At Long Last, "The Doorman Saga" (plus other tasty tidbits)
Once upon a time we had a doorman in our employ. He was a former drag queen of some renown who had decided to live a life in man drag again. He had issues. A drinking problem. He liked his pain pills which he took sporadically (when he could score them from the patrons) for a chronic hip condition that came and went. Painful hip conditions can do that, I guess. He cried often and you never ever wanted to begin a serious discussion with him after he had been drinking. You paid the price in lots of tears and hugging and half finished sentences with no real point or theme. In short, he fit right in. Bring us your damaged psyche, we'll give you a job. After a series of failed relationships (some beginning and ending in a weekend) he finally met someone that was either unaware of his problems or willing to overlook them and they are now happily cohabitating in Boston. I'm curious what their daily routine/dialogue is like but not enough to wish for fly on the wall status. Although he was never intentionally malicious, he was enough of a handful to deal with that his departure elicited a huge collective sigh of relief from both management and staff.
And so it came to pass that we began our search for not one doorman as a replacement but two. We decided that one of the mistakes we made was allowing someone to do over 50 hrs a week at the door. Especially for someone of dubious sanity. We decided to look for people wanting a second job, or supplemental income, or someone capable of fulfilling more than one position at the bar. This was my best case scenario as I have been frustrated lately. I've been forced to accept some really bad behavior in terms of people missing shifts or not doing the job I expected because we really didn't have an alternative. We are staffed so tightly that I frequently have no options when someone calls in sick or uses the all pupose "I have diahrrhea" card. they know that's not something I'm likely to ask them to prove.
So I placed an ad on Craigslist and sifted through the responses (I tend to reject people with martial arts background, you rarely have to wrestle an AARP member to the ground) and set up a day of interviews. I end up hiring a couple of younger, attractive guys that i hope will also be able to double as cocktail servers and set them up on training shifts. With the outgoing crazy person mentioned above. In retrospect a mistake. It was a very busy weekend and all manner of things went wrong. I think the highlight though was when the drunk doorman and a 75 yr old drunk regular went tumbling down the front stairs together, after which, the drunk doorman tried to hail a cab for the 75 yr old drunk regular and when the cab driver (rightly so) refused the fair, my drunk doorman sprawled out on the hood of the cab... in the rain... at 3am, and screamed that we were going to sue him. I can't imagine why neither one of them showed up for their first shift.
Back to square one and now we're really screwed because we have no doorman to schedule. Crazy has already moved to Boston. So we press various people in to service at inflated hourly rates and this time, I stay out of the hiring as I'm a little gun shy. I take my regular days off and when I come back Jabba The Drunk has hired someone to train the following night. He's hanging around the bar after he's hired which always makes me a little nervous. In addition, he apparently volunteered during his interview that he didn't drink but over the course of the evening he is clearly intoxicated. He stays until closing time. From his interview at 6pm. Not good. Not good at all. But I ignore the obvious red flags and besides, he dutifully shows up on time for his training shift and quite frankly, he's a body. He's got an "I'm insane" pasted on grimace/smile and no ass at all but he's a body. About 45 minutes into my shift the phone rings and my new serial killer informs me that I have a phone call. It's the manager of the restaurant with the same name as ours. The conversation goes something like this:
"Hey T-- this is J-----."
"Hey J----- what's up?"
"You have a new doorman working there?"
"Well yeah, brand new he's been training for an hour or so, why?"
"Well, we have a problem because last night I had to throw him out of my restaurant he was sucking dick in the bathroom."
"SHUT UP!"
*peals of laughter from me*
"And the customers that we share are running down here saying they can't believe the guy I threw out is an employee of the bar. "
*guffaw* "Well, yes. That is a problem." *snicker*
Apparently, at some point in my new serial killer's evening as he was shuttling back and forth between my bar and the restaurant, he decided that it would be perfectly acceptable to recuse himself to the bathroom of a restaurant full of people and proceed to service another patron. To make matters worse he didn't even have the sense to use a stall with a lock but opted instead to just suck him off behind a door. A door that when opened allowed people about to shove a forkful of fettucine alfredo in their face to get what amounted to dinner and a show. I would have just slapped a surcharge on their checks. And to make it a really odd situation apparently being discovered by two patrons wanting to use the bathroom for what it's meant for did nothing to disuade him from his mission. Even after J----- intervened and told him to drop the cock he expressed a desire to get a face full of man milk first. A textbook example of Inappropriate Public Behavior. And a clear violation of the Never Shit where you Eat rule. As hilarious as I found the entire episode I knew I had to fire this whack job but now the question is how big a whack job is he? I didn't want to pull him off the door and cause a scene and what if he totally didn't remember it happening? After all, he greeted J----- as if nothing happened when he came over (to check and make sure it really was the same guy). So I opted to be a management pussy and let him train till about 2 am (instead of till closing. I was really not comfortable being in the bar after we closed with this guy) and then let him off. I fired him over the phone the next day. He didn't sound surprised. I guess he figured he'd just act as if nothing happened and hope for the best. I said something about making a bad judgement call immediately after being hired and what could we expect from him after he got comfortable. But what I really wanted to say was "Man, explain to me what process went on in your head. How in the world did you manage to justify that by any stretch of the imagination it was a good idea to go down to a business affiliated with the one that just hired you not two hours ago and cause a scandalous scene that everyone would talk about by slobbing the knob of a total stranger in a crowded restaurant? What the fuck is disconnected in your head that didn't go "Hang on, could this adversely affect my employment prospects"? Do people really get so led around by their dicks that this kind of behavior is common?
At any rate I ended up re-posting the ad on line and interviewed another round of applicants. Just to be a little safer this time, Jabba is going to interview my favorites and hopefully, we can come to a consensus and hire (relatively) stable people. They have to be a little fucked up just to fit in. Want to know a secret? I usually hire people I want to sleep with. I never have, as I seem to be among the minority of men who hears what my dick is saying but ignore it anyway. I just feel that if I have to be around people 50 hrs a week, being sexually attracted to them makes it more bearable. And besides, I find I can forgive them faster when they fuck up if I'm wondering what his face looks like when he cums.
In other news:
I am so not enjoying having another room mate. More specifically this room mate but really, I guess it could be anyone. You never know how important something is until you lose it. In this case, it's my daytime television. He watches SportsCenter in the morning. I opt for House Invaders. He tends to fall asleep (!) every afternoon around 3pm with an ABC soap on. I prefer Call for Help. He likes to talk either to me or the TV during the day let alone that I have tried to demonstrate that I can't speak at all until I've had one cup of coffee minimum. I prefer two before attempting anything but monosyllabic efforts. I suppose I would be more inclined to talk if we had more to talk about but quite honestly, it's not that I dislike him but he is just not someone I would choose by any stretch of the imagination to be a friend. So aside from some ordinary non commital pleasantries I see no reason to really speak. He saves grease from cooking in a coffee cup. Park that trailer over here, Bubba Joe. He has supposedly landed two jobs the details of which I find very suspect. Did I mention that the first time rent was due since he moved in he couldn't pay it? Who moves to NYC with absolutely no money? People who declare bankruptcy in Rhode Island and walk away from 30 Thousand $$$ in debt, that's who. So yesterday, I leave to run some errands and notice (not significantly) that something's cooking on the stove. I hit the Kinko's, the hardware store, the new Ricky's (I love that overpriced store) and pick up a sandwich. (Blimpies, natch). I was gone just shy of an hour I would say. When I opened the door to the apartment I swear, for a second I thought it was on fire. The place was filled with smoke. I mean two feet of thick, hanging smoke. I realized that whatever was cooking on the stove was now burning and here comes Al Coholic from the other direction just in time to throw it in the sink. Now here's the weird part. As I'm racing around the apartment opening windows and turning on fans he's insisting that he doesn't know how this happened as he just put the pan on. I know this isn't true so my question is is this a "panic lie"? Or did he fall asleep? Or is he so out of touch with reality that he really wasn't aware that an hour had passed? And even if that was the case, how did he not realize the entire apartment was filling with a thick, choking smoke. How bad would it have gotten if I hadn't returned when I did? It's going to be a long winter.
