Read Online Waiter to the Rich and Shameless: Confessions of a Five-Star Beverly Hills Server by Paul Hartford - Free Book Online Page A

animal.  In
every picture he was either shirtless or wore his shirt wide open to the navel.
He looked like the new Scandinavian version of Hugh Hefner holding court in his
own debauched Playboy pen.  I can’t stress enough how in these party pics he
looked nothing like the stiff, starched, formal service-oriented waiter to the
stars.
    He
wore ropes upon ropes of sterling silver jewelry like a rock star or rap icon.
There were Maltese crosses on his belt buckle; long, heavy chains around his
neck; super cool sterling skull rings on his fingers. He even had a heavy
sterling silver ring made with his actual family crest on it.  He wore the
latest in Italian casual fashion, back when Diesel was becoming all the rage.
Jens had style. 
    Although
in the eyes of some, the squares, he looked like a fag, I thought he was the
coolest guy I knew.  As it turned out, his clothing style was a few years ahead
of its time.  Just a year later everybody was wearing $200 jeans and distressed
designer clothes that looked worn but cost a fortune.  Jens had been doing it
for years.
    Jens’s
favorite music was not really what I considered music.  It was club music. Like
House and Trance, most of it was instrumental. I assumed he had developed his
musical taste while living in Ibiza and Marbella and hanging out in discos.  He
had also had a fair amount of experience DJ-ing at clubs and parties.  As we dug
through his shoebox full of photos of half-naked girls in beds surrounded by
empty liquor bottles, he reached deep into his closet and returned with his “other”
shoebox.  It was chock full of dollar bills, twenties, fifties, hundreds. 
    “Pauli,”
he said, “this is the money I keep hidden from Christie.  It’s my emergency
fund, you know?  I’ve been putting three hundred a week in here and now I’m
itching to start spending it.”  He lifted it all out, and there had to be close
to twenty grand.  This was the real buried treasure.
    “You
ever try opening up an account in an actual bank?” I asked sarcastically. “Don’t
you think this is dangerous?”
    “Yeah,
uh, come on, of course, Pauli, I have an account; this is just the stuff I keep
for me .”
    Once
he took all the money out, there were a few baggies of pills and coke and drug
paraphernalia left at the bottom.  He tried to play it off as if he were
surprised. “Wow, I didn’t even know this shit was here! We should do some!”  
    He
finished the thought by cutting up lines of coke on the glass table and snorting
up the biggest one.  “Oh shit, this stuff is clean!” he said while he handed me
the glass snuffer tube, which was a fancy version of the cut off clear plastic
drinking straw that most people use.  This thing had a rounded end that fit in
your nostril more comfortably and the other end was just slightly flared.  Oh,
shit , I thought to myself, I thought this part of my life was over . 
Apparently not.  I reached for the glass straw and snorted a line.  It’s not
often you get free coke.
    Immediately,
the white light shot through my brain like a blast from a Star Wars laser gun. 
My senses were blasted into a higher realm and all light, color and sound
became exceptionally vivid.  I could feel the drug flood into my bloodstream
and give me a sense of relaxed alertness mixed with an air of confidence and
extreme focus, as if each moment were its own beautiful photograph frozen in
time and then surpassed by the next.  I was high! A fleeting thought passed
through my now electrified brain: random drug testing.  I laughed at the irony,
buoyed by my almighty, drug-induced confidence. That’ll never happen to me!  
    Jens
laughed too – I’m not sure why – but he instantly became very excited, convinced
that he had found a new partner in crime. “We should get the hell out of
Sherman Oaks and go to the Viceroy Hotel on Santa Monica Beach,” he said, bouncing
all over the place in a state of complete delight.  When Jens gets crazy