Waiter to the Rich and Shameless: Confessions of a Five-Star Beverly Hills Server (30 page)

Nicole
ordered her usual:  the chopped salad without cheese or bacon and egg white with
no yolks.  For all the food value in that she might as well have grazed on the
lawn. At least she might get some protein from a bug or two. Urban at least had
six ounces of Wagyu beef, and Mom and Dad each had the $38 burger. They were
drinking their water quite fast so I kept bringing new bottles and they kept
thanking me all along. At one point, I returned to their table to refill their
water glasses, and when I picked up the water bottle, Nicole suddenly shoved
her hand in my face and said, “We’re fine!” 

What
the fuck is that shit?  Speak to the hand?  Wow, I couldn’t believe it, so I
just went ahead and asked her folks if they wanted another glass of wine, which
her father did. When I brought it back I was still pissed off about the hand
thing.  I mean it’s not like they were engrossed in any secret conversation –
they were talking about a house and some fucking furniture.  It sounded pretty
boring to me. I guess she wanted to control the water-pouring. The thought
crossed my mind that a good slap might bring some color and expression to her
face, but I still needed my job. Plus a night in jail didn’t appeal to me.
Maybe Botox causes bitchiness, like steroids cause aggression.

Urban
finally asked for the check and left me a better than usual tip and Nicole took
her uptight ass out of there and that was the last time I ever served her. 
Speaking of an uptight ass, I wonder if she’d had that lifted too. I had
actually dropped the check without clearing the table.  I would normally never
do that. I guess I let my emotions get the better of me on that one.  Oh, ye
gods of service, I pray for forgiveness, please have mercy on my soul of
servitude. Amen. And fuck Nicole NoKiddingMan.

Even
I could tell I was turning into a waiter burnout.  My attitude was getting too
negative; I just was not enjoying the job like I used to.  I probably needed a
change of scenery. A year ago I thought the honeymoon would change all that but
it only made me realize how nice it was to be elsewhere.  It also reminded me
how pleasant and rewarding it could be in places where service was considered
more than honorable; it was honored and respected. Where great waiters were
admired.

But
it wasn’t just me, I knew that.  It would have been impossible not to notice
that there was also an odd ambiance in the air lately, a vague sense of
foreboding.  In a movie you'd be able to hear the music become dark and
ominous. I heard rumors swirling around regarding a scandal involving our big
GM.  I’m not one to listen to gossip, most of it turns out to be bullshit, but
when I kept noticing executives from our overseas office milling around the
restaurant like G-men, it made me wonder what was in store for us. They all but
spoke into their lapel pins and rubbed their secret decoder rings. The suits brought
about a feeling of unease that trickled from top management straight down
through the ranks, all the way to the bottom of our culinary food chain.

Mr.
P was nervous all the time.  He kept stressing that we needed to keep to the
rules of service at every table no matter what. “Jus’ treat everyone like a
chopper!”  Meaning keep to the script, play it by the book, no deviations,
upsell at every opportunity and act like a robot. This was not what I wanted to
hear.  My thoughts were rampant: 
Whatever happened to genuine two-way human
interaction, simple courtesy, and respect?  The sophisticated guests at the
Cricket Room don’t want to hear our prefabricated scripts and pathetic attempts
at upselling. Why don’t they just get iPads at every table programmed to force upselling
with popup windows and make the guests place their own orders?

And
now, after all these years of running back and forth, covering what feels like
miles a night, the physical stress started taking a toll on me, and my body began
breaking down.  Foot and ankle problems exacerbated by constant overuse plagued
me and interfered with my time off as well.  I could no longer go for leisurely
walks with Juliana, take long bike rides, or go hiking.  That alone was
depressing as I’ve always loved being outdoors and these little adventures made
up some of our most memorable times together. I was slowly being reduced to a
park bench sitter, feeding the pigeons and watching others live actual lives.
"No!" I screamed internally, "Not Pauli the rock star waiter to
the rich and shameless!"

Painkillers
could only keep me on my feet for so long until one day I knew I would require
major surgery to fix the wear and tear.  I’d already had to go to therapy to
help with all the anxiety problems caused by this job.  Now my body was caving
to the pressure too.  Anyone got Nicole NoKiddingMan’s phone number? Bet she
has just the thing to preserve me like an Egyptian mummy.

I
started to brainstorm about my alternatives – I’d dabbled in the stock market
but dabbling can’t do it -- you’re up one trade and down the next; might as
well play Lotto.  My music was really starting to take root – perhaps I should
pursue that full time?  But my flagging music career was what had brought me to
the restaurant in the first place.
Shit!
I felt like a caged dog that
just wanted to get out but had no idea where to run.  More importantly, I yearned
for the peace I used to feel before I started working at the Cricket Room,
before the nightmares, before the foot and ankle problems, before all the
missed holidays and insults to my self-esteem.  While I used to identify with
my job, suddenly I didn’t anymore.   It was an odd sort of peace I felt. The
illusion of feeling important and valued had been shattered, which was a relief
of sorts, but it had been a really nice illusion and I’d cherished it. Now I
needed to find a replacement. Finding it though, was like trying to nail smoke
to the wall, or remembering a dream that is just beyond your grasp.

As
luck would have it, a friend of Juliana’s soon invited us to the star-studded
David Lynch Foundation fundraising gala in support of Transcendental Meditation,
which seemed like another hint from above.  I hoped it would provide some
answers.

In
the meantime, the fact remained:  I knew I was trapped in the asylum, yet I had
never tried to fly away. Who was the real cuckoo here? Was it time for the
caged bird to sing?

Seems
like these days I’m walking around here angry all the time, getting into fights
about things that won’t change anyway, and not giving a shit about who I’m
serving.  If you’re not Johnny Depp or Russell Crowe, you’re boring the holy
crap out of me.  It’s tough to work at a job that is a paradoxical ragout of
heaven and hell at all times.  Every day at the Cricket Room, I have a strange,
euphoric feeling of doom, if that makes any sense.  I’m on a train, heading for
a wall, and I’m terrified of the impending crash, yet I can’t wait for the trip
to be over. I want off at any cost.

Mine
could have been a great job, and was for a while – it was very exciting to
serve such interesting, iconic people, but the creeping fear that at any moment
I could be thrown into an impossible situation with no backup caused my gut to
twist up in knots constantly.  Hell, those nightmares come from somewhere, and
that somewhere is my everyday reality.

I’ve
established the fact that our upper management couldn’t run a Denny’s
efficiently if their lives depended on it.  Why?  For the simple reason that
they are cold, calculating number crunchers who don’t understand the needs of
sophisticated restaurant guests and they don’t understand how even small adjustments
to our budget tremendously impact the guests’ experience. Imagine if the
Rockefellers were operating a day care center and slashed snacks from the
budget to help pay for their annual trips to Aspen. That would make for
ill-equipped workers and some seriously cranky kids.

Lately
they’d been running the place like it was the McCarthy era all over again.  Paranoia
and suspicion reigned. The corporate goons manufactured excuses to fire more
staff in eight months than they had in my entire ten-year career.  Many employees
with a permanent position and benefits (the same benefits I was so proud of
when I began) were being let go, for reasons that hardly deserved a reprimand. 

One
of our most beloved bartenders, Don, who’d been there for over twenty years, was
fired a week before he was to retire.  Don was soft-spoken and a great listener
who always had a smile for his guests.  All the regulars loved him.  He knew
their drinks and always poured a perfect cocktail. The guy never had a guest
complaint lodged against him.  He was a throwback to the Cricket Room’s heyday
and wasn’t particularly hip to all the fancy mixologist-concocted new wave
drinks.  Bogart would have loved him; he was our version of Sascha, the bartender
in Rick's Cafe Americain. Unfortunately, he was also resistant to learning the
trendy new “junk” as he called it.  Our classless twenty-something bar manager apparently
thought that the Cricket Room should comply with the latest cocktail trends
like a slick downtown bar run by Adonis bartenders.  He started testing Don on
all the new drinks, some of which the bar manager had created
himself
. 
Don failed miserably time after time.  But the truth was that none of his
guests even ordered that crap – they all ordered old-school drinks like
manhattans and martinis, and an occasional raspberry lemon-drop martini which
he made quite nicely.  And yet just a week before he was to announce his
retirement, he was fired for not complying with company rules.  At that point,
they could have just let him ride out the extra week and proudly leave a place
he had served so loyally for two decades. But no, they chose to contemptuously
dismiss him as easily as you would swat a pesky fly. “Waiter, there’s a fly in
my soup” became a metaphor for getting rid of unwanted payroll bugs.

It
was a despicable act, which was looked upon with tremendous scorn and resentment
by all of us, not just me.  Morale plummeted, now at subterranean levels. After
that, three more full-time bartenders and servers plus one Maître d' / manager
were fired for untenable reasons.  I thought I wanted to rub elbows with the
rich and shameless, but now I see that this isn’t the same thing at all.  Like
Hollywood itself, the Cricket Room chews up the little people and spits them
out like sunflower seed hulls. I suspect our regular guests and celebrities,
who make news on a daily basis by championing various minorities and causes,
would not approve of how their dear servants at the Cricket Room were being treated.
The Player,
please meet
Amistad.

During
this Grand Inquisition, we found out that the top brass had given our general manager
no choice but to leave.  Apparently, he was the cause of a class-action lawsuit
claiming racism, sexual discrimination, and unfair promotions to employees of
lesser seniority in exchange for sexual favors.  Mostly true, he was a scumbag
for sure, but probably not much different than many other corporate executives.
In my experience, anyway. One national channel carried the news on this but the
money machine was successful in shutting the media out a day later and it never
surfaced again.  

The
GM left, and all of his evil minions were fired along with several other
comrades in the chain of command. There was initially some joy in this, some
sense of retribution for the perceived wrongs inflicted on the staff. But it
was short-lived. The new high-powered firing machine that replaced him was
headed by a freshly unmolded glob of gelatin in the form of a grey-haired GM
who handled both of our Los Angeles properties.  But did that improve things? 
No, because the fish stinks from the head, and all of the same ills and
idiocies crept up again like a stubborn infection.  It was a crippled and inept
corporate culture that was too deeply ingrained to change with one surgery.  It
just left the rest of us twitching as if laser sites were on the back of our
heads too. 

There
was tremendous fear and insecurity among the ranks.  Everyone was walking on
eggshells, adding to the crushing pressure we were already dealing with.  Now
we were covering for missing colleagues, missing managers, longer hours, and the
job was more intense than ever.  Everyone was afraid to screw up, to speak up, or
to be noticed for any reason whatsoever, even for doing a great job.   Dare to
complain, and in retaliation your schedule is changed to shit.  Take a few days
off and suddenly you have no money nights scheduled for the foreseeable
future.  You are suddenly an enemy.  If you wanted to last there, it was best
to be a mindless automaton and avoid the spotlight.  I was having serious
trouble keeping my famous temper at bay. But one thing I knew: the celebrities
and regular folks who came in to celebrate or dine in peace and quiet did not
deserve shitty service just because our jobs stunk to high heaven.

When
we finally attended the David Lynch Foundation’s “Change Begins Within” gala
fundraiser at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), I was desperate for a
sea change. The event was fun and Ellen DeGeneres hosted along with Russell
Brand, who was surprisingly well-spoken and impressively entertaining.  I was
curious and intrigued to see and hear all the stories of troubled school
children and even veterans with PTSD who were praising Transcendental
Meditation for helping them get through their struggles. Once again, meditation
was pricking my consciousness.

Several
entertainers performed, amongst them some up and coming stars like Eli Lieb
(“Young Love” singer) and James McCartney (singer and son of Paul).  After
meeting Bob Roth, the executive director of DLF, he mentioned to us that as a
special gift for attending that night, all of the attendees were eligible to
learn Transcendental Meditation at no cost.  Well, I guess it can’t hurt,
right?  It seemed this was somewhat inevitable. And free. My favorite
four-letter word.

We
called later to set up an appointment with an instructor who had a most
peculiar name:  Puki.  The appointment was set for the following month. I’m so
used to seeing these uptight Hollywood types take, take, take that it was refreshing
to see a hugely successful director pay it forward in this way.  Lynch is such
a creative mind that I figured if it worked for him, hopefully it could help me
too. It sure as hell couldn’t hurt.

On
the other side of my schizophrenic, disgruntled,
waiter-slash-frustrated-rock-star life, I was seeing good residual checks from
my BMI quarterly statements and was getting a bit more work creating different
styles of songs for films and TV.  I started putting out as many feelers as I
could to get more musical work, trying to build my brand and create a
platform.  It dawned on me – finally – that that was why I had taken the damn
waiter job anyway:  it was supposed to leave me time during the day to pursue
my alternate reality. And I had figured that if I were going to be a waiter, I
might as well work at the most famous “gin joint” in town. It hadn’t actually
worked out ideally, as the job was so physically draining and stressful that I
had little energy left for music.

My
dabbling in the stock market was going well too.  I had gotten myself into day
trading triple-leveraged ETFs (exchange traded funds).  I took a course on how
to set and read many complex special technical indicators, and it actually all
made sense to me.  Maybe it was all related somehow – my ability with musical
notes, an anal focus on service perfection, and an affinity for math – and
resulted in financial gibberish being clear to me. But that delusion was about
to pop like an overinflated balloon.  Learning and doing can be very different
in practice.

The
trading had started out as a lucrative venture, giving me a tremendous sense of
confidence in my abilities, but it was extremely stressful trying to keep track
of constantly changing indicators. I eventually lost my footing when the
artistic, musical side of my brain finally clashed with the calculating, stock
trading, stick-to-the-rules side of my brain.  The rock star wanted to color
outside the lines and be creative; the number cruncher said “stop it!” It
wasn’t long before I took my eye off the ball and made a terrible mistake that
affected our finances deeply.  The longer I waited for that leveraged ETF to
come back, the further down it went, along with my flawed understanding of all
the rules that the teacher had given me.  The trading instrument I had chosen
was a leveraged ETF that followed the Russell 2000 index.  Even though the
Russell 2000 finally came back and actually surpassed my break-even point, the
ETF was nowhere near breakeven for me.  What I didn’t understand then was that
the leveraged ETF was compounded each day and once the market started moving
sideways it didn’t pick up as much steam.  And another thing I didn’t
anticipate is that losses are compounded in a unique way as well.  Here’s an
example:

Long
story short, in my case I ended up erasing all my profits from the previous twelve
months, plus I lost an added $65K, and that was
really hard
to accept,
financially, emotionally, and egotistically. My dream of leaving the Cricket
Room had just gotten even further away. 

To
top it all off my best buddy and pretty much only work companion, Jens, was
fired for using a manager’s code to correct something on a guest check. When
they upgraded the POS (point of sale) system they had allowed him to use it
because he was the only person who was familiar with it from a previous job. 
But with the dining room being short-staffed and Mr. P unable to work every
single day and night, they would send stand-in managers to attend to the
now-fired Maître d’s shifts.  These guys were unfamiliar with the system and
too fucking slow to act, so Jens took matters into his own hands in a
non-hostile way and got the job done.  But he was still fired for it. He tried
to explain that he was only doing what a supervisor would have done in the
past, but they showed no mercy.  He was so heartbroken and unprepared for
joblessness that he told me he was planning to move back to Denmark the
following month. That was just about all I could handle.  I had to get out of
there.  I just couldn’t enjoy the environment anymore, but I had no exit plan
and considering that I lost a huge chunk of my savings, I regretfully had to
stay put. I felt alone and more trapped than ever.  Jens had always been a role
model for me at work, and an amusing fellow to be around. He savored life and
made me want to savor it too. Now work would suck even more, and I hadn’t thought
that was possible. The light at the end of the tunnel dimmed.

At
the restaurant, the staff began to tell each other, “If the boss calls, get his
name.” We never knew from one day to the next who the fuck was in charge.
Management was as distant and anonymous as a colony on Mars.

A
couple of weeks later I helped Jens pack up all his stuff.  We got drunk that
night and reminisced about all of our good times, like taking the ferry to
Catalina and drinking all day at Descanso Beach Club, and how our friend
Jonathan slept on the floor in the hallway of the hotel that night.  We shared
memories and laughed but deep inside we were both hurting, for perhaps some of
the same reasons.  But I also had many other private reasons.