By Steve “the Mailman” Breen Going Postal
HOW MANY OF YOU ARE CHEAPSKATES? How many of you, when you were out partying and trying to impress some cute little hottie with a clubfoot and an eye patch that you picked up at the dry cleaners, have stiffed the bartender or waitress paying a restaurant or bar tab?
I worked for about a half dozen years as a bartender. Being a bartender gives you a great insight into the nature and nurture of the hominid beasties here on the sociological Serengeti Plain. From time to time everybody has shown up at the watering hole for celebration, cerebration, misery or mirth. A customer will sometimes tell his bartender things he would never tell his wife, priest or parole officer.
A bartender is the king of the blue-collar workers. Where else can you work and be Elvis every night? You are five belly buttons deep across a 50 foot rail and yet you are the Lone Ranger without Tonto because someone called out sick on a Labor Day weekend night. You’re bustin’ your hump to make mixological magic like a nine-armed octopus, but you never lose your cool.
And by some miracle of St. Dymphna, the patroness saint of the insane and mentally ill, you somehow pull it off and you feel like a god. Tom Cruise got nuthin’ [sic] on you.
A cocktail waitress is the Duchess of the dance floor.
If you doubt this, try balancing, one handed, a 14-inch tray above your head with six Irish Car Bombs and an “ups” Martini while bobbing and weaving through a mosh pit of frolicking inebriates and not spill a drop, make correct change amidst ear hemorrhaging Gothic Cowboy Punk music (you learn to read lips like a deaf-mute for survival) while fending off wolfishly amorous advances from man-scaped Euro-trash poseurs.
Now picture those scenarios and then your customer “party-fouled” a miserly 10 percent tip. Pretty grim numbers, eh?
OK, Diamond Jim Brady, if you can’t figure out how to budget your disco dollars to include a reasonable gratuity (adults pay 20 percent plus) for the individual that you have treated for the last four hours as your personal bootlick, then maybe you should’ve stayed on the curb outside the local Qwik-E-Mart swilling Duff Malt liquor 40’s with the rest of your unwashed sponge monkey brethren.
And some of you ladies are, in many cases, much worse. Is it a case of “math is hard, boys are cute” syndrome or a group manifested delusion that you are all channeled descendants of inter-galactic royalty that somehow entitles you to run a diner waitress ragged and leave as a “gratuity” what is essentially parking meter change on a $30 breakfast?
This is not the “change” your server has been waiting for.
If you folks can bust out the Benjamins for a $200 pair of ripped organic hemp jeans or a new $300 whale skin purse in order to wow your friends at Temple Bar, then you better excavate some “dead presidents” from your lint-lined Lucky jeans for some of the hardest workin’ people in show business.
Believe me, the grub and grog racket is “show business” because it takes a great actor to smile at a customer over whom you’ve lost flesh to service after they’ve just left you a pittance because they’re just another self-absorbed jackass.
Well, they say you are what you eat. Let me tell you an old bartender secret that guarantees instant service: When you go to a crowded nightclub or hangout, go to the bar and place your order. Don’t run a tab. When you are presented with the first bill, drop a 40 percent tip.
When you show up for a second round, that bartender (or waitress) will be on you like white on rice. Onlookers, including your clubfoot date, will think you are Brad Pitt’s stunt double. For the second and any successive rounds drop 20 percent.
Don’t expect something for which you cannot afford. The service industry is tough enough in this “instant gratification isn’t fast enough” culture. If you can’t be merciful with your demands then be generous with your wallet.
And use those two words your Mother taught you that are increasingly disappearing from the vernacular: “please” and “thanks.”
It has been my distinct privilege to know some great bartenders and restaurant waitresses in this pretentious little bastion of “liberalism.” Why do liberals want to pay welfare to deadbeats who don’t want to work but then shortchange the barkeep? I have a few favorite haunts where the company behind the bar is more civil and decent than many of the Thunderdome mooks on my side of the rail.
A man’s got to believe in something. I believe I’ll have another drink.
STEVE BREEN is a conservative connoisseur who likes his liquor like his politics: clean, neat and straight and is still “the best looking mailman at the U.S. Post Office.” He
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 3, 2008. Read the original PDF.