It's ugly, but you read it.  Like this blog.

Every waiter, waitress, busboy, bartender and seating hostess at Smuggler’s Inn knows about “The Chart”.  The Chart, actually a series of charts illustrating the findings of a 2-year study on the tipping habits of Americans, caused a firestorm when it was published in Restaurant News in 2009.  If you are not familiar with the publication, Restaurant News is a bi-weekly tabloid that reports on the service and hospitality industries.  Despite a decidedly utilitarian aesthetic complimented by a paper stock that recalls the waxy packets drive-in French fries came in, everyone from the Chief Operations Officer of Wynn Hotels down to the Pakistani immigrant restaurateur with dreams of franchising his samosa truck reads RN.  To not do so would be to risk not knowing something invaluable.  For, mediocre though its art department may be, there is nothing second-rate about the content in Restaurant News.  The hefty rates paid by advertisers and a steep, $209 annual subscription price pay for painstakingly researched articles written by reporters who have come over from no less newspapers than the Miami Herald and the Washington Post.  “If you read it, it must be true” probably applies when you’re talking about Restaurant News.  The fact that research largely confirmed what passed for common knowledge among restaurant folk didn’t stop critics from jumping all over Restaurant News for seeming to endorse such controversial statements as Scottish tourists seldom tip like Scotsmen but many Australian tourists refrain from tipping at all.   It wasn’t the Australians who raised a stink, though.  It was the teachers.

In one bar graph showing average gratuities paid by 28 professions, “teachers” placed dead last, behind day laborers and “religious professionals” a category that includes those free-spending sub-groups, nuns and priests.  The teachers cried, “Foul!” and the powerful California Teachers Union issued a written protest denying the article’s finding and containing statements by several of its members, all of whom swore that they tipped 20%.  Restaurant News stuck to its guns.  The numbers didn’t lie, they said; teachers across the country were tipping just under 11%.

Other findings contained in the article seemed questionable, or at least impolitic.  Like that independent business owners didn’t tip any more than their employees or that while gay men are great tippers, gay women tip about average.  There were no statistics based on ethnicity, but if your first language was something other than English, you probably really did think that tipping was a city in China.  In short, there was something to offend everyone.

Everyone, that is, but the waiters, waitresses and, bartenders for whom this article was primarily intended.  Not only did food and hospitality workers top the list of good tippers (no surprise there), but these men and women were able to turn the findings of Restaurant News’ survey into actionable intelligence.  Teachers groups began seeing that parties of five or more had a 15% gratuity automatically added onto their tabs, separate checks or no.  Non-drinkers, never a preferred group because of their smaller bills, might have noticed that they were waiting a bit longer for their food, even as any gay men sharing the dining room with them were enjoying cocktails that were especially frosty.  It would be wrong to say whole segments of restaurant and bar patrons experienced bad service because of this one article, but service jobs are all about time management and since you can’t be in two places at once, why wouldn’t you choose to be in the place that would earn you a 20% tip?

Smugglers’ Inn uses the standard restaurant model for training in new employees, which means that we largely leave that task to our old employees.  A new busboy or bar girl would have heard an oral recitation of “The Chart” right after they’d learned where the Whip-it!© canisters were hidden.  By the time they made bartender or waiter, they would be warning their future replacements about stingy Australians.  “And don’t get me started on teachers.”  It was a quaint tradition.  They all are.

Last month, in the “Coming in your next issue of Restaurant News” segment of that magazine, subscribers saw an item announcing a comprehensive survey of tipping in America, RA’s first in five years.  Much has happened to America in five years.  We have a black president.  Spanish is commonly heard not just in our kitchen, but everywhere else in Minnesota.  The largest company in America is no longer Exxon-Mobile or General Motors.  It is Apple.

Smug’s employees waited with bated breath (that’s how it’s spelled; I looked it up) to discover just who was tipping what in our brave new world.  Yesterday, the wait was over.

“A demographic survey of gratuities paid by Americans in 2013-14 based on independent data” contained 14 new job descriptions, plus new categories including several deliberately frivolous one, like dog and cat owners and Survivor vs. Game of Thrones viewers.  No need to irritate anyone this time; let’s all just keep it light, shall we?

As the Smug’s copy of RN made its way from one pair of hands to the next, you could hear, “Hah!” “Yes!” “Andele!” 

Almost every stat contained in the previous, five-year-old survey had changed, if not been turned on its head.  Every stat, save the one we all went to immediately.  The cheapest people in America were…STILL TEACHERS!  The mood at Smugglers’ Inn that day was downright celebratory.  Once you’ve directed all of your enmity against a group of people, the last thing any of us wants to hear is some reason to stop hating.

There’s a holiday message in there somewhere, but I’m damned if I can find it.   From all of us at Smugglers’ Inn to anyone reading this, “Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Joyous Kwanzaa.” 

Unless you’re a teacher.  In which case, “Why don’t you get run over by a sleigh?”   Cheapskate.

I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy. We don't serve cowboys.

Ever wonder what people from other countries think when they see images of invariably mustachioed or goateed white American citizens prancing about in in faux-military gear, waving assault rifles and screaming about their Christian god who, apparently, wants every man, woman and child strapped?  Well, wonder no more.
     “Hey!  There’s some assholes with guns in our parking lot," said Jorge III, Smugglers’ Inn’s landscaper and a citizen of Mexico.  Jorge had just stepped into our westerly bus station from the door that leads to the outside.  All of Smug’s employees are compelled to use this side entrance when the restaurant is not officially open.  “They’re in the front. Check it out!”

I did.  Sure enough, about 50 feet from our front door three heavyset men were leaning against an older white pickup truck that had a Minnesota Vikings pennant tied to its antenna.  Each man had conspicuously strapped a black firearm to his thigh and an assault rifle lay across the pickup’s hood, as if on display.

 “Thanks. I’ll let Northtown security know,” I told Jorge III. “For now, let’s not worry about ‘em.”

  A few minutes later, I heard, “Hey, ‘choo know there are some douche bags with guns and a flag hanging out in our parking lot?”   The flag was a new addition.

  “American flag?” I asked Ramón, our bartender who claims to be Cubano-American from Florida, but who sends money back home to his family in Quito, Ecuador. 

  “No, man, a snake.  Eet look like a little kid drew it.  Had some messed up words on it.”

  “Don’t tread on me?” I ventured.
  “I din’ read eet,” Ramón said (Although couldn’t read it may have been more accurate).  “You want Jorge and me tell ‘em to leave?”

  “Naw, they’re gun nuts.  Don’t antagonize ‘em or we’ll never get rid of ‘em.”

  “Gun nuts?  Like the douche bags in Texas?” If you haven’t guessed, “douche bag” is Ramón’s favorite expression.

  “Unfortunately, they’re everywhere.  Hey, Jorge needs help moving the broiler.  Can you…?”

  “I’m on it, boss!”

  Well, the fact that our guests had Betsy Ross’d their own flag was encouraging; they probably weren’t affiliated with the NRA or any national gun organization.  Most likely, they were three guys who had met at Weight Watchers or the Herpes Connect dating site and discovered they shared a fetish for firearms.  No doubt they’d watched the confrontations between “open carry” advocates and police on YouTube and thought that the whole thing looked like fun.  Why did they pick Smugglers’ Inn to make their stand, though?  The idea behind forcing these confrontations is to show how Americans who choose to brandish lethal weapons in public are routinely deprived of their right, guaranteed by the 2^nd amendment, to scare the shit out of anyone with a triple digit IQ.  The goal is to get media attention, preferably television.  Why, then, had these men chosen to brandish firepower at a freestanding restaurant on the edge of a shopping center parking lot on a Tuesday afternoon?  It made no sense.

  “Ha-looo!”

  Erin, who was acting as our seating hostess for three weeks while her roommate, Cat, was backpacking in Yosemite, had decided to show up early, for once.  She’s may not Smugglers’ hardest-working employee, but she charms everyone with her lilting Irish brogue. 

  “Pardon me, but is anyone else a bit concerned that there are three fat bastards camped outside the front door wavin’ fookin’ goons about?”

  “Erin!  We have the situation’s under control,” I lied.

  “You called the army, then?”

  “Northtown security.”

  “Mall cops?  Fer fook’s sake, they don’t even have whistles.”

  “It’s protocol.  You said there are four of them?”

  “Three great fat bastards dressed up to look like Rambo and one little John Wayne.

  “Boom!  Boom!  Boom!” 
   Someone was pounding to get in.  As much a decoration as a functioning portal, Smugglers’ Inn’s massive front door is made from sandblasted wood and is crisscrossed with Spanish-looking beaten metal bands.  It looks like a door to keep out pirates, but it’s easily damaged.  Half of the metal bits are held on with hot glue.

  “Boom!  Boom! Boom!”

  “Fer fook’s sake, you’re not going to open it?””

  “Erin, please, just go get changed.  Unless you plan on seating my customers in jeans that smell like cigarettes and beer, in which case, we’ll need to talk.

  “You’re such a cunt,” Erin said, not offending me in the least.

  “Thank you!” I replied and went to see who was pounding on my door. 

  It was, indeed, the gang from the parking lot.  Apparently, they had just been waiting for their fourth.

  “Can I help you gentleman?” 

  One of the “gentlemen” had what I think was an AK-47 lashed to his back.  All of them had side arms in holsters.  The man in the cowboy hat must have been the brains of the outfit, for it was he who addressed me while the others stood with feet wide apart and hands clasped behind their backs.  I remember going to a Public Enemy concert in 1993 and seeing members of Chuck D’s entourage assume this same “parade rest” stance.  I snickered then, too.

  “We demand that you let us into this establishment,” said the Cowboy.

  “I’m very sorry, sir, but I cannot let you come in like that.”

  “The laws of the state of Minnesota and the 2^nd Amendment of the Constitution of the United States says we have the right to keep and bear arms,” said the Cowboy.  “We are here today to exercise our rights.”

  “Our right and our freedom!” barked the guy with the AK, who looked sillier, even, than one of Public Enemy’s “soldiers”.  At least those guys could stick their chests out beyond their stomachs.

  I looked back at the leader.  And his hat.

  “I believe we’ve met before.  I believe…” I made a show of looking the Cowboy up and down. “…I asked you to remove your hat on one occasion and on that occasion you refused.”

  “Is that what this about?” yelled one of the Cowboy’s companions, who immediately dropped any pretense of a military bearing and assumed the “disappointed guy with bonehead friend” slouch.  “You and that stupid hat of yours?”

  “This is about our constitutional rights, which Obama and the liberals are prying away from us day-by-day.”  The Cowboy must have prepared this, for he said it with a straight face.  And used the word “prying”.

  “Whatever you gotta say, you can say it to security,” I said, “but Smugglers’ Inn has always had a “no hats” policy.”  I leaned in to the most pissed-off of the play soldiers ant said in a confidential tone, “It keeps out the pimps.”

  The pissed-off guy walked away.  He flipped the bird, but whether the gesture was directed at me or to his comrades, I could not say.  His buddy with the assault rifle shouted after him that he still had his gun case in his truck, but the guy just flipped the bird again.

  “In any case,” I continued, “we don’t open for another 20 minutes.  Security’s slow, but they shouldn’t take that long.”

  “Take your hat off, Jerry,” said the guy with the AK.  “If I get arrested, I don’t want them to say it was over some dress code violation.”

  “Me, neither,” said the remaining soldier, who had pulled out an iPhone. “Take it off and I’ll tape us having our rights violated.”

  “I take this hat off for no man!” said Cowboy Jerry.  

  They were squabbling outside our door when Lisa and Paul, the Northtown Security force, showed up in their little, black Rav4.  While they only pack flashlights and zip tie handcuffs, Lisa is a part-time personal trainer with a neck like a fullback while Paul has the ramrod-straight posture and “jarhead” haircut of a marine, a look made more credible by the fact that he has a bulldog and “USMC” tattooed on one hand and his other hand is a stump.

  Since our open carry patriots could hardly post video of themselves standing up to an unarmed woman and a wounded warrior with a humiliating job, the three martyrs for freedom got back in the cowboy’s BMW X5 and drove away, but not before Paul confiscated the one guy’s assault rifle. 

  “Man! Did you see that?” Jorge shouted.  By now, everyone had congregated by the front door and nobody was getting ready to open in five minutes. “He gave up his rifle like a little bitch.”

  “You know he’s only gon’ get it back,” said Ramón, adding, “douche bag.”   Ramón turned to Erin.  “What ‘choo think?  They gon’ give him hees gun back?” 

  Erin seemed to ponder the question before responding, “I tink they should make him ask for it back from someone who’s child’s been killed by one ‘o the fooking tings.”

We can only hope.

The Winter of 2014

*This month’s blog entry comes from Smugglers’ Inn’s seating hostess and recent University of Minnesota J-school grad, Catherine “Cat” Pike.

To winter, whose name is Sebastian:

How do I know your name is Sebastian?  Because everyday that I wake up and look around, I see that you’ve left something else for me to pick up.  We hadn’t heard too much of you these last three years, Sebastian—not that anyone was concerned.  Maybe it was too much to expect you to fade away entirely, but now you’re back in my life and worse than ever.  I expected you to split before Valentine’s Day, if only to avoid buying me a present.  Well, February 14 came and went and I didn’t get crap.  It was nine below and snowing this Valentine’s Day at the airport.  I don’t know why Minnesotans measure temperatures at the airport, unless it’s entertaining to watch the reactions of people who’ve disembarked from planes originating in cities in Florida and Texas step from baggage claim into a breeze that freezes their eyelids open.  You’re so cruel; I can’t believe I ever liked you.  It was only because you showed up right as I was discovering snowboarding.  I confused the endorphin high I'd earned from conquering my fear of the half-pipe with falling in love.

Looking back, I must have been mad.  What else could explain how I, practically a college graduate, moved in with you three weeks after buying my first pair of mittens?  Alarm bells should have gone off when you couldn’t cover your half of the damage deposit.  You told me that that you were waiting on a $5,500 check for having worked that fall on domestic caviar farm.  Shoot me, but when you talked about how you raised sturgeon from tiny minnows into giant adults with individual names and personalities, I believed you.  How you must have laughed telling your friends about the idiot meal ticket you’d lucked upon.  Wait!  I forgot; you don’t have friends.

Why am I going on?  Sebastian or winter or whatever you’re calling yourself these days, you should never have come back.  Remember how I put your crap out in the yard and then it immediately rained?  I don’t believe that was an accident.  I think God saw it there and said, “Hey, this is that D-bag,  Sebastain's,  crap.  I recognize it from all the horrible charcoal drawings.  Didn’t he cheat on that nice girl who still talks to me whenever she’s sad and alone?  What was her name?  Cat!  Yes, Sebastian cheated on Cat.  With her best friend’s little sister, no less.  My self! Is that the entire Twilight collection in paperback?  I’m gonna dump, like, two Sea World aquariums on that.”

You have 72 hours, Sebastian.  If, by March, I cannot tell that the lawn is made of grass (albeit grass littered with fast food containers and dissolving piles of dog poo), I’m playing the god card.  I’m not really ready for the Rapture, but if it takes the end of life as we know it to be able to go outside without a parka and a snow shovel, so be it.

Caviar farm!  Right.  Why don’t you take your act back there, Sebastian?  The world needs sturgeon fish sticks.  Like it needs you.    

2014? Well, forage our truffles.

Waiting for the party to be over.

If the printer doing our New Year’s menu doesn’t come through, we’re forked.   If the African American and Mexican families who got into it last New Year’s Eve return for a rematch, we’re muggled.  If the Blaine PD shows up and notices that our newly-minted bar manager with the orange hair and knuckle-dragging physique matches the description of a certain feces-throwing fugitive from justice, we’re in for a spelunking.  If the party hats and favors don’t show up, it’s San Quentin date night.  If the half bottles of champagne that say “Happy New Year!” run out, if anyone in the 10 o’clock seating insists on staying until midnight, if Jorge III gets too high to come in or passes out at his Hobart DishPro Elite IV, we shall be Sky Bar’d.  If it snows, well then, we’re pretty much Frodo’d.  In our hobbit holes.

We are busboys and bartenders, waiters and waitresses, managers and dishwashers.  Among our other professional skills, we know more euphemisms for screwing and being screwed than the non-service industry world  has screws. 

Tomorrow, as you know,  is December 31^st.   Perhaps you’re unsure what (or whom) you’ll be doing on the last eve of 2013?  Not us.  We’ll be selling Bud Light to you and yours for six bucks a glass and $12 cuts of prime rib for $19.50.  What will you say to that?  If you’re smart, “Thank you.”   After all, we’ll be working like trauma surgeons to ensure that you and all your new best friends can welcome 2014 with full bellies and a minimum of inhibitions.  Given that this is the most difficult night of the year for us,  why shouldn't we be compensated?  We are hardly Communists.

You'd never get a seat in the dining room without a reservation,  but if you do find yourself in Blaine, Minnesota tomorrow at twenty to midnight, you could do worse than to elbow your way past the smokers and claustrophobes into the Smugglers’ Inn cocktail lounge, where DJ PJ will be playing disco hits from the golden era of Smugglers’ Inn, long before the place needed to do the odd brilliant ad campaign to keep it's faux nautical doors open.

And if you aren’t prepared to part with ten bucks for a hat and a noisemaker at the door, you can Winehouse yourself.

It's Thanksgiving. Merrry Christmas!

Crap stacked to the ceiling.

By now, Christmas lights have replaced this year’s impressive selection of talking tombstones and animated rubber zombies at the local Walgreen’s.  The marked-down bags of “fun-sized” candy bars were broomed nearly as soon as the trick-or-treaters changed back into children.  Walgreen's, or maybe it’s just our branch at the Northtown shopping center, hardly bothers stocking Thanksgiving decorations at all,  preferring to leap right from Halloween to Christmas, or as the holiday is referred to in retail circles, “Hammer time”.

Not so your pals at Smugglers’ Inn.  We remember Thanksgiving and, if we don’t keep it holy, we make an effort.   We decorate.  One of our greens suppliers always hooks us up with an enormous selection of colorful gourds, squash and pumpkins every year.  These used to live in an oversized wicker cornucopia set up on a table by the front door, but the cornucopia walked off several Thanksgivings ago and we’ve never gotten around to replace it.  (It’s not the sort of item you can find at Walgreen’s.)  It falls to me or the other manager to place the fall vegetables in visible spots around our dining room and lounge.  One or two stay behind the bar, but the rest of them are deemed to be in the way and will be stacked into a neat, warty pyramid by the hostess desk, looking rather like something the Confederate artillery would have fired when they had run out of canon balls.

Smugglers’ will be serving a traditional brunch for those of our neighbors who either can’t or don’t want to cook.  Typically, these are lone middle-aged men or women with their elderly mothers.  The turkey and ham are what you’d expect, but our cook does a Belgian pumpkin galette that is quite special. It’s served with vanilla ice cream—the kind with the specks of vanilla that some ancient grandmother, released for the day from the old folks’ home will invariably refuse to eat. (“Really Grams, it’s NOT dirt.  See?  I’m eating it.  Mmm!”)

Those are all restaurant traditions, though.  Smugglers’ Inn is also an ad agency.  Agencies have their own Thanksgiving traditions.  Like, layoffs.

In keeping with a time-honored practice, Smug’s is choosing this holiday, where we acknowledge our blessings, to let go those who we deem no longer essential to our operation.  (Thank you, God, for this new, non-union America.)  Since the goal it to gin-up our balance sheet and start the new year with less debt on the books, we could have waited a month to dish out the curb sandwiches.  Firing people at Christmas, though, just looks bad.  Plus, then you have to pay Holiday bonuses.

So here, without further ado, is a list of people who have touched our lives in so many ways and who we now salute as they march off to pursue other interests away from us.  If you read your name remember: just because you own an assault rifle doesn’t mean anyone wants to see it.

Michelle Bachman.  Michelle, even though Blaine is not in your congressional district, we at Smugglers’ Inn find the fact that you are from Minnesota almost as disturbing as the fact that you are on anything called “The Intelligence Committee”.   We wish you every success in your next job as Ambassador to The Island of Forgotten Toys.

Tim Pawlenty.  Two years ago, the then-governor of Minnesota was pegged by pundits as the dark horse candidate who was going to snatch his party’s nomination after the entire front-running field of influence peddlers, liars, ditzes, know-nothings, health care socialists and serial sexual harassers had demonstrated their supreme non-electability over the course of six months of televised debate.  Then, TP was a shoo-in to be Mitt Romney’s running mate.  Instead the Mitten chose…well, it was somebody else.  Paw-paw then slipped from view, but has recently begun turning up on news and infotainment shows, dutifully  parroting whatever the current Republican party line is on any issue from gun control to immigration to whether the embassy attack in Benghazi is proof that Hillary Clinton doesn’t deserve to be president. 

Mr. Governor…Tim, give it up.  They just aren’t into you.  If you’re going to be president of anything, it’s going to be a college.   Carlton is nice.   Maybe they have a course on evolution.

Jesse Ventura.  Jesse, we loved you; you put our state on the map.  You stood up to religious bullies and the press and the political machines and forever changed the criteria required to hold high elected office in America.  “A pro wrestler governor?  That’s AWESOME!”   Yes, it was.  Sadly, the years on the beach seem to have fried your brain, judging from your most recent appearances on TV.  Conspiracy theories can’t be your response to everything.  And what’s with that hair?   Thank you for your service.

Peter Lundquist, owner, The Anoka County Shopper, AKA, “The Mystery Diner.”  Pete, here is a dollar.  Kindly review McDonald’s value meal and leave food criticism to people who don’t ask a mid-priced restaurant in Blaine, Minnesota if you can tour their wine cellar.  Or if said wine cellar has lambrusco.

Pongo the dishwasher.  No other employee who was not high on nitrous has ever asked me for a 100% raise before (and that person had been kidding). Nonetheless, Pongo, who had not been working at Smugglers’ Inn all that long, (OK, four years), got it into his head that he should have been making minimum wage all along and DEMANDED that his salary not just be brought up to that benchmark, but doubled.   I pointed out to Pongo that had he remained in his native Sumatra, he would be lucky to find a job outside of drug mule that paid $7.25 an hour, let alone $13 (See? We weren’t far of MW).  Plus here he never has to worry that we are going to kill him rather than pay him.

Perhaps that was insensitive.

Following my out-of-hand dismissal of his request, Pongo, who previously had to be reminded not to whistle while he worked, became sullen and withdrawn.  He stopped combing his bright orange hair and was given to long sighs, of the type ejaculated by nerdy school girls going through their Syvia Plath stages.  Pongo is one of our few employees who counts friends amongst both the kitchen and serving staff,  By playing the aggrieved party, he effectively drove a wedge between management and the staff as a whole.  Although he has continued to perform his duties at Smugglers’ Inn with machine-like efficiency, Pongo clearly would rather be doing something else.  

Well, I am happy to oblige.  Pongo, turn in your rubber apron.  You’ll never wash dishes in this town again.

You’ll need a different uniform from now on, maybe even a tie.   Pongo, you are henceforth Smugglers’ Inn’s first cook/assistant manager of operations.  I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay anyone $13 an hour to wash dishes.

Happy Thanksgiving, all.

The Management

Smugglers’ Inn

The lesson of the purse.

World's least waterproof item?

“Those who do not see the power of social media are dinosaurs with their heads in the sand…and  you can’t breathe sand!”   

--Forward, “The Ten Commandments of Social Media Marketing”, E.Rand and V.S. Majudru, 2013.

Well, it isn’t as if we at Smugglers’ Inn are keepers of the Queen’s English, but sentences like the one above, which one encounters throughout “The Ten Commandments of Social Media Marketing” might have tipped us off that we should have popped for one of the other 20 similar titles Amazon had on the subject.  It was probably the biblical reference that hooked us; Smugglers’ Inn runs on a prayer.  Once we had the actual book (or the Kindle Fire with the book app) in our hands, we learned that communicating to the public through numbered lists was one of the Ten Commandments of Social Media Marketing.  As was the number 10 itself, which knocked off another commandment, but not the tenth commandment, as one may think.   No, the tenth commandment was, “Thou shalt fascinate!” “Remember the power of ten and keep it holy,” was commandment three.  Just as I was making sense of commandment four, “Thou shalt gather the data”, our seating hostess, Cat, stuck her head in my office and knocked to get my attention.

“Hey, boss!  Got a flaming emergency.”

“You don’t seem to be on fire,” I said, putting down the Kindle.

“Funny.  Somebody tried to flush a purse down the toilet and there’s water everywhere.”

It never fails; just as you’re about to tap into the hidden market forces that will make you rich beyond comprehension, someone presents you with a plumbing problem.

“Did you try pulling the purse out of the toilet?” I asked Cat. Quite reasonably, I thought.

This was greeted with a snort.  “Like you pay me enough to stick my hand in a toilet.”

Cat had formerly been as faultlessly courteous with me as she is with our customers.   It's only in the last week or so that she’d taken to calling me “boss” and being disrespectful as a show of  solidarity with Pongo, our dishwasher, whom I’d turned down for a raise.  Still, she was right: as a seating hostess, Cat made zilch tips and got the fewest hours of anyone on the schedule.  I’m not sure what the going rate for paying young ladies to stick their hands in toilets is, but it surely exceeds $7.20 an hour.  The going rate for plumbers, I know.  Which is why, when Cat turned on her heels and left, I rolled up my sleeves, stood up and took a deep breath.

“Jorge!” I shouted.

Jorge was the third of his name to have worked at Smugglers’ Inn as a cook/dishwasher.  He inherited his job from his nephew, Jorge number two, who had run into what you might call a spot of bother with the authorities.  We sincerely hoped Jorge 2 would be rejoining us soon, as Jorge 3 skeeved everybody out.

“What’s up, boss?”  Jorge had been hovering right outside my door.  Good—he already knew what was coming.

“Jorge, I need you to go into the women’s bathroom and pull out a purse that somebody tried to flush down a toilet.”

“Can I keep what’s in it?”

“Only if it’s gum.  Oh, and grab a mop, will you?  There’s a lot of water.”

Number Six of the Ten Commandment of Social Media Marketing is “Thou shalt be diligent.”  In the context of the book, “diligence” refers to monitoring how your efforts are paying off as expressed in terms of visits, Facebook likes and any of a dozen numbers associated with online performance.  Diligence is also a good motto when you’re running a restaurant with a diverse workforce that includes a man with no solid references and a tattoo of a spider on his temple.  I’d give Jorge 3 a couple of minutes alone, then I’d pop in and pretend to be looking for the shut-off valve for water going into the ladies rest room.
The valves controlling the water to and from our men’s and women’s restrooms are, point-of-fact, located in our cloakroom.  Talk to the architect.

After going to the cloakroom and moving a quiver of black umbrellas that were obscuring them (why do only black umbrellas get abandoned?), I located the two shut-off valves.  I turned them both off rather than look up which was which.  We had officially been open for dinner for 40 minutes, but there was no one in the dining room and I wasn’t overly worried about inconveniencing the party of teachers taking advantage of happy hour.  None of them was drinking beer.  Besides, they’re just teachers.
I waited in the cloakroom for a couple of minutes, during which time I tried to name all of the Ten Commandments of Social Media Marketing.  I could only recall the ones already mentioned, plus “Remember the list and keep it holy”, commandment eight.  Or was it nine?   I went next door to check on my man’s progress.
Jorge was already mopping up.  Laid out on the sink was a beige leather clutch purse and its soggy contents, which consisted of a Minnesota drivers license showing that she was just a year over drinking age, a pack of tissues, lip gloss, lipstick, Dentyne Ice, Hyundai car keys and can of mace the size of a cigarette lighter.   For those really tiny assailants.
“Any money?” I asked Jorge.  If the purse had been stolen, the thief would have removed cash and credit cards and if not, they’d be in Jorge’s pocket.  Still, I thought I had to at least ask.

“Over there,” Jorge said, motioning with his head. “I didn’t count it.”

The infant changing table had been pulled down.  Laid out on it was $56 in wet bills--one ten, the rest fives and ones.  Waitress money.  Had Jorge left it out of professional courtesy?
“Jorge, you’re the man.  You saved me calling a plumber. Thanks.”

“Nothin’ to it, boss.”

“Don’t worry about this,” I told Jorge, indicating the floor. “I’ll get one of the busboys to mop up.”

I located the purse’s owner in the lounge.  She was leaning over the bar, chatting up our bartender, Adolpho.  I’d guessed semi-right.  The woman wasn’t a waitress; she was a bartender.  Somehow, she’d gotten started talking shop with Adolpho.   Service workers almost always talk shop when they come together, although it ain’t for nothing that Adolpho’s nickname is “El Fabio.”  When I informed the young lady about her purse, she glanced over to a table occupied by two empty margarita glasses and blurted out the “C” word.  Apparently, she’d gotten so wrapped up swapping stories of surviving bar rushes and 86-ing drunks that she’d forgotten she hadn’t come in alone.  Or that she was supposed to be getting drinks for her girlfriend and herself.  God knows how long her wing gal sat fuming before she’d lost it.  Still, trying to flush someone else’s purse down the crapper is déclassé, even for Blaine.

I set a plastic with the purse and contents on the stool next to her and left, not waiting for a thank-you from the woman, who was still swearing.  She would likely get some sympathy from Adolpho, whose other nickname was “Ado the slut”.
I was confident that this episode had fulfilled the drama quotient for the evening, but as so often happens lately, I was wrong.  When I returned to my office to look up the Ten Commandments of Social Media Marketing that I couldn’t name, Jorge was sitting in my guest chair.  Great.  I pasted on a smile.
“Jorge! What’s on your mind, big guy?”

“Ah, boss,” he said, “I hate to do this to you, but I’m gonna have quit.  Tonight’s gotta be my last night.” 

“Well, that f***ing sucks,” I said.  I was sincere; Jorge III may have been of the poorest employees on the payroll, with a history of showing late and/or high, but he will show up and he will wash dishes.

“I know, I know.  I would like to give you, like, two week’s notice and all, but my cousin got done with his thing.”  What Jorge II’s “thing” was had never been explained.  Still, I knew what this meant.

“And he wants his old job back?”

Jorge III nodded.  “He’s got a family to take care of, you know?”

I didn’t, but if he was sending money back home to a wife and kid in Mexico, it would explain why he worked so insanely hard.  Jorge II didn’t look old enough to be a daddy, but Hispanic families start early.  I’ll have to ask to see pictures of his kid when he comes back.  Yay!  Good Jorge is coming back.  Evil Jorge? GONE-O.

“I suppose,” I said, “you want me to cash you out?  We’re just into a new pay period; I’m guessing you don’t want to wait 15 days for your last check.”

“Man, that would be real good; I’m kinda short right now.”

I got $137.50 from petty cash, the pre-tax amount Jorge had earned in his last two days with and scribbled out a receipt for the funds.  As I watched Jorge go through the motions of reading the receipt before signing it, I tried and failed make out a single identifiable image or word from the layers of blue-black ink that practically obliterated the top of his hand and forearm.  How had I had ever let this stone killer come to work at Smugglers’ Inn in the first place?

“Well, I better get to it,” Jorge III said, ”Chef wants me to de-vein about twenty pounds of shrimp.”

“Yeah, better get to it.”

“Um, boss?”

Jesus, what now? I saw Jorge swallow, like he was getting ready to say something that was really difficult for him.  He was going to ask me for a loan, I could see it coming.  That’s it: cancel the send-off drinks I was going to authorize tonight.  We’ll celebrate after he’s gone.

“I just wanna say, “thanks”.  For giving me a shot, you know? I really like my job."

“Jorge, we hate to see you go; you’re a good worker.  I wish there was someway we could keep you on, but if your cousin’s coming back…”

Jorge waved me silent.  “I know that I don’t exactly make a good a first impression.  I’m not stupid.  Well, I’m not that stupid.  I appreciate that you gave me a chance—that everybody gave me a chance.  You got some nice people here.”

“The best,” I agreed.  Then Jorge shook my hand.  He was smiling, but I think he was actually choked up.  “The shrimp,” he managed to say and started walking off.

“Hey, Jorge, wait a sec.  You ever do any landscaping? Northtown is gonna stop maintaining this little patch of turf that we’re on.  I thought we could make some little hills and plant trees around the dumpster.  Make it presentable, you know?”

And that’s how Smugglers’ Inn got a gardener and Jorge III got to keep his 40 hours a week.  For a month or two, anyway.  I still can’t say why I did it, but I’ve no regrets. Smugglers’ will need to convert an advertising prospect or two, but that shouldn’t be impossible; we’re social media experts now.

Found in our dumpster (the car, not the person).

Ok, our car only vaguely resembled this.  It was cut up into many rusty pieces and there was no engine or running gear.  Still, you don’t dispose of a vehicle in this manner, not even a Yugo.

Yugos, if you weren’t alive in the mid-80’s, were manufactured in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.  They were supposed to appeal to Americans with less than $4,000 to spend on a new car, but later consensus was that the Reagan Administration had engineered the Yugo’s importation to quell domestic fears that The Soviet Union was only pretending to unravel.  Today, you can find the marque on every list of worst cars of all time.  Near the top.  

“Eets a Hugo,” our cook, Jorge #3 (4?), had said when he’d explained that he couldn’t dump our trash in our own dumpster because there was a car in there.   

We've been having one of those months at Smugglers’ Inn.  There had been a freak snowstorm on April 25.  Blaine,  for all its charms, is not one of our state’s winter wonderlands and by the time May rolled around,  paper trash and half-thawed dog doo were floating in an unappetizing lake that had formerly been our parking log.   Pongo, our treasured dishwasher, gave us a May Day surprise by asking for a 50% raise.  (Ha!)  On May 4, we learned that we officially did not win the Arby’s business.  OK, Smugglers' Inn is several sizes too small for a McDonald’s or Burger King, but Arby’s is a tax write-off for the Blackstone Group.  While the brief didn’t come right out and say it, it was understood that Arby’s agency of record would be tasked with just making it look like someone ate there.  We could have done that.  But no!  Now we have all this great work for a roast beef sandwich with avocado on a bagel that will probably never see the light of day.  Thank heaven, we took the precaution of copyrighting the name, “Texajewfornia”; we may still get reimbursed for our time yet.

“Can I take eet, boss?”  Jorge had asked. “Chew don’ wan a Hugo, do you, all busted up like that?” 

Jorge wanted every splintered table, dented light fixture and wheel-less bakery rack that Smugglers’Inn tossed out.  I don’t know what he did with all of it; the man lived in a trailer.

“Jorge,” I told him, “the only thing I want is my dumpster back.  Take her.  Go with god.”

Jorge made a call and in short order, a boy in a wispy mustache who looked all of fourteen appeared driving a battered pickup truck with makeshift plywood sides.  He and Jorge formed a 2-person bucket brigade and transferred all but the heaviest part from the dumpster into the back of the pickup truck.  Pongo came out and helped them load up the rear axel.  (Maybe the guy does deserve a raise.)

And like that, the bad thing was gone.

There are people you can call to take away your dirty laundry or your fallen tree—or your fallen relative.  We employ a security service whose uniformed employees can escort unruly drunks from our bar and place them in cabs.  There are even people who will come and take a disassembled Eastern European car out of your dumpster.   But who do you call to remove a month?”

I muse on this as I walk back into the restaurant and whatever fresh hell awaits me inside.  There are bright spots on the horizon, I remind myself.  We have a new bar manager coming on board and we’re expecting another ad assignment (finally!) from our old friend, Tours Abroad.   We’ll just gut out the last week and change of May and then we’ll be into June.  June is a good month.  June is June.

In the meantime, I’m sending Pongo to the mall to buy a padlock for the dumpster.  A big one.