Full online text of Steal Stuff From Work Excerpt by Jasper Pierce

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Steal Stuff From Work

It was the busiest night of the year. Friday night, graduation weekend at the University of Washington. One cook and two waiters had called in sick. From the back of the kitchen, I saw the extant waitstaff come in from the front dining room looking white, glazed with fear, with twice their normal number of tables refilling themselves unstoppably, customers lined up out the door, having waited for an hour to be seated, each party a family dressed tastefully and obviously forcing a celebratory air. You would take their drink orders and come upon them again ten minutes and fifteen tables later struggling to remember them as they looked up with imploring eyes. They recognized you, they knew your name, you were their only chance at surviving this restaurant with celebratory air still intact. But you had no idea who they were despite having previously engaged them in hypnotized small talk during which you guessed who had graduated and congratulated them and asked their major while your mind crawled with appetizers, checks, remembered forgotten errands such as Dijon mustard or a peppermill or even a cocktail napkin a particular and labor-intensive customer might have requested for a spilled drop of martini or perhaps just to test you, to prove that you really were willing to jump through the smallest imaginable hoop even in the stormiest of weather on this special special night.  

Where were their orders? 

The waitstaff would come into the kitchen looking white, transmitting the tension of angry customers toward certain imperative unbegun steaks, salmon, or veal medallions. The overworked cooks glared back with paring knives in their eyes. 

The waitstaff would come in looking white, except, that is, for Cy. Cy gleamed like a messiah, and all you saw in his eyes was cash. Short, stocky, with big glasses, an owl in a tuxedo shirt, he played the kitchen staff like a piano. He was a pro, issuing staccato orders, reminders, retractions — irritating in his punctiliousness but refreshing in his unaffected, audible brevity — an expert air traffic controller in a thunderstorm. And oh yes his orders would all come through perfect and on time and with only minimal injuries perpetrated by enraged cooks — the filet that had fallen on the floor served up as pretty as a photo on the cover of Restaurant magazine, or garlic alfredo infected with invisible traces of saliva, mucus, pus, blood, semen, or who knows what revolting bodily fluid. Or Cy would inform the cooks who the richest pricks in the crowd were and the cooks might experiment with the dinners, work out their vengeance that way. And by the end of the night when the crew had regrouped barside, Cy would buy, a puffing suspendered bow-tied penguin emperor, in a blur of generosity dispensing upon the cooks less than they were worth but more than they had ever been given.

And if Cy had broken 0 in tips, admitting to perhaps 0 of it for tax purposes, this currency converted to charisma, and then maybe even I, Sir Kemp the dishwasher, might be invited to join in a round of shots underwritten by Cy, who also overtipped his bartender, keeping vital the gratuity economy on which he was financially and emotionally dependent. And, believe me, he didn’t have to buy me a shot. Working the cooks to get his orders served up unerringly and swiftly was how he brought down his cash. But in the end, where I worked, it didn’t matter to the customers how well or quickly I washed their plates. Cy rode the cooks for the dishes, the cooks rode me for clean plates, I rode the bussers for the dirty plates, and I might ever interact with Cy only if I waited too long to run a rack of water glasses through the machine and then he would be in my face for the moment. But I was not anxious to get attention. I worked like a wench, truth be told, and became the star dishwasher for nights like these. Shifts like these, obviously, were not popular among dishwashers. Only for the waiters and the owner did a crescendo of commerce bring a corresponding surge in wage. 

But I could get away with a lot, and, if I turned the dishes around, and if, when they saw me working, they saw me working like a wench, and if I kept the servers in water glasses still so hot from the dishwasher they might crack if you poured ice in them, and if I kept at least two saucepans of every size hanging where the cooks could grab them without looking, and if I unloaded the bustubs so the bussers might grab them back, then, even if I made use of every horizontal surface to stack procrastinated saucers, tupperware, parfait glasses, baking sheets, they left me alone with the whole back of the restaurant and its storage areas at my disposal, with me knowing that by the end of the night — a night like this might finally end by two a.m. if the closers didn’t drink too much (but they would) — when the floor was mopped, the register drawer in the safe, and half the inventory gone, nobody would be in any kind of condition to count how many steaks and how many swordfish. The math would work itself backward, reverse-engineering the expected totals. Yes, in a buzz of activity nobody would notice anything I did, and if I moved fast enough to keep abreast of the buzz, if I truly worked like only a wench would work, well, I might just extend to myself the exemplary and generous customer service the restaurant as a matter of policy offered, and similarly extend the concept of gratuities to myself, and extend the concept of working on commission to myself. I might go home with any number of tips, bonuses, or incentives: rewards for a job well done.

Distraction is key to prestidigitation. Don’t avoid attention, control it. I whistled while I worked. 

My earliest memories are of my grandmother’s farmhouse in Iowa. Three floors of treasure. A coin collection, a gilded porcelain chamber pot, a wooden trunk of photo albums and ancient newspaper clippings, a feather bed, and, in a red canister filled with generations of toys, a children’s book called Gillespie and the Guards. Since my last name was Gillespie, I took the book for an heirloom, some important family document.

The Gillespie in the book was a peasant kid in feudal times. He got a temp job in the King’s castle. Every day he would be seen leaving work pushing a wheelbarrow filled with something worthless. Straw, sand, gravel. At the palace gate, the guards always searched the contents of the wheelbarrow to make sure Gillespie wasn’t trying to rip off the King but they never found anything. 

Turns out Gillespie was stealing wheelbarrows. 

I used to wonder what Gillespie wanted with all those wheelbarrows. 

But now I understand. 

The food and kitchen supplies I took were no better than wheelbarrows. There was no way to get money for them that I knew of. But stealing them was a game I could not quit.  

I only ever wanted to be a writer. I’ve had jobs every day of my life since I was eight. My spirit had just about been hammered flat. Working took its toll on me, until the day I started taking my toll on it. I had become so exhausted and demoralized that by the end of the day I was no longer taking any of myself home from work. So I started taking some of my work home with me. 

I guess I’m something of a criminal.  

I steal stuff from work.  

I’ve never been caught, and always moved from one job to the next with a good reference. And I’m principled. I never steal from coworkers or customers, only from the job itself. My patterns outwit inventory, my operations on the edges of what is known or plausible.  

I am committed to breaking even.  

And understand that I’m not the only one. 

The rush had passed. While most of the restaurant’s work was ending, mine was just beginning. The evening’s flashflood of business was draining into my area, floating stacks of bustubs from the dining room and pots and pans from the kitchen, the dreaded clam chowder tureen with its rubbery, unscrubbable inner skin. The seven-foot cook Iain ducked out from under the ventilator hood, threw his apron in the laundry bag, and headed back to the break area, an unlit cigarette already in his fingers. The cooks were a fun bunch of miscreants. Two of them lived in prison, contracted to the restaurant every evening for two dollars an hour, half of which was claimed by their work-release program. Derek the chef impressed his crew by rolling up the white sleeve of his double-breasted chef’s uniform and immersing his entire hand in steaming lobster bisque, demonstrating no pain. In the eyes of the cooks this mettle impressed any skeptics who may have doubted he was managerial material, and his disregard for the most basic protocols of hygiene only reinforced their respect. Drunks, prisoners, illegals and me. Today’s game involved playing catch with knives. Cy paused to admire their antics.  

“Seattle Globetrotters. Take it on the road, make some real money.”  

“Cyrus, catch!” Derek faked tossing a cleaver. Cy blinked but did not flinch. He moved on, barely smiling. 

“Somebody oughta chop that boy a new mouth.” 

“Slice and dice.” 

“Serve him up. Pan-sear him.” 

“Asshole sauté.” 

“Fried leech.” 

“Throw a little garlic butter and capers on there, get rid of that sour monkey taste.” 

I heard the tinkle of ice: the chef had just been delivered his aperitif