From the Frying Pan Into the Fire

With my stunning turn of good fortune becoming a waiter at Abernethy’s Restaurant, and a now steady income sufficient to afford me not only rent and utilities but also food and alcohol all in the same week, I decided it was finally the right time to finish my college education. Apparently my father’s relentless socialization had made acquiring a bachelor’s degree not just a means to the desired end result of success in life, but some sort of moral imperative. So it was that I once again found myself in the registrar’s office enrolling at Portland State University for the spring quarter, and I’m pretty sure she recognized me.

By this time, I had made the momentous decision to pursue Political Science as my declared major. Of what practical use a degree in Poli-Sci would be I had no idea, but that was of little concern. It simply was the most interesting subject to me and therefore must surely be my ticket to a bright future.

It should be noted that my class load was not terribly burdensome as I enrolled in a single required course on U.S. Government – understanding the structure and why it didn’t work very well seemed like the logical place to start – and took two other classes which were of modest interest for a grand total of nine credits. Quite by chance I had discovered a good chunk of credits outside of your major could be taken on a pass/no pass basis and naturally I elected to do that so I could have Ps in my alphabet soup.

I quickly discovered to my amazement and relief that attending school for three hours on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays did not interfere with my five-night-a-week work schedule, or the much more important and demanding seven-night-a-week party schedule.

Thusly I embarked simultaneously on the preordained path of academic achievement and a newly discovered path of professional pursuit. It occurred to me that the two paths forward were divergent and even somewhat antithetical, but sorting that out occupied few of my thoughts at the time and I happily settled into a new life.

While I was busy getting my professional and academic shit in order, my home life was another story. I was still living in Raleigh Hills which required a longish commute downtown for work and school and was doing so without Maura but with Charlie, the not-so-good cook, and Frisco the Pig.

Shortly after I started waiting tables and restarted school, Charlie was unmasked as an imposter in the kitchen at Abernethy’s and somehow immediately landed a serious job with a consulting firm doing environmental engineering or some such thing. As it turns out, Charlie already had one of those handy dandy bachelor’s degrees. What this meant was that Charlie started spending most of his time on the road and I spent a lot of my time with his dog.

The neighborhood was still buzzing with talk of my not-so-dearly departed pit bull Mikey, and Frisco’s penchant for pooping in their yards further burnished my sterling reputation.

I should note that this phantom roommate arrangement did precipitate one life-altering event of which I will expound more on later. One fine day Charlie dispatched his younger sister Lucy to retrieve some item of importance which is of no importance to this story, and when I answered the door shirtless because I had just gotten out of the shower, her beguiling Mona Lisa smile suggested we either had a future together or that I needed to hit the gym. Or both.

When summer arrived, I burst with pride having completed my first quarter of college in nearly two years, carding an A and two Ps, so with great pomp and circumstance I celebrated by getting hammered at the seedy Cheerful Tortoise tavern on the PSU campus.

I felt the wind in my sails and was so besotted now with academic success, if not booze, I decided to keep it rolling and enrolled for the summer quarter. Spending a summer going to school was something heretofore I never would’ve imagined I could or would do. Yet, as it turned out, I hardly missed a beat attending class and working nights, all while being a tanned wastrel.

What happened next can only be explained as kismet and described as another life-altering event. One thing people who’ve never worked in the restaurant business should understand is that restaurant workers are even better customers than they are workers.

And it’s fair to say that roughly half of all tips earned on any given day or night are immediately plowed back into the industry right after their shifts, and the servers, bartenders, managers, et al, act merely as conduits of commerce between one establishment and another. Consequently Abernethy’s, being a very popular eatery and watering hole of the moment, got more than its share of visits from people working in other restaurants.

This is notable only because one night a waiter from the venerable Portland institution, Jake’s Famous Crawfish, happened to be seated in my section and after a satisfactory meal and apparently service to match suggested that I should jump ship and come wait tables at Jake’s.

I inquired of this urbane and charming fellow, John, if he was in any position to offer me a job there and he assured me that although he was not in management, he held sway with those who were and was confident they would find a place for me. He said he would speak to the General Manager, Bob, and I should swing by the restaurant the following week to meet him. I was flattered a veteran waiter would think highly enough of my waiting skills to make such a recommendation, and excited at the prospect of stepping into arguably Portland’s busiest restaurant with no doubt a significant increase in pay.

So the following Monday I found myself sitting across a table from the aforementioned Bob, who was sporting the toothiest smile I’d ever seen under a neatly trimmed black mustache, furiously smoking a Marlboro, and asking me a series of very casual questions about my background and future aspirations the answers to which he seemed only mildly interested in.

Toward the end of the second cigarette, he mentioned that the junior partner of Jake’s ownership, Doug, would want to meet me, but that seemed more a formality because Bob then suggested I give my two-week notice at Abernethy’s and could start immediately after. Pumping my hand with enthusiasm equalled only by his relish of cigarettes, he welcomed me to the team, and I left in a haze of shock and euphoria and second-hand smoke.

While I marked time in my final desultory days at Abernethy’s, I was treated to dinner at Jake’s by my sponsor John. It was only the second time I had ever set foot in the establishment and the contrast between my interview in the empty but smoke-filled dining room and the din of dinner in full swing could not have been more stark.

Watching the white-jacketed and black bow-tied waiters navigate the chaos of the front door foyer then glide across the garish green carpet with plates stacked up one arm and down the other left me in awe and unnerved. My dinner of salad, steak and lobster went down easy but the thought of me stepping into those shoes in a matter of days almost brought it back up.

My exaggerated angst was mollified somewhat when I discovered that rookies at Jake’s were not put in the dinner line-up without having first completed a probationary period serving lunch on weekdays. This news required modifying my school schedule, but I deemed that a small price to pay for the opportunity to ease into my new surroundings and get accustomed to the much more formal style of service expected by the ownership, management, and customers.

Moving from Abernethy’s to Jake’s was what I imagined it must feel like to be traded from the Mets to the Yankees. Also, as it turns out, what it must feel like to sit at the end of the bench and watch the marquee stars play ball.

What I did not expect playing for my new team, or budget for, was that initially I took a substantial hit to my income. The weekday lunch shifts were manned exclusively by a group of waiters who were long in the tooth, short on patience and good humor, and at the end of their ropes doing a job they should’ve quit a decade ago. Mark, Jack, Bill, and Dehner, the senior citizens at Jake’s with an estimated combined century of experience in the business, were of course given the preferred lucrative sections in the main dining room while yours truly, being low man on the totem pole, was almost exclusively assigned to the bar. This might not sound like such a bad deal, but I assure you it was the equivalent of being sent to a Siberian gulag.

Although Jake’s was packed to the gills every single night, lunches were not nearly as popular, and the guest counts were rather anemic except perhaps on Fridays. Many days, there weren’t enough diners to even fill the main room, so my task was to set the dozen or so tables in the bar then stand at attention hoping for someone to be seated at one of said tables.

It should be noted that the bar itself often saw a lot of action but that was the domain of the day bartender who doted on his regulars and totally ignored me. Absent any business of my own I was to offer whatever assistance I could to the other waiters, which I did and which was always flatly refused.

When it became clear I would yet again have no tables for the day, I would remove all the table settings and be summarily dismissed by the lunch manager.

Making no tips meant my only source of income was the minimum wage I earned for the three or four-hour lunch shifts. Bear in mind the federal minimum wage in 1978 was $2.65 an hour, and further bear that back then Oregon still was a state where restaurants could take the so-called ‘tip credit’ and pay tipped employees roughly half the minimum wage. You can do the math if you’d like but suffice it to say I was doing some deficit spending on my newly acquired Visa card just to keep food on the table. And when you factor in that I regularly forgot to plug the meter and accumulated a pile of parking tickets to boot, you can understand why I was wondering why the fuck I ever left Abernethy’s.