hide? You do nothing wrong, then you have nothing to worry about.”

  That hurt. I had processed millions of dollars’ worth of Fluvio’s cash and inventory. I’m not claiming any kind of moral superiority. You’re not supposed to steal. But it hurts to think Fluvio needed to videotape my integrity. If I had wanted to steal from him, I could have robbed him blind and he never would’ve known about it. Eventually, I realized that, even if The Bistro was staffed by a convent of nuns, Fluvio would still want to act like Big Brother. Why? Like every anxious paranoid, Fluvio assumes the worst about every situation and person.

  That’s why Fluvio freaked when Beth changed the schedule without telling him. He’s not upset that she switched shifts; he’s upset because he didn’t know about it. When he doesn’t know something, he assumes people are trying to get one over on him. So instead of indicating to Beth his desire to be kept in the loop, Fluvio immediately launched into Code Red.

  Fluvio drives me insane, but I have a very soft spot for him, too. Despite his many shortcomings he can be a likable and kind man. When business is slow, he always makes sure everyone has enough hours to work and never lays anybody off. He’s made health insurance available when few small business owners are doing so. He’s lent money to people (including me) when they’re broke. He was also quite nice to my family, cutting my brother and me a major price break when we held a surprise party for Mom at The Bistro. He takes good care of all his children and his aging father. But, despite all his good qualities, you never know when Fluvio will slip into Mussolini mode. This forces you to keep your guard up continuously. That constant expenditure of energy makes him an exhausting man to work for. Fluvio makes things a lot harder than they have to be.

  I learned early, because of his personality, that I had to be the buffer between Fluvio and the staff. Whenever he screams at the staff, I calm him down. Whenever he gets hot under the collar about firing someone, I make his eternal preoccupation work for me and distract him. I’ve smoothed things over with aggravated customers, vendors, and staff. I’ve apologized many times for his rudeness. There are many people in the neighborhood who don’t like Fluvio. My normal response to their trash-talking is to say, “Yeah, he can be difficult, but he’s a good man at heart.” So as the years have passed, I’ve done my best to protect Fluvio from Fluvio. I remind him to shave, tuck in his shirt, and zip up his fly.

  The hours pass by. Soon it’s dinnertime. The Bistro has only a few patrons sitting in the window. Saroya and I are sitting in the back keeping an eye on things. Fluvio, however, is also keeping an eye on us.

  The house phone rings. I pick up the cordless handset. “The Bistro,” I say cheerfully. “How may I help you?”

  “What are you doing sitting down?” Fluvio says.

  I look up at the video camera. “Fluvio?” I say. “Where are you?”

  “Never mind where I am,” Fluvio yells. “Why are you sitting down?”

  “It’s slow here.”

  “I don’t like you sitting down.”

  I press my ear to the receiver. I can hear traffic noises in the background. “Fluvio,” I say, “are you in the car?”

  “I’m on my way to the airport.”

  “You’re looking at us on your laptop while you’re driving?” I shriek. “And talking on your cell phone?”

  “It’s a traffic jam.”

  “But still.”

  “Listen,” Fluvio says. “You work for me. I do what I want.”

  “Well, it’s not your highway,” I snap. “Keep your eyes on the road before you kill someone.”

  “Goddamnit. You’re—”

  “Hey, Fluvio,” I say, winking at Saroya. “Is your son with you?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “So, you’re driving a car with your son in the back while talking on a cell phone and looking at a computer screen? Tell me I’m missing something.”

  “Hey.”

  “Buddy,” I say. “The state troopers will execute you on the side of the road if they catch you doing that shit.”

  “I don’t get caught.”

  “One in the head, buddy. Kapow!”

  “You think you so funny.”

  “GET OFF THE PHONE!” I yell. “OR I TELL THE WIFE!”

  Fluvio hangs up, quickly.

  “He’s watching us while he’s driving?” Saroya asks. “Can he do that?”

  “He’s got one of those broadband wireless cards for his laptop,” I reply. “He can watch us from wherever.”

  “He likes calling people out of the blue. It’s happened to me a few times,” Saroya says. “He tells me, ‘I see what you doing.’ It creeps me out.”

  “Makes you wonder if he keeps a jar of Vaseline nearby.”

  “Oh,” Saroya says, shivering. “That’s too creepy for words.”

  Saroya and I do not get up. Fluvio doesn’t call back. Things are so slow I go back to reading Raymond Chandler. I flip to my favorite part of the book—the introduction Chandler wrote years after he became famous. Oddly enough, his reflection on what makes Philip Marlowe a hero became one of the most famous pieces he ever wrote.

  But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid…. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

  One of the kitchen guys interrupts my reading and asks, since it’s so slow, if he can go home early.

  “No problem, papi,” I say. “Just be sure to clock out.”

  A few minutes later the worker emerges from the basement, out of his kitchen checks and wearing his civvies. He punches out on the computer. The printer spits out a receipt. The cook examines it, makes a face, and comes up to me.

  “Can you fix this, papi?” he asks me.

  I already know what the cook wants. I examine his printout. It says he worked fifty-one hours and fifty-five minutes. Fluvio hasn’t paid employees for partial hours in years. He’ll pay this guy for only fifty-one hours—and no overtime. Where does the fifty-five minutes go? Into the ether, of course. Fluvio ends up leeching a free week’s worth of work out of his employees every year. This kind of bookkeeping is common in the restaurant business.

  I reopen the cook’s time sheet and add ten minutes. I reprint the time sheet and hand it back to him.

  “If he still shorts you,” I say, “let me know.” Yet again I’m the buffer zone. This time I’m keeping the staff from revolting.

  “Gracias,” the cook says. “I don’t want to give him a free hour.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “Good night, jefe.”

  “Good night.”

  Fluvio’s a bag of contradictory impulses. He’ll pay people’s medical bills in a pinch, but he’ll also nickel-and-dime his hardworking employees out of a couple of bucks. The restaurant world is a tough world. I’m sure Fluvio thinks he’s doing the best he can by his employees, but I wonder if he truly understands how he’s pushing everyone away from him. After almos
t seven years his nonsense is starting to wear me down.

  I exit out of the time-sheet program, look up at the cold implacable eye of the video camera, and cheerily flip it the bird.

  Chapter 8

  The Back Alley of Affluence

  A few days later a late winter snowstorm’s slamming into the East Coast. The Bistro, yet again, has almost no customers for lunch. With temperatures hovering in the single digits, I figure most of the office drones ordered in today. It’s a shame we don’t deliver.

  I rub a hole in the condensation gauzing The Bistro’s front door and peek outside. Granules of bone-dry snow pushed by the wind skittle and scrape against cars and buildings, scouring them like an Arctic sandstorm. I watch as the delivery boy from the King of Siam restaurant carefully pedals his bicycle down the treacherous street, the wire basket perched over his front tire laden with grease-stained brown-bagged orders of Pad Thai. He looks miserably cold. As I watch him pedal I have a macabre vision of his bones piled outside the entrance of a faceless office building, a skeletal middle finger stripped clean by the icy pumice thrust heavenward, protesting a lousy tip even in death. Maybe it’s a good thing we don’t deliver after all.

  Safe and warm inside The Bistro, I feel my stomach growl. I look at my watch. It’s time for lunch. Hunger pushes the delivery boy’s plight out of my mind. I head into the kitchen to ask what’s cooking.

  “Yo, Ernesto!” I shout.

  “What, cabrón?” replies Ernesto, one of the sous-chefs, not looking up from the sauce he’s stirring.

  “Tengo hambre, papi,” I whine. “Feed me.”

  “Whatchu want to eat?” Ernesto asks.

  One of the nice things about being the manager is that I can order anything I want off the menu—within reason. That’s nice, but after a while you get sick of Italian food. Experience has taught me to see what Spanish grub the kitchen guys are rustling up first.

  “What are you making for the troops?” I ask.

  Ernesto stops and scratches the top of his crew cut. Short and powerfully built, Ernesto always reminds me of a larger version of Hervé Villechaize. Whenever I see him standing on his tiptoes trying to shove something into the oven, I have to bite my tongue not to call him Nick Nack, Scaramanga’s diminutive henchman from The Man with the Golden Gun.

  “I don’t know yet,” Ernesto replies, breaking away from the stove and opening the fridge. After surveying the foodstuffs he says, “Give me a minute. I’ll make something nice for everybody.”

  “Tacos?” I ask hopefully.

  “Maybe.”

  “You make tacos, and I’ll love you.”

  “You only love me when I feed you.”

  “And you only love me when I close early.”

  “That’s right, cabrón,” Ernesto says, his face breaking out into a smile. “You get it now.”

  “It only took six years.”

  “Puta!” Ernesto says without rancor. “Get out of here.”

  Playful banter over, I exit the kitchen. The bus girls, Imelda and Lourdes, are busy leafing through the Spanish version of People. Unlike other restaurant managers, who’d bark at them for not doing anything, I leave them alone. If these girls are sitting down, they’ve finished their work. The back-of-the-house crew at The Bistro have the best work ethic I’ve ever seen. Besides, it’s dead. I sit down next to them and start leafing though a newspaper another waiter left behind.

  “Anything interesting in the paper?” Imelda asks.

  “Same shit, I’m afraid,” I reply.

  “Does the paper say anything about the immigration thing?” Imelda asks.

  “What immigration thing?” I ask.

  “That law that says you can’t hire illegal aliens.”

  Imelda’s referring to bills under consideration that would force employers to be more vigorous when verifying a prospective worker’s immigration status. Currently, all Fluvio is required to do is ask for documentation (Social Security card, driver’s license, etc.) to verify a worker’s eligibility. He does not have to validate the authenticity of those documents. Many immigrants looking for work use fake Social Security cards, fraudulent tax ID numbers, or counterfeit green cards to secure employment. They know the documentation’s fake, we know it’s fake, but we and countless other businesses hire them anyway. If you were to suggest to Fluvio that an applicant’s papers might be counterfeit, “I don’t work for Homeland Security” would be his standard response. The new law under consideration, however, would use the threat of heavy fines to force employers to use electronic means to verify eligibility. The idea is to cross-check IDs via the Internet against some kind of national database. That means thousands of illegal immigrants would be unable to get jobs anywhere in the United States. It should come as no surprise that the National Restaurant Association lobbies against these efforts. Without illegal immigrants the restaurant business in this country would come to a shuddering halt.

  Some people want all immigrants stopped at the border and sent home. Others think we should accept every one of the “huddled masses, yearning to be free” who manages to jump the fence. I don’t know what the solution to America’s immigration dilemma is. I do know that illegal immigrants are a big part of our economy. Most domestic servants, restaurant employees, fruit pickers, landscapers, and janitors se habla español. Restaurants, especially operations like The Bistro, have thin profit margins. Unable to hire illegal aliens, restaurateurs will have to hire “legal employees” for higher wages. Increased wages will get passed along as higher food prices, and dining out will become even more expensive. In fact, getting rid of our illegal alien labor pool would drive up prices for many consumer goods. We enjoy cheap chicken because poultry pluckers work for low wages in factories where the owners skimp on annoying details like paying for safe equipment and health care. We enjoy cheap prices at big-box stores because corporate bean counters keep overhead low by using undocumented aliens as janitorial staff. If we could magically send every undocumented worker home, life in the United States would suddenly get more expensive. Americans might bemoan their porous borders or decry the desperate plight of immigrants, but we love paying $30 for DVD players. America is addicted to cheap labor—whether it’s from China or Mexico.

  “I don’t think anything will come of it, Imelda,” I answer.

  “Why not?”

  “If we sent you all home, the Anglos would have to pay more money to get their lawns mowed,” I reply. “That ain’t happening.”

  “It’s not fair,” Lourdes says, joining the conversation. “I work hard. I pay all my taxes and I’ll never see Social Security. These people want to make me into a criminal.”

  “That’s true,” I say. “And look at the hypocrisy. Thousands of Americans try scamming their way out of paying taxes every year.”

  “That’s right!” Lourdes says.

  “But do you remember that illegal waitress we had from Colombia?” I ask. “The one with the little boy?”

  “Sí”

  “She claimed six dependents on her W-2 when she should have claimed only one. She paid almost no payroll taxes while I paid a bundle. Her child got free health care through my tax dollars, but I have to pay four hundred dollars a month to insure myself. Is that fair?”

  “No,” Lourdes admits.

  “Anglos game the system; immigrants game the system,” I continue. “People get exploited. It’s a mess.”

  “It’s a big problem,” Imelda says, shaking her head.

  All this heavy talk suddenly makes me want to have a cigarette. I excuse myself from the table, grab my black wool coat off the rack, and head down a small flight of stairs into the basement. The bowels of the Civil War–era building are a rabbit warren of passageways and small rooms. Tables, equipment, and boxes of food are crammed into every conceivable niche of space. It’s like being on a submarine before a long patrol. The heat radiating off the walk-in freezer’s condensers keeps the basement warm in the winter and oppressively hot in the summer.
Come to think of it, the cramped quarters down here remind me of a World War II submarine I toured when I was a kid.

  “Hola, amigos,” I say to the guys working in the prep kitchen.

  “Hola,” Moises replies as he peels a red pepper. Looking at my warm jacket, he asks, “Still snowing out?”

  “Yeah,” I reply. “I’m going into that shit to smoke.”

  “Not good, man,” Moises says, shaking his head. “Not good.”

  Moises gave up smoking a year ago. The patriarch of a large El Salvadoran family, he has a tribe of children and a mouthful of gold fillings. He’s been our salad man almost as long as I’ve worked at The Bistro. Over the years Moises saved his pennies and now owns a house in the suburbs. When I try figuring how I can make more money than our salad man and still live in a small apartment, I remind myself that Moises has a little something called discipline.

  “Think of all the money you save by not smoking,” I reply.

  “I need it for my house,” Moises says.

  “How’s that going?”

  “Something always needs fixing.”

  “Siempre trabaja?”

  “Sí.”

  “Ah,” I say, winking. “The joys of home ownership.”

  I walk through a series of doors and enter a long passageway that connects to the stairs to the back alley. The light fixture in the hallway is busted. The only illumination is provided by the red glow of the EXIT sign. As I head down the passage I see Felipe, the dishwasher, carrying an empty trash can over his shoulder. Bathed in red light we look like crewmen from my childhood submarine. I can almost hear the Klaxon sounding general quarters. I resist the urge to shout, “Dive! Dive! Dive!”