The Dirty Dishes of Others

Years and years ago on Pacific Coast Highway south of Malibu, in the shadow of Castellamare, where now there are only a few weeds at the asphalt’s edge, Ted’s Rancho Restaurant once stood. I became a man there.

Actually, while working there first as a busboy and then as a parking attendant, I became a slightly older teenager.

The gruff, ass-pinching boss, Lucky Fields, was right out of bad film noir. He had beady eyes, slicked back gangster hair, and a pencil mustache, and exuded venality and corruptness — and grandiosity. When I first ventured down the hill from my parents’ house to ask for a summer job, he said I would be no more busboy, but a junior waiter. His pearlescent blue business card said

“Your Courtesy”

at the top. I have spent hours of my life pondering what he imagined himself to be conveying.

I didn’t take naturally to busboying. In my household, the cutlery was sterilized after every meal, so I was neurotic about hygiene, and not thrilled about having to handle the dirty dishes of others. The horrible greasy gray plastic tubs in which I had to carry them back to the kitchen — to be washed by a small black schizophrenic who must have lost 10 pounds in sweat per shift, and who’d started weighing around 90 pounds — were even worse.

One of the alleged perks of the job was getting a free dinner every night, but I wouldn’t have put in a compost heap what we employees were offered. The waitresses (there were no waiters) were supposed to give us busboys 15 percent of their own tips, but none seemed able to embrace the concept that 15 percent didn’t mean one-fifteenth. My trying to explain it only made them observe, snarlingly, that I was a smart alec. It wasn't the last time I would endure that cruel epithet's awful sting.

The restaurant was right over the Pacific Ocean. Restaurants right over oceans, or rivers, lakes, or fjords, don’t have to try that hard with the food, and Ted’s didn’t, except approximately once per evening, when some high-roller intent on impressing his date would order (for $13.95!) the chateaubriand. For the excitement this turn of events would engender, you’d have thought Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had popped in for a couple of highballs and a look at the ocean.

The waitresses always had lighted cigarettes waiting for them back in the kitchen. My pal Chief and I mocked them for their addiction, and then, of course, took it for our own; ducking back into the kitchen for a drag on a Kool seemed so terribly worldly.
The summer I worked there was that during which A Hard Day’s Night came Out. There were lots of Beatles tracks on the jukebox, and Mary Wells’ sublime “My Guy,” and Dean Martin’s “Everybody Loves Somebody,” of which I was never not tired. But my own favorite was Ray Price’s “The Night Life”. I’d be swabbing the deck in the moonlight at 1:45 in the morning while the Pacific gurgled beneath me, and old Ray would sing, “Well the night life ain’t no good life, but it’s my life.” I, a self-romanticizing 17-year-old, would think, “Hear hear, brother.”

When the little schizophrenic was fired, he was replaced by Collins Hall, the first black person with whom I ever had an extended conversation. Even one as thick as Lucky Fields could see that Collins was extremely diligent and extremely reliable, and Lucky soon promoted him to chef, to the palpable consternation of the existing chef, a redneck motherfucker named Bill. A combination of the tension their hatred for each other generated, my distaste for the gray plastic tubs, and the fact that a junior waiter, thanks to Edd “Kookie” Brynes of 77 Sunset Strip, was lots less glamorous than a parking attendant, inspired me to ask to be moved outside.

It's possible, as we speak, to buy a Ted's menu on eBay for $75, for which you could, back when I worked there, have eaten chateaubriand for five days. But if I were rich, it's one of Lucky's "Your Courtesy" business cards I'd buy.