accountant for advices. So werun it as a business and it is our livelihood. If you watch the nuts and bulbs, the business works for you. If you don’t watch, and go out and talk with the guests all the time, you are losing money.
“Years ago we did not serve all the time through the afternoon on Saturday. We still don’t. But we make food available to the people. The smart thing is to give people what they want rather than say no, I have this rule, I have that rule. I am pretty strict about the way I think about things. But the public teaches me to be not so strict.
“We have fifty in staff, including part-time. Serving staff is thirty-five—waitresses, bus staff, dining room supervisors. We have twelve rooms plus the annex. We can take twenty-eight people and are full most weekends, though not during the week.
“In the restaurant we can seat one hundred and thirty inside and one hundred on the terrace. But we never seat two hundred and thirty people altogether. The cooking line can’t handle it. What we look for is turnover.
“The other serious problem comes with the staff. . . .”
This went on for an hour. There was a fire blazing in the main dining room, as well as the smaller one burning in the bar, and because of the cold winds blowing outside, the windows were all shut tight. The fireplace was only some six feet behind Matija, but the heat of it did not seem to affect him the way it did the Scotch drinkers at the table. They were the first to pass out. The beer drinkers were able to hold on longer.
“We are not absentee owners. I am the main fellow. If everybody else leaves, I am still standing here. My wife can do everything except two cooking-line jobs. She can’t work on the broiler, because she has no idea how to cook. And she can’t do the sauté, where you are basically frying in pans. But all other jobs she can do: the bartender, the dishwasher, serving, bookkeeping, working the floor. . . .”
Gus, on the wagon these days, drank Tab, but Sabbath saw that Gus was out. Just from Tab. And now the beer drinkers were losing their grip and beginning to look enfeebled—the owner ofthe bank, the chiropractor, the big mustached guy who ran the gardening center. . . .
Drenka was listening from the bar. When the puppeteer turned in his seat to smile at her, he saw that, leaning over the bar on her elbows, her face balanced on her fists, she was crying, and this was with half the Rotarians still clinging to consciousness.
“It is not always nice for us that our staff doesn’t like us. I think some of our staff likes us a lot. A lot of them don’t care for us at all. In some places the bar is open to the staff after hours. We don’t have that kind of thing here. Those are the places that go bankrupt and where the staff is in terrible auto accidents on the way home. Not here. Here it is not party time with the owners. Here it is not fun. My wife and I are not fun at all. We are work. We are a business. All Yugoslavs when they go abroad, they are very hardworking. Something in our history pushes them for survival. Thank you.”
There were no questions, but then there were barely a handful at the long table still capable of asking one. The Rotary president said, “Well, thanks, Matt, thanks a million. That took us through the process pretty thoroughly.” Soon people began to wake up to go back to work.
On Friday of that same week, Drenka went to Boston and fucked her dermatologist, the credit-card magnate, the university dean, and then, back at home, just before midnight—making a total of four for the day—she was fucked, holding her breath for the few minutes it lasted, by the orator she was married to.
♦ ♦ ♦
Now, down in the abandoned center of Cumberland, where the movie theater was long gone and the stores mostly vacant, there was an impoverished wreck of a grocery where Sabbath liked to get a container of coffee and drink it standing up right there after he’d done the weekly
“Years ago we did not serve all the time through the afternoon on Saturday. We still don’t. But we make food available to the people. The smart thing is to give people what they want rather than say no, I have this rule, I have that rule. I am pretty strict about the way I think about things. But the public teaches me to be not so strict.
“We have fifty in staff, including part-time. Serving staff is thirty-five—waitresses, bus staff, dining room supervisors. We have twelve rooms plus the annex. We can take twenty-eight people and are full most weekends, though not during the week.
“In the restaurant we can seat one hundred and thirty inside and one hundred on the terrace. But we never seat two hundred and thirty people altogether. The cooking line can’t handle it. What we look for is turnover.
“The other serious problem comes with the staff. . . .”
This went on for an hour. There was a fire blazing in the main dining room, as well as the smaller one burning in the bar, and because of the cold winds blowing outside, the windows were all shut tight. The fireplace was only some six feet behind Matija, but the heat of it did not seem to affect him the way it did the Scotch drinkers at the table. They were the first to pass out. The beer drinkers were able to hold on longer.
“We are not absentee owners. I am the main fellow. If everybody else leaves, I am still standing here. My wife can do everything except two cooking-line jobs. She can’t work on the broiler, because she has no idea how to cook. And she can’t do the sauté, where you are basically frying in pans. But all other jobs she can do: the bartender, the dishwasher, serving, bookkeeping, working the floor. . . .”
Gus, on the wagon these days, drank Tab, but Sabbath saw that Gus was out. Just from Tab. And now the beer drinkers were losing their grip and beginning to look enfeebled—the owner ofthe bank, the chiropractor, the big mustached guy who ran the gardening center. . . .
Drenka was listening from the bar. When the puppeteer turned in his seat to smile at her, he saw that, leaning over the bar on her elbows, her face balanced on her fists, she was crying, and this was with half the Rotarians still clinging to consciousness.
“It is not always nice for us that our staff doesn’t like us. I think some of our staff likes us a lot. A lot of them don’t care for us at all. In some places the bar is open to the staff after hours. We don’t have that kind of thing here. Those are the places that go bankrupt and where the staff is in terrible auto accidents on the way home. Not here. Here it is not party time with the owners. Here it is not fun. My wife and I are not fun at all. We are work. We are a business. All Yugoslavs when they go abroad, they are very hardworking. Something in our history pushes them for survival. Thank you.”
There were no questions, but then there were barely a handful at the long table still capable of asking one. The Rotary president said, “Well, thanks, Matt, thanks a million. That took us through the process pretty thoroughly.” Soon people began to wake up to go back to work.
On Friday of that same week, Drenka went to Boston and fucked her dermatologist, the credit-card magnate, the university dean, and then, back at home, just before midnight—making a total of four for the day—she was fucked, holding her breath for the few minutes it lasted, by the orator she was married to.
♦ ♦ ♦
Now, down in the abandoned center of Cumberland, where the movie theater was long gone and the stores mostly vacant, there was an impoverished wreck of a grocery where Sabbath liked to get a container of coffee and drink it standing up right there after he’d done the weekly
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