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.

Raindance Film Festival of London

Smugglers' Inn is pleased to show some work for our first international client, the Raindance Film Festival of London. Our friends at Raindance were celebrating 20 years as the leading venue for independent cinema in the UK  and we created an integrated, multi-media campaign that included festival trailers, tv and radio ads and a web-based series. None of which could they afford. We did, however do some funny point-of-sale posters and a bit using messages stuffed into bullet casings.

The ass-whupping will not be televised.

“Sour sucker?”  I thought I must have heard wrong.

“It’s one of my signatures: margarita mix, lemon Absolut vodka and a splash of Midori, garnished with a sour gummi worm, served in a Mason jar.”

It sounded god-awful and looked like something meant to appeal to alcoholic preschoolers, but I and everyone else assembled made smacking sounds with our lips and fawned over the mixologist like cocker spaniels at a boot-licking contest as a videographer who’d not changed his T-shirt in days pressed a camera into the face of our 57-year-old bar manager, Tito, in hopes of capturing the man’s soul escaping through his mouth.

This was Day Three of shooting the Smugglers’ Inn episode of “Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares” and we’d gotten used to Mr. Ramsay and his producer snickering at our nautical décor and teeing off on our largely Spanish-speaking kitchen staff like Anglo-Saxon lords of the British Raj castigating their brown house servants. 

We knew what we were in for when we signed up.  It may be called reality TV, but every episode of “Kitchen Nightmares” adheres to the same script:  G.R. comes in, finds a cockroach, throws a plate, empties the contents of your walk-in cooler into the dumpster along with your menu and your old clientele then, voila!  Overnight, you have a new menu, new staff uniforms and a spiffy new décor, all paid for by the show and its sponsors.  There is a tearful group hug where all hurt feelings are washed away and a triumphant grand re-opening where Gordon Ramsay flits between tables of delighted diners and a kitchen that hums like a sewing machine.  If you’re the restaurant, it’s the kind of exposure you just can’t buy. 

What we hadn’t counted on was Sahib Gordon insisting on sticking his Great Pyramid of a nose into every aspect of our business.  The show is called “Kitchen” nightmares.  Our bar and our advertising sideline are not nightmares; they make money (well, the bar does).  After failing to entice one of his London buddies who owned a digital branding agency to fly to Blaine, Minnesota in February, Mr. Ramsay’s producer used that particular line item to import a bartender from Manhattan, a city where they can get away with charging more for a mojito than we do for a 14-oz. prime rib and African lobster tail with your choice of rice pilaf or baked potato.  The bartender’s combinations were original—a terrible thing for drinks; Blaine-ites looking to get drunk don’t like to be challenged.  Sitting in our sun-streaked Castaway Lounge at 4 o’clock surrounded by lights and cameras, I tried to imagine what would happen the first time a guy who had gotten dressed up in his only hockey jersey without bloodstains got his drink handed to him in a jar. 

“Now, I’m sure you haven’t heard of molecular mixology, but this variation on the traditional Old Fashioned uses a nifty interaction between the acid in orange peel…” 

The bartender’s condescending spiel was interrupted by an ear-piercing shriek.  This was followed by a crash that every restaurant worker would recognize as an aluminum rack falling over.  As a group, we ran to the source of the noise, the kitchen area or, specifically, the storeroom in the back of the kitchen area.

The sight of our Sumatran dishwasher, Pongo, riding Gordon Ramsay’s personal assistant like a pony and beating him with a joint of meat is one that I hope I will carry to the grave.  Said meat, which I instantly recognized as a Parma ham, was mottled with a velvet of green fungus.  It would be shameful indeed if such a large chunk of animal flesh had been allowed to molder in some neglected corner of our pantry.  Of course, this is Blaine and the example currently being used as a club was likely the only Parma ham for thirty miles.  Although, come to think of it, Parma ham is mentioned on our brunch menu.

“Get it off of me!” the assistant wailed.

“Pongo, are you OK? Did he hurt you?” Cat, our seating hostess, shouted as she ran to Pongo, who dismounted and threw his hairy arms around her like a child being reunited with his mother after getting separated during a Black Friday Sale at Best Buy.

“Pongo hide in storeroom like you say.  Man come in, not see Pongo.” 

“It talks!” screamed the personal assistant, who had scooted himself against the wall in a sitting position, one leg cocked to lash out with his foot should the attack resume. 

It’s true that Pongo’s appearance takes some getting used to with his long arms, short legs and impossibly wide cheeks.  Still, he ain’t John Merrick.

“He’s Sumatran, dipshit!” 

The assistant yelped when Cat stomped over and buried the toe of her mule into his thigh, then oh-so-casually walked back to hold Pongo’s hand.

“Can someone tell me what is going on?  Kevin, what are you doing on the floor?  Bloody hell!  What is THAT?”  Gordon Ramsay pointed at the ham.  (Where the heck had he come from?)

“Dis one bring dat ham inna garbage bag, boss,” said, TJ, a kitchen worker who, like Pongo, was hanging out in the back owing to a severe allergy to cameras. “I seen de whole ‘ting. He go like he goin’ hide it behind dem bags ‘o rice, but I don’ thin’ Pongo like dat too much.” The big Jamaican smiled and absently scratched at the waterfall of tattooed tears running down his cheek.  “No, boss, I don’ tink Pongo like dat AY-T’ALL.” 

It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened.  Smugglers’ Inn’s immaculate kitchen and food storage areas had not been consistent with good TV.  Where the horrible ham had come from was anybody’s guess, but I had no doubt Gordon Ramsay was counting on being able to discover it and hurl it down in front of me, the chef and the day manger as we broke down and wept, imploring Jesus and Gordon Ramsay to save us from the ruination that was our rightful due.

Of course, that still might happen. 

“Kevin, you have let myself and the show down.  Consider yourself fired as of this moment.  Get out.”  But it was Gordon Ramsay who left, very hastily and with his producer in tow.

The former personal assistant stared up at us with wide, Keane painting eyes, speechless at having been so savagely thrown under the bus.

We knew this man was just a fall guy.  If we should be angry with anyone, it should be Gordon Ramsay and his odious producer.   They were the ones who had put him up to the sabotage.  Of course, we couldn’t touch them.

We chased the assistant out to the parking lot, TJ and Tito raining blows on him the entire way.  When we passed the lounge where the film crew was shooting close-ups of the mixologist’s creations lined up along the bar, the assistant called out for help.  He received none.

Outside on the front steps, Cat gave the toady one more taste of her shoe leather and he scurried off, slipping and falling on the icy pavement before realizing that we were letting him make a clean getaway. 

Which he really should have done.  Instead, he revved the engine of his rented Nissan Altima in an impotent show of force before driving back in our direction, honking his horn and giving us the finger through his open window.

“BAM!”

A Parma ham struck the side pillar of the Nissan as if fired from a cannon.  Lord, but Pongo has an arm!  The assistant was going to have fun explaining to the rental company where that particular damage had come from. 

As we watched the taillights of the assistant’s fishtailing car zig-zag onto Highway 10, it felt as if we had regained our unit cohesion.  Team Smugs had been taken down a few pegs and we’d reacted by thumping some lackey named Kevin who was only following orders.  His bosses, our real tormenters, were free to lord over us for a bit longer, but were now almost certain to bestow some largess upon us when they departed to degrade the crew of another failing restaurant.  The whole thing was positively feudal.

“He who mess with de Smugglers’ Inn…” began TJ in mock-solemnity.

“Gets a big ‘ole ham up his butt,” finished Cat and we all laughed, happy now to go back and swallow our gummi worms.

Say what you will, the old ways are still the best.   

But it looks good on you.

Even though we would love the tax advantages, Smugglers’ Inn is not a religion.  That is not to say that our employees are without faith; there are no atheists in kitchens, especially not when your broiler has chosen ten o’clock on New Year’s Eve to solve forever the debate of whether there is or is not a gas leak by sprouting a 2-foot tongue of blue flame from the flex-tubing connecting said broiler to the gas coupler.  Mormon, Jew, Catholic, Buddhist, Church of Elvis—all of our employees prayed just to get through the night that ushered in 2013—and they prayed there would never be another like it.  

Which begs the question, “Is anyone listening?” January is always a dog, but we’d been sued, broken into and visited by ICE.  Our advertising sideline is, well, sidelined until we can bail out the leaky pirate ship that is Smugglers’ Inn, the restaurant.  Sure, we have a killer pro bono campaign in the pipe, but “pro” and “bono” are two words that mean free.  We’re still looking to reap one callback from 84 gallons of World Famous© clam chowder we sent out at Christmastime to officers of Apple, Exxon, GM, TBWA Chiat Day and Choo-choo Bob’s Train Store (we just like trains).  I probably shouldn’t have, but when one of our employees asked for permission to read a Prayer for Smugglers’ Inn at our annual Employee Appreciation brunch, I didn’t think to consult with the other managers. 

“Go for it!” I’d said.   I mean, Smug’s already had its own theme song.  Why shouldn’t there be a Smugglers’ Inn prayer, too, written by our eldest employee?  Bartender Tito was in his fifties and had to be spiritual after all of those times in and out of AA.  We aren’t a school or public institution.  Who could object to a little public prayer?

When Tito tapped on the karaoke microphone and announced that he wanted to lead the assembled in grace, most of the employees, wives, husbands and kids were still making their way down the buffet that we’d set up on our bar.  All reverently stopped loading their plates with baked potatoes and prime rib to bow their heads and listen to Tito read “A Seafarer’s Pray-yur”, which he began to recite in a clear, Hispanic/British pirate voice.

“ARRR father , who aRRRRt in heaven…aRRRRR!”

I did a Danny Thomas spit-take and ran out of the lounge, hand pressed over my mouth and the club soda I’d been sipping dribbling out my nostrils.  I was back in the office with the door closed before I dared laugh, which I proceeded to do until tears joined the club soda slicking my chin.  If that had been a joke, it would have been horrible, but Tito had looked deadly serious.  As had every person in that room.

I knew that if I went back immediately, I’d lose it all over again.  I was looking for a kitchen towel to wipe my nose on when my cell phone vibrated. 

I’m hardly the type who feels compelled to check whenever he gets an email alert, but I was killing time.  At first, I thought the message had to be a prank, but everything seemed legit, the tone, the logo, the address.  If it was a hoax, it was an elaborate one. 

I called what the author of the email listed as her office number.  Since this was a Saturday, I wasn’t expecting a human being.  I didn’t get one.  What I did get was a recording stating that I’d reached Fox Programming after hours and asking me if I knew the extension of the person whom I wished to reach.  It was for real.

“Holy crap!” I thought.  “They want us!  They want Smugglers’ Inn for Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

Our little restaurant/ad agency is being invited to receive an extreme makeover from TV’s reigning tyrant chef, Gordon Ramsay.  When Ramsay sees how screwed-up this place is, he is going to pull our pants down and bugger us like choirboys in front of millions of viewers.  We’re going to be FAMOUS.

I ran out to share this incredible good news.  Tito, it seemed, had added a bunch of extra lines to the prayer we are all familiar with and was just asking the divine for a full folksail and a safe “haRRRRbur” from nor’easters.

“Arrr-men!” I shouted.

“Arrr-men!” the room shouted back.  And we proceeded to have the best damn Employee Appreciation brunch since we started hosting these events in 2009; we didn’t even run out of rolls.  Smugglers’ Inn was headed for reality TV, just when all had seemed black.  And to think, I once doubted the power of prayer. 

A Christmas Memory

photo courtesy of Carl Corey

‘Tis the time of year when your pals at Smugglers’ Inn start looking at what we’ve done in the previous 11 months and bemoaning the fact that, at this rate, we’ll be able to afford that wide-format printer when Chelsea Clinton is in her second term.  We believe in Christmas miracles, but it seems Santa, like fortune, favors the rich.  Then, something happens and we say, “Awe, crap!” down a glass of eggnog and start beatifying every plastic holly leaf and over-sweet cookie the season has to offer.  December 18 though, still finds us meditating on what we don’t have.

Bert Gardner was not an easy man to know and, some would argue, a harder man to like.  For much of his life, Bert was a fixture in Twin Cities advertising.  Possessed of an imposing frame and what drill sergeants refer to as a “command voice”, Bert strode about like a bear on its hind legs, investigating everything, raising up that or those he deemed worthy and swatting down the pretentious and the tedious.  While Bert did not generally suffer fools, he was a great friend of Smugglers’ Inn.  Perhaps our strange business model (to date, there are no other restaurant/ad agencies) appealed to his sense of the absurd.  Maybe he just liked our clam chowder.  Whatever the reason for it, we could always count on Bert for an encouraging word or a voiceover when we needed Orson Welles, but couldn’t afford the bill to re-animate his frozen corpse.  

Bert was a not-untalented writer.  Every year at this time, Bert would send out a CD of himself reading a Christmas story that he had penned.  The stories always involved a dog and usually one or more small children.  They were sappy stories with happy endings that would always leave you with a tear in your eye.  Everyone loved them.  We loved them.

This December, there was no new story from Bert Gardner to slap us upside our self-referential heads and inform us that the time had come to suspend our hard-won cynicism for another holiday season.  Just over a year ago, after a death that was so protracted that he felt compelled to make apologies for it in his blog, Bert Gardner passed on, surrounded by his loving family and probably more than one dog.  Well, we aren’t sure Bert believed we “pass on”, but it’s too harsh to think that Bert’s spirit isn’t alive somewhere, grinning, riding motorcycles and writing Christmas stories that turn us, for a while at least, into human beings.  Please join Smugglers’ Inn in a toast to our very dear, very dead friend and to those friends everywhere who will forever hence belong to holidays past.

Smugglers’ Inn: Providing foreign countries with bullets and anthrax-like pathogens since 2012.

"Yoo-hoo, Smugglers!  Might we discuss this parcel with you?"

London’s Raindance Film Festival received a bit of a shock when they received a package from Smuggler’s Inn containing hundreds of .45 caliber bullets.  (Thanks, Fed-Ex, now we know who will ship all the these surplus hand grenades we’ve been selling on e-Bay.)

To be fair, the brass cartridges we sent to Raindance were loaded not with lead and powder, but messages which began, “You’re fingerprints have turned up on a piece of evidence in a criminal investigation.”  Further reading asked you to report to the Raindance film festival for questioning, where you may also buy tickets “for a good crime drama or shoot-em-up.”  The bullets were just one of several no-budget/high PR gags we did to promote the various offerings at the 20th incarnation of London’s bravest independent film festival.  Other ideas included tricking passers-by into touching a poster that had supposedly been sprayed with poison and posting festival flyers sideways at ground-level on pub walls and in gutters so London’s notoriously hard-drinking young people could more easily read them.

Yes, if you’re a paying customer, Smug’s can promise you an effective campaign that you’ll be comfortable with, but if you’re a film festival, free clinic or similar, you may have to trust us that whatever we give you is going to work.

So, did Smugglers’ Inn deliver for Raindance?  While we can’t take credit for the festival’s exceptional line-up of great features and short films, attendance for the 20-year anniversary set records and re-established Raindance as a mandatory stop on the indie circuit.  Raindance, as well as some other people, blogged about the crazy promotions, which was what we wanted.  Your friends at Smug’s are presently lobbying to shoot the festival trailers for the 21st Raindance Festival, which we hope to attend next October in London.  Provided, of course, we aren’t in a black-site prison.

Young, gifted and orange.

Pongo, our Sumatran ball of energy, has been back on the job for a few months now and the Smugglers’ Inn dishwashing/prep area is beginning to resemble an American automobile from the 1950’s with every surface that isn’t painted or tiled gleaming like triple-dipped chrome. Whatever happened to Pongo during his time away, it did not make him lazy. We’ve had to ask our employee-of-the-month-for-life to take easy on the obsessive cleaning after going through two $18 mop heads in as many months.

We recently lost our bar boy and Pongo had begun filling in on Friday and Saturday nights, making sure our bartenders could concentrate on pouring booze without having to cut limes, clean glasses or run to the freezer for ice cream to make the dreaded Grasshoppers. This represented a much-deserved raise for Pongo, since bar boys make tips in addition to minimum wage.

While his English might have kept him from becoming a full-fledged bartender, Pongo was showing real flair as a bar boy, flipping fresh bottles into the well from a great distance and running to the cooler to and returning with two cases of Amstel Light on balanced on his head. Our customers ate it up.

All save one. A broad-shouldered lass in a blond wig and dark glasses had been nursing a 7-7 for an hour and a half when she stood up, pointed at Pongo and did a fair imitation of Donald Sutherland in the remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. This happened a couple of Saturdays back and we’ve since learned that this person had been an employee of the Blaine Police Department and had, coincidentally, visited out restaurant on the same night when she’d experienced a psychotic episode brought about by PTSD.

While we officially 86’s former officer Corrine Chessman from our establishment, we still thought it prudent to pull Pongo from the bar and dining room. Pongo didn’t say anything (Pongo never does), but by the way he attacked his duties, it was clear that he was working harder than ever. Like most recent immigrants, Pongo thinks that this is how you get ahead, a quaint notion to anyone who has logged any serious time in the Home of the Brave. As compensation for his loss of tip income, we gave Pongo the additional title of food prep technician.

The Ecuadorians and Mexicans who work in Smug’s kitchen stopped talking to Pongo after their hours were cut. The fact that Pongo was handling virtually all of the food prep in addition to his dishwashing duties meant that we could run a leaner kitchen. This actually made the cooks’ jobs more stable, but try explaining that to a 21-year-old with two kids. In a show of solidarity, Smug’s Hispanic workers, meaning everyone who didn’t interact with our customers face-to-face, started referring to Pongo as “puto” or “El Naranja” (the orange one).

While I, personally, find spiders scarier, believe me when I tell you there is nothing more unsettling to the average restaurant manager or manageress than the specter of brown people acting in concert. I could take Pongo’s food prep duties away from him, but this would send all the wrong messages. Like I didn’t care about money.

Poor Pongo. He’d done nothing to deserve it, yet half of his coworkers (OK, 75%) were going out of their way to be nasty to him. I knew that by shifting just a few more hours of prep work back to the cooks, I could remedy the situation. So, I went looking for another job that I could assign Pongo. Our advertising sideline always needed digital enablers.

I was going to see if Pongo had any interest in learning WordPress when he showed up for work one day, sporting a tiny American flag on his white chef’s jacket and a smile that indicated Sumatra is not a nation awash in orthodontists.

“Pongo!” I said, “What’s up? Find another Kennedy half dollar in the street?”

Pongo said nothing (did I mention he does this?) but he handed me a red folder, which he had managed to fold in half twice in order to fit it in his pants pocked. I couldn’t believe what was inside. There was some stuff about the silver standard that made no sense to me, but there was no confusion that it was, essentially, a contract.

“You’re bringing in an account? I dunno, Pongo...it says here they won't be paying us anything until mid-2013.”

Pongo gave me a look like a little kid asking for permission to keep a dog that had followed him home.

“OK, Pongo. We'll keep it. But you’re going to have to take care of it.”

And that’s how Smuggler’s Inn got our very first national account and how an immigrant dishwasher from a fourth-world country became the account supervisor on the Ron Paul for President in 2016 account. Only in America.