#72 "Gettin' the Band Back Together II" In Color! September 18, 2013

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Wolf Credo

Respect the elders

teach the young

 cooperate with the pack

Play when you can

 hunt when you must

 rest in between

 Share your affection

voice your feelings

 leave your mark.

This has been hanging in the Men's room of the Cafe Loup for as long as I have been working there. It has probably been up there for 20 years. Most people think it is a charming addition to the place, or at least, an amusing thing to read while you pee. Guys like it so much that they sometimes get carried away and steal it. This is unnecessary as we keep copies behind the bar for those same guys who love it so much as to steal it. The saddest time that someone heisted the Wolf Credo was probably about eight years ago. The Loup was being repainted, head to toe, and the guy who was painting was a friend of Lloyd and a fine artist. He, as a gift to Lloyd, made a beautiful hand-made Wolf Credo on a repurposed piece of wood. He hand painted the credo and even hand painted the wolf peeing on the tree. It was all lacquered and sanded down and looked incredible. He probably spent as much time on it as he did painting the place. Well, it was promptly stolen from it's place above the urinal, and so we went back to having the photocopied version in there. One hopes that it has a nice home now, but I fear that whomever stole it, did so in a drunken stupor and once awoken to the hungover light of day, looked at it with mild bemusement and then promptly forgot about it and now it's in some landfill in New Jersey. Truly a shame. And it goes against the teachings in the Wolf Credo itself.

I never really wondered about where the Wolf Credo had come from until recently. I thought it was some ancient saying, possibly stolen from the Native Americans of the plains or some other such place where wolves are held in high regard. I was wrong. The saying comes from a woman from California named Del Goetz. She wrote a book called "Life in the Pack," all about raising and living with Siberian Huskies. According to her website, she has raised over 25 dogs and up to 12 at a time. She says, “I chose to raise dogs instead of kids because you don’t have to buy them a car or send them through college — and, they don’t do drugs. They show their appreciation when you feed them and show their affection constantly rather than conditionally when they want something.” She seemed like an interesting person so I decided I would find out a little more about her, and see if I could get a connection with her and the Cafe Loup, if there is one. However, she has proven pretty hard to find. Googling her gets you her website and the Amazon link where you can buy her book. The rest of the results are Marin County board meeting minutes praising Del's community service in the Muir Woods Park of California. She seems like she is an outstanding member of the community and I wanted to know more, so I emailed her. She, sadly, has not written back. I figure she's out in the woods raising dogs and helping with the community fire department. If she ever writes back and I can set up some sort of dialogue, I will certainly add that to this post. 

 Del certainly did leave her mark. Although she seems to be living the quiet life somewhere outside of San Francisco, at one time she penned a poem that has lived on in the Cafe Loup Men's Room for at least 20 years. It is so popular that we keep copies of it behind the bar for the guys who come out laughing and talking wildly about it. Some guys have even memorized it. It's odd that we don't have one in the Ladies Room, although in the picture, it is obviously a male wolf leaving his mark on a snow topped pine tree. But it seems cruel to leave the ladies of the Loup out of the loop. It's always funny to see a guy come out of the john laughing and talking about the Credo to a woman who has no idea what he's talking about. The guy is usually a little tipsy anyway, and then rambling on about teaching the young and voicing your feelings clearly leaves no mark on his date. She's probably rethinking sharing her affections with this guy, until I come along and say how great the Credo is, and handing him a copy from out from behind the bar, thus saving this guy's night and sharing the Credo with his date as well. 

All in all, the Wolf Credo is pretty solid advice for humans. I hesitate a little with "Leave your Mark," but as a species, that has been done already what with man made substance that may never break down and mutating wildlife. As individuals, everyone does want to leave their mark historically. No one wants to be forgotten, and I think that this little poem may remind people, even very subtly, that they aught to get out and do something with their lives. 

Cafe Loup and the Wolf Credo: Always trying to help out humanity.

#71 September 10, 2013

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"Garden of Eden"

As my loyal 8 readers know by now, the text in these blog posts really doesn't have much to do with the picture posted above.When I started writing this blog, it was more based on the pictures, but as the years wore on and I struggled with the meaning of the drawings and the meaning of the project in general, the text of the blog started looking inward at the restaurant that the drawings are made in. The space of the restaurant, and the inner workings became as important to the drawings as the drawings themselves. I mean, one could exist without the other, but without the restaurant, the drawings would never have come into form. In fact, these drawings represent a perfect storm of opportunity. The restaurant has gone through so many changes in name, ownership, and time, that if it hadn't been for the exact time and scenario that we were able to find ourselves at Cafe Loup, this blog would be about something completely different.
Which brings me to an awesome event that happened a week ago. We were having a normal Friday night at the restaurant, when a table of eight men of varying ages sat down at Table 8. They seemed to be just a normal table of eight, until they revealed who they really were. It turns out that one of the guys at the table was getting married, and this was his "bachelor party," even though his 12 year old nephew was in attendance and he was in his 60's. So, ok, they were having a tame bachelor party. Big deal, right? That sort of thing happens all the time at the Loup, so why was this party special? Well, the guy who was about to get married at one point tells Edie that his parents used to own the restaurant in the 1960's and that he hadn't been back to the restaurant since he was 11 years old! He had the idea to have the bachelor party at the same restaurant that his parents had owned 50 years prior.

Back then, the place was called "Garden of Eden" and it was a glorious downtown restaurant that seems like it thrived in the 1960's. It was then, as it is now, a family run establishment, serving delicious food and drink. The family goes by the name of Monasebian, although they spell it "Monas'bien" on the menu (as you can see in the picture above, depicting the front page of the menu). The Monasebians built the bar, and put a little pool with goldfish and plants in the middle of the dining room! The bar that they built is still that bar that is in the restaurant today. The pool, sadly, is no longer in the dining room. I am pretty sure that it was right in the middle, where Table 24a and 24B are today, and next time I am at the restaurant I am going to see if I can find some traces of the pool.

Mr. Monasebian in the dining room. 1965

The picture above shows Mr. Monasebian in the dining room. The column to his left is still there, although since the picture is so dark, it is hard for me to get my bearing on which direction we are looking. However, you can see the pool to his right, with flowers poking out next to him. 

When his son was in for dinner, they brought with them an old menu from the place and also a bunch of pictures from the dining room and kitchen. Those are the pictures I am showing you all here. We, as the staff, were so interested that we were all huddled around these guys looking at the pictures and menu while our sections sat patiently on a busy Friday night. Tomoyo even gave the guys a tour into the basement (so that she could photocopy the pictures and menu) and they said it was the same as they remembered. In fact, the picture of the kitchen looks incredibly similar.

In the kitchen of "Garden of Eden" 1965

The kitchen of today still has some of the same things in it, from 50 years ago. In this picture, you can see a metal structure hanging from the ceiling with metal hooks hung from it. That thing still hangs in the kitchen now. The shelf behind the head chef is still there and still in use today. You can see a server in the background under a stack of plates. We no longer keep plates there (we do keep pots and pans there), but it seems like that is where one would pick up food, which is the same as today. I admit, that when I first went into the kitchen at Cafe Loup, I was surprised by how small it was. I was then doubly surprised to see how much food could come out of such a small kitchen. But this being New York, you have to make it work with the space you have. Upon seeing this picture, I realized that they were working with the same size kitchen 50 years ago. Not only that, but it was set up the same way! So, these guys figured out how to make such a small space efficient, and it got handed down from owner to owner until today, where it is essentially the same setup now.

Some of the menu from "Garden of Eden" 1965

The menu was a real treat to look at. Not only for the things that they served, but for the prices! 

Prime Rib for $3.95! Coffee for $.35! 

I'm sure these prices were relatively high for the time, but this is New York! And this is Greenwich Village in it's prime (rib)! This was probably a place where you would dress up and take a special date or go with a group for family style dinners. You'd get some steak and some wine and have a grand old time. One of the great things on these menus, besides the food and prices, are the little sayings on the bottom: "Your Presence is a Compliment to Our Restaurant- Haste Ye Back!" That one is great, but the one on the next page, I think we should somehow incorporate into the current menu....

More menu from "Garden of Eden" 1965

"Dinner Without Wine is Like a Day Without Sunshine." 

Truer words have never been written. This whole page is incredible. When the guys showed us this page, it was literally like finding a treasure chest. From the warning that this new-fangled thing called curry is indeed very spicy to the "Shashlik" served on a flaming sword! This place must've been the best! I mean, you could get three lobster tails for $3.95, served with salad and a Baked Idaho potato! So amazing. 

It seems like they also had some special occasions. I don't know for sure, but the next picture looks like there was a buffet every once and a while. I know that at my grandparents place in the 1960's, they used to have a buffet every Sunday evening. It was that way until the 80's, as I remember having to dress up in a little mini suit and tie every Sunday night to dine at the buffet. It was quite an event! This picture certainly reminded me of that time, even down to the chefs tall hat. The only thing that's missing is the decorative Jell-o molds with lobsters in them.

The buffet at "Garden of Eden" 1965

Yes, it looks like the Monasebian's had quite a place. I don't know where this picture of the buffet table was taken, but I have a theory. It seems like the back wall of the restaurant, which would be where Tables 36-40 are now. Now, there is a large banquette there (and photos of Janis and Jimi), and I know that in the place that replaced "Garden of Eden" this was a live room where bands would play. This seems to be that back, and the wall behind the Monasebian's seems to be lined with marble, as you can see a slight reflection of a light fixture just about the chefs hat. I could be wrong, but no matter what, the place looks so 60's glamorous! 

View from the pool. "Garden of Eden" 1965

Finally, here is a picture from across the pool. It depicts Mr. Monasebian seated while his guests put on their furs and prepare to depart for the evening. The pool is in the foreground and you can almost see the goldfish swimming around in it. 

I am not sure when the Monasebian's sold the restaurant. The son, who was celebrating his bachelor party there two Fridays ago said that he hadn't been back to the restaurant in 50 years, so I am guessing they sold the place right round 1965, or so. Maybe not, maybe they kept it until the 70's, who knows. I don't know when it changed hands, as there is nothing about it on the internet that I can find. I even brought that point up a couple of posts ago, lamenting the fact that I didn't know what was in this space in the 1960's. "The Garden of Eden" must have been the first thing in the building, as the building itself was built in the 60's. What I find fascinating is that the place that I know of that replaced "The Garden of Eden" was called "The Bells of Hell." It's so poetic, and so New York. The owners of "The Bells of Hell" must have known the Monasebian's and known about the "Garden of Eden." They must have thought, "Well, we're not going to run a fancy dining room with live goldfish and flaming swords. We're going to run a honkey-tonk rock n' roll bar, so why not take the name in the exact opposite direction?" I think New York business owners of the past thought about that stuff more than they do today. I mean, Cafe Loup got it's name with the same sort of mind-frame, but that's a different story. I like to think that for the past 50 something years, the little space on 13th St. has been both Heavenly and Hellish, and now serves as a kind of space in between the two. A place with both qualities, and now it lives in the body of a wolf, an earth-bound creature that for centuries has been both feared and respected by all those who come in contact with it. A perfect middle ground between Heaven and Hell.

#68 "Make Your Wish" In Color! August 9, 2013

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I am not a writer.
When I started writing these blog posts almost 5 years ago, it was really just to showcase the drawings. I was only posting the drawings on Bookface before posting them here, and in Bookface there was no description of the drawings, how they were conceived, or any information at all except the number of the drawing. We didn't even name them on there, it would just show up one day as "Tim & Jeremy's Mind on Loup #68!!!" Usually with three exclamation points. When number one hundred was posted, I used all caps. No one cared.
As the blog posts seemed to get longer and longer I also started thinking about them differently. Originally, I would make a couple comments about the drawings themselves, but then I started thinking about the restaurant more. Since these drawings are all done in the restaurant, during the operating hours of service, I thought that it would be more fun for my 8 regular readers to get a glimpse of life within the restaurant.
The Loup is, after all, a strange and magical place. It has been at 105 W. 13th St. since 1989, and was conceived a decade earlier in a different location also on 13th St. Since that time, it has become a neighborhood staple. Regulars know they can come in any time for comfort food and strong, delicious martinis. It is a safe haven for artists and celebrities, who know they can show up and dine unmolested by tourists or people looking for autographs. And then there is the literary aspect. When the restaurant was first opened in 1977 by Bruce and Roxanne Bethany, they decided to court the literary community. They decided that if the place was full of writers, the rest of the world would follow. They were right. Writers of all types have haunted, and still haunt the walls of the Cafe Loup. From Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens' wild late nights, to young unknown poets struggling to buy a pint, the restaurant has been a comfort zone and meeting spot to an entire generation (or two) of New York literati.
Of course I had no idea about any of that when I walked through the doors in 2002 and handed someone my resume. For me, it was off a convenient subway line, it was in a cool neighborhood, and it was a on a block with a bunch of other restaurants so it was easy for me to walk up and down the block dropping off resumes. At the time, I had been unemployed for months and so I would go out every day looking for jobs wherever I could. I was cold-calling places, like the Loup; I was going on mass cattle calls that I found in the back section of the Village Voice, and any other method I could think of to get a job; any job. So when I got the call from the Loup, I was just happy to get a call back. I didn't care if it was a Village Institution. I didn't care if it was a Writer's Bar. I was just happy to get a full schedule and the ability to pay my rent. It wasn't until much later that I realized the respect and admiration the people of New York felt for this little restaurant. I was always a little jealous of the regulars because they had this incredible place to go night after night and interact with all these interesting people. Later on I realized that I was not only part of that, I was helping to continue the tradition of making it people's favorite spot. Cafe Loup was my regular bar, and I got paid to be at it. It was a wonderful revelation, and even though I do have some favorite regular places outside of the Loup (aka work), I still consider it my regular place.
I went off on that tangent to let you know about the restaurant a little, although I am sure I have written all of that in some form or another throughout this blog sometime in the past. The original point of this blog post was going to be me going on a self deprecating rant about how I am not a writer, or how I don't describe myself as a writer. I write this blog out of a weird compulsion to continue writing about these drawings in relation to the restaurant that they were created in. It really is compulsory in that I have no motive, I have no goal in mind for the drawings or for the text that accompanies them. Tim and I have talked about making them into a book someday, and maybe some of this text could be included somewhere in there, but that is not the motivating force for me to continue writing. The truth is, I don't know why I keep writing these things. I think it might be a way of processing the work experience and trying to convey it in a clear and concise manner that helps me understand my past 13 years at this establishment. Not that it is important or even very interesting. Maybe I am trying to defend to myself my employment at a place for such a long period of time, even though working at the Loup has given me the freedom that I moved to New York for in the first place. I needed a place that was steady where I could work while pursuing my other interests, which have been incredibly varied in the decade and a half that I have called New York my home.
So, when you read these posts, I hope you enjoy them, but also know that I am almost writing them as a diary that I might look at some day to help me  remember this time and place in my own history. I always say that in an ever-changing world, at least the Cafe Loup stays the same. I sincerely hope that it stays the same forever, but I know that it won't. Some day it will be a Duane-Reade with a Starbucks kiosk in it, and the Cafe Loup name will be in every mall in America as a "New York style French Bistro." Then, you and I will be able to come back and read all of these blog posts and remember a time that was, of people that were, and a special place in the middle of it all. And we can all laugh at all of my typos, run-on sentences, and basic inability to write in the English language. Until then, I'll see you at the Loup!

#68 "Make Your Wish" August 9, 2013

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Bad Co-Workers

Everyone has bad co-workers. Maybe you have one or more at your place of business. Maybe you are the bad co-worker and you don't know it. Sometimes it is hard to see yourself as others see you, and when you do the same job over and over, you tend not to notice the small things that you are doing that can be incredibly annoying to the ones working around you. I was that guy once.

I had been working in New York for three years at that point. Working in any kitchen is going to be an education of swear words in at least two languages, but in New York it is brought to the next dimension. I could barely put an order in the kitchen without insulting someone or having to defend my girlfriend, mom, and all of my female cousins and aunties. So, I decided to take some time off and go work at my mom's restaurant where the pace was a little slower. I was working there for about a month, when my mom pulled me aside and said we needed to have a little chat. I literally did not know what it was about. So, we sat down and she said essentially, "I am going to have to fire you if you don't start treating the kitchen staff with a little more respect." Now, the staff at the time was my cousins and my brother-in-law on the grill. Not exactly people who I was aiming to piss off. As my mom was having this conversation, I looked back on my behavior from the last month and I realized I had been treating these guys like the kitchen in New York had been treating me. And I realized that I had gone full circle and was now the bad co-worker. These guys, my own family, had taken it upon themselves to complain to my own mother about my behavior. Then, my own mother threatened to fire me because of my bad attitude. I was amazed because I hadn't even realized what I was doing.  I had gone from one kitchen to the next thinking that all kitchens must run this way, and they run on insults and negative vibes. I mean, I should have known better, I had worked in plenty of kitchens before, and not all of them were so dysfunctional. And, to give credit where credit is due, that dysfunctional kitchen was pretty darn functional. We put out an insane amount of dinners with a small staff and an even smaller kitchen, and night after night, they went out without a hitch. These guys had the thing down to a science. And maybe that was why they were always so nasty; they were just bored. Yeah, they could serve up 200 dinners every night 300 days a week, but so what? Let's talk shit about your new haircut! What ever the reason, it had rubbed off on me and I was continuing the cycle of negativity. But I vowed to break the cycle and be more aware of my actions, and lo and behold I wasn't fired. That was the turning point for me to be a better co-worker though, that's for sure. Never again would I step into a situation thinking that I could get by on the actions I had been getting by with prior to that situation.

Not like I am always the greatest co-worker to this day. I am still a pain in the neck, like everyone else, but I try my best to stay positive in the work environment. The way I look at it these days is this: I am only at the job a finite number of hours in the week; why not try to make those hours as pleasant as possible by keeping a positive mental attitude. It's not always easy when you are stressed out, hungry, overworked, broke, and tired. In fact, it's hard to stay positive anywhere, and the last place you think that is possible is in the workplace; a place you don't really want to be but kind of have to be or else you'll be traveling the countryside with a polka-dotted bag tied to a stick. I find that copious amounts of coffee help, and then at a certain time of the evening, a glass of wine does wonders. We call it, "The Attitude Adjustment." So, what I'm saying is that I need medication to stay sane in the workplace. Haha. This entire project grew partly because literally keeping ones head down and pushing through the shift was sometimes the best way to cope with unsavory co-workers. It became so much more, but that was certainly one of the original reasons for the project.

Of course, all this talk about positive mental attitude goes out the window when you are working with truly terrible co-workers. It's hard to stay positive when someone you work with is actually costing you money. Once you cross the threshold of being annoying to the next level of actively harming your co-workers financially, then maybe it is time to look in to another line of work, or at least another place of business. And yet, people stay at the same job far after they've overstayed their welcome. I am probably one of them! I wrote in the last blog post about my brunch colleagues and I not getting along all that well. A sane person would've said, "Well, it's been three years and this person still doesn't like me, maybe I should look for a new job." But I stuck it out for another 10 years! I outlasted the people who didn't like me, or I grew on them so much that they ended up, if not liking me, than at least tolerating me enough to work alongside me for another handful of years.
So, I guess the takeaway is that there are always bad co-workers and you just have to try not to be one of them. As far as the guys in the kitchen are concerned; I still work with half of the original crew. We still go back and forth with each other, but after working together for 13 years, it has become more of a secret language than insults. When a new person is introduced onto the scene, all we have to do is say one word, and the whole crew ends up laughing. Except, of course, the poor new dude.

#66 "The Dirty Shirty Gang" In Color!!! July 17, 2013

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The Music Boxer

I hadn't been to work in a while. I was somewhere, I forget where now. It was probably one of two places, but the specifics are lost on me now. I was settling in to work as one does after an extended time away from the workplace. You know, when you are kind of happy to be back and working again, but still a little melancholy about the trip you were just on. You think about where you were a week ago, two thousand miles from work, where your co-workers were the whole time, toiling away while you were on a beach or something.
But I was kind of happy to be back. I certainly needed the money.
I was excited to get started, to see some of the regulars and chat about the adventures I had been on. I would tell them the highlights and maybe the lowlights. We would talk about getting there and getting back. Somehow people always like to talk about that. It's almost like it comforts them to know that going on a long trip requires a fair amount of travel between the two places. If this travel takes a turn for the worse, it helps the person who never left feel better that they never left. It makes them think that well, I didn't go anywhere but thank goodness I didn't, with all that confusion and hassle just getting there and back.
I was back. The guys in kitchen had already made the usual jokes about me not having a job anymore, they had given it away to someone else since I was gone too long. I had already told the stories over dinner to my co-workers, eager to hear something new. We weren't open yet, but there was already a little buzz of activity over at the bar. My Monday was their Friday. My first day back was their end of a long, awful week. They needed that first, second, and third drink. I needed some coffee.
I went into the coat room to change clothes, from my street clothes into my work attire. Button down shirt, tie, and bistro apron. I put on my King Kong tie and tucked it in so only the bi-planes flying high over the Empire State building were visible, while Kong himself stayed hidden beneath my shirt. People really loved that tie, somehow, even without seeing that Kong was always hidden away, minutes from an ugly death.
It was then that I heard it. It had been the next CD in the 5 disc CD player the whole time, I simply hadn't recognized that the previous CD was the same as it always was. And now, this. This one CD that was on an endless repeat. Waiting patiently as 4 other CDs played before it, until it spins into place and starts. I don't know exactly how long it had been in there. It must have been years, spinning around in the same order and playing the same music 6 nights a week for how long? How could anyone gauge that? The only people who would know tried not to think about it. Outside of the place, we all put it out of our minds; tried our best to not think about the tunes. I'm sure some of us dreamed about the tunes, over and over again, playing in our work nightmares. The trumpet, the saxophone, that one solo, that one note that isn't right but is so ingrained in our minds that if it were to magically become correct we would all revolt.
The whole CD came back to me in those first couple of notes. I could see the entire setlist in my head, knew all of the parts and all of the breaks. I didn't need to hear it, it was so deep within my psyche, I could recite it a capella on the street corner and pick up some extra change. I hadn't thought about it for the entire time I was gone, and now, within one hour of being back, here it was, waiting to greet me upon my returning. Like a bully waiting for me after school, waiting to beat me up because he liked the girl I liked but couldn't articulate himself enough to make her notice. He just bellowed and howled out the same tunes over and over again, punching, kicking and scratching at me with them until I wore them as scars.

#66 "The Dirty Shirty Gang" July 17, 2013

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Being a server or bartender in America, you are dependent on the system of tipping. We make a hourly wage, but it is the minimum wage, so in New York, it comes to about $5.00 an hour. That's double what waiters are making in 19 states, the lowest being $2.13 an hour to wait tables. That is not a lot of money, to say the least, so we depend on the system of tipping. A lot of people are against this system and think it should be abolished completely, with servers then making a salary like any other profession. I am of the school of thought that this is not going to happen any time soon, as it is not something that anyone ever thinks about unless they are working in the restaurant business. People who have never worked in a restaurant know that they have to tip, and so many times it becomes a power trip for them, or a discriminatory act. Some people hold the tip over their servers head nearly from the get-go, saying some things like, "we're going to be a pain in the ass, but we leave good tips." Other people warn you, usually in a joking manner, like when you spill a little water, or worse, some of the drink; "That's coming out of your tip!" It seems to me that at the end of the night, the tips have a way of equalling out, so you'll get those awful tips, but then you'll have some great tippers, so the two offset.
There are some instances in which the tip is entirely lost because of the way people divide up the tip. These days, most people pay by credit card. I don't mind this although our tips are then taxed, but most places these days also collect the cash tips at the end of the night and put it all in the pot so it's all taxed anyway. This is not the case at our place, so our cash tips are tax free. Again, since most people don't pay cash, or tip in cash, this money is usually just a couple bucks here and there; enough to buy a round of drinks, essentially. What really irks me though, and this was the point of this rant, is when people divide the check between each other using cash and credit card, because the majority of these people do it incorrectly. I am here to let you know the incorrect method and hope that in the future, you and your friends will divide it better. So, the incorrect way, and the way that is most commonly seen is as such. Two (or more) people will be dividing the check, I will come over to the table and one of them will hand me a bunch of cash, a card or two, and say, "put the rest on the card." That is incorrect! What usually happens in this case is, I do just that; I count the cash (9 times out of 10 it is more than half of the bill because people are "adding on the tip" as part of their cash payment) and then I run the card. Most times, I pick up the credit card slip and the tip that has been left is only counting the money on the credit card slip, so I am only being tipped on half of the bill. This happens all the time. For some reason, people don't understand that this is happening. They think that since the cash payer "included" the tip in their part of the bill that we are going to get that "extra" money as a tip. But, when someone asks to "put the rest on the card" they obviously know how much they owe. So, if you take out the cash tip, and put more money on the card, they accuse you of overcharging. Some of the time, the people who are paying with credit cards will leave the right amount for the tip, but most of the time, in this scenario, the waiter gets half of the tip that is standard. If the credit card payer is a lousy tipper, then it is sometimes even less.
The correct way of doing this is so achingly simple, it makes me crazy each and every time I get the line, "put the rest on the card." Before I get to that, let me just preface this statement with the following. I realize that not everyone who comes into the restaurant has a lot of money on their debit card. I realize that a lot of the people paying with credit cards are behind on their payments and drowning in debt. I understand all of this. But, this does not excuse you from paying for your meal. So, with that said, here is the correct way to divide the check with cash and a credit card.

Whoever is paying cash in the party gives the cash to the person who is paying with the credit card. The person paying with the credit card keeps the cash and puts the whole bill on the card.
 Boom. Simple.

This way, the whole bill goes on the credit card, the credit card payer can leave tip in cash or credit form, and everyone is happy! The cash payer can feel good about his "tip included" payment, the credit card payer now has some cash on their person, and the tip is correct. Unless, of course, the credit card payer is a bad tipper. But t least they paid correctly!

#64 June 19, 2013

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One of my favorite parts about this one was making the ant farm. It seems to help this giant machine devised by large-brained aliens run well. Although maybe it is really just cosmetic. Regardless, I enjoyed drawing it, and I am not sure I had ever drawn one before. It's funny how there are some things that you never draw even though they are part of your history. When I was a kid, we had an ant farm. I am pretty sure we were inspired to get one by Raul's Wild Kingdom on the classic Weird "Al" movie, "UHF." Whatever the inspiration, my brother and I thought it would be a cool thing to have an ant farm. So, we went to the mall, and picked one up from Kay-bee toys or from the Nature store. You don't get ants at the store, which I initially thought was a little weird, but these kits are all sealed up so there's no way the ants would be able to survive on the shelf for so many weeks/months/years, so instead you had to send away for the ants. The company who makes the farms will then send you live ants through the mail. At this time in my life, I was living in Syracuse, New York, and anyone who has been to Syracuse, knows that it is cold there pretty much 10 months out of the year. So, when we finally got our ants from the real farm/factory, they were frozen solid and dead. It's crazy to think back on that, only because I am remembering them all frozen and dead, but also packaged in a test tube, essentially. So, my brother and I are looking at all these dead ants in a frozen tube and we are obviously pretty bummed out because we want to see these ants dig! Right? That's why you get the ant farm in the first place, because you can't believe that they will actually be able to do the digging (even though your whole life you've seen ants doing just fine on their own). So we sent back the frozen ants, and soon enough we had ants in a tube that were totally alive! We put them in the green plastic farm that was three-quarters filled with white sand, and watched to see if they would really dig. And weren't we pretty excited when they did! Wow, those ants really digging tunnels! Minutes of fun!
We had the ant farm for about as long as the average kid has an ant farm, which is to say, until the first batch of ants dies. Once they were in there and working away, the whole novelty of thing had worn off. Don't get me wrong, the inventors of the ant farm are geniuses. Whoever can make money by mailing bugs to suburban homes for 50 years is pretty smart. Not to mention, the simple design of the thing is pretty amazing. It's no more than a couple inches deep, and about the size of an 11 x 14 poster that is a self contained, living  picture. The more I write about it here as an object, the more I want to get one again, but in my adult life. I think I want one just to see if I could take better care of the ants now that I am a relatively normal, functioning adult. Or, would the ants grow to be a finite age and die, but not cannibalize each other. Because, that was one of my questions then, as it is now. What happens to the remains of the ants when they die? I doubt the ants bury one another, so where do the corpses go? Also, since there is no queen sold with the set, how does one continue the colony except by introducing new ants into the existing farm?
Luckily for me, there are still thousands of people buying and selling ant farms. In fact, NASA developed a new gel as a sand substitute which also contains nutrients for the ants, so they could be observed in zero-gravity. All of the questions I have just asked have been answered by the internet. That is a great thing about writing these blog posts. While I am writing, I have some pretty random stories that send me down strange rabbit holes of internet. This post is a perfect example of this; I would never look up ant farms or be interested in getting one, but since I was going down memory lane, it just kind of happened. Now I know NASA is interested in ant farms and their history goes back to 1900's era France. Yes, this knowledge is all but useless, but it might make for some interesting conversations at the bar tomorrow.

#63 "Highway 61, Re-twisted." in color? June 12, 2013

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When I was a kid I was really scared of horror movies. I couldn't watch them and my mom would  not allow me to watch them because I would have bad dreams about them for weeks. But there was this one stretch of time when me and my boy Greg Prescott would sit down in his basement and watch all the classic horror movies on afternoon t.v.; Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolfman, The Creature From the Black Lagoon and so on. I think I was able to watch those ones without being completely scared senseless because they were in black and white and so they were removed from reality enough for me to stomach it. I have not re-watched any of those movies since that time in Greg's basement and I doubt I will watch them again. It is because I am very peculiar when it comes to black and white movies. I realize that there are true classics, and arguably the greatest movies of all time, all shot in black and white, but I find them to be less powerful than movies in color. I think it has something to do with the extra step away from reality, but I also don't like the way the actors in black and white movies act.
I understand that this view is broad and that there are exceptions to the rule, but I am speaking here in generalizations. I find that the actors are overacting and speak with an unbelievable affected accent. I can't imagine that is how people actually talked. However, there is one woman who comes into the restaurant who might just prove me wrong. Her name is Sheila and she must be 85 years old, minimum. She is amazing. Sheila comes in every Sunday after going to, fittingly, the movies. She wears a hat with a hat pin and always has a Dewar's on the rocks in a stem glass and then a light dinner with some Sauvignon Blanc. She is a dear old lady and is always going to see weird movies. I want to write a spin-off blog called "What did Sheila Watch This Week?" and have it just be a list of all the things Sheila watched. We've gotten to the point where we ask her what she watched and her opinion on it. For instance, she went to see "22" a couple months ago, only because she had never heard of it and thought it might be interesting. She had no idea she was in for Jonah Hill and Tatum Channing putzing around for an hour and a half. So we asked her what she thought of it, and naturally she said, "It was awful!" Now we are getting to the part where Sheila just might convince me that people talked weird back in the early days of film. Sheila has a way of speaking that very few people possess today and can really only be explained by harkening back to old films. She might be from England, giving her an undistinguishable English accent. Or maybe it's not an English accent, but upper crust American accent, which I am guessing was once an upper crust English accent that has been passed down a couple generations in America. To give you an example, you'll have to use your imagination and speak out loud, so if you are in a coffee shop or other public place, you might get some weird looks, but it'll be worth it. One day, Sheila beckoned Tim over to her table. He bent down to hear what she had to say, and with a big grin on her face, she said the following. This is where you have to speak out loud, as an 85+ year old woman with maybe an English accent. If you can't say it out loud, come by the restaurant and ask Tim and I to say it for you, it's one of our favorite sayings. So, ok, back to what she said. She leans in and says to Tim, "You know that waiter that I don't like? He touched my hat! Can you believe that?" I am laughing just typing that, but I am also laughing picturing all 8 of you devoted readers saying this out loud in your homes and/or offices. The point is, Sheila is the closest I have ever come to believing that people in old movies weren't just making up some accent because of a cycle perpetrated by the movies themselves.
I am no linguist, and so this theory is all assumption, and I would gladly listen to how I am completely wrong I am and learn the real reason that movie stars of yore talk in this slightly affected language. And I am only talking about white actors. Don't even get me started about black people being portrayed in black and white films.
Instead, I will just say that this drawing was a fun exercise in coloring in a monochrome palette on the computer. I had never colored a drawing in with a monochrome palette in Photoshop before. On the one hand I liked it because it made my job a lot easier because I didn't have to think about what color was going to look good where. This one also took significantly less time to color than the one that are "in color." Those ones take me an average of 6 hours to color, especially these days when the color is very detailed. This one took less time than that, although it was still pretty time consuming. It remains the only T&J colored in "black & white" so it will always stand out because of that. I think Greg Prescott would approve.

#63 "Highway 61, Retwisted." June 12, 2013

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You hear about haunted houses and buildings all the time in New York. There are even ghost tours that you can pay money to have people show you various spots in the city where there are tales of hauntings. Since this city is huge and it's history goes all the way back to the time before white people, you are guaranteed to be standing or working on the exact spot where someone or something was killed. Actually, if you think about it, every square inch of the earth is littered with the remains of something that was once alive, but that is a different, more complex story that I will get into at another time.
I have never seen anyone die in the restaurant, although I have seen people very close to dying and having to be taken out of the restaurant by the EMTs. It's always a scary thing to witness, but it's a thing that happens when you work in a place that is always open for the public to use. People die every day in all kinds of strange manners. Most of the time these people are not planning on dying that day, and so it's a surprise to them and the ones who are around them. Many years ago, I was working in the front of the restaurant and a young lady came in with her father and mother, which is a extremely common theme. But this night, things would end up being somewhat less than common. They had essentially just sat down at the table when I went over to get drink orders from them. As I approached, the young lady started screaming at me to call 9-11. Her father was having trouble breathing, and one look at him and I knew that, yes indeed, I should be calling 9-11. He looked awful; pale white skin with green undertones, an 1,000 yard stare in his eyes and barely breathing at all. It scared the crap out of me, so I took out my cell phone and dialed 9-11 for the first time in my life. I told the operator where we were and what was happening and to send an ambulance right away, and that was that; or so I thought. I went over to the manager to tell him that I had called and instead of being happy about it and saying that was a responsible thing to have done, he started screaming at me! He told me that I was under no circumstances to call 9-11, that it was his job to call 9-11. He said that he had already called when he overheard the young lady and my conversation and now he was yelling at me because the city was now probably sending over two ambulances. I know that sounds crazy, because it was. This manager from back then was crazy. He didn't like me very much and would use any excuse to yell at and berate me. I used to think all restaurant managers were insane and there was a special place in hell for them. No doubt I have talked about that at some point on this blog. I have since changed my tune a little bit, but now I have only upgraded it into the belief that restaurant managers are doomed to live out eternity managing restaurants in some strange purgatory-like restaurant that is always open.
So, anyway. One ambulance showed up and took the father away in a stretcher and out of the restaurant for the evening. I don't know if he died or not. He may have lived and is still a customer at the restaurant to this day. I did not know those people, so I wouldn't be able to remember them today. Since that surreal first time, I have seen the EMTs in the restaurant a handful of times. Every time I can remember, the person who needs them leaves the restaurant with full consciousness, thankfully. However, before the restaurant was in that location, there was a bar in it's place before it. Who knows how many people died there? And the fact that there are 100 apartments above the restaurant almost guarantees human death on that exact location at some point in time. All of this begs the question, where are all the ghosts?
I have closed that place up hundreds of times over the years and have never seen a ghost. How could this be possible? Yes, I have been a little freaked out on occasions very late at night when I am the only one in the whole place and there's no music and no sound. But even then, I am more freaked out about being robbed than about being scared by a ghost. Although now that I know restaurant managers are perpetually managing restaurants for eternity in the hereafter, I guess I should keep my guard up a little. After all, one our most evil managers died in mysterious circumstances about 5 years ago, so he may be haunting the establishment and I have merely not noticed. He's probably haunting a club though, now that I think of it. If I do end up seeing his ghost, I will certainly tell the NYC Ghost Tour people about it. This way we can diversify our clientele by adding occult members and finally get to the bottom of this haunted house thing. Because I really just want to know about the place across the street that I believe was built on an indian burial ground. But that, too, is a different story.

#62 "Blue Shirt, Period." June 6, 2013

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New York City certainly has it's share of pests.
They say that the rat population in New York is 8 million, meaning one rat for every person who lives here. I like that idea and I will continue to spread that myth even though there seems to be a much smaller number of rats living here. But, like anyone who has grown up with cartoons on the mind, the idea that there is one rat for every person makes for a great cartoon idea. I like the idea that there is a "rat Tim" and a "rat Jeremy" and so on and on until every person has a rat doppelganger. Like in the movie, "Ratatouille" the rats are having their own lives and going about it in a parallel miniature New York right under our feet. Some of the rats wear glasses, some of them have funny haircuts and tattoos. Sometimes they get into KFC and run around for the camera crews that show it on the news.
Thankfully, we have never had any rats in the restaurant. We've had other things, but never rats, thank goodness. As long as I have worked there, we have had cats. The first one was old when I got there, and though he was very loved by the staff and the late-night patrons, he wasn't very good at his job. Namely, catching mice. Now, before I go on, I just want the light-hearted readers to know that mice are a part of living in a big city. They live outdoors, but like any warm blooded creature, they like being warm more than being cold, so if they get the opportunity to be inside, the are going to take that opportunity. Sometimes, this means that they will live inside a huge building complex with multiple underground entrances that houses over 100 apartments, multiple restaurants and other businesses. So when you are in a New York City restaurant, remember that there has been, or currently is, an active pest presence. So anyway, this cat was pretty old and didn't have the will to hunt anymore. I resented him for that and I would always tell him to do his job and get rid of these little dudes. Well, he never listened to me and soon he died.
We replaced him with a brother and sister duo by the names of Coco and Felix. Coco was the star, and Felix was the workman. Coco would come upstairs at 10 or 11 and lounge on the bar liked she owned the place, which she kind of did since she was a "child" of the actual owners. We would put out plates of ice and she would lick the ice and the people at the bar would go gaga over her. Felix would hang back in the basement until everyone was gone and then he would do the patrol. This was the case for years and years until the NYC Health Department started cracking down on all furry residents and started giving out grades. Before the grading system, it was just pass/fail. Now they grade you. It's a racket though, as it is just another way for the city to squeeze money out of it's business operators since you can essentially pay your way to an A. When this system was first put into place, you might remember, the restaurant got a "C." I talk about it a little more extensively in this post from a couple years ago. Well, the cats got kicked out and we ended up getting an "A," but then we had mice. And those mice were brave. They didn't care about business hours or waiting until everyone had left the place to start foraging for the occasional french fry. No, they came out all the time. It was crazy. For a year or so, we had a really big problem with the pests. That was, until we finally had Felix come back to live there again. Now we have our friendly little buddy back with us and are once again pest free. We even maintained our "A."
I guess I started talking about pests since this one has some sort of bug being gassed while an evil Wibblesmack looks on laughing. I realize that this image might not even be the focal point of this piece, but I feel sometimes with these sprawling drawings, I have to pick one thing to discuss, since finding symbolism in a piece like this is usually difficult at best. I think some of them have overall themes, but this is one of the pieces that is a bit more abstract. I realize that sometimes these can hit you over the head with the themes, but this one is more like lightly patting you on the shin. Or brushing up against your rat doppelganger's tail.

#61 "Richard of XIII Street" May 30, 2013

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Working in the Village in New York City puts you in pretty close contact with all walks of life. You come across the salt of the earth as well as the pepper. I have seen and heard things that most people couldn't dream up, and this picture is about one of those instances. This story happened to Tim and I sometime in the fall of 2011, I am guessing, based on the date that I scanned this picture into the computer (that date is January 18, 2012. That means it took me a year and a half to color it in. Looking at the timeline of these drawings sometimes makes me think about the years that people would spend on one painting. I never understood that until now). So, Tim and I were standing outside of the Loup and Tim was complaining. He had this thing on his hand, a swollen, red bump that may have been a spider bite or a rash of some sort, but it was painful and itchy. As we are discussing this, a man walks right up us and says, "what's the problem?" To this, Tim shows the guy his hand and the guy whips out a switchblade and says, "I could lance it right now!" To which, Tim and I backed off and said something along the lines of, "Whoawhatareyoudoingdudeputthatknifeaway." The guy chuckled and said he was just kidding and that he just wanted to use the bathroom. We let him in the restaurant because we were a little shell shocked and maybe thought we didn't have a choice. This guy only looked a little homeless and the stunt with the knife had caught us off guard. Well, we were laughing about the whole thing, and then we thought, "Oh no, this guy is probably robbing the place, and we let him in!" so we look through the window, and see him coming out, so Tim decides to retaliate with a joke of his own. As the guy is coming out the door, Tim pretends to rob him! We all laugh and the dude starts telling us a story. His story goes like this: His name is Richard and he lives in the neighborhood. He's been carrying the switchblade on him for 30 years, since back when the neighborhood was a little dicier than it is today. Back then he thought he needed a little extra protection, and then when his kids were born, he thought they might need a little extra protection. I realize that there are people out there that believe they have to be armed to walk around the city, but I had never been confronted like that. I have been jumped, but those dudes were just kids without weapons, and sure they made me bleed, but the incident didn't make me think I needed to arm myself to walk around the city. So, we hear all of this talk from this dude, and then we invite him in for a drink. He says he'll come back another time, and as we are exchanging our farewells, he leans over to Tim and says, "Oh, and your hand? That'll clear right up tomorrow." And you know what? It did!

Well, I was amped after that whole thing. I went right inside and broke out this triple dupe pad. It already had that Batman rip-off guy on it, so I thought Richard would be a good foil to that. If the Batman character was Good, then Richard would be Evil or vice versa. I think I got his likeness pretty spot-on, from his shit-eating grin to the army surplus jacket. The only thing I did wrong is he is holding his knife backwards, the lock should be on the top. My favorite part about the drawing is the Tim character whose hand is all swollen up and Richard is about to lance it. Tim drew the face of "himself" earlier, and I merely added the arm and body. It worked out perfectly. The rest of that drawing filled itself in pretty steadily over the course of a month or so, until I finished it up in mid January, 2012.  We never did see Richard again. Maybe he cut his hair or trimmed his beard. Maybe he was really just a well-maintained homeless guy. Maybe he moved. Or, probably, he was just one of the 12 million people that cross your path every day in this city. Only, this one time, he stopped to talk and give us a little scare with a switchblade. 

#59 "2-5-5-4-7-4-6" in Color!!! July 10, 2013

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Pick up your phone and call the number that is also the title of this piece. Area code +1 (212).
The phone will ring in a restaurant on 13th Street, in between 6th and 7th Avenues in New York City. Depending on the hour, someone might answer the phone, although if it's too early in the morning, it will ring for a very long time, or until you get bored of listening to the constant ringing of the phone in your earpiece/hands-free device. Yes, this is the phone number to the place where Tim and I work, and where we create these art pieces. We draw each of them at the restaurant and only at the restaurant. We don't color them there, since our only source of color is to use the natural colors in the food, such as beets, bitters, and blue #2, or to use the various crayons that we keep in the tea drawer for our younger guests who like to color on the table cloths (I have kept some of those masterworks and will post them here someday). I have contemplated coloring one or some or all of them at the restaurant with said hues, but I continue to bring them home and color them in on Photoshop instead. I like the way that the drawings change. They start off so randomly, so arbitrary, and usually so dirty. They have been lying around a restaurant, being used by servers, bartenders, busboys, and food runners to put in orders, jot down notes, reservations, and phone numbers. During that time, Tim and I are drawing on them, and then they get stuffed into a drawer to live with the rest of the triple dupe pads that have run out of order forms, but have unfinished T&J drawings on them. There, the dupe pads could live for a couple days up to a couple years. That's right, years. I think there are a couple drawings in there now that have been living in the drawer for multiple years. These drawings just won't be finished. I am sure as drawings they want to be finished, but neither Tim nor I can find the inspiration or content to finish them, and so they wait for motivation to find us, so that we can finish them. They must feel left out, because some of these drawings come together in the matter of a couple days. We'll start one of the drawings and it'll just fly through the "system" and be done before you know it, while it's comrades sit in the drawer waiting to be finished for years. Next time you come into the restaurant, ask us to see the unfinished drawings. It's pretty neat to see them in their original environment.
This drawing is not one of those fast ones. If I remember correctly, this one took quite a while to finish. The reason I know this is from the woman depicted on the left-hand side of the drawing holding the #2 sign with the massive growths on the other arm. This is one of my first sketches of a character from my children's book, Jenny Balloons. This is literally one of the first sketches of that character, who would eventually change significantly. In this drawing, she is definitely a woman, whereas in the book, she starts as a baby and only ages to about 16, I believe. However, I drew this drawing of the girl who actually inspired the whole story in the first place. The story goes like this: I was leaving the restaurant late one Sunday night sometime in 2011. I was having one of those nights where nothing was going right and I was annoyed with everything. I get down to the subway and there is a woman dressed head to toe in balloons. She looks like she wants someone to talk to, and I know it's going to be me. I am not in the mood to talk after a long, busy night behind the bar, so I avoid eye contact and walk to the other end of the platform. Well, don't you know, the train arrives and I get on the last car in the last door, and who do I see coming towards me? The girl in the balloon dress. She comes up to me and sits down right there on the floor of the subway and starts talking to me. I knew it! I end up talking with her the entire time back to Brooklyn. She turned out to be a really interesting person. I should have known that anyone dressed in a full gown made entirely out of balloons and adorned with a balloon hat would be interesting. It turns out her name is Katie Balloons and she is an incredibly talented balloon artist. She makes dresses, does sculpture, parties, all with balloons! She gave me a couple of balloons and we said our goodbyes, and I went home much happier than I had been before. The next day I woke up and immediately wrote the first draft of what would become "Jenny Balloons." I drew a rough draft of what the dress looked like that day, and then drew the one you see above later that week. I wouldn't start illustrating Jenny Balloons for another 8 months, as I was working on other books for Mibblio and we were originally going to go with a female illustrator for Jenny. Once I started illustrating that book, I was busy with it for the rest of the year, which is why 2012 is essentially a black hole of T&J drawings. I wouldn't get back to coloring this drawing for about a year and a half after it was originally drawn. By that time, I had spent so much time illustrating all those balloon dresses and outfits found in the children's book, that coloring this one was a breeze. It goes to show you that some things take time to be realized. And sometimes, the final product is worth the wait!
Is the phone still ringing?

#58 "Magic Wanda" in color! May 15, 2013

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(small talk)
Well, it was an interesting summer. In New York, the weather was pretty mild and I only had to turn on my ancient air conditioning unit a handful of times. I don't know if it was a historically mild summer or if it just felt mellower than years past, you'll have to consult some sort of online almanac for that information. Tim and I had an art opening at Hifi bar again in July and the show is still up in the back room of the bar if you would like to go check it out (probably for a couple more weeks, so see it while you can). I opened up a couple Etsy shops, (the one in the link is not for T&J prints, that one can be found here) but I have only sold a couple of things.

(theoretical rant)
However, I thought the summer was successful overall and felt like I made some progress in my life. Sometimes it's hard to see if you have made progress or not in your life. Time, for the most part, seems to drag along and it's not until you turn around and reflect that it, all of a sudden, seems like the time sped by. The day to day grind of life seems to take so long, and then you look back on the summer, and it seems like not only was it a year ago, but it also seems like it went by in the blink of an eye. I guess when you think about the universe in the universal scale, it did go by in the blink of an eye, and actually, much faster than a blink. But we usually don't think of our lives on the universal scale, because it is too big to grasp. That sort of thinking can be depressing, since the conclusion is always that life is incredibly short and that in the universal scale of things, anything that we do, short of super novae, is not going to leave the slightest mark on the history of the universe. Or, you could look at it from the point of view of chaos theory, that believes in the Butterfly effect. This is the theory that states that even the flapping of a butterflies wings can have enormous consequences days or moths or light years later. If we were to believe in that theory, then every single thing we do is affecting not only the space directly surrounding our person, but is affecting the entire history of the universe henceforth. That is kind of interesting to think that even the breath we are taking in and out of our lungs, all day, every day, could have an effect on the future history of the universe. The sad part is that we will never be able to witness the effect that we had on the history of the universe because we presumably won't be around to witness the effects.

(conspiracy nonsense)
I was talking about that over the summer as well, but on a more celestial plane. I mean, it is depressing that we won't be able to experience the future, but the really sad part, I was saying, is that we'll never know all of the secrets that have been kept secret from us. Or all the knowledge that we will never know. These truths are slightly depressing. Take the universe, itself. We will never know how big it is, who or what made it, and what is on the outside of it. Scientists generally agree that the universe is finite and that it is expanding, but what is on the outside if the "outside" is not made up of "matter?" These questions were on my mind this summer. But also, on a smaller level, I was waxing that in my life time, we will never know who shot JFK or ever get any answers to the great conspiracy theories of our time. I guess on the one hand, it's more interesting to live in a world where all of the answers are not readily available, for if that was the case, everything would be boring because you would know the outcome of every event ever. It would be nice from a gambler's standpoint, because you would never lose on the ponies, but other than that, it would be boring. Also, I am willing to bet that even people in power don't really know all of the answers to all of the conspiracy theories. JFK, for instance; I doubt our current president knows or even cares about who shot JFK because he has so many pressing issues on his plate that he couldn't possibly care less about that 50 year old mystery. Now, when he first entered office, he strikes me as the kind of giddy person who's first questions were to unveil all the national secrets, but then almost immediately he had a country to run, so the excitement was probably short lived, if it happened at all. It's fun to think that when you die you could ask someone all the questions and get all the answers, but then you're dead, so what's the fun in that?

(final thoughts)
I guess you have to accept that you will never know the answers to all the questions, so the least you can do with your life is try to get the answers to as many questions that you possibly can. Then, when you die, your brain will be so heavy with knowledge that when you collapse from death and your head hits the pavement, the impact will tilt the Earth off of it's axis and create a domino effect in which the universe destroys itself, thus rendering the rest of universal history obsolete and no longer worth talking about. 

#56 "Frozen Pool Party" In Color! May 1, 2013

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I love a good cocktail just as much as the next guy. I also love that "cocktail culture" keeps changing. Remembering back to the early Aughts when people were going to fancy Hotel Bars and ordering a $250 bottle of Kettle One just makes me cringe. I realize that people still do this, and in spades, but I like that it is not fashionable now, and when you think of the people who still practice this bad habit, they are thought of as excessive fools. No, we live in a new time, the time of the "craft cocktail." You may have been to a couple places that make them. The bars are usually very dimly lit, the mixologist behind the bar carefully pours the exact amount of ingredients into a tumbler, stirs furiously, slaps a piece of mint or chars the spritz from an orange rind, puts it in the drink and serves it to you, all for the low price of $14 a drink. This is, of course, the extremely over simplified, caricature of what is involved in a craft cocktail. Usually, these men and women who serve this type of drink are extremely knowledgeable about the booze that they are slinging. Their knowledge goes well beyond brand recognition, they are interested in craft booze; small batch liquors and distilleries who use only the finest quality grains, barrels, and customs allowed by law. They're almost like the vegans of the spirits world in the sense that they know exactly what is going into the drink, and making damn sure there is no secret ingredients (added caramel for color? I think not!). I think that this trend is a great thing for the world. People should be more knowledgeable about what is going into their bodies, especially when it comes to alcohol. My whole adult life, I haven't really cared what I was drinking, so long as it had something in it to get me to where I was going. Granted, I had things that I didn't like, or things that I had had a bad experience with, but I would drink almost anything. I don't really like gin, but it's been years since I drank it, so I don't even know if that is true anymore. I used to not like scotch because of an incident with Johnnie Walker Red back in my teenage years. In fact, I was physically unable to even smell the stuff until well into my 20's. However, I work in a restaurant where it is my job to serve these beverages, so I got over it; I actually enjoy single malt scotch very much these days. 

All this being said, the restaurant where Tim and I work is not a craft cocktail bar. If the craft cocktail bars of the world want to be seen as the filet mignons, we are more of the meat and potato stew variety. Does that mean that our cocktails are bad? No way! We have some of the best drinks in New York City; they are huge, they are cheap, and they are cold. What more could you want out of a beverage? Seriously though, our bar caters to a lot of old people, so the drinks are old fashioned, literally. We make Martinis, Manhattans, Cosmopolitans, Old Fashions, Gimlets and Gibsons more often than not. Even the youngsters that come in don't want something fancy, they want Vodka Red Bull, which we don't have (we toyed with the idea of Jaegermeister but never sold any of it). I grew up in an old persons bar, and I was trained there as well, so this kind of old school bar tending is what I know. There is a certain charm in it, and when the going gets tough, I can make a lot of drinks in a short amount of time. Craft cocktails are meant to be made slow and enjoyed slowly as well. You don't shoot these drinks, although sometimes they are so delicious, you would like to, but then you remember that they're 14 bucks a pop and you chill out and sip the thing like a normal person and not some alcoholic menace that you really are. In that case, you come down to our restaurant and have a pint glass full of gin that we call a martini, charge you $12, and send you stumbling into the streets. Because, at the end of the day, people drink alcohol because it gets you drunk. Sure, you can dress it up with all the best ingredients, make the drink with a song and a dance, but at the end of the day, you just want something that's going to make you feel good.

#56 "Frozen Pool Party" May 1, 2013

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There have been a lot of dishwashers at the restaurant since I started working there a million years ago. Some of them have been teenagers, some of them have been grown men. Most of them have been from Mexico, although a couple of them were white boys right out of high school. That didn't last that long, it may have been a summer job, but all of them left looking for something more; a promotion, a different position in the kitchen, or anything else besides being in Dish Land. Being a dishwasher in a restaurant is a brutal, thankless job. It's hot and wet and the dishes seem to never stop arriving from the dining room. On top of all of that, you are expected to mop the dining room, the kitchen and the bathrooms every day. You have to be the last ones there most nights, cleaning the kitchen, and a lot of the time, you have to be the first one in to clean the dining room. Sometimes you have to help in the preparation of food, doing the most mundane of chores; peeling carrots, dicing bread, peeling shrimp. Because of this challenging workload, and it is a challenging job, most people do not want to have anything to do with it. That, and it doesn't pay well. If you are working in a restaurant, being a dishwasher is the low end of the totem pole, and usually you want to work your way up through the ranks as fast as humanly possible. 

I started out as a dishwasher at my aunt and uncle's restaurant, called Bishop's Terrace. I worked the lunch shift when it wasn't that busy. I am thankful for that now, because the fast pace of dinner would have been a bit much for my childhood self to deal with. Having to load, and unload an industrial sized dishwasher under pressure can be not only difficult, but incredibly unnerving. You are dealing with scalding hot water and extremely hot dishes; the metal ones burn your hands and the ceramics slip and can shatter. And then there is the mess. The whole job revolves around taking something that is dirty and making it clean. Dealing with food waste is particularly disgusting. People forget this, and are mindless with their plates. They put butter everywhere, ketchup everywhere, and all of it ends up on the dishwashers hands. I rarely eat ketchup to this day because of this. 

I washed dishes a couple other times in my life. Mostly just to help out when there was a spot that needed to be filled, but it was never my only job. I would supplement it with waiting tables and working the counter at the fish market, for example. I can't imagine washing dishes 5 or 6 days a week as your only job. And yet, people do it. We have a guy named Carlos who started at the restaurant the same time I did, worked the dish pit for 7 years, and then took all his money that he made and moved back to Mexico. He bought a house, married a girl and had a baby. A couple months ago, he moved back and got a bunch of his old shifts back. I guess if you can save money, it doesn't matter how bad the job appears to be from the outside if you can deal with the day to day monotony of the thing. I have said it before on this blog that every job can be monotonous and awful if you have a bad attitude about the whole thing. After all, you don't want to be defined by your job, even though a lot of times, people actually will judge you by what you do. It's one of the reasons I stopped asking people what they do. They have to actively tell me what they do for work, but I have stopped asking. I have good friends that I have no idea what they do for work. In the end, it doesn't matter to me what you do if you are a interesting person to be around. 

The whole reason for this dishwashing rant is that one of the dish washers who work with Tim and I at the restaurant contributed to this edition of "Mind on Loup." The kid's name is Alex and his last day was actually just last night. Like Carlos, he is taking the money that he made here for the last couple years and is moving back home, where presumably the money will last way longer than it will here in New York. Alex has some talent as an artist, he would sometimes draw pictures on the white board in the kitchen and is always interested in the progress of these drawings. I don't remember which night he contributed to this one, but he wrote the "Graffitty" in the lefthand side. Then, he wrote "Mexico" on the right hand side, which got turned into a monster of some sort. In the colored-in version, you can't even make out the word as it has been completely integrated into the drawing. I don't know Alex's last name and I might never see him again, but I will always remember him through this picture. He is a good kid and I wish him luck in Mexico and wherever else his life might take him. I hope he continues to draw pictures and make art in some way. I also hope that he never washes another dish if he doesn't want to. Dishwashers are an integral part of every restaurant but they never get the respect.

#55 "A Day at the Beach" In Color. April 24, 2013

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I wasn't allowed to watch "Jaws" when I was a kid. In fact, I never even saw the full movie until last year. I thought it was okay, kind of like two movies in one, with the first one being about a shark killing people and the second about people hunting for said shark. Nowadays, Lil' Stevie Spielberg would've broke it up into two (or three) movies and it would probably still be a summer blockbuster. I give it less than 10 years until they remake it. My uncle Jigger had the novel and I read the first couple chapters this past summer. It's pretty bad, although with the subject matter, it's no mystery how the movie became the blueprint for all future blockbusters.
I spent a lot of time on the beach as a kid, and so it's no wonder my mom didn't want me watching that movie. It would have probably scarred me a little bit and made going to the beach a chore for her, as I would be scared to go swimming because Jaws would obviously be waiting in the water and ready to eat me. I knew about the movie, of course. It was mythological to all kids my age, and kids would talk about it with the same reverence as King Kong and Godzilla. In the early 80's it was as famous as any previous movie monster had ever been (I know that it came out in 1975, but I wasn't born yet and by the time I was able to discuss these important topics in elementary school, it was almost 10 years old). But the thing that probably made Jaws scarier than the Wolfman or Dracula was that Jaws was real, sort of. Granted, Jaws was a caricature of the Great White shark, but (s)he was based on a real live living thing that actually is a threat to humans sometimes. People are still scared of sharks, and every summer, one of them attacks someone, chomping off an arm or nibbling on legs. This fact makes Jaws a timeless movie monster that will always be scary.
In this picture, however, the real monsters seem to be the people. I mean, there isn't even a shark pictured; or is there? Yes, there is a giant squid present but that is more out of the 1954 classic "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." That movie, I was allowed to see. I was allowed to watch a lot of Disney movies and those classic ones are sometimes pretty crazy. I don't remember much about the movie, but the squid attacking the Nautilus will always be with me. It might even be where this squid came from, although now that I think of it, there have been a couple of squids in my life that have been influential. The first, and scariest is obviously the one from the aforementioned movie, the second would have to be from the cover of They Might Be Giants album, Apollo 18. This album came out in 1992, a couple years after I was introduced to the band and listened to them almost solely until high school. The squid on the front cover is attacking a Sperm Whale, not unlike in the Museum of Natural History in New York City. Above the aquatic battle scene is the Apollo 18 moon landing craft. I always liked the bringing together of space and sea. I still do, as I find the two places eerily similar and sea creatures to be incredibly alien. In fact, more people have been to the moon than have been to the very bottom of the ocean. I think that is why people are so afraid of the ocean and the creatures that live within the ocean. The ocean is vast and seemingly endless, and then when you think of all of the things beneath the surface, it is a bit unnerving. The same can be said about space; the size is almost too big to even imagine and the lack of knowledge of what exists out there is fodder for a million more movies.
However, the guy at the end of the food chain seems to be the surfer dude. This seems unlikely, since most surfers seem to be pretty laid back and have a respect for all of the creatures of the ocean. This is not always the case, and there have been numerous accounts of surfer dudes being pretty awful, but the prevailing stereotype is that they are not actually monsters. Maybe this guy was in Swayze's surfer gang in the movie "Point Break" and he was the last remaining dude after Swayze caught the 100 year wave. Either that, or the guy really loves sushi style calamari. Regardless, the whole scene could be a pretty bizarre scene in some extremely surreal summer blockbuster.