The Grazing Saddle

I started work fifteen minutes late; an inauspicious beginning to be sure. Jodi warned me how much she adored promptness. I promised to never again be tardy. I knew I was lying. Anyway she had some old tart named Virginia show me around the place. I had a nickname for the old sot instantly.

Clown-Face Virginia spoke with a slow witted drawl; southern like corn syrup; “’Is here’s thuh wait station – where we roll the silverware – a hunert pieces - no ‘ceptions – you gotcha salt and paper shakers rite-chair and the extra salt rite-chair in ‘is cabinet rite-chair,” She kept saying ‘rite-chair’ instead of ‘right here’. I was used to this dialect; the southern sloe melting from the tips of the arctic tongues, words frozen and numb… but more fascinating was the amount of rouge she used on her pale chubby wrinkles that brought too much attention to her drunken hung-over inability to gauge tint, space or layer. Her lips were a mess of candied cherries eaten hungrily; disastrous amounts of red lipstick were applied with the DTs – her half century old fingers shaking like rickety pistons in an antique engine applying globs of tar to her grey and decaying eyelashes; transforming her blink into a car crash. The eye-shadow was ‘summer sky’ and she used the whole horizon. She looked like something all the children used to aim at in the carnival; a balloon sprouting from her head, each squirt hoping for burst – circus punk hairdo – frizzled and stringy, brushed too much, waiting patiently for the high school baseball players to wind up and knock her over.

I barely listened as she showed me around the place: Where to find the ketchup, where we kept the kegs of iced tea – sweetened, and the one bucket of unsweetened iced tea and how to make the sweet tea and where the sugar was stored, how much to use, etc, gallons, where we kept the lemon wedges, and how many seconds you’re supposed to wait before asking the bottom feeders would they care to see the dessert menu, which I later learned from Jas to put on the table as you remove the entrée course – cause those fat bastards almost always want dessert, and if they think they don’t, change their mind and sell – because every dollar you sell is another dime or if you’re really lucky two. Clown-face Virginia continued; “Now ya always got to remember to go in and out through the right-sided door only. Don’t never try to go in nor out of the left-sided door never. Ya might get hurt.” She was not the most eloquent of monologists but she got her point across.

I had never worked in a restaurant before, but it’s true – I had been in them, and could imagine trays of hot food splattered everywhere if not for this simple rule. Clown Face Virginia showed me to the kitchen and introduced me to the chefs.

The chefs looked like the gnarlier of the staff; loud, tattooed animals with the radio up and a taste for cutting meat in their genes, sharp knives in their hands, and fire by their genitals; hot oil spitting at them from skillets and hands that seemed scarred and meaty like a villain’s claws.

Clown Face Virginia kept showing me around the place. “Now ‘is is Cindy and ‘is hears Brett; ‘ey’ve both been here forever, so you know, feel free to ask ‘em anything.”

I was so fucking hung-over I had already forgotten their names. My head was caffeine racked and light – airy. I continued to follow Clown Face Virginia around Grazing Saddles learning the ropes – took my first order and sized up my new career. The people that waddled in and out of there had enough oil in their bellies and arteries to fuel lamps for the whole state for centuries. They oozed and seeped rich butter fat from their shortening skin as if their liver was protesting its job. They stank of rotten flesh trapped in folds of fat and unwashed skin, the gas of processed food and neglected assholes. It reminded me of a farm, but without the purity – their shit stank worse than pig and cow. Not all of them, but certainly my first table, my first impression of this line of work. They would have made vampires vomit.

“Hi; may I take your order?”

“Can we have more sweet tea please?”

“I hope you enjoyed your evening and y’all come back to see us soon.” – This was the mandatory closing line, which never got old to the customer, not even as it was being said simultaneously three tables down.