Waiter to the Rich and Shameless: Confessions of a Five-Star Beverly Hills Server (6 page)

Puff Daddy, Diddy, P. Diddy, Sean
“Puffy” Combs:
 
He’s changed his name more often than an identity thief. Nobody likes him in
the whole Cricket Room, no one, not even the regular guests.  He’s impolite and
disrespectful, definitely has a chip. One night on his way out, he asked the
hostess for a toothpick.  Ariella very politely held the container so he could
pick one out.  Diddy picked through the selection and discarded the ones he
didn’t want on to the floor by her feet, kept one for himself, and left. We
couldn’t figure out what was wrong with the ones he discarded since they were
all wrapped in plastic.  Maybe this was during his “I’m a rebel” phase. Or it
was his time of the month.

Ludacris:
 Loved the guy. He’s full of
funny comments and surprisingly insightful conversation. Alizé and pineapple.
Line ‘em up! Another rapper who is no thug and is completely different in
person than on stage. Shorter than Puffy but no chip there. He knows who he is;
nothing’ funny about that in spite of the ironic name.

Nelly:
  A clean-cut rapper and
entrepreneur with a soft voice who would come in to romance some young girl
while his huge bodyguard looked on.  His signature facial Band-aid was removed. 
He was too quiet, I couldn’t hear a damn word he said.

Jay-Z:
  That’s one tall mother at over
six feet.  Beyonce knew what she was getting in on with that guy. A smiley
happy dude who seemed good-natured to me. 

The
funny thing is, all the rappers ordered stupid ass drinks. It stood out to me
because they all have tough-guy images and you expect more coolness.  Maybe
it’s because they all pretty much came from nothing and never had a chance to
develop a taste for classic cocktails – like they learned the names of drinks
from TV shows or lousy 'B' movies – and here they are at the elite Cricket Room
but really don’t know how to drink. I always found myself making them Pina
Coladas, Mai Tais, Malibu and pineapple juice, Alizé or Hpnotiq with pineapple
juice, banana Daiquiris, strawberry Coladas. Those sweet froufrou drinks are
disgusting!  There’s only one sweet drink that qualifies in my book: the
classic Mojito made from scratch with raw sugar or sugarcane juice, although
it’s a pain in the ass to assemble.  But if you’re gonna drink that other shit
it has to at least be by the pool or in the Florida Keys and it should be a Rum
Runner topped with 151:  Bacardi light, Captain Morgan, Malibu, spill some
grenadine, cranberry, orange and pineapple juice, blend it smooth with ice, top
it with a sugared lime wheel and a 1/2 oz. shot of 151 lit on fire. Hollaaaa!
And eat some fried cheese sticks or jalapeño poppers while you’re at it.  Come
on, guys, man the fuck up.

Despite
this illustrious parade of celebs at my bar, I noticed that most stars usually don’t
want to sit at the bar because sooner or later they will be approached by some idiot
asking them stupid questions that they just don’t feel like answering.  So most
of the celebrities end up at dinner tables where their privacy is more easily
guarded. 

During
my time as bartender at the Cricket Room, I was never bothered by any managers
or anyone interfering with my job.  Once in a while my boss would bring some
new agreement for me to read and sign but it was usually pertaining to the wait
staff and since I also served some food at the bar I would have to look it over
and sign it too.

Being
a bartender in this place was an absolute dream.  With less than ten chairs, I
got to know guests on a personal level, and they knew me by name.  It wasn’t
even the Cricket Room anymore, it was Pauli’s Bar and we were all in love with
our own little world.  It was far away from the eyes of Big Brother. Since
there were around fifty-five dining tables, the establishment kept all of their
focus on the diners, as we know from experience that diners are way more prone
to complain and bar patrons are easier to keep happy – you just have to manage
their blood alcohol level and make sure they don’t get too happy.  At the
Cricket Room my bar patrons were kept happy and I made sure we always had
interesting topics to talk about.  Even my European patrons were becoming
regulars. 

After
my third year behind the bar, the management decided I was also going to handle
table service at the few tables that were in the front of the bar, mainly
during the early hours of lunch when I wasn’t too busy.  I didn’t realize it
then but they were grooming me to become a waiter.  They were instructing me on
how to perform five-star food service at the bar as well as educating me on all
the ingredients in each dish. I also learned a bit about how the kitchen works
and details about the food and wine pairings. Since I was a bartender and not a
waiter, the kitchen staff was always nice to me.  We had a good deal going. 
Their friendly demeanor had much to do with the alcoholic drinks I secretly
obtained for them, and my friendly demeanor had to do with the top-notch food
they would provide to me in return. There was a constant food-for-drink
tradeoff, usually bartered through the food runners so it looked legit, as if
they were bringing it for me to serve to a guest.  Instead, I would be the one
enjoying lobster, Kobe burgers and steak tartar. 

It’s
odd that in the combined twelve years I spent as bartender at the club downtown
and at the Cricket Room, I had now managed to forget all about my bad
experiences as a waiter.  I lost track of the vast differences between the two
jobs and in the ways that guests and even the kitchen staff relate to you.  I
should have kept all that in mind, but I was seduced by the glorious atmosphere
of the Cricket Room and intrigued by the confidence our Maître d’ was placing
in me to handle the art of food service their way. I should have stayed behind
my polished mahogany bar, been the cool guy mixing exotic drinks for the 1% of
society, and continued to turn down more ass than most guys get in a lifetime.

I
was surprised at how well I had fit right into the scene at the Cricket Room. I
wasn’t a celebrity fucker but I did enjoy rubbing shoulders (and only
shoulders) with people who had become A-Listers.  It also helped that I enjoyed
characters, including my colleagues, who had roles of their own to play and
played them well. There was always a lot of pride evident in the staff;
everyone knew they were privileged to work there.

Who
knows why I was so fascinated by jocks, jerks, and jump-your-bones bimbos that
populate Hollywood today. Maybe it was the contrast between their trashy
behavior and what I perceived to be the class acts of previous stars and
starlets. Memory and history do have a way of whitewashing the truth. Ever
heard some dork tell you how great high school was? And you just know he lived
with a permanent wedgie and carried breath freshener and acne cream in his
hand-me-down-jacket pocket.

Or
maybe it was my own dream of rock stardom that just wouldn’t go away; it was
always a mosquito buzzing in my head. Could I gain some sudden inspiration or
learn some magical method for rocketing to fame and fortune? Maybe. And in the
meantime it couldn’t hurt to work amidst the Hollywood glitterati in the most
famous bar/restaurant on planet Earth.

One
of my new friends – a consummate performer in his own right – was my Danish colleague
Jens. Our common Scandinavian background made our soon to be prodigal bond even
tighter. We were both making enough money to begin to party somewhat in the
manner of the degenerate show biz types we served at “The Room.”  

It
also helped that we shared the exact same work schedule.  One perfect So-Cal
spring day Jens invited me over to his girlfriend’s condo in Sherman Oaks.  The
complex had two swimming pools with hot tubs attached; her unit was just a
two-minute walk from one of the pools. It was a very lush and quiet complex
with most of the tenants at work since our days off were during the workweek. 

Jens
gave me a tour of the unit; it was a two-bedroom, two–and-a-half bathroom
townhome with Brazilian dark-wood floors and elegant furniture, a balcony facing
the pool and another in the back. The fridge was stocked with food and there
was ample wine and booze to be had as well. Jens instantly offered me a
Margarita.  Why would I say no?  Even if it only was one o’clock in the
afternoon on a Wednesday, anytime was party time for Jens – if he wasn’t
working. 

A
couple of dips in the pool and a few margaritas later, Jens started to share
stories about his past.  His gift for storytelling was one of the reasons he
was a waiter who people remembered. As we were paging through loose photos from
his life in Ibiza which he kept in a shoebox stashed under the bed in the guest
bedroom, he became even more excited and energetic.   Every guy has that secret
stash of pictures that he hides like buried treasure and digs up every so often
to count the gold and polish the jewelry.  Valuables he can’t share with his
wife or girlfriend because she wouldn’t understand, or simply wouldn’t want to.
The big drama comes when they’re discovered and long stuttering explanations
ensue. But I digress...

He
had pictures of himself bartending in some kind of club with a dance floor covered
with soap bubbles and semi-nude girls everywhere. There were pictures of Jens
partying on a yacht; pictures with hot, horny girls on both arms, one with a
leg twisted around his and the other with her tongue in his ear.  The more
pictures I saw, the more I realized that this guy was a true party animal.  In
every picture he was either shirtless or wore his shirt wide open to the navel.
He looked like the new Scandinavian version of Hugh Hefner holding court in his
own debauched Playboy pen.  I can’t stress enough how in these party pics he
looked nothing like the stiff, starched, formal service-oriented waiter to the
stars.

He
wore ropes upon ropes of sterling silver jewelry like a rock star or rap icon.
There were Maltese crosses on his belt buckle; long, heavy chains around his
neck; super cool sterling skull rings on his fingers. He even had a heavy
sterling silver ring made with his actual family crest on it.  He wore the
latest in Italian casual fashion, back when Diesel was becoming all the rage.
Jens had style. 

Although
in the eyes of some, the squares, he looked like a fag, I thought he was the
coolest guy I knew.  As it turned out, his clothing style was a few years ahead
of its time.  Just a year later everybody was wearing $200 jeans and distressed
designer clothes that looked worn but cost a fortune.  Jens had been doing it
for years.

Jens’s
favorite music was not really what I considered music.  It was club music. Like
House and Trance, most of it was instrumental. I assumed he had developed his
musical taste while living in Ibiza and Marbella and hanging out in discos.  He
had also had a fair amount of experience DJ-ing at clubs and parties.  As we dug
through his shoebox full of photos of half-naked girls in beds surrounded by
empty liquor bottles, he reached deep into his closet and returned with his “other”
shoebox.  It was chock full of dollar bills, twenties, fifties, hundreds. 

“Pauli,”
he said, “this is the money I keep hidden from Christie.  It’s my emergency
fund, you know?  I’ve been putting three hundred a week in here and now I’m
itching to start spending it.”  He lifted it all out, and there had to be close
to twenty grand.  This was the real buried treasure.

“You
ever try opening up an account in an actual bank?” I asked sarcastically. “Don’t
you think this is dangerous?”

“Yeah,
uh, come on, of course, Pauli, I have an account; this is just the stuff I keep
for
me
.”

Once
he took all the money out, there were a few baggies of pills and coke and drug
paraphernalia left at the bottom.  He tried to play it off as if he were
surprised. “Wow, I didn’t even know this shit was here! We should do some!”  

He
finished the thought by cutting up lines of coke on the glass table and snorting
up the biggest one.  “Oh shit, this stuff is clean!” he said while he handed me
the glass snuffer tube, which was a fancy version of the cut off clear plastic
drinking straw that most people use.  This thing had a rounded end that fit in
your nostril more comfortably and the other end was just slightly flared. 
Oh,
shit
, I thought to myself,
I thought this part of my life was over
. 
Apparently not.  I reached for the glass straw and snorted a line.  It’s not
often you get free coke.

Immediately,
the white light shot through my brain like a blast from a Star Wars laser gun. 
My senses were blasted into a higher realm and all light, color and sound
became exceptionally vivid.  I could feel the drug flood into my bloodstream
and give me a sense of relaxed alertness mixed with an air of confidence and
extreme focus, as if each moment were its own beautiful photograph frozen in
time and then surpassed by the next.  I was high! A fleeting thought passed
through my now electrified brain: random drug testing.  I laughed at the irony,
buoyed by my almighty, drug-induced confidence.
That’ll never happen to me!
 

Jens
laughed too – I’m not sure why – but he instantly became very excited, convinced
that he had found a new partner in crime. “We should get the hell out of
Sherman Oaks and go to the Viceroy Hotel on Santa Monica Beach,” he said, bouncing
all over the place in a state of complete delight.  When Jens gets crazy about
hanging out with somebody, he starts making big plans. “You don’t have to go to
work ‘til Friday, right?”  I nodded. “That’s awesome, Pauli, neither do I!  Let’s
go!”

Next
thing I knew we were in Jens’ green Jetta screeching and lurching towards the
beach.  We headed straight for the Viceroy and grabbed a cabana by their tiny
little pool.  By the time I had gone to the bathroom, done my business and
washed up, there were two bottles of 1995 Piper Heidsieck chilling by the
cabana and Jens was sprawled out like he owned the place.  We were like
characters in a movie, maybe
Get Shorty
, completely convinced we were
all-knowing, all-seeing hunks who owned the world. We were the pearls in an
oyster known as LA.

Just
twenty minutes later three people I had never met before showed up.  One guy’s
name was Andrei – he was a tall, dark-haired man with a heavy Russian accent,
and he’d brought two girls with him.  One girl’s name was Victoria – she was
cute, in her late thirties, and thin but curvy with long dark hair twisted up in
braids.  The other was a blonde named Susan, who was a bit younger.  Susan was bubbly,
genuinely attractive and had a fine, full hourglass figure that made her look
like a movie star from the 1940s.  Of course, the first thing going through my
mind was that we now had two girls and three guys.  Then I remembered that Jens
already had a live-in girlfriend.  But the question remained, which one of them
was with Andrei? 

We
occupied that cabana for the rest of the day and part of the evening.  We were
all drunk and Susan and I continued to hang out and have a good time while Jens
yakked it up with Victoria.  Andrei was always on the phone and kept
disappearing.  The bill at the cabana came to five hundred bucks, so I gave
Jens two hundred cash thinking that Andrei would be putting in a couple of
hundred too but he never did. I suspected he was a dealer and something of an
amateur pimp, not really a friend of Jens.

Jens
had booked a room on the penthouse floor for the night, The Monarch suite. 
This guy was like a professional partier.  Once we got up there, things
really
got crazy.  The two-room suite was awesome.  There was a balcony off the
living room overlooking the sea.  The sun had set but you could see the
moonlight reflecting off the waves below.  I had never partied like this before
with any other waiters I’d worked with.  With record execs, it was normal
enough but not with restaurant employees.  They were usually too broke to spend
money on coke, champagne, hotel suites, and hot party girls. A big night out
after work usually consisted of a game of pool, not a swim in one.

Andrei
emptied out a quarter of an ounce of cocaine on the glass coffee table in the
living room. There was a knock at the door and in walked another sexy blonde
girl in a red Scotch tartan miniskirt, knee socks, pigtails, and a tight white
shirt tied above her belly-button. 

“Hi,
I’m Victoria.”  She shook my hand, and I turned to Jens who had a really crazy
look on his face, probably from doing too much coke.  He had his sleazy porn
face going now and I barely recognized him.  I wondered if he’d made some money
on the side by playing party animals in porn films. Victoria seemed to be a
popular name for sex workers. This one was probably another actress wannabe
that populated LA like fireflies on a summer night. She most likely told
herself she was studying for a future role – Heidi does Hollywood.

“Yep,
that’s right, Pauli, another Victoria,” he said.  And as she sat down beside
him, he put his arms around them and said, “I’m going to give it to both of
them,” looking at them with his crazy porn eyes.  By that time I was getting extremely
high, as we all kept drinking Piper Heidsieck. I literally began feeling
ecstatic and having an out of body experience. It was wonderful, weird,
fascinating, and frightening all at the same time.

Andrei
was long gone, probably off to deliver coke or broads somewhere else.  I noticed
that Jens was playing a game on the blonde Victoria in which he pretended to
ignore her; he didn’t invite her to snort a line of coke when he did, which as
anyone knows is common druggie courtesy.  Doing coke in the company of others
and not sharing is just rude. Even degenerates have some rules they live by.
Jens was breaking one of the most important ones.

She
was left perplexed, staring at the illustrious white lines as they twinkled and
teased her for a full thirty minutes before she finally got the nerve to ask
him for a hit.
Bingo!
That’s what he wanted apparently – for her to beg.

He
played dumb. “Oh, you want some of this?  Sure, help yourself,” he said
highhandedly. “As you can see, we have got enough to last us for a couple of
days,” he added as he let out a stale gargled laugh.  Who was this guy?
Certainly the elegant waiter I knew from the Cricket Room had disappeared in a
champagne bubble coke powder haze.

When
she bent over to snort her line, Jens grimaced and said, “It’s okay, Miss Hoover,
slow the fuck down, it’ll be here all night!”  Blonde Victoria casually ignored
his comment, pinched her nose, took a deep breath like a pro, and then bent
over to kiss Jens. Her ass was facing me and Susan so we had a front row seat
to the real Victoria.  Her skirt rose nearly to her waist as she bent and we saw
that she wasn’t wearing panties. Let’s just say she had taken her role as a
schoolgirl completely to heart and was as pristine as a ten-year-old.
La
Dolce Vita
with no missing scenes. Holy hard on, Bat Man. Even with the
booze and drugs, Little Pauli was suddenly as awake as a heat-seeking missile.

This
was almost too much for me to take.  Susan giggled as if this were an everyday occurrence
in her world.  She pulled me closer, slid her hand in my waistband, and asked
if I wanted to go into the bedroom.  Does a horny bear fuck in the woods? Of
course I did! But should I? I still wasn’t sure if these were friends, hookers,
or what they were. Hot was as far as I’d gotten. And really, at that point I
didn't give a shit about their pedigree or life beyond the hotel room we were
in.