Chapter 1: The Invitation

Fucking Liam!

What a drama queen!

I shook my head at the engraved invitation to his upcoming fet.

The damn invitation was on expensive, thick gauge card stock! It was the kind of stuff that unless you had impeccable penmanship you could ruin with a single fatigued shake of a hand. The kind of thick invitation-style material that swallowed the tip of your pen so you always got a perfect scribe when you wrote with any functional pen.

Liam left penned indents into the thick material.

I ran my fingers over the strong cursive, so clean and clear that even I could manage to make it out. I read aloud, quoting, “‘Delectable treats of the flesh, both sweet and savory’, what in the hell does he mean by that?”

I wondered at some of the strange turns of phrase that littered the invitation.

Behind me in the restaurant, Mark was starting his staff terrorization ritual. First, he was accosting the hostess in front of the customers, nagging about this or that. Then there was the transition into the service staff as he staggered and swaggered through the place. Finally, he made it to the next to last stop before the office to yell at the cooks, loud enough as always for customers to hear his magnanimous authority all the way out in the dining room.

I dropped the invitation into my laptop bag and got back to the food inventory sheet and order I was compiling. If I was obviously working and could manage to avoid eye contact because I was so busy, the owner’s kid would get bored and go away to hang out at the bar.

He would be out of my hair for a little while, at least until he downed a handful of shots on mommy and daddy’s dime. He expensed it through the restaurant and blamed it on the bartenders as spillage for accounting purposes.

“Why the fuck don’t we have our fish special today!”

That stopped me, with my hand over the keyboard, pen frozen over the inventory sheet. Without fully looking over my shoulder, just cocking my head the slightest in his direction, I asked Mark, “Excuse me?”

Pouring out his derision and mommy-daddy issues onto me now, he roared so the cheap seats could hear, “You fuckin’ deaf now too!” He huffed like a thirteen-year-old kid getting his video games taken away because he was being grounded. He demanded again, “Why in the fuck isn’t there a fish special on for today! I fuckin’ told ya I wanted sixteen-ounce tuna steaks on for tonight!”

His selective drinking memory was so frustrating.

Mark swayed, eyes mildly crossing in the hall as he clutched onto the office door jam. Again, he was already drunk before he arrived.

So it was going to be one of those nights.

Tapping the pen silently on the inventory sheet I gently reminded him as patiently as I could manage, “Because I told you last week when you asked that we are a cow steak restaurant. I also mentioned that if we priced those steaks so we weren’t bleeding red ink onto every plate, then they would cost four times what we charge for our most expensive porterhouse. That was right before I reminded you that I do not particularly like fish, so because I do not have a pallet for it, I suck at cooking fish. Because I’m not very good at it, I won’t be able to supervise our kitchen properly. And we agreed that those steaks were too expensive to ruin in our kitchen during the dinner rush.”

Immediately shifting blame, Mark swayed irritably in the hall to the kitchen, deliberately speaking loud enough so the cooks could hear. “Bet it’s fuckin’ Juan’s fault!”

To summon my patience I scratched my chin with my pen hand, and reminded Mark, “His name is Jose. You fired Juan last month.”

Mark demanded, “Where’n the fuck is that other fucker then? Why ain’t he at work!”

I reminded Mark, while silently wondering just how much he had to drink before swerving into the handicapped parking space out front, “Juan refuses to come back. You know that. We talked about this last Wednesday.” Shaking my head I calmly re-informed, “Juan will not carry any shifts. He won’t help out. He won’t be on call when we’re short. He is done and screens out calls from the restaurant.”

Mark barked, “That fuckin’ jerk off!” He swiftly relapsed into mumbles and staggered away to the bar, where he had coopted a bottle of Jack and was pouring himself shots.

We all knew that Julia would not touch that bottle until Mark left.

I went back to work. Mark would occupy himself with the bottle for a few hours while convincing himself he was being a great host and representative for the place while he slobbered and drooled, and slopped and spilled Jack Daniels all over his shirt and any customers foolish to enter his proximity.

The little voice in my head told me again for the hundredth time this week, and it was only Wednesday night, ‘This restaurant manager is a dick. You are doing his job. You are training, hiring, and handling personnel issues that he creates, night after night! You should be in the kitchen where you are paid to be. Considering quitting yet? Dump this shit stress!”

Shaking my head, the age-old dialog in my head roared to life in my head again!

That quibbling little pussy that I am whimpering back in my head, ‘But I’m unsure. This job pays okay. We really don’t need much more. If we leave we’ll need to climb the ladder from this mid-range stress factory to find some other higher-end place. Who knows how long that will take? All that time without getting paid? And then, who knows if that new one will work out? It might be worse! Or I’ll need to put on a suit and go looking for backers to open my own restaurant! And that’s just terrifying!’

I finished ordering and placing the delivery schedule for Thursday morning.

Then the minutia grabbed a hold of me and dragged me down again until more of my life was sucked away into oblivion.

I did not even realize how much time passed!

I did not get far, so it could not have been too long.

Julia the bartender stuck her head in the office door behind me and angrily snapped, “Why can’t that fucker just get himself a fuckin’ DUI, so he’s out my my fuckin’ bar for twenty-four hours! Before mommy and daddy bail his dead-ass out!”

Containing my sigh, I asked, addressing the obvious, “He’s pouring his own shots again?”

She snapped, “Of fuckin’ course! Blamin’ it on me while tellin’ me not to put ‘em on tabs!”

The fool was going to get the place’s liquor license suspended if we were ever audited. We both knew he would be stapled to the bar stool for at least forty-five minutes now. I reminded her, as calmly as I could muster, “If he was drinking at the bar, he would blab and blame you if he got a DUI.”