The Bozo Section

Author’s Note: For the better part of four decades my wife Lori has wanted me to become an author and write a book, specifically a book recounting my many zany experiences as a waiter in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. I didn’t for various reasons. For starters I didn’t feel like there was enough material for a book, and I wondered why anyone outside of a small circle of friends would care, plus I had a full-time job and limited free time I preferred to waste, but mostly because I didn’t want to. On a couple of occasions, I made a half-hearted attempt to start the book but quickly aborted the mission for the reasons I cited above. I did, however, come up with a title for it, The Bozo Section. Read the post and you’ll understand.

As a last-ditch effort to inspire me, Lori created a paperback book with blank pages and a cover naming me as the author. That didn’t work either.

But now that I am nominally ‘a writer’ and have been chronicling my life – I was right about no one outside of a small circle of friends caring – the aspirational assignment Lori gave me became inescapable. I am actually at the point in my story when I was waiting tables. So, this very condensed Reader’s Digest version is for you, darling, and here after all these years is The Bozo Section.

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I briefly introduced you to the cast of characters at Jake’s in a previous episode, as well as giving you a sense of what the scene in the dining room was like and the nature of various denizens who came in for lunch or dinner. In this chapter I’d like to tell you more about a few of the people I shared the floor with and describe as best I can, from the vantage point of nearly fifty years hence, some of the more notable escapades I witnessed firsthand and occasionally participated in.

Deserving of first mention is John, the elegant man who sat in my section that fateful night at Abernethy’s and both invited and assured my ascendance into the rarified air of service at Jake’s Famous Crawfish. It was no coincidence that I was assigned to ‘shadow’ John for my training at dinner. His graceful ease and genial tableside manner belied a methodical approach to service, obsessive attention to detail, and a steely professionalism which I recognized as something I should try to emulate.

Not only did John teach me many of the finer points of service, but also that it was possible to maintain composure with a sure sense of self and humor when confronted with boorish guests. Something that not every waiter at Jake’s was able to manage, and that failing led to some of the more colorful anecdotes I’ll share in a minute. That’s not to say John suffered fools gladly, he didn’t, but to my knowledge he never got mad. He did on occasion when it was warranted, however, get even.

Mind you, this was back in the dark ages when computers were the size of a small car and there weren’t any snazzy electronic point-of-sale systems. We wrote orders on paper tickets and had total control over what was included in customers’ bills. That this offered ownership and management virtually no control over product cost is something I will touch on later, but it did provide John the opportunity to add unordered items to a difficult guest’s check as a penalty for being a jerk.

When I first watched him prepare a bill and asked what the extra crab cocktail was for, he smiled and explained it was the ‘asshole charge’.

Equally impressive as John’s professionalism on the floor was his marshaling of tip income, also something many of my fellow waiters couldn’t or wouldn’t manage. Dinner waiters at Jake’s would often walk away from their shifts with $100 or more in tips – the equivalent of about $400 a night today – but wake up in the morning with five bucks in their pocket. As you know by now, I was not opposed to partying or the frivolous spending necessary to do so, but since John owned a home and two rental properties, I resolved to try to follow his path of fiscal responsibility and at bare minimum hang on to half my tip money every night so I could at least afford rent, food, gas, and school.

Equally deserving of marquee billing were two men who mostly tended bar but also spent time on the floor and were instrumental in teaching me how to be a total pro and have a blast at the same time.

Mike was an imposing man who was as gentle in nature as he was big in stature, and also perhaps the funniest guy I’ve ever met.

He had earned the moniker ‘Boats’ at Cal Berkeley where he was a member of their feared crew and that is how we all addressed him. He and I became fast friends and would share many funny moments over the years but I will leave it at that for now.

The other barman I befriended was Ross, although I took to calling him Roscoe for no reason other than it amused me. Like Mike, he was good natured and funny, and possessed of the most prodigious handlebar moustache on a staff where almost everyone sported one.

Perhaps better than anyone else on the floor or behind the bar, Ross embodied the ethos of what it meant to look like, talk like, act like, and be a Jake’s waiter or bartender. He too became a friend and will have a starring role in later episodes, so I will move on.

Of all the co-workers I befriended and hung out with, last but certainly not least was Bill. He was an affable character with a wanderlust and thirst for adventure that inspired me, and we ended up sharing a lifetime of experiences. Not the least of which was launching a chain of pizza joints, which became a master class in how to not run a business. But that’s for another chapter.

Bill and I bonded not only over a love of travel and leisure, and a simpatico approach to work, but also pan-fried oysters.

As I’ve mentioned before we worked long shifts without breaks, and since there was absolutely nothing preventing us from ordering the oyster appetizer, we did. Nearly every night. Bill will have star turns in several more episodes so once again I need say no more for now.

Speaking of the ill-fated pizza business, a fresh-faced waiter named Jerry, another recruit of John’s, would later join Bill and I as managing partners in Hot Lips Pizza which we opened in downtown Portland in 1985.

But before that happened, Jerry was already something of a legend among legends at Jake’s for two reasons. One was his astonishing artistic ability which he expressed in brilliant pieces using different media, and the other was his propensity and capacity for doing serious drugs both on and off the job.

I became aware of this one night when I noticed a sly smile and rather odd twinkle in his eyes. A closer look revealed his pupils to be very dilated and I asked if he’d smoked a doobie before work to which he replied he hadn’t, but he had dropped acid.

At this point in my life, I had tried LSD on a couple of occasions, once with friends in downtown Portland on a busy Saturday night and another at a party packed mostly with people who were not on acid. Although I would do it a handful more times on trips to Steens Mountain in southeastern Oregon where deer and antelope outnumber humans by a wide margin, which proved to be a hilarious and delightful if a bit overly long enhancement of the experience, I knew that being high on that drug in loud and crowded environments, like the Jake’s dining room for example, was absolutely nuts.

Jerry for whatever reason found it amusing and made it look effortless, then after his shift went home and painted all night producing masterpieces of hallucinogenic art.

He will appear in the Hot Lips episodes as well, and his predilection for hard drugs would eventually become a problem, but during my time on the floor at Jake’s I learned to take great comfort in the fact that no matter how messed up my head was trying to keep tables and their orders straight, Jerry’s had to be exponentially worse.

Deserving of honorable mention were a handful of other waiters who were notable for a variety of different reasons.

There was the suave, silver-tongued Steve whose professionalism was unequalled at Jake’s. His descriptions of menu items, particularly the nightly specials, were so well worded and smoothly delivered that other waiters, myself included, would eavesdrop to try to steal his showmanship.

His presentation of one popular special in particular was so good I remember it to this day. Through his perfectly manicured mustache and pearly white teeth, Steve would use subtle hand gestures and croon to his enthralled guests, “These are plump, sweet Dungeness crab legs rolled in butter with freshly foraged cremini mushrooms, bathed in béarnaise sauce and served over fluffy white rice.”

Then there was Marvin. He was an iconic figure at Jake’s in part because of his bowling-ball physique and comically large handlebar mustache, but also for his bombastic service style and seemingly endless repertoire of outlandish embellished stories and bad jokes.

No records were kept that I’m aware of, but Marvin was likely the most requested waiter on staff primarily because a surprising number of diners have little to say to each other and want to be not just fed but entertained. This was of course long before smart phones became everyone’s constant companion, but even today Marvin would be more fun than Facebook. He also achieved legendary status for his willingness and ability to convince drunk or otherwise-addled female guests that he was the owner Bill and later escort them to bed with promises of riches.

Larger than life characters included the tag team twin brothers Rod and Rudy, who were among the most thin-skinned waiters on staff and had zero tolerance for demanding or clueless customers and no compunction being brutally honest or outright rude.

By virtue of his name, you’d think Rudy would be the worst, but it was Rod. Many nights I marveled at his ability to offend guests and not get fired, but my fondest memory was the night he received a very substandard tip of mostly coins from the patriarch of a very unruly family. Upon discovering the amount of the gratuity, Rod followed the group outside, threw the couple dollar bills and handful of coins into the man’s back, and shouted, “put that in the kid’s college fund”.

Also larger than life and larger than anyone else on staff, at least in terms of girth, was Jon. Having been supersized since birth, he went by the nickname Tubby, which he relished with pride and insisted everyone address him as such.

He was notorious for demanding and being given the same section every night, which was both a relatively easy one to work and in close proximity to the kitchen but also the ‘closing section’ which meant he would get one more turn of tables than anyone else. Except, since Tubby hated working late, he would without fail refuse to give his last tables a bill until it was exactly closing time thereby ensuring his early departure and making other waiters take the latecomers in their sections.

Most notably though, like the brothers Rod and Rudy, Tubby would take nothing from guests who fell short of his high standards for intelligence, propriety, and politeness.

This also was a nightly source of amusement and amazement for his fellow waiters. One night stands out in memory when a particularly obnoxious man – why some men think it impresses their date to harass and belittle their server is beyond me – was snapping his fingers in the air and yelling “waiter!” at Tubby as he passed the table with an armload of plates. Tubby walked straight up to the guest and switching the plate in his right hand over to the left arm, started snapping his fingers an inch from the man’s face asking, “What’s this mean? I don’t know what this means.”

The stunned lounge lizard composed himself enough to stutter, “My soup’s cold.” Without hesitation, Tubby reached in his jacket pocket, pulled out a Bic lighter, lit the paper doily under the soup bowl on fire, then calmly walked away.

Jake’s was a relatively compact restaurant wedged into an old building but with a configuration that permitted over a hundred seats. The main dining room, a couple of steps up from the entrance level, with its vaulted ceilings and bright lights was where the action was and where most people wanted to sit and be seen. There was a large dimly lit back dining area called the ‘J Room’ with low ceilings and a relatively hushed atmosphere, and further back the ‘1220 Room’ which was an intimate bar for guests either waiting for dinner or desiring an after-dinner drink. Anyone with a reservation was invariably seated in either the main dining room or the J Room.

Patrons who walked in without a reservation sometimes got lucky and scored a table with the foresighted, but a large number were seated in what was designated the ‘B Section’. This tight cluster of eight tables was behind the host stand and very close to the very busy and very loud kitchen.

The worst table in the house was B7 which was directly in front of the kitchen door. Because many of these people were not sophisticated diners and often had been waiting in the bar for an hour or even two and thusly hammered, everyone on staff referred to this proletariat prison as the ‘Bozo Section’. Or, for the sake of brevity, ‘the Bozo’.

As you might imagine, the Bozo was not a section prized for its clientele or tip income. It was exclusively the domain of waiters at the bottom of the seniority totem pole, which meant Jerry and I were assigned there quite a bit early on.

It was not easy territory to work but it was the scene of some of the more depraved and hilarious incidents I can recall. Such as the night a patron who had been on the wait list for hours was so drunk he wolfed down a large dinner and proceeded to reverse wolf it all back on the table just as Jerry presented the check. This required extensive clean-up work before anyone else could be seated there, but when Jerry finally accomplished that, another equally hammered solo diner did exactly the same thing. Except this time passed out face first in his own vomit. Jerry luckily but not surprisingly was high as a kite so of course he found all of this highly amusing.

On another occasion, I was presiding over a raucous group of eight Japanese businessmen who had clearly consumed prodigious amounts of booze already and were continuing to do so at one of my tables in the Bozo, where two smaller booths had been combined to make a bigger one by removing a wood panel separating them.

As well as being extremely inebriated all of these men spoke little or no English, making the ordering process extremely confusing and difficult but also unintentionally hilarious. The table ended up ordering a ridiculously large amount of food – whether by design or accident was impossible to determine – including countless crab and oyster appetizers and more entrées than there were men at the table, all of which came with a house salad.

Several of them evidently had a passion for Pacific halibut but their inquiries as to the availability of this prized fish came out as cries heard throughout the main dining room of, “you have hairy butt?”

I’m Swedish by descent so the answer is no, but I of course nodded in the affirmative and wrote down orders for several dishes of Halibut du Chef – which sounds elegant but was actually a fillet of halibut baked with a slather of tartar sauce on top – all while shaking my head since we were at fourteen entrées for a party of eight and still not done.

It should be noted that house policy for groups of eight or more was to present a single check with a 15% gratuity included. These so-called ‘auto-grats’ are common practice now, but in those days fairly rare so it was quite common for guests to tip when the tip was already included, and this was known as a ‘double toke’. It was also typical for Jake’s waiters to not point this out to guests which always made for a big night. As you know from previous episodes, I’d done my share of double tokes, but I’d never received one up to this point.

Needless to say, with twice as many appetizers and entrées as there were diners on the bill, and three times as much Johnnie Walker scotch as you’d think humanly possible, the auto-grat was huge and even if I’d tried to explain to the man with the Gold Card that there was already a tip included it likely would have resulted in mass confusion and more food and scotch being ordered. I didn’t make quite enough to buy a house, but it was a very good night.

The last incident I want to share was at once scary, tragic, expensive, and in hindsight hilarious. I was presiding over a fine bunch of bozos, most of whom had been recently seated after long waits in the bar. This was to be my last turn of tables but no doubt a difficult task and I had girded my loins because these folks were wild-eyed from liquor and hunger. Just as I was about to enter the dragon, a fellow waiter was skirting the section with an impressive carry of four steak and lobster dinners, the priciest meal on the menu and generally beyond the reach of bozo budgets.

The server was Vern, a soft-spoken, mild-mannered, and cerebral man of philosophy and poetry, quite small in stature and slight of build. In short, the exact opposite of the rest of the staff. He had just reached the main dining room and was climbing the short flight of two stairs when he hit a small puddle of drawn butter on the copper flashing and executed the kind of back flip and fall only seen in cartoons and at the Olympics.

This was, as I said, scary and everyone’s initial reaction was shock and concern. Also a bit tragic because although he miraculously suffered no serious injuries, Vern was so shaken and humiliated by the experience he burst into tears, fled the scene, and had to be sent home. It was expensive because obviously the house just lost four top-dollar dinners, all of which would have to be re-fired.

But stay with me, it was hilarious because when Vern flipped over backwards the motion and momentum of his fall jettisoned the contents of the platters he was carrying, and it began to literally rain steaks and lobster tails on my tables. This was considered a manna from heaven by the starving masses and those lucky enough to catch surf or turf tore into it, some even without the benefit of utensils.

Vern survived and eventually was able to put the incident behind him, and out of respect for his gentle nature and the understanding something much worse could’ve happened, none of the waiters gave him a hard time or even mentioned it again.

But for those lucky few, and for the first and only time in Jake’s history, the Bozo Section was the place to be.