The Humbug Bistro

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2009-11-30T23:58:00.000-08:00

The Humbug Bistro is a fictional novel by me, Heather Spoonheim, based on my experiences in opening a restaurant in a small town. Although many of the events are based on those experiences, they are altered with a great deal of creative license. All characters are either entirely fictitious or are composites modified for the purpose of the storyline. The final manuscript chapters follow below, and you can read through by simply clicking on 'older posts' at the bottom of each page to continue.

The infamous working chapters are now being removed.

Introduction

2009-11-30T23:30:00.000-08:00

In 2007 I was living in Cuspidor, Alberta, running a lucrative home based business brokering large volume purchases of plastic for a large group of small buyers. That short description may seem enough to bore anyone to sleep, but there is no superlative to describe the day to day dreariness that was my life. I had had enough and was looking for a way out so I made some plans, sold my business and my home, and prepared to set out on a new adventure.

To make a long story short, my plans fell apart in a rather apocalyptic failure that left me with no place to go just three days before I had to vacate the home I had sold. Finding myself on a friend’s sofa, I began to re-contemplate my future and flailed about until, through a series of even more unusual events, I set about to convert a small town coffee shop into a restaurant. That was when the short story became very long.

When I say ‘small town coffee shop’, I’m certain the average reader envisions some sort of diner with chrome framed chairs upholstered in faded blue or red vinyl and a dining area of black and white checkered tiles. On the contrary, however, this place was indeed a modern coffee house with contrasting wood finish for the floors, front serving counter, and table tops. It had matte black framed chairs upholstered in black vinyl and walls painted in autumn colours. It was located in the town of Humbug, just 60 miles west of Cuspidor, and was appropriately called The Humbug Coffee House.

The financials of the business were a mess, although not nearly as ravaged as the owner. I contemplated if his nerve-wracked state was the result of sleepless nights worrying about a failing business or perhaps more influenced by long days fueled on espresso; I decided that it could only have been induced by a combination of both. It was obvious that a small town like Humbug just couldn’t support a specialty coffee house and I felt that switching the location over to a food venue might generate viable sales.

Only fifteen years earlier I had sworn that I would never work in a kitchen again. I hoped, however, that by sticking to a very simple daily menu with limited selections that I could avoid the nightmares of short order work and focus on showcasing some simple, freshly prepared, hearty meals. What I encountered, though, was an experience so bizarre that I often found myself looking around for hidden cameras – hoping beyond all hope that I had been cruelly selected as the mark on some merciless new hidden camera reality show. Every small town has its quirks, but I swear I must have chosen the quirkiest little village in Canada.

I cannot lament the long hours or the hard work, for that is to be expected of any new business – especially in the food service industry. On the other hand, I would like to advise the reader that if ever you should be at a potluck and receive the compliment, “Oh, you’re such a great cook, you should open a restaurant,” please feel free, without hesitation, to turn to the person that just uttered those words and punch them straight in the face. I say this because cooking great food is the smallest part of running a restaurant. They may as well have said, “Oh, you made that vest yourself? You should be a child labourer in a third world sweat shop!”

The following pages are my attempt to convey my first foray into the restaurant business.

Main Street

2009-11-30T23:28:00.000-08:00

A good old fashioned main street can be hard to find these days – especially in Humbug; for some reason the Humbug powers-that-be opted to keep their Main Street unmarked. I had been very impressed with the pictures I’d received of The Humbug Coffee House and was ecstatic when I found out it was on an old fashioned main street. In only a four block stretch there was just about every type of business that a small town could support, and the coffee house was right smack dab in the middle.

On my first trip to Humbug I encountered a very typical prairie town. The highway ran straight through the middle of it and was cluttered with a variety of fast food franchises, gas stations, and even a big old fashioned green water tower labeled ‘HUMBUG’. My eyes darted about looking for signs directing traffic to ‘downtown’ or ‘city centre’ but before I spotted any I was already departing, as indicated by a very large sign that read, “Auf Wiedersehen”.

Turning back, I began to look at the street signs themselves. The numbers counted down to three, and then after three unmarked streets they mysteriously began to count up from three. Realizing that I had crossed Humbug’s prime meridian, I once again turned back. I crossed one unmarked street and then prepared to turn off the highway to the right, hoping this prime meridian was in fact Main Street. Upon turning I quickly realized I was heading into a residential area but I also spotted a business district in my rear view mirror. With one more reversal of course I was finally headed down Humbug’s Main Street.

It was glorious. The post office was a big old brick building with decorative concrete cornices and corbels that gave it an incredibly officious finish. On other stores, a mish-mash of facades created the impression of an old west town transported to the 1960’s. There was even an intersection with four major Canadian banks occupying each corner. Bundled up people bustled up and down the streets carrying packages and, to my surprise, there weren’t even any parking meters. If there were a heaven, and it had a downtown, then this is exactly what it would look like.

Realizing that I had completely forgotten to look for The Humbug Coffee House, I reversed course yet again. Upon finding it, I hurried in from the cold to find the owner nervously manning the register. His spastic disposition initially made me nervous but I was soon calmed by his joy at realizing I was his potential buyer. I asked him about the lack of signs for Humbug’s downtown and Main Street, but that seemed to be a question that re-aggravated his nervous side so I dropped it.

Over the course of the following months I inquired repeatedly about the clandestine nature of Humbug’s downtown district, only to receive my first lesson in how Humbuggers think outside the brain. I occasionally received an answer that involved a silly little chuckle followed by, “Well everybody knows where downtown is!” I was certain that everyone in Humbug was fully acquainted with the location of their downtown but had immense difficulty understanding how that applied to the rest of the civilized world. The most common response I got was a non-verbal gesture that I came to call the ‘Humbug Huh’.

The Humbug Huh is a perfect pantomime of a dog tilting its head in utter confusion, and Humbuggers always Humbug Huh to the right. Some Humbuggers actually make a small sound in their throat as they do this, a sound I can only describe as, “ah-roo?” There seems to be no way to continue with the same line of conversation once a Humbugger gives you a Humbug Huh, for once their head tilts to the right they assume the personality of an android with dead batteries. They can be rebooted, however, with a quick change in subject or meaningless comment on the weather.

Eventually people in town started to whisper about my inquiries. I should mention here that Humbuggers don’t seem to have very good hearing, as they are almost entirely incapable of whispering. And so it was that everywhere I went I heard raspy voices hissing, “She’s been asking about signs for Main Street!”

After a few months I was approached by one of the town’s leading businessmen, Lyle Duerr, owner of Humbug Hardware. I was vaguely familiar with Lyle because his store was down the street from my soon-to-be restaurant. His expression indicated that he was a bit embarrassed for me, and his lack of eye contact made me self-conscious and left me worrying that I might have toilet paper dragging behind me.

As he closed in, he took a stance next to me and leaned in to speak. In a fatherly tone he said, “Heather, I’ve heard that you’ve been asking around, and I think I need to tell you a little about Humbug.” He held his fist in front of his mouth as though he was about to cough or perhaps was just searching for the right words to keep from embarrassing me further. “You see,” he proceeded, “we really don’t want all those people from the highway coming downtown. This is a small town, and we don’t need a bunch of city folk coming around here shoplifting and passing funny money, if you know what I mean.” He finished with a knowing nod.

I can only describe my feelings at that point as total disbelief. Here was a leading businessman in town telling me that he didn’t want any more traffic in his store. That was the first time I looked around for someone hiding with a camera because I was sure it had to be joke. Lyle, obviously confused by my darting eyes, looked around a bit as well and then gave me a Humbug Huh. He stood motionless and for a moment I thought time itself had stopped. In utter astonishment I just blurted, “You gotta be fucking kidding me!”

Lyle snapped back to life and his expression turned to one of horrific shock. He spun about on one heel and sped away. I had no idea what had just happened. What I didn’t know at that time was that Humbuggers never swear, under any circumstances. Even while in the Humbug Tavern they will only reference the word ‘fuck’ when quoting the words of an outsider, and even then they refer to the word ‘fuck’ as, “the f-bomb.” Needless to say, I still had a lot to learn about Humbug etiquette.

The Purchase

2009-11-30T23:26:00.000-08:00

Purchasing The Humbug Coffee House really wasn’t an option. Aside from the financials not being in order, it was a sole proprietorship in a leased location. This meant there was no way to purchase previous losses, leasehold improvements, or delineate the debts of the owner from those of the business. In short, it just plain didn’t exist as a financial entity unto itself.

The only real option was to purchase the equipment after securing an agreement from the building landlord to ensure I would be able to hold the location. There was a lot of great equipment and the furniture was a must-have because it matched the décor so perfectly. There had to have been a professional decorator involved, but I didn’t want to pry too much since I was really only paying for the equipment and getting it at a steal.

I had hoped that the coffee shop owner, Dave, would want to keep the espresso machine but he wasn’t willing to sell me a stir stick unless I was buying the entire kit and caboodle. The most awkward part of the purchase was the presence of all sorts of third party property, like the art on the walls and a piano that belonged to a local music teacher. I tried pressing Dave for some details about these things but he began to mumble and shake so pathetically that I just didn’t have the heart to demand that he have them removed. It seemed like a moot point, however, since it would only take a few phone calls to get the rightful owners to come and pick up their property.

Several trips were required to make all the final arrangements. A local lawyer was brisk in setting up a corporation and writing up a very tight purchase agreement for the equipment. A local bank quickly setup an account and point of sale terminal – although the gentleman I dealt with was initially horrified that it was going to be a ‘corporate affair’. Finding an apartment was rather difficult, but a remarkably friendly woman who worked at the post office told me of one that was coming up as she processed my application for a mail box.

Word spread very quickly in town that I was opening a new restaurant and everybody seemed remarkably excited and eager to meet me. I found their line of questioning to be incredibly invasive but wrote it off to small town curiosity. With each trip I became more acutely aware of the differences between Cuspidorians and Humbuggers. When I gassed up, the cashier in the Humbug store would greet me by name and with a friendly smile. In Cuspidor the clerk at the service station rarely took his right hand off the baseball bat hidden under the counter – at least I hoped that his hand was on a baseball bat. Humbug was so friendly that on one trip home I found myself exclaiming, “Fucking-A! This place is exactly what I’ve been looking for!”

On the night before the lease and property were to change hands I made my most exciting trip to Humbug. I was leaving Cuspidor for good and was about to become a citizen of a small town once again. The Humbug Hotel gave me a deal on a room, which I needed for nearly a week as I awaited my apartment, and I settled in to try and sleep. The excitement was almost more than I could bear and I’m not sure if I slept a wink. I just kept thinking about all the work I had to do, about what my final menu decisions would be, and about how I was going to setup my kitchen. My brain just spun like a top inside my skull as all the details whirled around.

In the morning I had a quick breakfast at the hotel and then walked over to the Humbug Coffee House. I met the landlord out front at about 8 a.m. and Dave let us in just a few minutes later. Dave had been there all night trying to clean out personal papers and belongings. I could tell it was very difficult for him, standing there for the last time in his coffee house. He stood by the register in his apron and tapped a few keys in a gesture of good bye. He handed over the keys to the landlord, who then handed them over to me in an awkwardly ceremonious fashion. Dave’s head drooped a bit and I just didn’t know what to say to him. We stood for several minutes in uncomfortable silence.

Then, suddenly, Dave blurted out, “I’m outa here!” and he charged straight down the back hall, hands flailing in the air, and he was gone with a slam of the back door. The landlord shook my hand, wished me luck, and departed almost as abruptly. I stood there in awe. I had some changes to make, but there I stood in my own restaurant; my first brick and mortar business.

I wanted to clean it. I wanted to wipe down all the counters and shelves and cupboards. I wanted to turn the chairs upside down on the tables and mop the floors. I wanted to polish each and every glass by hand. I wanted the whole place to sparkle and for the world to see the wonder that I had created. I paced from front to back and back to front as I surveyed the mighty restaurant that was to be; and it was good.

I was rather horrified when I looked in the deli cooler and found that half of the containers were bursting with mould. Obviously Dave hadn’t had the ambition left to clean everything out. It didn’t matter, though, because by the time I finished even the floors would be fit to eat off of. I was ready to work.

A few hours later, Dave returned sheepishly through the back door to return his apron and retrieve his jacket.

The Flintstone Whistle

2009-11-30T23:24:00.000-08:00

While making the purchase arrangements for my restaurant I had traveled to Humbug frequently. It hadn’t occurred to me, however, that I hadn’t actually spent an entire day there. The first full day that I spent in Humbug was the day I took possession of the equipment and location. That was also the first day that I began to learn of the rigid routines adhered to by Humbuggers.

Taking a break from my cleaning and planning, I stepped out the back door of the restaurant to have a cigarette and to survey my new back alley. Across the alley I saw a stack of plywood crates behind the undertaker’s shop. It dawned on me that the crates were about the right size to contain coffins. Then it dawned on me that that was exactly what they contained. I found it strange that they were piled up in the alley that way.

Suddenly a deafening blast came from some sort of siren and I nearly had a heart attack. It was loud and it was long – just a roaring long wail that seemed to go on forever. I was soon to learn that this happened every day at noon. Suddenly people emerged from the back doors of most of the other shops, got into their cars and tried to back into the alley simultaneously. There was a lot of jostling around with some people waving others on but everyone being much more polite about the fiasco than might be observed in the city. I also noted that there were almost no pedestrians at all. In a town so small it seemed odd that every single person had driven to work.

It was this daily stampede for lunch that gave me the idea to call this noon horn the 'Flintstone Whistle’. I imagined Mr. Slate reaching out the window to pull the tail on a giant bird that let out this horrible scream, followed by every single person in town screaming, “Yabba Dabba Doo!” All of this, followed by a stampede of remarkably polite people racing for lunch. I wondered if they had ever considered just wearing wrist watches.

One day, while playing around with the espresso machine, I looked out the front window and saw some municipal workers doing some sort of road repair. Just like in the city, they put up sawhorses, wore reflective vests, and two men stood idly by, watching a third man ply his craft with a shovel. I looked down at my espresso just as the Flintstone Whistle blew. I looked back out the front window and all three men had vanished. The only evidence that they had ever been there was the shovel – all alone and rotating in mid air.

Humbuggers are so conditioned to the Flintstone Whistle that they can’t bring themselves to stop for lunch without its permission. This makes going for lunch quite convenient for all of Humbug’s non-Humbuggers. You can walk into any restaurant at ten to twelve and find it almost completely deserted. It’s wonderful to walk into a restaurant, chose any table you want, place your order, and have your food in front of you before a single member of the lunch rush crowd comes barreling through the door.

One day, during the renovations, I offered to buy the contractors lunch. They were very enthusiastic until I suggested we leave immediately. One of them said, “But the whistle hasn’t gone yet.” I replied, “Exactly!” I waited for this to sink in, but abstract concepts just didn’t seem to ‘sink in’ to Humbuggers. I said, “If we leave now we can have our food ordered before the lunch rush starts.” Another one of them said, “But the whistle hasn’t gone yet.” I replied, “Exactly!” I waited some more.

Finally I told the men that if they wanted a free lunch then they had to follow me immediately. Again, one of them said, “But the whistle hasn’t gone yet.” I pointed out that if they quit fifteen minutes early and then returned fifteen minutes early then they would still only be taking an hour for lunch but they would be saving themselves a lot of time and frustration. Yet once more, one of them said, “But the whistle hasn’t gone yet.” I dined alone.

The number of businesses that closed for the noon hour was astounding. Even the banks seemed incapable of running staggered lunch breaks and usually only had a couple of tellers left to handle the crowds of people paying bills and cashing cheques at lunch. City Hall locked it’s doors at noon as well. I had never witnessed anything like it before in my life.

In almost every town I had ever lived in, the elementary school children were let out ten or fifteen minutes before noon so that those who went home for lunch could do so before the noon rush hour traffic started. In Humbug, however, the children couldn’t leave their desks until that damn whistle blew.

I asked no fewer than a dozen Humbuggers why the Flintstone Whistle went off seven days a week, and how long it had been doing so. The only answer I ever got, verbatim, was, “That’s the noon whistle.” This was one of the first things about the town to creep me out - and I had a pile of coffins across the alley from my restaurant.

The Renovation

2009-11-30T23:22:00.000-08:00

Turning a coffee shop into a restaurant doesn’t require a great deal of renovation, especially if you are planning a cafeteria service bistro. The seating and serving areas remain the same, requiring only some changes to the kitchen and enlargement of the dish pit. As small as the renovations may be, however, they leave the restauranteur facing his or her arch nemesis: the contractor. Contractors bring along a particular set of challenges for anyone, but for a female restauranteur in Humbug they can be a special pot of trouble.

Rule number 182 in Humbug etiquette is to never comment on any construction or mechanical error, no matter how egregious, unless you have balls and a penis. When I pointed out to the framer that he had put a door in backwards in comparison with the drawing, he simply said, “Well, it’s in now, so you’ll have to learn to live with it.”

In an attempt to conform to Humbug etiquette, I avoided my instinctual reply which was, “Well I sign the fucking cheques here, so unless you want me to write your name backwards, turn the fucking door around!” I thought for a bit and then opted for the more passive-aggressive response, “Well, I’ll call the fire marshal and ask him if a fire exit can open inwards.” I hadn’t even picked up the phone when I heard a drill gun removing the screws. It was frustrating to have to think of a way of saying what I wanted to say without actually saying it – but I was glad it worked.

As soon as the door was reversed, however, the framer disappeared, never to be seen again. I would like to say ‘never to be heard from again’ but of course he was prompt in sending an invoice and asking me to pay for the half of the work he had completed. Contractor after contractor disappeared after doing as much or as little of the work as they enjoyed, each sending an invoice for the portion of the work they had done. Painters were the worst. Every single painter I contacted promised to come on Monday and when I called on Monday to find out where they were, they promised to come the following Monday. This continued for five weeks and I finally decided to do the painting myself.

Since my renovations were minimal, I only had to paint a small area at the back of the restaurant. I walked down to Humbug Hardware and Lyle, in good Humbug fashion, let me have his master collection of paint swatches so I could match the colours as accurately as possible. After a quick round trip, I presented him with my selection, and asked for five gallons of ‘pepita’. Doing business on Humbug’s Main Street, marked or otherwise, seemed so much easier than the tedious journeys across even a medium sized city. It would have taken me hours to make the round trip to a paint store in Cuspidor, and there was no way that they would have let me have a master ring of paint swatches. On the other hand, in Cuspidor, I might not have wasted five weeks waiting on delinquent painters.

In just a few days I had two coats of primer up and was busy rolling in the first coat of pepita. I had to open the back door to let some of the paint fumes out, and I was quite enjoying the nice cool breeze when I got the uncanny feeling that I was being watched. I looked around and was startled to find a little old lady standing right beside me, watching the roller descend the wall.

“Who are you?” I exclaimed.

“Where’s your husband?” she asked, oblivious to my dismay.

“Who the fuck are you?” I barked at her.

Her head jerked to the right in a Humbug Huh, and I realized I had sent her into a system crash. I didn’t want to change the topic or move onto inane weather commentary but I had to find a way to reboot her. I decided to try repeating the question without the ‘f-bomb’.

“Who are you?” I asked again.

Suddenly re-animating, she replied, “I’m your neighbor,” seeming to think that would make sense to me.

“What neighbor, who the fuck are you?” I demanded.

Once again she crashed into the Humbug Huh posture and once again I had to reboot her.

“What neighbor, who the – who are you?” I demanded, sans profanity.

Once again re-animating, she replied, “I have the boutique next door! Why are you upset?”

“What the – uh, are you doing here?” I further demanded.

“Your back door was open. Don’t you have any children?”

For a moment I was speechless. What the hell did children have to do with her walking into my restaurant uninvited? Nothing was making sense. For the second time I looked around for hidden cameras. This had to be some sort of twisted prank, I was sure of it. I decided to play along.

“I don’t have a husband or children,” I responded.

“Why not?” she asked, completely void of inhibition.

“An open door isn’t an invitation,” I said, “why would you just walk in like that?”

“Don’t you WANT to be married?” she continued, so oblivious that I was gobsmacked.

I decided to just escort her out, and I asked her to please knock the next time she wanted to speak with me. She sort of giggled and muttered, “Knock, ha ha, on an open door, ha ha.” I decided she must be the senile mother of the boutique owner. I later found out she wasn’t senile, and she was in fact the owner of the boutique. As is common of many Humbug women, she suffered from the inability to speak with other women on any topics other than husbands, children, and baking. Sad.

Upon completing my coat of paint, I locked up the back and decided to head out the front and down the street to the bakery. I loved having everything so nearby. I hadn’t gotten three steps down the street when another little old lady beckoned me to stop. After a brief exchange of gratuitous salutations and comments on the weather, as I had learned was customary in Humbug, she turned the conversation to a more serious matter.

“I just thought you should know, a lot of us think the paint you’re using isn’t a very good match for the old paint,” she said. I have to admit I was quite agitated by this and spoke a bit harshly saying, “A lot of us? Who exactly is ‘a lot of us’? Just how many people have been wondering in and out while I’ve been painting?” Defensively she replied, “Oh, we haven’t been inside. We were just looking at the paint swatches over at the hardware store. The colour you picked is too orange.” “I see,” I said, a bit embarrassed that I had been so set on edge by the crazy lady I had encountered earlier, continuing with, “Well I guess you’ll just have to come in and see for yourself when I open.”

I managed to cut the rest of the conversation short but as I walked away I couldn’t help but wonder what sort of people collect in a hardware store to analyze someone else’s paint swatches. Admittedly there likely wasn’t any implied confidentiality in selecting and purchasing paint, but the public disclosure of my choice sort of bothered me. Humbug’s version of small town life had a much slower pace than I could have imagined without experiencing it first hand. The most difficult consequence of this slow pace was the rate of the contractors. The renovation, which should have taken five weeks, wound up taking well over 7 months.

The Undertaker

2009-11-30T23:20:00.001-08:00

One of the comfy little arrangements that I had inherited upon leasing the location for my restaurant was a shared garbage bin. The previous tenant had shared the lease of a large commercial dumpster with the undertaker across the alley. I contacted the undertaker to see if he would like to continue such a deal with me and he did. We each had a key to the lock on the bin and the bin was emptied every other Thursday. This seemed to be a very simple arrangement - but this was Humbug.

The problems began almost immediately. As I began to clear the building of the previous tenant’s waste, I found the bin to be completely full. I stacked garbage in the back hall waiting for Thursday. When Thursday arrived I had to spend most of the day on the phone trying to find out where the contractors were because they were already over a week late getting started. By the end of the day I went out to see if the bin had been emptied and it had not, or least I didn’t think it had.

Now one bin full of garbage might look like another bin full of garbage, but the bin full of garbage out back didn’t look at all like it had only days earlier. I couldn’t imagine anything more had been put into it but I was equally perplexed by the idea that it had been emptied that day and filled up before I had gotten a chance to put anything into it. I called the undertaker to find out if he had already filled the bin up, and he assured me that he had not. I was suspicious, but polite.

When the contractors finally arrived the following Wednesday I told them the bin would be emptied the next day so we could just pile any refuse material against the back of the building. On Thursday I checked several times to see if the bin had been emptied and then finally called the waste company. They told me that it had been emptied the week before. I was not happy.

By the end of the week the garbage was really piling up with my backlog of trash and the heaps being quickly generated by the contractors. One of the contractors offered to bring a trailer on Monday to haul it all away – at his usual hourly rate plus $30 for rental of the trailer. I was irritated at having to pay for a bin and then again for a trailer, but his rate sounded fair so I accepted.

On Monday we got almost all the garbage into his trailer, and I just had some loose bags of rubbish in the back entrance. If I was now in sync, then the bin would be emptied on Thursday, so I felt the rest could wait until then. When Thursday came I was quite busy with the contractors all day and didn’t get to taking out the trash until the evening. As I walked out I saw a pick-up truck backed up to the bin, which was now full to overflowing, and atop the pile stood the undertaker jumping up and down trying to get it all to fit.

I couldn’t believe he had managed to fill the bin so fast and I am certain I was more than visibly upset. The undertaker stopped his jumping and stood motionless with an expression of guilt - like a child caught jumping in a mud puddle. We stared at each other for a few seconds then he glanced down at the pile, back at me, down at the pile, back at me, and he blurted out, “Wow, your contractors sure managed to fill this bin up fast, huh?”

All I could think to say was, “Like Fuck!” He didn’t Humbug Huh into psychological hibernation but he was still obviously very surprised and with a terribly shocked expression he said, “What’s the matter?” As I walked towards him I threw the bags in my hands at him and screamed, “My contractors never got to put a fucking thing in there you cunt! I had to pay for a fucking trailer to get their trash hauled away and now you’ve filled the fucking bin up already. What do you fucking think I am? Stupid?”

He took a very authoritative stance from atop his pile of trash and said, “Now look here, you can’t talk to me that way. This garbage isn’t mine. I don’t know where it came from if your contractors didn’t put it here.”

I screamed back, “The bin was locked! Only you and I have keys! You never opened the bin to find it this full because the lid won’t even fucking close it’s so full. You’re standing on the fucking pile of shit you put in there, and that purple carpet under your feet is the same as that piece in your fucking truck, asshole!”

He jumped off of his royal mound of garbage and into the back of his truck, then out of the back of his truck and onto the ground on the opposite side from me. His face was beet red as he whelped, “You can’t talk to me this way. I don’t have to take this.”

As he got into his truck I yelled, “Call the waste company and get your own bin, or get this one off my property. The deal is off!” With that, he sped off - and I only wish I could say never to be heard from again.

Two more weeks went by. Contractors came and went and I paid once again to have someone bring a trailer to take the trash away. Finally Thursday arrived and this time I checked the bin several times to make sure the undertaker wasn’t filling it yet again. By the end of the day it was completely empty and I finally got to throw in three bags of garbage. I didn’t get out of the restaurant until nearly midnight, but I checked the bin again. I was starting to think I was paranoid because no one on the planet would have had enough gall to fill it once more after the confrontation we had just had.

I drove down to the restaurant at about 6 a.m. the next morning. As I pulled into my parking space, to my astonishment, the bin wasn’t just full, it was overflowing and the lid was wide open. On top of the pile was a piece of all too familiar, purple, geometric print carpet – left as a calling card. There was no way to even start closing the lid without knocking some of the pile off of the bin. My head was spinning and all I could think was, “What kind of bastard would do this? What the hell is the matter with this guy?”

At 8 a.m. I called the waste company to find out if the undertaker had undertaken arrangements to get his own bin. He had not. I told the waste company about the problem and to expect a call from the undertaker shortly. At 9 a.m. I called the undertaker. After some gratuitous salutations and comments about the weather, which I had learned was Humbug custom, I set into the matter at hand.

“Ok, here’s the deal. You aren’t using the bin on my property anymore. If you want the bin then the waste company will move it to your property. If you don’t want the bin then I’m changing the lock. You have until noon to make up your mind. At one o’clock I’m calling the waste company and if you haven’t asked for the bin to be moved to your property then the lock will be changed. Are there any questions?”

The undertaker was silent for a moment then replied, “You know, I really only agreed to share the cost of the bin as a favour to you. I really don’t need a bin at all. For the little bit of trash we have here I can just as easily take it home to throw it out.”

“Fine then,” I replied, “I’ll change the lock right now.”

“Now ho’ up there,” he interjected, “there is no need to go getting all hasty about things. If you’ve already filled up the bin again then I’m willing to meet you half way and pay half the cost for an extra dump.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. This guy couldn’t stop lying if his life depended on it. I grew angry, furious, and I screamed, “Who the fuck do you think you are? Obi Wan Fucking Kenobi? What the fuck is this, some sort of Jedi mind trick? You know you filled the bin! You know that I know you filled up the bin! And you have the fucking nerve to suggest that I would pay half for an extra dump? You have the fucking nerve to suggest that you are doing me a favour? Here’s the deal, asshole, I’m changing the lock right now!”

Suddenly he reverted to his authoritative tone again, saying, “Now you think long and hard about what you are doing to yourself here. YOU are going to have to pay the FULL cost of the bin. YOU and YOU alone! If that’s the way you want it then I can’t help you. I’ve done all I can for you, and I’ll thank you to return my padlock!”

I slammed the phone down before the last part had sunk in. Had he actually just laid claim to the lock as part of some sort of conditional surrender? The lock had been on the bin when I arrived, so for all I knew it could be his, and so I was going to return it. I couldn’t help, however, to be reminded of some belligerent drunk being thrown out at the end of a party who turns to grab some bottle containing a couple ounces of stale liquor, declaring it as his victory trophy as he marches out the door. He was going to get his trophy, alright. That night I returned it; I threw it through the back window of his shop.

The fact that to the very bitter end he couldn’t just admit to his transgression was the most astounding and frustrating detail to me. He had been caught red footed. I knew that he was lying, and he knew that I knew it. He was completely incapable of computing what it meant to be called a liar. Eventually I would learn that this was because Humbuggers have a bigger aversion to calling someone out on a lie than they do to actually saying the word ‘fuck’.

This was a phenomenon I would come to know as Humbug rule number one: In Humbug it is a far greater faux pas to call someone a liar than it is for that person to tell a bald face lie to your face, no matter how outlandish that lie may be. This was part of a collection of higher order Humbug rules of protocol which dictated that no Humbugger, under any circumstances, should ever speak their mind directly. I would eventually learn that this was an integral part of the typical business model in Humbug.

Rule number one was greatly exploited by a vast number of Humbuggers. Whenever caught red handed in any transgression they simply made up the most outrageous lie to exonerate themselves. It didn’t matter if they claimed to have broken a commitment due to being abducted by alien beings; nothing could ever be done to re-establish their guilt because doing so would require calling them on their lie, and that just wasn’t an option. There was an old Humbug rumour that the mayor had used this very technique to acquit himself of having an affair, numerous times, by simply stating that the young lady on his lap was giving him a reverse massage for his sciatica.

Location Legacy

2009-11-30T23:18:00.000-08:00

One challenge I had not foreseen in turning a coffee shop into a restaurant was the legacy of the location - especially in a small town. The coffee shop had run for about five years under various owners with varying degrees of failure. The problem was quite obvious upon studying the numbers: The door costs (rent, utilities, insurance, etc.) were far too high for a coffee shop to be viable. The store was extremely large, with enough room in the back for a full kitchen and enormous pantry, but this space just wasn’t viable for seating.

The limited number of tables had to turn over much larger covers than even a round of double half-caf lattes could provide, and rural coffee drinkers aren’t known for their high espresso consumption. I didn’t even want the espresso machine but Dave didn’t want to take it with him and it was plumbed in with holes through the counter top. I needed every square inch of counter space to generate revenue but finally acquiesced to keeping the old La Pavoni espresso machine in place until I could find out what, if any, revenue it could generate.

The espresso machine wasn’t all that Dave left behind. There was art on the walls that appeared to be for sale by a local art dealer, a bubble gum machine in the front entrance that had a sticker indicating it was the property of some vendor, and a piano that belonged to a local music teacher. Furthermore, there were numerous boxes of various types of candies and chocolates lined up on top of the baking display cooler and these candies and chocolates all belonged to various charities using them to solicit donations.

A cordless phone became my best friend as I spent several days measuring up the store for the renovations and new equipment while talking on the phone to the endless array of people who were taking more money out of the store than all of the previous tenants combined. Most of the charities required several calls. I would call the number on the collection box only to be told I had to call the fund raising secretary. I would leave a message for the fund raising secretary only to hear back days later that I had to call a local volunteer. I would call a local volunteer who would say he or she couldn’t remove the merchandise without being contacted by the head office. This just went around and around. Some of the boxes never did get picked up and ended up in storage in the pantry with other items that I hoped Dave would eventually claim.

The bubble gum machine vendor was particularly deluded and required several phone calls.

“Hello, Bob’s Confections,” he said.

“Hi, I just leased a storefront in Humbug and one of your machines is here,” I explained.

“Oh, you are the new owner of the coffee shop?”

“No, I didn’t buy the coffee shop, I just leased this storefront.”

“So you are putting a store in there?”

“No, a restaurant, and I was hoping you could pick up your machine.”

“Well a restaurant needs a gumball machine in the lobby.”

“If it does then I’ll put my own in. When can you pick up your machine?”

“I’m sorry, I’ve had that location for years now, and I’m not giving it up.”

“Actually you don’t have this location,” I explained, “I hold the lease and I want your machine out.”

“No, no,” he said, “I do quite well there and I plan to continue.”

On and on this conversation went until I finally screamed at him to get his damn machine out of my store. He huffed and puffed a bit but finally agreed to come and pick up his machine within a week. Two weeks later I phoned to see why he had not arrived yet and he made some feeble excuses accompanied by a further attempt to convince me to let the machine stay. Several more phone calls ensued. Eventually we had one final phone conversation that resolved our little problem.

“Hello, Bob’s Confections.”

“Bob, where the fuck are you?”

“Pardon me?”

“Your vending machine is still in my store, are you on your way to pick it up?”

“You can’t expect me to just drop everything and come and get it,” he whined.

“Do you hear that bell, Bob?”

“Yes.”

”That’s me going into the front foyer. Did you hear that car, Bob?”

“Yes.”

“That’s me, opening the door to the street. Can you hear that scraping sound, Bob?”

“Yes, what’s going on there?”

“That’s the sound of your machine being dragged out, Bob. It’s now sitting on the yellow dotted line in the middle of Main Street.”

“What!”

“Take all the time in the world picking up your fucking machine, Bob. It’s no longer my problem.”

I clicked the phone off and Bob was never heard from again. I assume he picked up his machine but, to be honest, I didn’t happen to look out front again until the next day. Either way, the machine was gone.

The art dealer wasn’t as problematic as Bob but he was even more deluded. Upon being asked to remove his art he offered to come right over to resolve matters. When he arrived he was very personable and claimed to fully understand my situation. He handed me an envelope and said, “I’ve brought this proposal for you to perhaps encourage you to change your mind. It outlines my commitment to the quality of the show and details the rent.”

I was slightly encouraged by his offer of rent. Not one of the other legacy leeches offered any sort of revenue and, in fact, actually drained money from the previous store. The art was problematic because it really created a coffee house atmosphere but I thought that perhaps I could look the other way this once for a vendor actually offering to supplement door costs. I opened the envelope and read his letter and to my astonishment he actually indicated that I should be the one paying rent; $75 per month!

I openly laughed and said, “You want ME to pay rent?”

He fumbled a bit and said, “Well, usually I just take the rent in product.”

I stopped laughing and said, “You want to use my restaurant to sell your art without paying a penny for door costs AND you want me to give you free food?”

Obviously insulted he said, “These are quality shows that I put on. I bring in only the best artists and spend a lot of time choosing pieces appropriate for the venue.”

I replied, “You’re an art dealer, that’s your business. Do you charge people admission to your gallery?”

“I don’t have a gallery,” he said.

“And you not only want to use my place as a free gallery but you actually expect me to feed you in return?”

Needless to say his art didn’t stay on my walls long. I couldn’t believe how backwards things were in Humbug. I would eventually learn that this was only the tip of the iceberg. Before one penny had gone into the register, and while I was still hemorrhaging money for the renovations, several local charities came by to ask me for donations.

The piano was too heavy to drag into the middle of the street and it took the music teacher nine months to get it out. I didn’t mind it that much, to be honest, as it was a nice piece of furniture. The music teacher was a bit more realistic than the art dealer and at least didn’t try rent the piano to me. All she wanted was for me to close the restaurant on occasion so she could put on music recitals, although she couldn’t understand why I would want to charge her anything.

Even in the middle of renovations, a couple of hippy kids dropped by to tell me that they were going to use my place for a poetry reading. They didn’t ask for permission - they just seemed to think it was a matter of courtesy to tell me when they were going to do so. I just told them to fuck off. Further, I didn’t pass a day in Humbug without somebody asking me when I was going to open my coffee shop back up. The location not only had a legacy of being a coffee venue but it also seemed to have a legacy of being the unofficial town hall, available to every citizen who needed a free location for their event or fundraiser. This was a reputation I would struggle with to no end.

It didn’t matter how often I told them that I didn’t own a coffee shop, that I hadn’t closed my coffee shop, and that I was renovating to put a new restaurant in town - all they could ask was when they could get back in for coffee. Several people showed me cards from the coffee shop that said they were entitled to a free coffee if they purchased ten in one month, telling me that I had better count their previous purchases towards their next free coffee when I finally ‘re-opened’.

I made a point of going back to some people who had initially expressed excitement about my new restaurant when I had begun making trips to Humbug. Most of them had reverted to this coffee shop mentality, and when I pressed for a reason the typical reply was, “Well I didn’t know you were just buying the coffee shop.” No matter how I tried to explain that I hadn’t purchased the coffee shop, that I had just bought the equipment and leased the location, the only answers I would get back were, “But that’s the coffee shop,” or a Humbug Huh. Occasionally I wouldn’t even bother to reboot Humbuggers who were stuck in a Humbug Huh, and I just left them standing there as I walked away. I often wondered if, when they finally snapped back into consciousness on their own, it appeared to them that I had simply vanished.

No mind is as rigid as that of the Humbugger.

Plan A

2009-11-30T23:16:00.000-08:00

The full expectations of modern restaurant customers are truly impossible to meet. The perfect experience would be to walk into the restaurant, be seated immediately, select ingredients from around the world which are field fresh and waiting, order them cooked in a culinary style selected from any part of the planet, receive the food instantly in portion sizes that Marlon Brando couldn’t possibly finish, and all for a price of under $10. Unfortunately all too many restaurants actually try to pull this off.

As soon as you see a menu that has pizza, souvlaki, stir fry, schnitzel, beer battered haddock and Swedish meatballs - you can be certain that you won’t be receiving fresh ingredients. The only way to serve a menu like this is to follow the deepfreeze to deep-fry methodology. Even the stir fry will be prepared by pulling out a bag of pre-portioned frozen vegetables and dropping them in a deep fryer for a few minutes and then onto the flat top where the meat has been doused with a bottled sauce. If you don’t believe this, you have never worked in a large kitchen that puts out this sort of catalogue menu.

The trick is in knowing from the start that something has got to give. For my menu I decided to cook as fresh as possible while shooting for the lowest menu prices possible. To do this I had to start by limiting the number of dishes available on any given day and eliminating table service. I created a daily menu that would have a soup, salad, hot pot, wrap and sandwich to select from. Along with the daily deluxe salad there would be some extra side salads to go with the wraps and sandwiches. For breakfast I decided on Belgian waffles, muffins, and hot cereal.

To serve this menu I needed someone who could run the cash register and prepare beverages, a line cook who could rapidly plate the meals, and a chef in the kitchen keeping the front line supplied. If we were very busy then a dishwasher could be found easily enough, but I felt that until that time everyone could take turns in the dish pit and bussing tables. I was to be the chef, not just because it was my menu but because I really didn’t like dealing with the public that much.

I began the hiring process by putting up a ‘help wanted’ sign in the front window. If you ever want to have a string of uncomfortable, bizarre and remarkably surreal experiences, just put a ‘help wanted’ sign in your front window. Eventually I did find some viable candidates, and I found one real gem in particular. Warren was a line cook who had worked in hotel kitchens from Calgary to Montreal and he had incredible talent. He suffered from depression and had been on a downswing for the past while, making it hard for him to find work in a town as small as Humbug. By the time he came to me he was getting back on his feet and vowed to continue his medication. Since anti-depressants carried as much stigma as street drugs in Humbug, I was about his only employment option. Beggars can’t be choosers so we settled on each other.

I decided to have him work as hands on as possible with the menu development to give him a sense of being a part of the new restaurant. Every day I set him up with a list of dishes to prep and plate so that we could gauge our portions and set our pricing. I spent most of my time costing out the recipes, ordering equipment, and organizing the front service area. One day Warren told me that he had a friend, Steve, who was working at another restaurant in Humbug but who wanted to come to work for me. I told him to have Steve drop by.

The next day, Warren brought me Steve’s resume. It was a great resume but I wanted to meet Steve first hand so I phoned and left him a message to this effect. The next day, Warren told me that Steve would soon be dropping by. Steve turned out to be rather elusive but I asked around and he did seem to have a very good reputation at the restaurant where he was working. I was glad to find out he wasn’t just Warren’s imaginary friend but I still needed to see him in action.

Warren and I were getting along just great and he started opening up about himself. He was a bit of an odd duck - sharing an attic loft with his friend Bert. It didn’t sound like it was even legally an apartment since they had to use an external set of stairs to climb down to a basement bathroom. I couldn’t help but start to wonder if Warren had a rubber ducky. I think he started to worry that I thought he and Bert were lovers because he soon shifted to telling me all about his girlfriend.

Warren and his girlfriend had been together since he was in Montreal, but she was living with her parents since his last downswing. He said that made more sense since he couldn’t afford his share of the rent on any sort of decent apartment and she needed a proper space to work on her studies. The more he told me about her, the more I couldn’t understand why she was with him. As near as I could figure out, she was working on an accounting diploma to round out her retail management experience while he had devoted his life to smoking pot and playing World of Warcraft.

Steve eventually showed up but said he only had five minutes to talk because of his hectic schedule. When I told him that I needed him to work for at least a few days before opening he told me that he couldn’t possibly do so before he finished his other job. I told him that I couldn’t guarantee him a job until I saw what he could do but he just said, “Oh, don’t worry, you’ll think I’m awesome,” and he bolted out the door. For some reason, I didn’t find his confidence to be contagious.

Later that day Warren told me that his girlfriend just got a great new job in another town. When I told him how sorry I was to hear that, he just smiled and said, “Oh, that’s ok, I think doing the long distance thing will actually bring us closer together.” Plan A was getting very shaky; Steve was a flake and Warren was going to be hitting another downswing as soon as he realized his girlfriend had left him. Sometimes you just don’t need flashing lights to figure out that there is an accident up ahead.

Within two weeks Warren was lost down a hole of despair and Steve was still in the wind. I had called Steve at least a dozen times and left five messages. It was becoming apparent that I was going to have to take a different tack. I spent my days waiting on contractors, setting up equipment, going through horrible resumes, and trying to figure out what to do. About two weeks after Warren disappeared, Steve walked in the back door.

“Hey, how ya doin’?” he said.

“Not so great,” I replied.

“No? What’s up?”

“Well, I’m trying to figure out Plan B.”

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Warren is gone, depressed again, and you obviously aren’t going to work out.”

“WHAT?” he exclaimed.

“Well, what did you expect? I’ve left you five messages and you didn’t call me back.”

“I’ve been really, really busy. I don’t even return messages to my mother.” he said.

“Well I’m not you’re mother. I’ve got a business to open here. I didn’t know where you were so I’m working on a new plan.”

“But I QUIT my other job to work here!”

“That was a pretty stupid thing to do,” I chuckled.

“It’s not fucking funny!” he screamed.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I told you I wasn’t offering you a job until I saw you work. I called to try to schedule you in to do that work. You didn’t get back to me and the only other way I had of finding out if you were still alive was Warren – then he disappeared. How can I possibly rely on someone who remains incommunicado for weeks at a time?”

He stormed out extremely upset. I began to realize that finding reliable staff was going to be impossible. In most restaurants there are at least a dozen staff at any given moment. If one person doesn’t show up, everyone else can just work 10% harder. I was trying to build a wheel with three spokes and that just isn’t a very good idea if you don’t have completely reliable spokes. It was time to reinvent my wheel.

Plan B

2009-11-30T23:14:00.000-08:00

Looking back at my first plan I realized that I had relied too much on line cooks. Based on my hotel kitchen experience I should have known this. I can’t tell you how many shifts I’ve had to work double speed because other line cooks didn’t show up. The more line cooks you have, the easier it is to get over one missing. I just didn’t have the seating to accommodate a full kitchen staff, and with my business model relying on such a small menu I made the mistake of relying on a single line cook per shift. To have to close the restaurant just because a single line cook phoned in hung-over was simply unacceptable.

I had to eliminate my dependence on a position that is notoriously filled by skilled yet unreliable staff. This meant I would have to work the front end and do the plating myself; an idea that I didn’t like but that I would have to deal with. With no chef in the kitchen to keep me supplied, I would have to do extra prep work before the doors even opened in the morning. All I needed was someone who could run the cash register and make the odd waffle while I finished cooking lunch. In the event that even that person didn’t show up, I needed a lunch menu that I could complete while still minding the front end. The menu had to be pared down to something even simpler that what I had started with.

I had to decide on either a soup or a hot pot – I wouldn’t have time to cook both if I was alone. The hot pot could be served on a bed of rice with the deluxe salad, or just in a bowl with some garlic toast. If I was going to get working men in, the sort who eat full meals and don’t mind buying lunch two or three times per week, then I needed the hot pot. Piping hot chili con carne or generous portions of turkey a la king would be just the thing to get some hardy men with big appetites swinging the doors. All things considered, the soup had to go.

Without the soup, the sandwich became problematic. Soup and a sandwich is a common combination but without the soup there would be too much expectation of French fries with the sandwich. People who eat wraps are more likely to choose side salads and I could keep those on hand easily enough. Obviously the sandwich had to go as well.

The new daily menu was a hot pot, wrap, deluxe salad and some side salads for lunch. I would serve that Tuesday through Friday. I designated Saturdays as ‘Siesta Saturdays’ and brought the first tacos and burritos to Humbug. Sunday was the crown on the menu, with a full turkey dinner and all the trimmings. Monday I would be closed so I could do banking, pay bills, and deal with other business issues. All I had to do was find the right people to run the register and make the beverages.

After another string of uncomfortable, bizarre and remarkably surreal interviews, I had three people selected. Jeffrey and Anna were all I could ask for. Anna was in high school, so weekdays were out for her, but other than that she was eager to work as many or as few hours as I needed her on weekends. Jeffrey was actually training as a minister with the local United Church so Sundays were out for him along with Wednesdays when he volunteered at the local hospital. Maria was the only one I had concerns about.

On the plus side, Maria was 50 years old so I felt her reliability would be very high. On the down side, she was adamant that she wouldn’t work weekends under any circumstances, and therefore felt she should have all of the weekday hours. I wasn’t crazy about putting too many eggs in Maria’s basket, but I felt that because of her age she would be the most reliable person for those hours.

We did two shifts of training and then started cleaning like mad for the pre-opening health inspection. Health inspectors can be a little lenient about a few missed spots when you are running a busy kitchen, but I had been told that the pre-opening inspection would be incredibly thorough. The inspector came through on a Thursday just as Jeffrey and Maria were putting the finishing touches on the bathrooms. He was a pleasant young man, obviously not very experienced but definitely thorough. He made a couple of notes on things he thought we could improve upon but signed off on my certificate to operate.

Jeffrey, Maria and I celebrated but I don’t think they had any idea how excited I truly was. This was it – I was finally going to have my own restaurant. I told them we would be opening on Tuesday, but asked if either of them could work Friday and Monday to help get things ready for opening day.

Maria blurted, “Oh, I can work eight hours both days.”

I replied, “Well, that’s just about all the hours I have to offer before opening.”

Maria stared harshly at Jeffrey and he turned to me and said, “That’s okay, I wouldn’t mind heading into Cuspidor this weekend to see my parents anyway.”

I was irritated with Maria for bullying him but said to Jeffrey, “Ok, so you are fine with starting next Saturday then? Maybe 10 o’clock?”

“Sure thing, boss,” he said with a big smile. He seemed to get a kick out of calling me boss.

Friday morning I started doing inventory to generate the shopping list. I had a program that could calculate every gram of every ingredient I would need if I punched in expected sales of each menu item for any given period. I needed to know what I had on hand so I could enter that and get a shopping list. This may sound a bit anal retentive but when you are planning the first week worth of meals for a restaurant it can be very difficult to remember everything that you need and even harder to get the volumes in the ball park. I also had a lot of signs to make and put up - from full display daily menus to daily special signs for the front window.

By the time I had the shopping list ready I began to wonder what time Maria was coming in. We had been starting at 9 a.m. but I had meant to ask her to start at 8 a.m. when we decided on an eight hour day. It was getting past 9:30 a.m. and I hadn’t heard from her. I called her and left a message. I didn’t hear back. Plan B was getting shaky.

I called her several times on Saturday, asking her to get back to me as soon as possible. I was beginning to feel glad that I had planned on a cold opening. No one in town knew when we were going to open so, if need be, I could just wait another week. The idea of waiting another week made me angry, though. The contractors had already cost me over six months, and staff was starting to cost me more. I already had a Plan C in place – running it by myself. That was only for a worst case scenario, however. Unfortunately it was starting to look like a worst case scenario. I realized I would never know if any employee was going to show up for sure so I decided to just stay the course.

Monday morning I was running around frantically filling napkin and paper towel dispensers, putting up signs and setting up the displays of herbal teas. I had to make the final grocery run before opening and still didn’t know what had happened to Maria. I waited as long as I could and then put my coat on to go get the groceries. Just as I ran out of my office I heard a knock from the front and looked to see Maria standing with another woman outside.

I ran to the door and opened it and said, “Where have you been?”

“What?” she said, seeming rather insulted.

“I needed you on Friday, and I needed you first thing this morning. I have been calling you. Where have you been?”

She just shook her head and said, “You don’t even open until tomorrow.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and I shouted, “There were fucking signs to set up, supplies to check, and I still need to get the groceries!”

Her friend just tilted her head and went into a Humbug Huh.

Maria stared at me like she thought I was crazy and said, “You really need to relax. I just stopped in with my friend for some tea. Don’t you want to sit with us and have some tea?”

I didn’t have time for this so I just screamed, “Are you here to work or not?”

“Well,” she sighed, “I guess I should go home and change into my work clothes.”

“Do it!” I screamed, “And get back here in thirty minutes. I still have to get out of here!”

She tried, to no avail, to reanimate her friend. To expedite matters I just grabbed her friend by the arm and said, “It’s pretty warm out for November, isn’t it?”

The woman popped back into consciousness as Maria stared in wonder.

“Please,” I said, “just get changed and hurry back.”

They trundled off and I just shook my head as I locked the door and stormed back into the dining room. I paced back and forth, frothing at the mouth. What the hell was wrong with her? Stopping in for tea the day before opening? How clueless could these Humbuggers be? Exactly thirty minutes later I grabbed the phone and called to see what the hell was keeping her. There was no answer. Did this mean she was on her way back? Did this mean she wasn’t coming at all? I decided to give her fifteen minutes. Finally I bolted for the door to get the groceries. Just as I was leaping out the back door the phone rang. I ran back inside and answered.

“Hello,” I blurted.

“Oh, hi, this is Maria,” she lilted.

“Where the fuck are you, Maria?”

“You know,” she continued, lilting, “I just don’t think I’ll be able to make it in at all this week.”

“Fine, fuck you!”

I slammed down the phone and ran. I had no idea what was wrong with her and I had no time to figure it out. I ran through the grocery store like a maniac. By the time I got back to the restaurant and got everything unloaded and put away it was 2 p.m.

I started by roasting almonds, filberts and poppy seeds in three different frying pans on the stove. I didn’t have filbert slices, so I was smashing them with a tenderizer hammer as they toasted. I have no idea what happened next, but there was a huge spark and I could barely see for the next few minutes. I rapidly slid the pans around to distribute the heat and stirred them by feel with a metal spatula. My vision had more or less returned by the time I could smell that the almonds and poppy seeds were done. Why weren’t the filberts toasting? I figured out that there was no heat from that burner. The spark must have been some sort of short circuit. I used another burner, but realized that now I only had 3 left.

I peeled the apples and started the spiced apple compote, strawberry almond compote and blueberry hazelnut compote for the waffles. As I was waiting for them to come to a boil I made the orange poppy seed dressing, coleslaw dressing, Caesar dressing, and a chili lime dip for the veggies. As soon as the waffle toppings were done I started the teriyaki pork for the wrap and got some bacon in the oven for the Caesar salad. In another pot I started the simple syrup, which I could flavour for the coffee syrups or use for iced tea. I started the potatoes boiling for the potato salad, and pasta for the pasta salad. I kept glancing at the clock in fear and chastising myself for having not worked longer hours on the weekend.

By 8 p.m. I was about half way through my list. I figured it would take me until 2 a.m. to finish but I had to take a break. I went to my office and studied my list to try to figure out the most efficient way to proceed. I needed to keep the oven and three remaining burners in continuous use to ensure I wasn’t losing time. Within a half an hour I was back in the kitchen mixing up waffle batter, ramming cabbage through the mandoline, peeling carrots and slicing celery sticks. Using a mandoline for carrot sticks delivers a really nice slice, but it’s tedious work by the time you’ve been in the kitchen for ten hours.

By 2 a.m. I was horrified to see that I still had quite a few items left on my list. I was slowing down and I just couldn’t get back up to full speed. There were so many stupid little things to do! I ran the croutons and parmigiano up to the front and loaded the whipped cream canister with a nitrous oxide charger. I was twisting the nitrous oxide into the whipped cream canister lid at the same time I was screwing it onto the container and the gas burst before the canister was sealed. I got a heavy whiff of the nitrous and felt really good for the first time since getting the license signed on Thursday. This was a different kind of good though, and I dropped to my knees and began laughing uncontrollably.

For a few minutes I didn’t know if it was just the gas or if I had truly lost my mind. I could swear that the espresso machine was my high school principal and he was looking down at me and yelling at me for not finishing my potato salad. Damn! I hadn’t finished the potato salad. Still high as a kite I ran into the kitchen and started chopping green onions, apologizing to them with each chop. My eyes started to wobble in my head, so I grabbed some cilantro and a bowl and headed out to a table in the dining room. I could barely see straight, but I could still pull the leaves from the cilantro and get them into the bowl. Each leaf screamed as I pulled it from the stem. By the time I was done, their screams had faded and I was almost back in the real world.

It was 6:30 a.m. and I only had thirty minutes until opening. I still had to make the coffee and get everything prepared for the turkey a la king. It seemed like I was running in circles and there was no end in sight. I had to set out ice for the cream and get a pitcher of ice water to the front counter. I was glad to have a change of clothes in my office for I was covered from head to toe in various types of salad dressing, fruit compote, and batter. I realized I wouldn’t be open on time, but it was going to be close, maybe only a few minutes late. At exactly 7 a.m. the phone rang just as I was getting changed in my office.

“Hello, Humbug Bistro,” I groaned.

“Hey, Boss! Congratulations on opening”

“Jeffrey. Damn. Where are you?”

“Uhm, I’m in Cuspidor at my parents. I was just calling to congratulate you. You don’t sound good.”

“I’m not good,” I lamented, “Maria never showed up. I’m not open, but I’m really close.”

“I could be there in a few hours, boss, if you need me.”

“Are you serious?” I begged.

“Sure thing!”

And with that I had help on the way. I couldn’t believe that this guy was going to drive over 100 kilometers to help me for opening day but I had to believe it or I wouldn’t have had the courage to go through with opening. It was just after 7 a.m. and winter was well upon the prairie. It was dark and cold outside and I took a moment to stare at the vacant street, wondering what opening day would bring. At that moment, a blustering icy wind drove wisps of snow down the dark, icy sidewalk.

Opening Day

2009-11-30T23:12:00.000-08:00

By the time I flicked the switch on the ‘OPEN’ sign I had been awake for 26 hours. The very moment that I flicked the switch on that ‘OPEN’ sign my hopes, dreams and plans coalesced into reality. This is an unnerving experience no matter how many times you've gone through it. Most people will never experience it. This transition from hopes and dreams to reality occurs whenever the entrepreneur finally works through all the dreams and gets to the moment of truth – meeting the customer.

Most people just fantasize about starting their own business. They will sit in a restaurant and say, “You know what would really make this place work?” They walk into a store and think how THEY would treat THEIR customers this way or that. They watch commercials and think how much better they could have made the ad. These people live blessed lives, being able to enjoy these fantasies without ever having their ideas tested. The unaccountability of the wage earner must be very blissful.

The entrepreneur is the person who willingly, even excitedly, throws him or herself to the wolves – and customers can be voracious wolves at times. I have experienced this transition from dreams and plans to reality several times in my life but this was my first brick and mortar business – this was the first time I had an ‘OPEN’ sign to switch on. This time I was experiencing it with the intensity that buzzes through every single nerve after 26 hours of wakefulness. The cold November winds howled down the dark, icy street outside.

Everything was ready. The waffle irons were hot, the muffins were steaming up the dome display on the counter, and the aroma of hot cereal reminded me of sitting by the wood stove in my grandmother’s kitchen. I stood behind the counter waiting, wondering who the first customer would be. Within fifteen minutes the front door swung open and rattled the chimes hung above them. A well dressed woman with coal black hair and brilliant, icy blue eyes walked in.

“Hi there, good morning,” I beamed.

“Good morning,” she replied, “Can you make a white mocha?”

“I can do that!”

I turned to the espresso machine and began creating her white mocha. I was a bit surprised because I hadn’t actually put that on the menu, nor had she even looked at the menu. I had really only been keeping the white chocolate sauce around for personal use.

“So you like white mochas, do you?” I asked.

“Oh yes, and this place has always made the best!” she replied.

“Oh, you mean the old coffee shop. I just opened.”

“Yeah, I’ve been waiting for you to re-open,” she said, to my confusion.

“Uhm, well, I didn’t really re-open – the coffee shop is gone.”

“But you still make white mochas?”

“Yes, but I’ve got a much fuller menu than the old coffee shop.”

“Oh, well I only come here for white mochas,” she said as she paid.

And with that my first customer had come and gone. It was a bit disconcerting that she seemed completely disinterested in the food. It was even more disconcerting that she seemed to completely disregard the change in venue. I comforted myself with the thought that along with the new customer base that I was sure to develop, I would also inherit the old coffee shop clientele. If a lot of them drank white mochas then they might actually contribute towards door costs, or at least the power bill.

Quite quickly more customers rolled in, but one by one they completely bypassed the menu and asked for coffee. I was tired so I have to admit that a part of me was a little glad to not have to jump out of the gates with dozens of orders for the Belgian waffles. It wasn’t long before I started to sense trouble, though. Lyle Duerr walked in and straight up to the register.

“One coffee,” he said.

“Sure,” I replied, “are you interested in trying a Belgian waffle?”

“No, I just come here for the coffee. Glad you finally re-opened,” he said.

“Well, I was kind of hoping to leave the coffee shop behind, actually.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“It’s just that I prepared a lot of breakfast here. Hot cereal, Belgian waffles, hot fruit compote toppings for both, and muffins as well. I’ve got cold cereal too, or toast, if you’re interested.”

“Nah,” he said, “I just come here for the coffee.”

“Well, I hope you’ll consider a waffle, eventually. They’re light and fluffy inside, crispy on the outside, and layered with the strawberry almond compote and whipped cream they are really quite decadent.”

“Nah,” he continued, “If I wanted breakfast I’ld go to John’s and get bacon and eggs. Are you going to start serving bacon and eggs?”

“Actually,” I replied, “I was hoping to keep this as a designated no-fry zone.”

“Well let me know if you ever decide to cook breakfast here,” he snorted.

He seemed completely oblivious to the food that I had prepared. With each customer I tried the up-sell, but with each customer my offerings were totally disregarded. Some people actually asked what the difference between a waffle and a pancake was. When I revealed the oven roast sausages in hot holding, some people actually balked and just said, “You didn’t even fry them?”

Obviously it was going to take some time to get these people introduced to the idea of a breakfast that wasn’t saturated with grease. At least I had good traffic. A couple of people bought muffins but the rest of the crowd just soaked up the coffee. I couldn’t believe how much coffee they could drink. I could barely brew the stuff fast enough. At about 9:30 a.m. the back door swung open and Jeffrey walked in.

“Hey, boss!” he chirped.

“Hey, there! Wow, am I glad to see you!”

“How’s it going?”

“Busy. No food orders though. You shouldn’t have any trouble running the front.”

“I’m on it, boss.”

The ‘boss’ thing was getting stale fast but I was too happy to complain. I left Jeffrey to mind the front of the store and jumped into the kitchen to start cooking the turkey a la king and rice. Everything was prepared for the Tokyo pork wrap – teriyaki pork, shredded carrot, cucumber, green onions, spinach and the orange poppy seed dressing. Everything was also ready for the Caesar salad; it only needed to be mixed and tossed when the orders started coming in. I set the rice to boil and started chopping the onion, carrot and celery.

In no time at all I had the turkey a la king cooked up and simmering on the stove in the kitchen. I took turns bussing the tables with Jeffrey. The dishes were easy to wash, with barely a plate having been used. By 11:30 a.m. I started anticipating the lunch crowd. One fellow came in at 11:45 a.m. and ordered the turkey a la king on rice with Caesar salad. The minutes ticked toward noon and I remembered that Humbuggers never ate before the Flintstone Whistle blew.

Finally the whistle wailed through the streets, giving permission to the Humbuggers to stop their toils and head for lunch. Minutes later the door opened and a line of people came walking in and, I have to admit, I was horrified. I had been awake for more than 30 hours and suddenly I had to start plating like an Iron Chef. The real bottleneck was at the register, and it wasn’t Jeffrey that was the problem. Customer after customer inquired about the soup – which wasn’t even on the menu.

I should mention here that Humbuggers have a particular way of enunciating the word ‘soup’. They say the word with authoritative force and in a percussive meter, punctuating the end of a sentence like an expletive. To the Humbug restauranteur, ‘soup’ was a four letter word in every sense of the phrase. There came to be a pattern to the exchange and within the first half dozen orders I started looking for hidden cameras, again, to see if someone was playing a ridiculous joke on me. It seemed that the next person in line must have heard the exchange ahead of them and would alter their course, but one after another they stepped up and took the exact same approach.

“What’s your SUPE?”

“We don’t have soup, but we do have Turkey a la King,” Jeffrey would explain.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a cream based turkey stew.”

“What did you call it?”

“Turkey a la king.”

“Is that some kind of French thing?”

“Not really, it’s just the name of a recipe for creamed turkey.”

“So you don’t have any SUPE?”

“It’s like a thick soup. Would you like to try it?”

“Bah, well, I guess so.”

One after another they went through almost identical exchanges. Almost every single one of them had the ‘poorboy’ lunch special – a piping hot bowl of turkey a la king with garlic toast and coffee. Every single one of them seemed completely perplexed that there was no ‘SUPE’. They were also aghast that we had no crackers to offer. Although the dish was lightly seasoned, almost every one of them complained that it had too much pepper. Almost no one ordered the Caesar salad. One lady, of the few that had ordered it, came up to the counter to complain about it.

“Uhm, my Caesar salad tastes fishy,” she whined.

“That would be the anchovy,” I explained.

“Yuck! Why would you put anchovy in it?”

“Well, that’s what’s in Caesar dressing!”

“You made the dressing?” she asked.

“Yes, from scratch,” I boasted.

“Can’t I just get Caesar salad with Kraft dressing?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t have Kraft dressing here.”

“Then this isn’t really Caesar salad, is it?” she sneered.

“This is a REAL Caesar salad!” I snapped.

“Well it doesn’t even have REAL Caesar dressing!” she snapped back.

“Real Caesar dressing has anchovy, lady!”

“Well who made you boss? You think you know better than Kraft?” she chirped as she turned and walked away.

I couldn’t believe my ears. The dressing was perfect, absolutely perfect. I had roasted the garlic in olive oil, squeezed fresh lemons, used a high grade extra virgin olive oil, emulsified it with Dijon and a perfect balance of worcestershire sauce and pepper. I had gone to great expense to use an authentic parmigiano-reggiano and baked fresh sour dough croutons. I oven roasted thick sliced country style bacon and chopped it by hand and selected perfect romaine hearts. This was the first authentic Caesar salad ever served in Humbug and this backward, inbred, mouth-breathing country hick had the nerve to tell me that I had cheated her by not using Kraft creamy Caesar style dressing? I was livid.

By the end of the lunch rush I was starting to feel the effects of going more than 30 hours without sleep. I left Jeffrey to mind the store and started bussing the tables with a service cart. As I rolled the cart back toward the rear entrance to the kitchen, a short red-haired woman started following me saying, “Excuse me!” I braced for yet another complaint, but to my surprise she offered me a compliment.

“That was a great meal,” she said.

“Thank you,” I replied.

“Do you know what would really make this place work?” she asked.

“A customer base that knows the difference between Velveeta and Camembert,” I replied.

With a puzzled look she continued, “Well, I was thinking about art.”

“What?”

“You need art on the walls. It just doesn’t feel like a coffee shop without art.”

“I’m not trying to run a coffee shop, I’m trying to run a restaurant, hence the word ‘Bistro’ in the name.”

“Oh, but you have such a great coffee shop here.”

“I really need to get these dishes done,” I said, lost for any other words.

“What’s your dream right now?” she asked.

“Getting some sleep,” I replied, backing into the kitchen.

She began to follow, “No, I mean what is your vision for this place.”

I had had enough. I didn’t know where this woman was going, but I knew she wasn’t coming into my kitchen. “Excuse me, this is a staff area,” I explained.

“Oh, that’s ok. I’m just trying to get a feel for your vision for your new business.”

“Look, lady, I’ve been awake for thirty some hours and I have dishes to do,” I begged.

“But don’t you want to share your vision?”

“Right now I have double vision. Lady - thirty some hours - I’m tired and I have dishes to do.”

She continued to push into the kitchen and I was getting really frustrated. “Please get out of my kitchen,” I pleaded.

“This place is such a great coffee shop,” she continued as she continued to advance.

“Lady, I don’t want a coffee shop, I want a restaurant, the only thing I want more is to get these dishes done, survive the day, and get to sleep.”

“I would be too exited to sleep on the first day if I were you.”

“This isn’t the first day. I’m telling you I’ve been awake since about 5 a.m. yesterday. I’ve cooked all night and I just want you out of my kitchen.”

“But what’s your vision? I can help,” she persisted.

“Lady, I appreciate that you liked the food, but you aren’t hearing a word I’m saying. I told you I want a restaurant here, not a coffee shop. I’ve told you that I’ve been up since yesterday morning and I just need to get these dishes done and get through the day. I’ve asked you to stay out of my kitchen and yet here you are in my kitchen. Apparently you don’t give a shit about anything I want and you’re just here to push something on me, and I’m not buying any. Now get, THE FUCK, out of my kitchen!”

She huffed and puffed a bit but finally got the fuck out of my face. As I franticly scrubbed the dishes I just kept mumbling, “vision…vision, who the fuck was that bitch?” Jeffrey could only stay until 2 p.m. and I needed to have the back end cleaned up before he left. The rest of the day was a blur to me as my consciousness began to grow more pliable. Before Jeffrey left he gave me a big high five at the back door and congratulated me again on finally being open.

There was a big afternoon coffee rush but once again no one seemed the least bit interested in food. Several more people expressed their joy that I had finally ‘reopened’ and told me how much they had always loved coming in for coffee. Most of them still referred to the place as the old Humbug Coffee House, and not one of them ever made mention of the Humbug Bistro. I was too tired to care. I was closing at 4 p.m. and realized that by that point I would be 35 hours without sleep.

The last customers left, having consumed copious amounts of coffee. I walked to the front and switch off the ‘OPEN’ sign. I stepped into the front foyer and turned the door sign to ‘CLOSED’. I locked the door and leaned my head against the cold glass. It felt so compelling and I imagined my head slowly slipping through the glass as though into a vertical pool of ice water. I began to notice that my nostrils were being filled with a pungent ammonia sort of odour. It burned my sinuses and drew me back into consciousness. As I looked around I noticed that the wall beside me was wet and there was a puddle on the floor. I leaned down and took a whiff and became nauseated as I realized someone had actually pissed in the foyer.

I didn’t have enough intellect left to even begin to ponder why anyone would do such a thing. The only thought that could pierce my haze was that I had to clean it up. By the time I finished and pushed the mop and bucket back into the dining area I had been awake almost 37 hours. I needed sleep but knew I couldn’t drive. I checked the waffle irons and hot holding to ensure they were off and headed towards the back of the kitchen to turn off the dishwasher.

As I shuffled through my galley it began to stretch like someone was pulling the focus way out on a movie camera - I felt dizzy. The dishwasher suddenly seemed to be a hundred yards away. I heard a muffled thud and darkness ensued.

Day 2

2009-11-30T23:10:00.000-08:00

Having spent most of my life off the beaten path I have found it extremely beneficial to awaken with great caution. There is a point well before consciousness when I become faintly aware of my surroundings and I am in the habit of using this transitional state to prepare myself for wakefulness. The feel of a cheap polyester bedspread signals that I am in a hotel room. Hot stuffy air lets me know that I am in a tent. Wilderness sounds without hot stuffy air serves as a warning that I’ve slept under the sky – a situation that is apparently uncommon for other people.

Finding myself in one of these pre-wakefulness transitional states, I felt quite disoriented. Something was vaguely familiar but I couldn’t quite put my mind on it. My head hurt and I felt lines pressed into my face. My memory was drawn to college and suddenly it dawned on me: I was face down on linoleum. I peeked through the eye closest to the floor and, sure enough, I saw the bottom of a cupboard. My last conscious memories came rushing back to me and I realized I was on the floor of the restaurant kitchen.

Peeling my face off the linoleum I took a quick mental inventory and was glad to surmise this was not a liquor induced situation. I must have passed out on my way to the dishwasher and hit my head. I searched for a clock. It was 1 a.m. I still had some dishes to do and I had to get the prep work done for day 2.

It took me longer than I had expected to finish cleaning up from day 1 and get started on the prep for that day. By the time I was done I no longer had time to go home for a shower so I just washed up as best as I could in the restroom. I was glad I had another change of clothes in my office and I was even happier to be the owner of an espresso machine. I walked up to the front and switched on the ‘OPEN’ sign.

As unfulfilling as my sleep had been, I felt exponentially better than the day before. This day started to fill out like the previous one though. There were lots of people coming in for coffee and by the time Jeffrey arrived there was hardly a plate used. A lot of the faces were very familiar from day 1, especially amongst one group that seemed to have no inhibitions against sitting for hours and drinking ridiculous volumes of coffee.

I hustled to prepare the day’s special – sweet chili pork, a dish I had re-invented from one of my grandmother’s recipes. It is a tomato based sweet & sour dish with plenty of heat from Hungarian paprika and a unique kick from allspice and tamarind. Whenever I serve this dish over rice people clamor for seconds, digging for more sauce and seeming to care less whether or not they get another helping of the thin sliced pork loin. This was Humbug, however, and I was rapidly learning that Humbuggers were repulsed almost as much by spice as they were by the unfamiliar.

Once again the traffic before noon was minimal. Two big men walked in at about 11:30 a.m. and boldly asked for ‘a big lunch’. They opted for coffee as their beverage and Jeffrey handed them their mugs as I plated their food. As near as I could tell, they were quite happy with their meal because they seemed to be shoveling it in as fast as they could without choking themselves. I decided to use the pre-whistle lull to go and ask how they were enjoying their meal.

“How are you fellas doing today?” I asked.

“Good,” they said in unison.

“So, how is your big lunch?” I asked.

“Good,” said fellow one, “but damn spicy.”

“Yeah,” said fellow two, “and it don’t seem much like chink food.”

“Uhm, Chinese food?” I asked.

“Yeah,” replied fellow one, “it’s good and all, but it don’t taste like chink food at all.”

“Well it’s not supposed to be Chinese food,” I said, somewhat puzzled.

“Then what’s with the rice?” asked fellow two.

“Well the sauce goes well with rice, coats it nicely, don’t you think?”

“I ain’t never had rice except with chink food,” explained fellow two.

“And what’s with the greens then?” his compatriot inquired.

“That’s a spinach salad,” I explained.

“That’s spinach?” they exclaimed in unison.

“Yes, fresh spinach salad with orange poppy seed dressing,” I explained.

“I thought spinach was dark and squishy,” one of them remarked.

“Oh, that’s canned spinach. This is fresh spinach,” I further explained.

“So you run out of lettuce then?” one of them asked.

“No. It’s just another leafy vegetable - for some variety.”

After several more references to how only ‘chink’ food should be served on rice, and a couple of inquiries as to where I acquired spinach that hadn’t been in a can, I gave up. I took solace that at least these two men weren’t put off by the spiciness of the dish. I waited for the Flintstone Whistle to blow.

Within minutes of the obnoxious wail of the town siren a line of people poured through the door. As they approached the register I overheard some of them talking about the ‘fancy French stuff’ being served the day before. Jeffrey took up his post and began to take orders.

“Hi there, what can I get for you today?” he asked.

“What’s your SUPE?”

“We don’t have soup, but we have Sweet Chili Pork,” he explained.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a spicy sweet and sour sort of dish.”

“What did you call it?”

“Sweet Chili Pork.”

“Is it spicy?”

“It’s fairly spicy.”

“So you don’t have any SUPE?”

“It’s like a thick soup. Would you like to try it?”

“Yuck, I HATE spice.”

I couldn’t believe someone just looked at us and blurted ‘yuck’ without even trying the food. Trying to remain calm I cut in to see if I could smooth things over.

“Would you like to try our Santa Fe Chicken Wrap?” I asked.

“That sounds spicy too,” the woman lamented.

“Not at all,” I assured her.

I went on to explain that the Santa Fe Chicken Wrap was stuffed with chicken breast, minced red bell peppers, celery and green onion, shredded leaf lettuce and dressed with our in house red bell pepper aioli.

“What the heck is oily?” she blurted.

“Uhm, aioli is a seasoned mayonnaise with garlic,” I explained.

“And it has hot peppers in it?”

“No, it has red bell pepper, like in the wrap.”

“What’s a red bell pepper?”

“Well, the same as a green pepper, but it’s red and sweeter.”

“Yuck! I hate peppers. I never eat peppers. Can you make it without peppers?”

I couldn’t believe that she just blurted out ‘yuck’ again. The line was growing and I renewed my efforts to remain calm. We finally agreed that she could have a chicken wrap with shredded carrot, green onion and cucumber – all stolen from the spinach salad - dressed with mayonnaise. As it turned out this was to be the consolation special for at least a dozen other customers, but not before they each asked at least twice about the ‘SUPE’.

The few customers who did opt for the sweet chili pork decided to have iced tea instead of coffee to ensure they were safe from the spice. These customers complained about the iced tea tasting like tea. Apparently it had never dawned on these hicks that iced tea could be made by pouring sweetened tea over ice and adding some hand squeezed lemon juice. Some of them had the nerve to accuse me of being too cheap to give them ‘real iced tea’. By the end of the lunch rush I was starting to feel like I had been awake for 30 hours.

I turned to Jeffrey and asked, “Did you grow up here?”

“No, Boss, I grew up in Cuspidor.”

“Right then. Would you like to try the sweet chili pork?”

“I was hoping you’ld ask, it smells incredible.”

I plated Jeffrey a heaping helping of sweet chili pork over a mound of rice beside some spinach salad. It hadn’t occurred to me that he had no time to sample the turkey a la king the day before. He stood at the end of the counter and took his first bite. His eyes got big and I grew concerned that maybe the dish really was too spicy.

“Is it ok?” I asked.

“Holy shit!”

“Are you ok?”

“This is amazing!” he said, as he began to shovel more into his mouth.

“Uhm, is it ok for a preacher to say ‘shit’?”

“When food is this good it is,” he said between mouthfuls.

“So this is good food then?”

“Damn right!”

I couldn’t believe that I had even begun to question myself for a moment. I had cooked for people from coast to coast and from the Arctic Circle to Texas and never had a complaint. How was it possible that this little pocket of people in this tiny hick town could have tastes that were so incredibly off? How could there be a town full of people who never ate bell peppers and hated any amount of spice? Jeffrey asked for a second serving and I was more than happy to oblige.

I spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about my menu. I had noticed that the food was remarkably bland at the other restaurants in town but I had thought this was going to be to my advantage. It had never occurred to me that their food was bland because that was all these hicks would eat. There was no time to change the menu in the middle of the week so I felt I had no choice but to stay the course.

Their aversion to diversity even extended to their ability to select between dark and medium roast coffee. Although the coffee row regulars seemed quite accustomed to choosing between different roasts of coffee, a lot of newcomers were completely baffled, often asking, “Which of these is ‘NORMAL’ coffee?” It didn’t matter how I tried to explain it. Even when I asked what sort of grounds they purchased from the grocery store, the most common answer was, “NORMAL!” I had never seen this brand on any grocery store shelf in my life. After several weeks I began to typically reply, “Medium roast is ‘NORMAL’ and the other stuff is for homosexuals.” I soon quit this practice, however, when I tired of having to reboot them from the inevitable Humbug Huh that ensued.

I was even having trouble selling my in-house seasoned cream cheeses. I was, and will always be, very proud of my cinnamon spread cream cheese. It is such a simple preparation that I can’t believe that I’ve never seen it served anywhere else. You just soften some cream cheese and then blend in demerara sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg. For a little kick you can even add some ground ginger. It is simply incredible on a toasted cinnamon raisin bagel. Every time I recommended it to a Humbugger, however, all they could say was, “Don’t you have any ‘NORMAL’ cream cheese?”

When they gave up on finding ‘NORMAL’ cream cheese they would always ask for a toasted bagel with margarine. Even this was impossible because I refused to carry trailer trash ingredients and there was never an ounce of margarine to be found in my bistro. I couldn’t believe that they even complained about being served butter.

Leaving the restaurant that night, I turned and stared into the darkness across the dining room. The icy wind was cold outside but it seemed warmer than the reception I had been getting inside. The pump in the espresso machine buzzed as though to taunt me as I closed the door.

Day 3

2009-11-30T23:08:00.000-08:00

By day three I was almost feeling like a human being again. I had finally gotten home, taken a shower, and slept in a real bed. This isn’t to say that I was well rested and loving life, however. I hadn’t gotten out of the restaurant until 9 p.m. the night before. The eight blocks down the icy street to my apartment felt like arctic tundra and I wound up chilled right to the bone. The only pleasant part of the experience was forty minutes under a steaming hot shower but it took most of that time to stop shivering. I don’t get cold easily except when tired and by the time I got to bed it had been a twenty two hour day. I only slept for five hours because I had to get back to the restaurant by 5 a.m.

The eight blocks back to the restaurant were pure hell, each and every one of them equivalent to an eternity of suffering. Once again I found myself kneeling before the espresso machine giving thanks. I had done most of the prep work the night before but there were a few things that had to be done just before opening. I psyched myself up to up-sell the customers on food, thinking I had to at least get a few of them to buy a fresh baked muffin. If it came down to it, I planned to give away some free samples. I switched on the ‘OPEN’ sign and took my place behind the register.

Until about 8:30 a.m., only a couple of people popped in for a coffee ‘to go’. Finally the morning coffee-rush started – as usual with Lyle Duerr leading the way. He threw down the exact change and asked for his mug and I quickly interjected, “Would you care for a fresh baked muffin with that?” His response was a snappy Humbug Huh. His head cocked to the right so severely that it was as though an invisible noose had just tugged up on his neck, and a faint “ah-roo” noise squeezed out of the back of his mouth. He stood motionless for several seconds, until I commented on the cold, finally rebooting and moving along his way. One after the other they all gave identical reactions. The only one to give me an audible response was Earla Hueber. She looked me straight in the eye and said, “You know, we really only come here for the coffee,” and then she shot her nose in the air and turned away. I wondered how she had become immune to the Humbug Huh and decided that if ever I got her stuck in one that I was going to scrape that grease paint off her face before I started her back up again.

Earla was the epitome of the female Humbugger. She was nearing sixty but still piled on make-up like a fifteen year old trying to catch the eye of the new boy at school. The oddest thing about her make-up was that she walked to the restaurant in the bitter cold so it got all frosted up and then melted off her face as soon as she walked in the door. It must have taken her at least half an hour each morning to do that amount of face-painting and as soon as she entered the restaurant she made a beeline straight for the restroom and spent half an hour re-applying the fiasco. I had never before witnessed this behavior in any woman over thirty.

Not to be discouraged, I cut up a few of the muffins and plated up samples for each table. I made sure that each table got one fewer samples than the number of people seated – an old and obvious trick to entice at least one sale. At each and every table, just as I set the sample plate down, there was one woman, not two or three but one, who immediately said, “Oh thank you, but I couldn’t - I just had breakfast.” Then every single other person at the table reached out and took their apportioned sample. It was enough to make me scream.

At this point I was absolutely certain that there had to be hidden cameras taping this whole conspiracy for some sort of reality show. How could they know so quickly that the samples were one short? How did they decide so quickly which woman would instantly opt out? On top of all of this, how could each and every other patron reach out simultaneously, retrieve a sample, pop it in their mouth, and then continued talking like it had never happened? For the second time, these people really started to creep me out.

By the time Jeffrey arrived I was glad to escape to the kitchen. The special was a modern take on Chicken Cacciatore that used diced, breaded chicken breast rather than thighs and yet again it was another menu item that packed a healthy amount of spice. I wanted to label the menu as ‘Pollo Allo Cacciatore’ but felt that might be a bit metropolitan for Humbug. Unfortunately I had chosen to pair it with my bell pepper salad – thinly sliced red, yellow and orange bell peppers, marinated in Italian herb vinaigrette, generously piled atop a bed of shredded leaf lettuce. A spicy hotpot and bell peppers were not a good combination in Humbug. I had already learned that most Humbuggers despised bell peppers but felt that the turkey club wrap would be familiar enough for their rural tastes.

Once again we had very few customers before the Flintstone Whistle. When it finally wailed its obnoxious wail throughout the streets, Jeffrey and I looked at each other and began the ninety second count down to the lunch rush. The stream through the door was a bit lighter that day as the first woman arrived at the register.

“What’s your SUPE?” she asked.

“We don’t have soup but we have Chicken Cacciatore,” Jeffrey explained.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a spicy, tomato based, chicken stew.”

“What did you call it?”

“Chicken Cacciatore.”

“Chicken catchy what?”

I decided to intercede and said, “Cacciatore. Just imagine that you’re chasing John Diefenbaker – you might say that you are trying to catch a Tory.”

“So you don’t have any SUPE?”

“No,” I explained, “but the Cacciatore is spicy so you might prefer the turkey club wrap.”

“Yuck! I HATE wraps,” she so eloquently explained.

“Well the main special is the Chicken Cacciatore on rice with bell pepper salad,” I said, hoping the mention of bell peppers would steer her towards the wrap.

“Why do you have all these fancy names? Can’t you just make something ‘NORMAL’?”

“Ma’am,” I said, in exasperation, “just be glad I don’t expect you to ask for the pollo allo cacciatore su rizo con l’insalata del pepe.”

“Hah!” she said self righteously, “This is town is German – we don’t parlay no frenchy frenchy around here!”

And with that remarkable revelation of linguistic etiquette being so eloquently disseminated she turned and walked out. Most of the remaining customers opted for the turkey club wrap with only a few braving a bowl of the spicy chicken cacciatore with garlic toast. Those who did select the chicken cacciatore simply called it chicken stew. The only sign of improvement was that fewer than half of them asked about the ‘SUPE’.

One fellow, who ordered the wrap, became particularly tenacious in his inquiry as to the nature of my ‘FRUM’. Let me explain: Humbuggers have an extremely invasive and uninhibited way of prying into a stranger’s personal details. When digging for the whereabouts of a stranger’s origins they seem unable to casually slip in the question, “So, where are you from?” They choose, rather, to demand instant gratification of their curiosity about a stranger by leaping straight into the question with tremendous forcefulness and completely without delay. Furthermore, they utter the ‘from’ in their inquiry with the same forceful meter that they place on the word ‘SUPE’.

So, as I was making this fellow’s wrap, he launched into his interrogation.

“Where are you FRUM?” he inquired, so subtly, leaning way too far over the counter.

“All over,” I said, spreading the mayonnaise.

“Like where?”

“Uhm, I moved here from Cuspidor,” I said, layering the turkey.

“What high school did you go to?”

“I actually went to high school in B.C.,” I replied, layering the bacon.

“So your parents are there?”

“No, not actually,” I replied in an irritated tone, layering the tomato.

“Well where were you born?”

I sighed, “Edmonton,” as I layered the lettuce.

“So your parents are there?”

“No, do you want cheese on this,” I answered and asked.

“Well where are you FRUM then?”

“All over,” I said, rolling up his wrap, without cheese.

I handed him his wrap and he walked away scratching his head. I had been through this line of interrogation at least twenty times since moving to Humbug and it was getting more and more difficult to remain patient with it. I tried, to no avail, to develop a means of shortcutting this tactless line of mindless questioning. Every time I tried to give a simple answer, these uncultured hillbillies pushed shamelessly for more and more details until I finally had to admit that I had no ‘FRUM’ as they defined it. Once in a while I remembered the Humbug Huh and managed to shoot a bizarre enough question or profane enough diatribe to hang them up in one. I could then escape with a quick change in topic that left them almost as displaced and confused as just telling them that I had no ‘FRUM’. Either way it was irritating.

I had come to realize that Humbuggers actually felt I was the one being rude by not providing them an anchor with which to tie down my origins. Most of them were born, raised, schooled, employed and bought their first home all within a ten block radius. Their entire lives, down to the most miniscule detail like a fart during the 1984 Christmas Mass, were fully catalogued in the public consciousness and they just couldn’t accept that anyone in the world was free of such scrutiny. For life to be fair, in the Humbug mind, every single person on the planet must be in some way defined by an imperfect community from which they can never ascend.

I was working on another plate when suddenly I heard a very loud, high pitched, “Woot, woot, woot!” I looked out over the dining area and saw a drab little mousy woman doing some sort of Curly Howard impression. She was running around her table yelping like a kicked dog and waving her hands in front of her face. I began to laugh but smothered the urge when I became concerned that she might suffer from a mental illness or perhaps she was in some true form of distress.

Suddenly she bolted towards the counter, still yelping and waving her hands around her face. As she arrived at the counter she grabbed the pitcher of ice water and began pouring it over her face, obviously trying to swallow as much as she could. As she choked and spewed I realized her yelps were actually an attempt to communicate the word, “hot”. Nothing we served was hot enough to be burning her, and the ice water didn’t seem to be helping, so I figured she must be having a reaction to the spice in the food.

I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a container of yoghurt and ran back around the counter to her side. I began to pour the yoghurt into her mouth and grabbed the pitcher so she could spit it back in there. The remedy began to take effect quickly and as she regained her speech she blurted, “Yuck! I hate yoghurt!”

“What’s the matter, ma’am,” I asked.

“You, you, you, you – that’s not funny!” she screamed.

“What’s not funny?”

“You filled my bowl with Tabasco!”

“No, ma’am, I assure you I did not.”

“That was pure Tabasco, and I’m going to sue you!”

“Ma’am, that isn’t straight Tabasco,” I pleaded.

I walked to her table and took a taste straight out of her bowl. Nothing was out of the ordinary and the cacciatore was no more or less spicy than I had remembered. The other customers who were eating it seemed to be doing just fine, although I will admit that several were perspiring a little – perhaps from the spice, perhaps from the fear of seeing this woman’s incredibly exaggerated reaction.

“Ma’am, do you have some sort of allergy to any spice?” I asked.

“I’m going to my lawyer! You are done!” she screamed.

And with that she ran out the door. Once again I turned to Jeffrey as a judge for the dish. Once again he gulped it down gratefully and confirmed it was delicious. He did find it a bit spicy but seemed to quite enjoy it that way. I had been open for less than a week and my menu already faced litigation. The specials for the next day were chili con carne and a satay beef wrap - and I just wasn’t feeling the love. I would at least have to change the satay beef wrap to something without spice.

It blew my mind that I was already considering a menu change. I would have to tone down the chili, but I didn’t know what to do about the wrap. Jeffrey still couldn’t work a full day because of his obligations as a pastor so I was trapped at the store until 4 p.m. I closed, cooled the leftovers as quickly as I could, finished the dishes and ran out into the minus forty winter to the nearest grocery store. I had no idea what I was looking for.

As I walked up and down the aisles of the grocery store trying to figure out what sort of wrap to make I had a culinary epiphany; if Humbuggers were indeed 100% backwards then my food tastes would be a perfect reverse barometer for what would and would not fly in their town. I tried to think of the last selection I would ever make when ordering a wrap in a restaurant. Tuna! Tuna is a great comfort food but I couldn’t imagine anyone leaving the house to pay for a serving of canned tuna.

I grabbed a few cans of tuna and ran back through the cold to the restaurant. By the time I finished the prep for the chili con carne and changing the menus it was 9 p.m. I stared out at the cold, dark, icy street and tried to muster the courage to walk home. I considered driving but that seemed to be a worse prospect. I wanted to keep my car at the restaurant in case I ever needed to make an emergency supply run. The time wasted warming it up just to drive eight blocks, and then doing the same in the morning, would just dig into what little time I had left to sleep.

I decided to sleep in my office and wash up in the restroom again. I was glad I had once again opted to bring a change of clothes to work. As I lay on the sofa in my office I thought about Humbuggers. These people lacked any concept of tact or manners, had absolutely no taste and, even worse, had an aversion to flavour. I could not have picked a worse town in which to open a restaurant.

Day 4

2009-11-30T23:06:00.000-08:00

Waking on the sofa in my office I felt overwhelmed at finally being reunited with the sensation of having had a full night’s sleep. I laid there for several minutes soaking in the almost intoxicating comfort. I didn’t have much optimism for the day but was glad that at least my brain would finally be functioning at 100% capacity. Unfortunately, I encountered a new challenge as I began to move off the sofa. Finally being fully within my senses, all I could sense was pain. My body ached from neck to toe and I realized the damage that the last few days had done.

It had been a long time since I had done this much physical work and I couldn’t remember a time in my life when I had been so active for so many hours in so few days. My calves began to cramp up and the muscles crossing my shoulders and neck felt like rebar. How many hours had I worked? Monday stretched for 35 hours into Tuesday. Wednesday was 19 hours. Thursday I worked 16 hours. Only four days in and I had already worked 70 hours. I tried to put my mind off of it.

I kept stretching as much as I could throughout the morning preparations. I switched on the ‘OPEN’ sign and took my place behind the register. I waited for Lyle Duerr to lead the coffee row crowd in. I hadn’t thought of any new way of up-selling those parasites. I had expected a bit of a coffee crowd to form between breakfast and lunch but with breakfast sales totaling about $40 in the first three days it was already difficult to justify opening for breakfast at all.

I thought that maybe I needed to find a way to promote the Belgian waffles better – they really were incredible. I knew that the hot cereal wasn’t going to be a big draw but I had hoped that perhaps with the hot fruit compotes it might attract a few sales from those looking for a convenient and healthy breakfast. I hoped that the weekend would bring in a bit of a brunch crowd and perhaps that would kick off my morning sales.

Once again Jeffrey arrived to mind the helm while I started cooking lunch. Once again the food sales were almost zero. I had set the beans to boiling earlier and they were nice and tender as I added the components of the sauce. I sautéed the onion, celery, red peppers, and mushroom with the browned ground beef. I began to wonder if the malt vinegar and demerara sugar might actually be off-putting to the Humbuggers. There was no way I was going to open a damn can of chili for these rednecks, but it seemed that might be what it would take to get them eating.

As I took the rice up front to put it in hot holding, Jeffrey turned to me and said, “This lady would like a tuna wrap.” I was astonished. It wasn’t even 11:00 a.m. and someone was actually asking for something on the menu. I told the woman I would be just a minute bringing the chili up front and I’ld get her wrap made up for her. To my amazement, within fifteen minutes we had some more customers asking for the chili. By the time the Flintstone Whistle wailed through the streets we had served about a dozen people and not one of them had asked for ‘SUPE’. Within minutes of the whistle, a steady stream of customers came flowing through the door. As the first one approached, Jeffrey asked her what she would like.

“What’s your SUPE?”

“We don’t have soup, but we have Chili,” Jeffrey explained.

“Is it spicy?”

“It’s pretty spicy, yes.”

“Yuck! I hate spice.”

“Well we also have a tuna salad wrap,” Jeffrey offered.

“Can I get that without onions?”

“Not really, they’re already mixed in.”

“So you don’t have any SUPE?”

“No, I’m sorry. It's really either the chili or the wrap – unless you’ld like a waffle?”

“Bah, I guess I’ll try the wrap.”

Fortunately the ‘SUPE’ customers were few and far between and, to my great joy, we had a number of orders for waffles and an even greater number for chili. Jeffrey and I were running like mad. I had taught him to make the waffles so he jumped from the register to the waffle irons to the espresso machine like a real trouper. I primarily focused on wraps and chili and took the odd turn with the waffles. At some point during the melee he turned to me with frantic eyes and yelled, “Is this ok, boss?”

“Oh, yes, buddy boy, this is great!” I yelled back.

“I don’t think we can keep up, boss!”

“One table at a time, buddy boy, just plate it up and ship it out!”

“Is this what a restaurant is like, boss?”

“Oh yes, this is exactly what a restaurant is like!” I exclaimed.

It had been years since I last scrambled to plate dish after dish after dish. My heart was pounding and I felt like I was surfing on a tidal wave. There are no words that can describe what it’s like to see people lined up in your restaurant, clamoring for your food. By 12:30 p.m. I was running through the dining area with a service cart, clearing tables as fast as I could and running back to the dish pit. By 1:00 p.m. Jeffrey was making another run and screaming that he had run out of room to pile the dishes. I ran to the back and told him to pile them on the floor under the sink. At one point Jeffrey actually had to push down on the cash to get the register drawer shut. The site of this nearly caused me to pee a little. This was indeed what a restaurant was like and I was in heaven.

By 1:30 p.m. the rush had died down and Jeffrey focused on bussing tables while I franticly washed dishes – because we had run out. He would bring the cart back and put the dishes on the floor by the back door and I would pile the cart up with racks of clean dishes to go up front. By the time he had to leave at 2:00 p.m. we had almost half of the dishes returned to the front counter.

Standing at the back of the kitchen I thanked Jeffrey profusely for his monumental work. This guy had never worked in food service before but he withstood the acid test and popped back out the other side smiling.

“I guess you were right, boss,” he said.

“About what?” I asked.

“Well, you said there HAD to be people in town who liked real flavour.”

“Yeah, I was starting to doubt it there for a bit.”

“Looks like word spreads fast in Humbug, eh?”

“Looks like it.”

“You know, boss, I never actually knew a restauranteur before.”

“Heh, thanks, little buddy.”

“Congratulations on your new restaurant.”

“Wow, thanks. Really – thanks,” I said, almost in tears that it was true.

“Well, see ya Tuesday!”

My heart stopped for a moment. I had forgotten that when Maria quit I had rescheduled Jeffrey for weekdays and Anna for weekends. Anna was great, as near as I knew, but she hadn’t worked an actual running day yet. The thought of opening Saturday without Jeffrey terrified me. He at least had a chance to ramp up to the real crowd but Anna was going to get thrown straight into the fire.

I ran to my office and grabbed the pile of resumes marked ‘unlikely’. I had already hired everyone in the ‘ok’ pile and the ‘unlikely’ pile was definitely better than the ‘when pigs fly’ pile. I spent the rest of the afternoon washing dishes, tending to the afternoon coffee rush, selling a few waffles, and working my way through the pile of resumes with the cordless phone pinned between my ear and my shoulder.

Going back through the resumes was a nightmare. I can’t tell you how many teenage Humbug girls had listed ‘hand gun proficiency’ and ‘hunter safety certificate’ under their skills. It seemed to be an odd thing to include when applying for food service work but I consoled myself with the thought that I would be the safest chef in the world if anyone ever tried to rob me.

I spent a lot of time talking to mothers who told me their daughters had already found other work. Some of the mothers took the time to tell me that they heard I was serving ‘weird spicy food’ and that they didn’t approve of that. I was starting to think that I’ld have to make it with just Anna. The last resume in the pile looked rather shameful – even before I realized it didn’t have a name or any contact information on it.

Under ‘experience’, this girl listed volunteering at an old folk’s home and for skills she listed ‘playing cards with the old people and stuff’. I decided to call the care home listed and see if they knew her name and number. This was really scraping the bottom of the barrel but the only other resumes I had on hand were in a pile marked ‘when pigs fly’.

The lady who answered at the retirement home was extremely friendly and sympathetic to my situation. She said they only had one volunteer who actually played cards with the residents, but that volunteer was a young man named ‘Marty’. I took down Marty’s number and thanked her.

When I called Marty’s number, his mother answered. When I mentioned that I was looking to hire him, she shrieked. She seemed very eager to have Marty find gainful employment and pressed me hard about how many hours I needed him to work. I managed to avoid making any commitments and asked her to have him call me. Marty returned my call at about 8:00 p.m. and he agreed to come in at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday.

I hung up the phone and looked around the restaurant. The food was put away and the dishes were finally done. The crowd had made an incredible mess of the floors and I had to sweep and mop the dining area from front to back. The bathrooms had taken far too long to clean but were finally sparkling. I still had to clean out the front deli-cooler and wash all the inserts, make more waffle batter and then prep for Siesta Saturday. I didn’t finish until midnight and didn’t even have to debate where I was going to sleep that night.

As I lay on the sofa in my office I thought about the day. I couldn’t believe that I had begun to doubt myself. It seemed that those Humbuggers who did like spicy food had perhaps given up on dining out in Humbug long ago. With so many of the bland Humbuggers being so over-spiced in my restaurant, word must have spread like wild fire to the Humbuggers with taste. If people were still talking about the new place in town that was serving spicy food then I couldn’t imagine the sort of crowd that would be drawn to ‘Siesta Saturday’. I drifted off to sleep with a huge smile on my face.

Day 5

2009-11-30T23:04:00.000-08:00

Day five began with both fatigue and pain. I hadn’t had much sleep and I decided that I definitely needed to start stretching before going to bed. I was, however, very optimistic that a breakfast crowd might finally form. Unfortunately, though, Saturday started off like every other day. I saw very few customers until coffee row, led by Lyle, came strolling in to suck down as much cheap brewed coffee as their bellies could hold. Once again they showed no shame in completely disregarding the menu.

Answering a knock at the back door, I found a tall slim fellow who turned out to be Marty. He seemed vaguely familiar but I couldn’t figure out if I was remembering him from when he had handed in his resume or if I was confusing him with a young Jon Voight from Midnight Cowboy. He had a young innocent face and an uncomfortable sincerity about him that just exuded a pure essence of ‘country boy’.

I had barely begun to show him around the restaurant when Anna arrived. Anna was only fifteen but she seemed to be the quickest study during training. I hoped that she had retained as much as possible because I needed her to finish showing Marty the ropes so I could begin cooking lunch. She jumped right at the opportunity to be the senior staffer for the day and sent Marty out to bus tables.

The menu for Siesta Saturday was quite basic. I had made the taco sauce the night before and really only had to cook the seasoned ground beef and mexi-seasoned rice. Once again I had set the beans to boiling early so I could season and blend them with some chicken broth to make some fat-free ‘refritos’. By 11:00 a.m. I had all the makings of our hard shelled tacos and my adventurously named ‘Baja Burrito’. The tacos were sold in pairs and either they or the burritos could be purchased alone or as a ‘La Cassa Platter’. This was definitely the widest selection of Mexican inspired cuisine ever offered in Humbug.

There was a little traffic before noon but not nearly what I had expected. I consoled myself with the upside of having an opportunity to get Marty and Anna a bit more up to speed before things got hectic. Marty took an immediate interest in the espresso machine and was very eager to make and try a latte. He seemed to have a natural talent for steaming the milk with or without foam and was quick to take an inventory of the flavoured syrups. I found myself hoping that he was gay, thinking that nothing kicks up the image of a little bistro like a gay barista.

Anna was amazing. She was young but had an incredible eye for what needed to be done and the courage to just hop to it. In no time at all, all the napkin, paper towel, and cutlery dispensers were filled and the counters were wiped down. I found myself thinking that Ray Kroc would have been proud of her and remembered his famous words, “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean.”

We decided that Anna would run the register and prepare waffles and that Marty would focus on beverages and bussing tables. When the Flintstone Whistle wailed, Anna took her place at the register and we counted down to the rush. The doors opened and customers began to trickle in. The first couple of orders went rather smoothly with the customers making fairly quick selections from what we had to offer but then we encountered our first full blooded Humbugger.

“What’s your SUPE?”

“We don’t have any soup. We’re serving tacos and burritos today,” Anna explained.

“What’s that?”

“It’s Mexican food.”

“Can’t you just make me a sammich?”

“Uhm, we don’t have any sandwiches.”

“Well I used to be able to get a sammich here!”

“That was when the coffee shop was here. This is a new bistro.”

“So you don’t have any SUPE?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“Bah, well what kind of coffee shop is this supposed to be?”

And with that the little Humbugger spun on her heels and left. Anna looked almost heart broken but I told her that this had been going on all week. Fortunately the Humbuggers were again few and far between but, of those that we did encounter, they seemed far more confounded by the menu than on previous days. The few that did order tended to use an English pronunciation of the ‘j’ in the ‘Baja Burrito’ and others were completely confused as to how one would go about eating a taco.

I found myself going to a couple of tables and instructing these backward hicks on how to pick up a hard shelled taco and cup it while taking a bite with their head tilted sideways. One of them actually got stuck in a Humbug Huh as soon as she tilted her head. At one table they laughed and giggled like simple minded children. At the other table they just gave up and asked for cutlery with which they smashed the shells to create an apocalyptic looking taco salad. I had to intercede at a few tables to keep a few people from unrolling their burritos and in a few instances just wound up delivering more cutlery. Marty and Anna just watched the fiasco in wide eyed amazement.

At one point Anna turned to me and said, “I’m really sorry about all this.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I have no idea how these people have never seen tacos before.”

“It’s odd, I guess, but at least they are trying something new.”

“We have taco night at least once a month at my house.”

Marty chimed in, “Mine too.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess they don't.”

Then it dawned on me to ask Marty and Anna if they had been born in Humbug. Both answered no. Anna had been born and mostly raised in Cuspidor. Marty was from a neighboring town but told me his parents were from Calgary. I found myself thinking that although Humbug was only sixty miles from Cuspidor it seemed to be separated by more like sixty years. Just then a middle aged woman leaned over the counter and asked, “Can I get the two tacos without the shells?”

“You want something like a taco salad?” I asked.

“No, I just want the two tacos without the shells – to go.”

“Ok, so just layer the filling from the two tacos into a to-go container?”

“NO! Just make the tacos without the shells!” she barked.

“I’m sorry, but that sounds like a taco salad to me. I can actually give you extra fillings for the same price if you aren’t having the shells, you know.”

“If you can’t do it then forget it!” she yelped as she turned and left.

I had absolutely no idea what this woman was expecting. To this very day I have no idea what this woman wanted. Having encountered a lot of strange behaviors, orders, and reactions in Humbug, this one in particular has come back to bother me over and over and I have no idea why. I have really only bothered to relate this woman’s strange behavior in the hopes that someone out there can eventually explain to me what the hell this woman was looking for.

By 2:00 p.m. I realized that sales were not going to be nearly as high as I had expected. I decided to send Marty home but asked him to come back the next day. I kept Anna on for the rest of the day so I could get started on Sunday’s turkey dinner.

I had decided to pre-cook the turkey by sectioning and boiling it with onions and celery. In this way I could cook the different parts evenly and create the broth at the same time. I kept a large piece of the skin in tact so I could roast it on top of the dressing. I could use the reduced broth to reheat enough turkey for Sunday’s dinner as well as making gravy and flavouring the dressing and garlic mashed potatoes. Aside from losing the presentation of a fresh-out-of-the-oven bird, this technique proved to be incredibly efficient in allowing me to put the entire turkey dinner together in only a few hours on any given Sunday.

I sent Anna home at 5:00 when the restaurant closed. Her mother came to pick her up and asked how things were going. When I told her that sales were much slower than Friday, she told me that the craft shop up the street had had a workshop the day before. Aparently people from far and wide came to Humbug to learn old fashioned crafts - why didn't this surpise me? I realized that my big breakthrough on Friday was just the result of an artificially high influx of non-Humbuggers. A little piece of me died.

I finished de-boning the cooked turkey and reducing the broth and started cooling everything down. Anna had kept up on the day’s dishes but I still had to prep the salad for the next day, mop the front, clean the restrooms, and reconcile the day’s receipts and cash. Just when I thought I was done I realized I had to make the cranberry sauce so it would have time to cool. I also set up the front end with more hot holding for all the extra side dishes. Every time I turned around I seemed to find a few more things that needed to be done.

Putting on a full turkey dinner with garlic mashed potatoes, dressing, salad, corn, gravy and homemade cranberry sauce is a full day’s effort at the best of times. Trying to do this so that everything is ready at 11:00 a.m., while also cleaning an entire restaurant the night before, is ridiculous. By 10:00 p.m. I realized I was going to spend yet another night on the sofa in my office. As I lay waiting for sleep to ensue, my mind ran through the hours I had worked so far this week: 102. Fuck.

Day 6

2009-11-30T23:02:00.000-08:00

On Sundays I offered my most ambitious menu; a full turkey dinner with all the trimmings. This day was designed to pull in the older customers - and in Humbug everyone acted like they were born in 1940. If Humbuggers hated progressive food then, I thought, this would be the menu to draw them all in. Even though the reactions through the week were extremely disappointing, at very least we had had quite a bit of traffic and plenty of people had read the menu and would know about the turkey dinner. The town only had a population of a few thousand so by this point everyone had to know about the new restaurant, even if they clung to the idea that it was still just the ‘old coffee shop’. Humbuggers seemed quite anachronistic, but what could be more old-fashioned than a Sunday turkey dinner? What would make for a better Sunday brunch than Belgian waffles?

Even though everything about the day’s menu seemed perfect for this little town I was filled with anxiety as I switched on the ‘OPEN’ sign for the sixth time. This day HAD to be a hit or I would have no idea what to do. If this day WAS a hit then at least I would have a starting point for restructuring the menu for the rest of the week. There was no way I was going to start serving flavourless prepackaged crap but maybe roast beef or ham would work just as well.

I took my place behind the register and waited. By 9:00 a.m., not only had I not seen a single customer but not even a single car had driven past on Main Street. It was obvious that this must be a real church-going town so I wasn’t entirely surprised. As I waited, I did find the absence of the coffee row crowd quite unexpected – not even Lyle Duerr came in. I wondered what time church-going people went to church.

By the time Marty and Anna showed up, the only glass used in the entire restaurant was holding my Americano. Up until owning my own espresso machine I had never been a coffee drinker but the habit was taking hold fast. I set to cooking dinner. The turkey bathed in hot broth while I thickened the velvety smooth gravy as the aroma of the seasoned pork and bread dressing roasting in the oven wafted sensually throughout the restaurant. The corn had to take a back seat to the potatoes because I still only had three elements on the stove. Marty and Anna helped me transfer all the food to hot holding because they didn’t have a single customer to serve. Everything was ready for 11:00 a.m. as the three of us stood in silence.

The time began to drag on horribly. I didn’t want to commit Anna or Marty to any big cleaning projects before our lunch rush arrived. To help pass the time we challenged each other to making various beverages. Anna was sharp as a tack but Marty shamed us both with his flawless cappuccinos, lattes, and espresso shots. He was just as fast with milkshakes and smoothies. When it came to barista talent, Marty was a monster.

The aroma of the turkey completely permeated the dining area. Boiling it in its own juices had allowed the light and dark meat to both be evenly cooked while still remaining moist and juicy. The dressing had crisped up and was a beautiful golden brown and it had a full turkey flavour from being prepared with the turkey broth. I salivated as I saw little pools of butter forming in the crevasses of the garlic mashed potatoes. We had all of this plus freshly prepared cranberry sauce.

Finally the Flintstone Whistle wailed its agonizing scream through the cold, empty, icy streets. We counted down to the lunch rush. We counted down some more. By 12:30 p.m. I felt like a tap dancer wearing mukluks. I decided to send Marty home but asked him to come back in on Tuesday to work with Jeffrey. Anna just started cleaning everything that wasn’t shiny and taking out the garbage. When I finally switched off the ‘OPEN’ sign at 5:00 p.m. the sales were $0.00. Zip. Nada. Zilch. Nothing. Fuck.

Anna’s mother came to pick her up. She came inside and told me that there had been a big pancake breakfast for the Catholic Church that morning. She said 80% of the town was Catholic so that had to be why nobody showed up. I desperately hoped that she was right so I agreed that she must be. After they left I stood in the middle of the dining area feeling more alone than I ever had in my entire life; a solitary pilot lashed to the wheel of a tiny ship being tossed about in the swells of the open ocean.

I had already thrown out all the food at 4:30 p.m. I could have kept the turkey and cranberry sauce but I wanted to destroy all evidence of that horrible day. Anna had completely finished the dishes and the restaurant was sparkling. My week was over with 113 hours of labour and about 40 hours of sleep. I went to my office and sat down with a bottle of whisky to evaluate what I had learned.

Full blooded Humbuggers seemed to want nothing but unseasoned ‘SUPE’. This meant serving the cheapest canned soup I could find for $4 per bowl. I had spent the summer watching the piles of crackers they used in other restaurants. I had learned first hand the volume of coffee they could drink. Even with a healthy price for coffee my margins would be, at best, about $2 per seat and coffee row was actually costing me money. There was no way to pay door costs and wages with such paltry covers.

The only way the other restaurants made it was on deep fried rubbish. By the time they paid the table server they actually lost money on all the ‘SUPE’ but managed to scrape some profit out of the high margin deepfreeze to deep-fry items. I didn’t have enough seats to keep a waitress busy - and installing a deep fryer, vent hood, and fire suppression would cost me about $20,000. There was no way to make ends meet in this location off of full blooded Humbuggers. In a town where so many people smoked, it drove me crazy that they could drop $10 per day on a pack of cancer yet balked at the idea of spending more than $8 on lunch twice per week.

I wondered how many non-Humbuggers lived in Humbug. Serving boutique quality food to other outsiders was the only way to generate meaningful revenue per seat. I had no idea how to reach this crowd but I had only been open one week and I had to let word of mouth have a chance. There just had to be a meaningful population of people who wanted fresh food and were willing to part with at least $8 to get it.

I decided to stay the course. My bottle of whisky agreed.

Week 2

2009-11-30T23:00:00.000-08:00

Monday morning slapped me in the face and berated me for drinking whisky. I wasn’t in bad shape but I needed to be in much better shape. I quickly learned that espresso wasn’t going to give me any help with a hangover. Sitting at my desk I quickly composed a schedule for the day but was disappointed to find that a day only had twenty four hours. I had various managerial duties to complete, like getting papers to the accountant and lawyer and paying some bills. I had some personal duties to complete like showering and laundry. Finally, I had some chef’s duties to complete – specifically the miracle of getting seventeen hours of cooking done in less than eight hours if I wanted to sleep that night.

I began rearranging the prep list for better efficiency. Suddenly I realized I also had to get groceries. I got the managerial duties over with as quickly as possible. I drove to my apartment and ran a load of laundry through the washer while I took a shower. I threw the clothes into the dryer and then raced to the grocery store. I ran up and down the aisles of the grocery store like a maniac. I picked up my laundry on my way from the grocery store to the restaurant. By the time I got back to the restaurant and got everything unloaded and put away, it was 2 p.m.

I worked my way feverishly through the prep list. I decided that since I had both Jeffrey and Marty coming in I could leave most of the dishes for them to do in the morning. I had a few salad dressings left from the week before and I was incredibly happy to stroke them off the list without losing a minute. I realized that anything with a shelf life of well over a week should have been made during the previous week. There was absolutely no reason for me to be boiling up a new batch of simple syrup during Monday mayhem. Then I wondered how I would ever find the time during the week to prepare such things ahead of schedule.

By the time I had worked my way through the entire list it was 4:00 a.m. I had time for about two or maybe two and a half hours of sleep. I opted to sleep in my office chair with my head on my desk to make sure that I wouldn’t slip too deeply out of consciousness to be resurrected again for opening. That small amount of un-restful and uncomfortable slumber, however, turned out to be worse than no sleep at all and not even the potent elixir, espresso, could provide me absolution.

I completed the pre-opening list, switched on the damn sign and waited for the coffee row parasites to arrive. I wondered why I had even bothered to bake muffins or make hot cereal. The well dressed woman with coal black hair and brilliant, icy blue eyes walked in and ordered her white mocha. A few hours later the leeches, lead by Lyle, arrived and began guzzling coffee. By the time Marty and Jeffrey arrived I was delighted to have solid proof that I wasn’t living in an endlessly looped recording of hell.

They both took turns working the dish pit while I cooked lunch. Lunch was transferred up front to hot holding, the Flintstone Whistle wailed through the cold icy streets, Humbuggers came in and asked for ‘SUPE’ and by 1:30 p.m. Jeffrey, Marty and I were alone in the store. Jeffrey and Marty hit it off quite well and got to know each other a bit as they cleaned up after lunch.

I had a chat with them about the schedule and it was decided that Marty would work from 10:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. for the rest of the week and that Jeffrey wouldn’t come back until Friday. Jeffrey didn’t actually need many hours since he was really only in Humbug to complete his training as a pastor. As usual, Jeffrey left at 2:00 p.m. Marty and I were left alone in the store and the big gangly country boy just stood and blinked at me like a tall blonde ostrich.

“So,” I said, “what were you doing before working here?”

“Well, I spent the last six months in a monastery,” he replied.

“A what?” I exclaimed.

“A monastery.”

“For real?”

“For real,” he replied.

“Wow, I didn’t know there were still monasteries.”

“There aren’t many, but there’s one about 20 miles north of town.”

“For real?” I asked, incredulously.

“For real,” he replied.

We stood in silence for a while and he continued to blink like a big blonde ostrich. He showed absolutely no signs of cracking a smile and I actually began to believe him. I knew before hiring Jeffrey that he was a pastor, but I wondered what the odds might be of also unwittingly hiring a monk. I decided to test him.

“So,” I said, “what do you do in a monastery?”

“Not much. Try to find inner peace, I guess,” he replied.

“Wow,” I said, for there really wasn’t anything else to say.

This kid seemed to be dead serious about this. I’ve done a lot of things in my life, and I’ve met a lot of different kinds of people, but I had never before met an actual bona fide monk. I have to say that I was intrigued.

“So what lead to you becoming a monk?”

“A brother, actually.”

“Ok, what lead to you becoming a brother?”

“I didn’t think I had much choice.”

“Called to it? Something like that?”

“No. It seemed I either had to do that or leave and never see my family again.”

“Because?”

“I’m gay.”

“You gotta be shitting me!”

“If that upsets you I can leave. I just feel a need to be honest about it.”

“Upsets me? Fuck no! This is great!”

“Great?”

“Well,” I explained, “I was actually kind of hoping that you were gay.”

“What!”

“Having a gay barista is really classy!”

“What!”

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to stereotype - but the stereotype is that a gay barista is cool.”

“You gotta be shtting me!” he exclaimed.

“I shit you not!”

He went on to tell me an incredible story. In the small town where he grew up, smaller than Humbug, he had never seen a gay man. He knew he was ‘different’ but had no idea that there were other people in the world like himself. His introduction to the concept of homosexuality was exclusively through his church and he was told such people were dirty filthy perverts. This is what he believed. He actually believed that he was a dirty, filthy pervert. Worse yet, he was told that homosexuals were the same as pedophiles and he was horrified at the thought that if he married a woman and fathered children he would end up molesting them.

As the afternoon coffee customers came in we moved our conversation to the kitchen. We took turns dealing with customers and brewing fresh pots of coffee and then returning to the kitchen to continue what was turning into a fascinating conversation for both of us. As he opened up more and more, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This poor kid had been raised to believe that he was a vile despicable pervert who was destined to destroy the lives of innocent children. As I reacted, he couldn’t believe what he was hearing – that I didn’t think he was a vile despicable pervert.

He joined the monastery believing that a life devoted to the church would curb his sexual appetite and provide him with the only path on which he would avoid shaming his entire family. His parents were extremely devout Catholics and he couldn’t imagine any other existence that would allow him to maintain any sort of relationship with them. His parent’s pride at his decision to become a brother only fueled his dedication to the monastic lifestyle.

Meanwhile, the customers had come and had gone and so too had closing time. We switched off the ‘OPEN’ sign and continued our conversation as we finished the dishes and putting away the food. Finally I couldn’t resist any longer and I had to ask.

“So, what lead to you leaving the monastery?”

“Well,” he said as he fidgeted, “that’s a tough one.”

“You can’t stop now, Marty. I’m sorry but I have to know.”

“It was my full disclosure.”

“What’s that?”

“Before you become a full brother, you have to make full disclosure.”

“So like no secrets at all between brothers?” I asked.

“Exactly.”

“And they booted you out for being gay?”

“No,” he said, seeming to become rather agitated.

“Hey,” I said, “this is no monastery. You don’t have to make full disclosure here. I’m sorry for prying.”

“No,” he said, “I want to tell you.”

We stood in silence for a while as he stared at the floor. He didn’t look like a big blonde ostrich anymore. He looked like a young boy standing in the shoes of a very troubled man. Finally, he continued.

“I told them I was gay. I told them I had been with other men. I laid on my face on the floor bawling and I told them every single last gory detail. You have no idea what that’s like. It’s something you build up to for months and it’s harder than killing yourself; and I’ve tried that - plenty of times. I don’t know how I got the courage but somehow it all just came pouring out right there on the floor in front of them. At that point I was nothing and I had nothing. I couldn’t even get up – couldn’t even get up on my hands and knees. That’s when they picked me up off the floor and hugged me and told me they understood and it was all ok. They told me it was all ok and that God loved me.”

By this time we were seated in the dining area. We were seated across from each other and I had absolutely no idea what to say. The silence roared in my ears like a jet engine as he stared at the floor into an abyss. After about ten minutes I just reached out and put my shaking hand on his shoulder.

“You see,” I said, “I’m not the only one who thinks you are ok.”

“No,” he said, with anger in his voice, “They didn’t think I was ok.”

“What happened then?” I choked, fearing the sudden change in his voice.

“They told me that they were all there for the same fucking reason,” he sobbed.

“What?”

“They’re a bunch of fucking homos too!” he sobbed.

“Christ! Are you serious?”

“Yes,” he wailed, “and that’s when things got really fucked up. Oh fuck!”

Up until that point the scariest moment in my life had been my first skydive. I had no idea how I was going to climb out that door but I had trained hard for what was coming. I had no training for this. I felt like I had just beamed into an operating room and I was staring down at an open chest cavity with a beating heart in front of me as a nurse addressed me as doctor while asking me what scalpel I wanted. What could be more fucked up than what he had already told me? I didn’t want to know. Would shutting him down now just damage him more than whatever had happened to him already? Would letting him go on be even worse? Finally the choice was no longer mine because he once again began to speak.

“After that they started coming to my room. These dirty old monks started coming to my fucking room and fucking hitting on me. I told them that Leviticus said, ‘Thou shalt not lie with a man as with a woman.’ But all these fuckers had to say was, ‘we can do it differently then.’ These guys are all just fucking each other in there and making out to be all holy and celibate and shit.”

“You gotta be shittin’ me,” I blurted.

“No, they are just fucking each other!”

“What the fuck? That’s fucked up!”

“No shit,” he agreed, “more than fucked up. I just said fuck this shit – I ain’t fucking no dirty old monks. If I was going to be sinning then I was going to at least find someone I could enjoy sinning with. That’s when I left the monastery and went into Cuspidor to the gay bar.”

“And you met somebody?” I asked.

“Oh, I met a lot of somebodies. I slept around something fierce. For a week I was heading home with all takers, and let me tell you, there were plenty of takers,” he said, using his hands to draw attention to his slender body. For the first time in hours he actually laughed.

I laughed too. He moved his eyebrows up and down as he looked down at himself smiling, obviously proud of his ridiculously slim build. We laughed so hard that it echoed in the empty restaurant. When our laughter finally subsided he sat up straight.

“So you’re really ok with me being gay?” he asked.

“More than ok,” I said.

“Wow,” he said, “I never imagined I could feel this ok with myself.”

“I’m glad – but I hope you won’t go slutting around like that anymore.”

“No?”

“No. You need to find someone to treat you right.”

“Oh god, now you sound like my mother.”

“Somehow I don’t think so.”

“No, really – it’s just that she wants me to find a girl to make grandchildren with; a good Catholic girl.”

“I hope she won’t be too disappointed.”

He laughed.

Things were looking up for the both of us. I had found myself a gay barista and he had discovered the concept of a progressive work environment with an open minded employer. Neither of us had expected to find such treasures in Humbug. Because of his hard work it had taken no time at all to close up shop. Even after our hours of talking it was only 8:00 p.m. As we left the bistro that night I watched him drive off and wondered what sort of home and parents awaited him.

Humbug ‘Non-Gay’ Hookups

2009-11-30T22:58:00.000-08:00

During the second week, running the bistro became much easier. Marty was an incredible catch. He became a veritable waffle chef, turning out incredible looking waffles slathered in berries and whipped cream and he came up with the idea of dusting them with icing sugar – a brilliant finishing touch. He worked so hard at bussing tables and keeping up on the dishes that I actually started to feel guilty. I wondered if he was only working so hard because I was the first person in his life that fully accepted him as being gay without looking to exploit him in some way. If so, then I felt I just might be exploiting him by letting him work so hard.

This isn’t to say that having Marty around made life at the bistro a bed of roses. His coming out was a lengthy process and his initial steps were sometimes awkward. He tried to adopt a more flamboyant gait and gestures which sometimes came across as an embarrassing impersonation of a prime time television comic relief homosexual. Marty just wasn’t that flavour of gay. His boyish looks and skeletal thin body definitely gave him the delicate look of some gay men but his country upbringing had conditioned him to other ridiculously exaggerated faux-macho behaviors.

I noticed a slight change in afternoon traffic as well. There were a few more afternoon coffee regulars, all men, who sat alone sipping on Americanos, watching Marty bus tables. These men never made eye contact with one another, however. Then one afternoon a lanky, scrubby-looking young man came in as I was standing at the register and Marty was doing dishes.

“What can I get for you today?” I asked.

“Uhm, yeah. There used to be a bookstore around here,” he said, leaning over the counter.

“I wouldn’t know. I’m not from here,” I said.

“Uhm, yeah, do you have a guy named Marty working here?”

This guy had a really creepy demeanor and I began to worry that he was going to lean even closer and ask me if I wanted to buy a letter ‘s’. He rolled onto his side on the counter and stared out the front window continuing his hum’s and hah’s. Another customer came through the door and approached the register and I didn’t want this weirdo creeping her out.

“Yes, there is a guy named Marty working here,” I answered.

“Uhm, yeah, he might know about the bookstore,” he said.

“Well he’s working right now,” I blurted.

Just then Marty came through the swinging doors of the kitchen with his hips swinging like an ice skater. The fellow in front of me bolted straight up and his eyes nearly burst from their sockets. He spun on his heels and sped out the front door. After serving the lady that came in behind him I went into the kitchen to ask Marty if he had any idea what had just happened.

“Marty, did you know that creep?” I asked, ever so tactfully.

“Uh, yeah. It’s a long story,” he replied.

“Give me the Cliffs Notes.”

“You remember I mentioned the part about me being with other men?”

“Yes. He was one of them?”

“Yeah.”

“And what does the bookstore have to do with it?”

“That’s one of the pickup spots.”

“So there IS a gay scene in Humbug after all,” I declared.

“NO!” Marty exclaimed, “These guys aren’t gay.”

“Oh shit. This IS going to be a long story,” I lamented.

Marty went on to tell me about the Humbug ‘Non-Gay’ scene where ‘Non-Gay’ men ‘hooked up’ and ‘helped each other out’.” Apparently the idea was that they weren’t gay because all of them were either married or had girlfriends, but sometimes a woman just isn’t interested in keeping a man ‘well taken care of’. These Non-Gay men had ‘no other choice’ but to seek out other men in similar situations so they could ‘help each other out’. The old fashioned way was to frequent certain locations – the sort where most redneck men wouldn’t be caught dead - and pass a series of ‘signals’.

“You gotta be shittin’ me!” I exclaimed.

“No. That’s just the way it is here,” Marty explained.

“These guys aren’t ‘Non-Gay’. At very least they’re bisexual.”

“That’s not the way they see it,” he further explained.

“So what part of having another man’s cock in their mouth is ‘Non-Gay’?” I demanded.

“Well, they don’t kiss or cuddle – EVER!”

“Ok, so a guy can give you a hand job – but as long as you don’t kiss he still thinks he’s straight?”

“That’s about it.”

“You do know that they are gay, or at least bi, right?”

“That’s how I look at it but that’s not the way it works.”

“And so why was he so shocked to see you then?”

“He was probably freaked out to see me gaying it up.”

“Oh! So it was ok to have sex with you as long as you both acted all tough about it but as soon as you start moving your hips he’s freaked to see you acting like a fag?”

“Exactly.”

Humbug had just launched to a new level of weird. I couldn’t believe that this little inbred town had actually managed to develop a gay scene based on a set of protocols that declared all same sex encounters to be justified as ‘Non-Gay’ based on a predetermined absence of affection. My imagination couldn’t begin to stretch to encompass this and I needed more information.

“How do you even find out about this in the first place?” I asked Marty.

“I was lucky. I ran into someone on the internet.”

“Ok, you can find everything on the net - but the Humbug Non-Gay hookup scene? How the hell does that work?”

“Well I started out by finding men from Humbug on chat channels. We’ld talk about sports and stuff and they would offer to send me a picture of themselves when they used to play football or wrestle or whatever. They’ld send a naked photo and then say, ‘oops, that was for my girlfriend,’ and I would say it was ok but that they had a pretty good build. We’ld talk about how women just can’t always please a man and stuff like that and eventually it would lead to a hook-up.”

“So they’ld give you their address then?”

“No!” he exclaimed, “It always remains anonymous.”

“So how would you meet?”

“They would tell me where to park and then give me directions to an alley or something. Usually I wound up knocking on the door of a shed that lead into the alley.”

“Christ! You could get killed doing something like that!”

“I never really thought about it that way,” he said.

He went on to tell me that with each new guy he would learn more of the ‘signals’ for hooking up the old fashioned way. Apparently there was a real trust building process in the Humbug Non-Gay community and new members had to ‘help out’ a lot of old members before they could gain access to the Non-Gay signal corps.

“And no one has ever been jumped by bashers?” I asked.

“It’s happened,” he admitted, “but no one ever does it twice.”

“What the hell?” I exclaimed, “There is some sort of Non-Gay mafia?”

“Sort of. Whenever some farm boys pull something like that they usually go to the bar and brag about it. If one of the guys hears about it he’ll put the word out and they get jumped even worse when they leave the bar. Sometimes a couple of them are taken into an alley and taught the big lesson.”

“They are beaten really badly then?”

“No. Well they are beaten – but also fucked.”

“Christ! Don’t say one more fucking word!”

My head was reeling. Non-Gays raping gay bashers in an alley in defense of gay rights was more than I could absorb. You hear about things like this sometimes, in twisted stories that you never believe are actually true, but to hear it in this way nauseated me. Not only was this little town so homophobic that the gay men had to create this bizarre Non-Gay culture, but there was a systematic Non-Gay justice system doling out male rape.

“Marty,” I continued, “you need to get the hell out of this town.”

“No kidding. I love working here, and I really am thankful you are so cool about me, but I just want to earn enough money to move to Cuspidor.”

“You’re working fulltime now, kid.”

As if the Non-Gay hookup scene wasn’t enough to worry about, I began to witness the influx of yet another Non-Gay paradigm. A ridiculously flamboyant fellow walked in just as the coffee leeches were leaving. He had his left hand in the air, palm up, with his knuckles as close to his shoulder as humanly possible. As he walked he swung his elbow and with his right hand he flung the loose end of his scarf over his shoulder. I found it odd that Lyle Duerr didn’t even give the chubby little flamer a second glance, what with homophobia running so high in Humbug.

“Hello,” he lilted, “I’m brother Th-teven.”

“Oh my. Are you here to speak with Marty?”

“Yeth, if you wouldn’t mind.”

This guy was the most ridiculous parody of a gay man I had ever seen. I had no idea how he managed to walk the streets of Humbug without ending up at the end of a rope behind a pick-up truck. I wondered if he might not be the Godfather of the gay mafia. I had to start cooking lunch so I just called Marty to the front and went back into the kitchen. I only caught snippets of their conversation as I transferred lunch to hot holding up front, but what I heard was as strange and bizarre as the ‘Non-Gay’ scene. Once again I began looking around for hidden cameras.

“Thith ithn’t really you, Martin. You are only doing thith becauthe you are lonely….”

“…Come back, Martin. Jethuth can fill that void for you.”

I have known a lot of gay people in my life and I’ve never been one for taking the low road on gay innuendo but my mind was tugged by an anchor to the lowest thought. It wasn’t Jesus that was going to be filling any voids at the monastery and those voids weren’t located in the heart; but I digress. Eventually a few customers walked in close to the Flintstone whistle and the little gay brother pranced out the door, turning to say, “Jethuth won’t give up on you, Martin!”

After lunch I asked Marty how this little gay brother managed to prance about so excessively without setting off homophobia alerts throughout Humbug. Marty explained that people in town just refused to believe that the brothers were gay. They had developed a mythology that explained their flamboyant ways as the result of their relationship with god. It was thought that these men lived so close to heaven that they lost all aspects of their sexuality and took on non-gender personas. Their flamboyance was considered to be a direct measure of their piousness.

“You gotta be shittin’ me?” I exclaimed.

“I’m not, I assure you.”

“So no one in town thinks these guys are gay?”

“Nope. Just pious. Close with god.”

“And you had NO suspicions when you joined the monastery?”

“None at all. I truly believed that their total devotion to their relationship with god had in some way made them eunuchs. I wanted so bad to be like them – to not have to be all macho anymore. I prayed everyday I was there to have god make me like them - to remove all my sexual urges.”

“So you basically hoped to be psychologically castrated?”

“I guess that’s one way to put it. I wanted to be pious like them. I wanted to be free of all physical desire and to live that life. It was the only way I could avoid having to get married but still have a great relationship with my family.”

“I can see now why you were so upset about what was really going on out there.”

Over the next few days, a few more brothers came prancing in to try to convince Marty to return. As I looked at each of these old withering pederasts I came to see just why they were so eager to have a young, healthy, gangly boy like Marty return. To these lonely old souls Marty must have looked like filet mignon.

By the time Jeffrey returned at the end of the week, Marty was getting just a little bit better at gaying it up. Marty and I agreed that Jeffrey should know that Marty was gay in order to reduce the chance of awkward slips. To Marty’s surprise, Jeffrey was almost as indifferent about Marty’s homosexuality as I had been.

“So you’re just fine with me being gay?” Marty asked.

“Of course!” Jeffrey said.

“I’m glad I don’t make you uncomfortable,” Marty sighed.

“Heck,” Jeffrey said, “just remember to come to me when you want to get married!”

“What?” I exclaimed, “Did you just propose to him?”

“What? No!” Jeffrey exclaimed, “I’m a pastor with the United Church! We’re the church that performs gay marriages!”

We all burst out laughing for several minutes. It was then that I saw the humour in me, an atheist, working with a gay ex-brother and a pastor. There had to be a joke in there somewhere. An atheist restauranteur, gay ex-monk, and a United Church pastor walk into a bar….

We all kept working on a punch line for the joke but the best we could come up with was, “And the bar was in Humbug, the most Catholic, homophobic town in Canada.” Then Jeffrey asked me if I had noticed a strong homophobic element in town. Without relating the details of the Non-Gay hook-up scene or the predatory pederastic monks, I said I had picked up some interesting vibes.

“Yeah,” Jeffrey said, “Not too many people in town are crazy about the United Church.”

“No?” I asked.

“Actually they burned down the first one,” he said.

“What!” I exclaimed.

“Well,” he said, “they blamed it on some troubled kid, but it seemed odd that he was so efficient with his first arson. The church burned to the ground in less than an hour. Apparently the pastor at the time had gotten some weird negative vibes from a lot of people in town the week before the fire.”

“So they burned down the United Church for marrying gays?” I asked.

“It’s tough to say,” he went on, “not many people in the church will talk about it much with me. They are really trying to put it behind them.”

I was now getting deeper into the bowels of Humbug than I cared to tread – and the descent would only continue. On Saturday we had a pretty good flow of customers. Anna was getting better at redirecting the Humbuggers who inquired about the ‘SUPE’ and I was getting better at diverting the inquiries as to my ‘FRUM’. All of us were learning to reboot them from their inevitable Humbug Huhs. Then a man walked in with his adolescent son. As the boy came through the door his head jerked back like it had been tugged by a shepherd’s hook. He had spotted the menu in the foyer and declared, “Dad! It’s Siesta Saturday!”

“What’s that mean, son?” the father asked.

“Uh, I d-don’t know,” the son stuttered back.

Cute little naming conventions on a menu were definitely not the Humbug way. Several of the younger customers reacted similarly – not having any idea what Siesta Saturday meant but quite eager to find out and try something new. One after another, the adolescents with parents were stifled rather quickly. The boy and his father approached the register and decided to each try the ‘bah-ja’ burrito. As I prepared their baja burritos, the boy stared down in wonder.

“Would you like black olives on that?” I asked.

“Oh! Ye..” the boy began to answer with wide eyed enthusiasm.

Just then his father barked, “We’re not a black olive sort of family!” jerking his son’s arm.

I was so startled by the forcefulness of his declaration that I stumbled back a few steps.

“I don’t even know what that means!” I exclaimed.

“NO BLACK OLIVES!” the man barked, even louder.

“Ok, ok, no black olives. Got it, ten four, yes sir.” I said in an irritated tone.

This odd reaction confounded me almost as much as the woman who demanded tacos without shells. This time, however, I would receive an explanation. At the end of the day Marty and I sat down for a beer. I had cut off his hours at 5:00 p.m. but he told me he just wanted to stay and help me finish so we could chat some more. With his help the store was immaculate by 6:30 p.m.

As we sat and drank and laughed about, amongst other things, rednecks ordering ‘SUPE’, he got an uneasy look about him again.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Well, you remember that black olive guy?”

“How could I forget?”

“Be careful asking the real born-and-raised Humbug people if they want black olives.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“It’s one of the signals,” he explained.

“One of the hookup signals?”

“Yeah. And that guy’s son is a real tease in town. He’s too young for anyone to hookup with – they have serious rules about that – but he has good gaydar and knows when he’s being watched. He likes to pose, if you know what I mean. His nickname is Bambi.”

“Damn, so the Non-Gay men know this boy wants it, and know that he poses for them, and they nick name him Bambi, and they still don’t find anything gay about that?”

“I know. It’s an odd situation. They haven’t seen a young one like this before. He’s like the day-walker out of that vampire movie. They always knew one like him would come along but never knew what they would do about it.”

“Obviously his father knows – judging by his reaction.”

“Yeah, and he doesn’t want his son picking up any of the signals.”

“So his father knows the signals?”

“He used to hookup but stopped when his son was born. At least that’s what I’ve been told. Bambi is one hot item here in town and doesn’t know a thing about the scene. I think his dad is scared he’ll actually like black olives and order them without knowing what it means.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake! What the hell happens to other young men who just happen to like black olives in town? Does ordering black olives without knowing lead to dirty old Non-Gay farmers hitting on them?”

“Well most people in town don’t eat black olives. They don’t eat anything different. That’s why it’s used as a signal. No kid is just going to decide he likes black olives if he’s never eaten them before. You might also notice that even some of the fast food places in town that should have black olives on the menu always seem to be out of them.”

“The sub shop was out of them a few weeks ago when I was in there. I never thought anything of it.”

“Yeah, well they are permanently out of them. It causes too much confusion. I just hope the new sub shop opening up on the highway figures it out really quick.”

“Ha, yeah. Otherwise the Humbuggers will be trying to buggerize every tourist who likes black olives on their pizza sub.”

Once again our laughter echoed through the empty restaurant.

Redneck Pride

2009-11-30T22:56:00.000-08:00

Within weeks the bistro began to develop a rigid routine. It was becoming obvious that breakfast might never happen without frying some eggs and I just didn’t have a good set-up for doing short order work. I hardly ever saw a soul between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. except on Tuesdays when the woman with the coal dark hair and icy blue eyes came in for her white mocha. From Tuesday to Saturday, Lyle Duerr would lead the coffee row leeches in at 8:30 a.m. and the last of them wouldn’t leave until 11:30 a.m. The Flintstone Whistle lunch rush slowed but, on the upside, far fewer people asked for ‘SUPE’. There was a significant afternoon coffee rush but selling two slices of cheesecake was a record.

The coffee row people didn’t seem to notice Marty’s search for a comfortable level of flamboyance. Most of them knew he had been a brother and just thought we was becoming more pious. They did take note that Jeffrey was training to be a pastor with the United Church, however. Earla Hueber expressed displeasure at this a few times. Whenever Jeffrey was working the register, Earla would pipe up in an absolutely inappropriate volume, “Oh, next thing you know they’ll be marrying pigs and chickens! What has this world come to?”

I plastered the front window with signs for the Belgian waffles but, although that seemed to draw a few people in, morning sales still made it difficult to justify opening for breakfast at all. Most Humbuggers just complained about the cost of ‘them fancy pancakes’. I gave up on the hot cereal altogether. People still referred to the restaurant as ‘the coffee shop’ and some of them had the nerve to still call it ‘The Humbug Coffee House’. I began to regret leasing the same location, if not buying the furnishings.

Some people actually brought in their ‘coffee club’ cards from the old coffee shop and expected me to just continue stamping their purchases towards their next free coffee. Others complained that I had ‘switched’ coffee suppliers and they would come back when I put up a sign to let them know things were ‘back to normal’. When I tried to explain that the coffee shop went out of business and this was a new restaurant they just cocked their heads to the right in a typical Humbug Huh. “But this is the coffee shop,” they would exclaim, falling into hibernation until I rebooted them.

I began to wonder if there was any way to run a restaurant without serving coffee. With few exceptions, I noted that the people who actually ordered full meals rarely wanted coffee. Removing the espresso machine would require repairing the countertop where it sat, for several holes had been drilled to plumb it in and hard wire 220 volt power. When I spoke with people around town and told them I was running the new restaurant they were completely incapable of understanding where it was until I told them it was where the old coffee shop had been. In every single case they just said, “Oh, I thought you said restaurant. So you took over the old coffee shop then?” I tried every way I could think of to describe the location without referencing The Humbug Coffee House, but it was as though those coordinates in space were completely void outside of the definition of ‘coffee shop’.

New people to town seemed to catch on quickly and most were ecstatic to have a fresh cooked menu in town. I wondered how many outsiders lived in Humbug and how to reach them. I surveyed my best customers and they all read the Cuspidor newspaper. Advertising in the Cuspidor paper was extremely cost prohibitive considering I needed to target perhaps only a few hundred people in Humbug. The locals read the Humbug Herald to find out who had grown the biggest pumpkin this year or to argue about the letters to the editor written by Earla Hueber and other low literacy locals. Outsiders didn’t even consider it well enough written to be a colouring book.

To add to my frustration I had a very difficult confrontation with the most obstinate Humbugger I would ever meet. I never did learn her name but I have come to call her Backdoor Betty. In the middle of a Friday lunch rush, shuddering each time I heard a request for ‘SUPE’ or a ‘sammich’ and dodging all questions about where I was ‘FRUM’, I heard the back door to the kitchen swing open. I had taken to leaving it unlocked so Jeffrey and Marty could enter without me having to run back to the door.

I was in the middle of making a wrap and was backed up by two orders so I ran as quickly as I could to see what was going on. As I passed through the swinging doors to the kitchen, there was Backdoor Betty walking straight through the kitchen towards me, seemingly oblivious to the concept that a kitchen is always strictly a staff area. Having no idea who this woman was I said, “Hey, hey, not a public entrance. Out, out!” The clueless little woman just tried to push past me.

“This is the way I come in here,” she explained.

“No it’s not, this is my kitchen,” I retorted, blocking her path.

“Get out of my way - I’m in a hurry to get some coffee!”

“We’re in the middle of lunch here, lady. Get out of my kitchen.”

“I just need a cup of coffee,” she said, trying to push past me.

“Get out of my kitchen!” I barked.

“I’ll get out when I get my coffee!”

“Who the fuck are you?” I asked, wondering what gave her such audacity.

“I work across the alley, and this is the way I come in here for coffee.”

“Maybe when it was a coffee shop, but this is my kitchen now. Get out!”

“I’m not leaving without my coffee.”

“Lady, I’ll call the fucking police, now get the fuck out of my kitchen!”

“You can’t talk to me that way!”

“I said get the fuck out of my fucking kitchen you little cunt!”

“Well if you want me to leave you just have to ask.”

“I have asked you four or five times. Now get the fuck out.”

“If you don’t want people coming in this way you should put up a sign!”

“There is a sign, it says employees only!”

“Well you should be more specific!”

“Because you are an employee across the alley? Get the fuck out!”

“Fine, I’m leaving!”

“Your feet aren’t fucking moving. Move your fucking feet!”

“Fine, I’m leaving!”

“Fucking leave already.”

Finally she marched to the back door, turned to give me her meanest expression, and slammed it as hard as she could. As I walked back up front Marty and Jeffrey asked why she wouldn’t leave. I didn’t know what to tell them. I had never imagined someone would walk into a restaurant kitchen and have the nerve to try to push past the owner. This was about the worst behavior I had seen yet, but it wouldn’t be the first time. You see, when most people get angry they leave without saying goodbye. Humbuggers, on the other hand, say good bye over and over but then refuse to leave.

Later that afternoon a regular customer walked in and asked me what had happened with the woman I threw out at lunch. I was surprised to hear that anyone other than Jeffrey or Marty knew about the situation. When I explained to him what had happened he stopped me to ask, “So she was walking in through your kitchen?” He went on to tell me that she was actually an instructor at the community college and he was in her class. She returned to the class without her coffee and then proceeded to break into tears and tell an incredible tale of how I attacked her in my restaurant and threw her out for no reason.

From that day forth there were plenty of Humbuggers who wouldn’t let their children stray near my restaurant for fear that I would ‘attack without reason’. These people just had absolutely no sense of appropriate behavior and there was never any way to explain the situation to them. They never questioned the account of the confrontation at all but every single Humbugger felt that if that was the way this woman came in for coffee then I had no business throwing her out of my kitchen. Apparently, under Humbug protocol, easement trumps health code.

There seemed to be no limits to their uninhibited, childish behavior. When something didn’t appeal to them they just blurted, “YUCK!” If they didn’t recognize another customer they just walked right up to the table and said, “Where are you FRUM?” If a coffee urn ran empty, rather than ask for the urn to be replaced, they simply pounded their mug on the counter until a new urn was in front of them – not even subsiding while I was in the process of changing the urns. If outsiders had unusual fashion tastes, perhaps Goth or Punk, they would openly point and laugh at what they considered unusual clothing.

I truly began to despise born-and-raised Humbuggers, not because they were remarkably rude and illiterate, but because they were so obstinate and even proud of their backward ways. When they became aware that outsiders were perplexed by Humbug protocol, they justified their behaviors by saying, “Oh, that might not be the way other people do things, but I’m German and this is Humbug.” I had never before heard anyone make such a bizarre association between being German and being rude and illiterate.

I could understand how, in times long past, the tradition of the ‘redneck’ had been born. Labouring long days over a shovel or pick in the field left the proletariat with large muscled shoulders and stooped posture which exposed the back of their necks to the hot sun. The resulting burn served as a badge of subservience that revealed the barer as one who toiled by brawn and who likely never had the luxury of pursuing more academic achievements. This was a horrible injustice and created a stigma around the label of ‘redneck’, and for this reason I was have always been reticent to use that label. But it was no longer times long past, it was the 21st century. No one was any longer forced into the subservience of long hours of field labour due to socio-economic castes. Even those who toiled at the most menial labour had access to public libraries and the internet and could elevate the mind if they so chose. It made no sense to me why anyone would so proudly don such a yolk of ignorance and cling to it with such stubbornness. It was because of their eagerness to cloak themselves in such purposely crafted ignorance that I became far more liberal in applying such a derogatory moniker.

Perhaps the most revealing conversation I ever had in Humbug was with a group of women who were planning a single’s dinner for ‘purebred Humbugs’. Upon inquiring into what sounded to be a disturbing plan I was informed that it was an annual dinner for those who could trace all of their ancestors back to the six founding families of Humbug.

“It just gives people a better sense of family to marry other Humbuggers,” one chirped.

“Wouldn’t you like to know where all your ancestors were FRUM?” another asked.

“We’re talking about five generations here, right?” I asked.

“Six generations for some,” one of them boasted.

“So a family tree that leads to twelve people?” I asked, with trepidation.

“Yes! Isn’t that just so cool?” several of them beamed.

“Uhm,” I treaded, “that’s not many branches.”

“And that way you don’t have to worry about not knowing where some of those branches go,” the leader said with a knowing nod as her compatriots burst into childish giggles.

I backed away slowly, offering no reply. These deranged women were pro-actively trying to produce a seventh generation from twelve ancestors. I am no expert on genetics but it didn’t take a lot of fancy math to realize that six generations of second cousins reproducing wasn’t a very good idea. As I looked at the women from a distance and realized that they all looked just a little too much alike, I realized that the Humbug gene pool was in need of a smidgen more chlorine.

Genetics Vs Environment

2009-11-30T22:54:00.000-08:00

Humbug provides an amazing living experiment in which to study the effects of nature versus nurture. It’s amazing to see bright eyed energetic children produced by hollow-eyed lethargic parents. Sometimes one sibling looks like an extra from the set of Deliverance while the other dresses and speaks so eloquently that you are certain he or she must be adopted. In most cases it seemed impossible for those who had never strayed more than thirty miles from Humbug to appreciate anything that hadn’t been mass produced and delivered in a box – from food to entertainment. On the other hand there were ample examples of those who, although born-and-raised Humbuggers, seemed to have eluded the pervasive cloak of ignorance so strictly enforced by local traditions.

One common scenario that highlighted these contrasts was the occurrence of the estranged sibling. There were a number of mouth-breathing families that had one offspring who, against all odds, managed to dodge all defective alleles, develop high literacy and, in most cases, lived outside of Humbug. Often these estranged Humbuggers returned to Humbug to visit for holidays, assist their illiterate siblings with tax returns, or just to help out their parents with simple household repairs. It was unfortunate that these genetically advantaged siblings so often lived outside of Humbug; thus removing their genes from the Humbug pool. The result just created a negatively reinforced loop amongst the genetically challenged. Each generation seemed to produce fewer and fewer upright waking, literate offspring.

One day a charismatic fellow stepped boldly through the door accompanied by a sharply dressed, bright eyed woman - both of them being followed by a doddering, old, ‘SUPE’ slurping hag and a disoriented little trollop who sported a greasy, farm-implements company cap. The women were his wife, mother, and sister. It was obvious that he didn’t reside in Humbug but had likely brought his wife home to visit his mother and sister and to assist with some semi-complicated chore. He seemed mostly unaware of the bizarre gait and vacant stares of his mother and sister but his wife was visibly embarrassed to be in such company.

It was Siesta Saturday and he absorbed the menu quickly, turning to suggest that they each have a Baja burrito. He was very patient in explaining to his mother that there was no ‘SUPE’ and negotiated with her until it was agreed that she would accept a serving of apple crisp. Several times during the negotiations she rasped loudly in a Humbug whisper that she didn’t want to eat in ‘this weird place’. His sister was a bit more enthusiastic and giggled like a simple minded child as she bounced in her chair at the excitement of trying ‘Mexican Foods’. The sister’s physical appearance, contrary to her demeanor, implied an age in excess of thirty years.

His wife came up to the counter and asked a few pointed questions about the food, expressing pleasure that everything had been prepared in-house. The sister just kept repeating, “We’re gonna eat some Mexican foods. We’re gonna eat some Mexican foods.” The mother just kept asking the man if he was sure there was no ‘SUPE’ and every time he told her that there wasn’t she rasped, “This place is stupid,” at a volume that could be heard throughout the entire dining area. Every time the mother rasped out another ‘this place is stupid’ while his wife was at the counter, she would apologize to me for her husband’s family. I assured her that this was by no means out of the ordinary and asked her what task her husband had been summoned home to assist with. She smirked and said, “Steam cleaning the carpets.”

Upon sampling the food, the wife told me that she really appreciated my heavy handedness with the cumin. The husband immediately noted that the cheddar was well aged and really brought out the flavours of the taco sauce and seasoned ground beef. The mother hissed, “My apple crisp is better than this fancy shmancy stuff.” The sister, obviously trying to impersonate the sophistication of her brother and sister-in-law, raised her collected fingers to her lips, flung her hand in the air and exclaimed, “Mag-knee-fee-ko!” She then asked, “Is that what they say in Mexican?” I replied, “I’m certain that that is exactly what all the Italian tourists say in Mexico.” The wife slumped in complete embarrassment but even the husband had to smirk a bit at my comment.

Often times a prodigal sister would return home and would drag a sibling into the bistro. The ‘humbugged’ sibling would rasp all the way to the counter, “I don’t want to eat here! This place isn’t NORMAL!” Usually the outsider would expound the merits of a fresh menu while the local would just whine about the absence of French fries. In these cases I usually appeased the locals with toast and sausages, assuring them that I would provide a healthy side of ketchup. One of the local siblings once complained to her sister, “This isn’t even a restaurant. They can’t even make a hamburger.”

Listening to conversations about lineage was almost more than I could handle. When the afternoon coffee rush began to thin out, often times the stragglers would begin to merge. Picking up your coffee and just moving to another table with another singleton is common practice in Humbug, and it’s considered extremely rude to be unwelcoming to such an advance. Upon joining the table the protocol was very well defined.

“FRUM?” the newly seated Humbugger would ask.

“Humbug. Hueber,” was a typical reply.

“Bauer. My mother’s mother was Bessie Hueber,” Bauer would add.

“Well my grandpa was her brother, Tom,” Hueber would reply.

“Any Bauers?”

“My mother’s father, Frank Bauer.”

“My grandpa was Ansel, his cousin.”

“Great grandpa Deiter Bauer then?”

“Yup.”

And on and on it would go until it was determined that every grandparent was a sibling, cousin, niece or nephew. The process seemed very fulfilling to them and I began to realize why they felt so confounded with outsiders. They had no idea where they stood with outsiders because they had no idea how they were related. Some customers just couldn’t drop their ‘FRUM” inquisitions. One day, while both Jeffrey and Marty were working, one of the hicks leaned in and asked, “Where are you FRUM?”

“I don’t have a FRUM,” I replied.

His head snapped right, in a Humbug Huh. Upon being rebooted he persisted, “You must be FRUM somewhere?”

“Not in the way you want me to answer,” I insisted.

“Well where were you born?”

“Edmonton.”

“Emmaton? Your parents are there?”

“No.”

“Well where are they?”

“It’s really none of your business.”

“So you grew up in Emmaton?”

“Again, none of your business.”

“Well geez,” he lamented, turning to Jeffrey and asking, “Where are YOU FRUM?”

“Born and raised in Cuspidor, went to St. Mary high school,” Jeffrey quickly shot back, having experienced this line of questioning before.

“What’s your last name?”

“Wilson,” Jeffrey replied, still unbothered.

“Any relation to Bob Wilson?”

“I am not directly related to a single Wilson in Humbug,” Jeffrey replied.

“Not at all?”

“Not at all.”

“Well geez,” the hick lamented, leaning way too far over the counter in an attempt to catch Marty’s eye and continuing, “So, what’s your story? Where are you FRUM?”

“Marty Engal. I grew up twenty miles east of here but my parents moved from Calgary. Their parents moved there from Saskatchewan. I’m not related to, nor do I know, a single Engal in Humbug.”

Marty was obviously very good at this.

“Well geez. None of you are FRUM around here then?”

“EXACTLY!” we all exclaimed.

The invasive hick shot up off the counter, turned, and staggered away like he had been hit on the head with a mallet. It was just not conceivable to him that he didn’t share a single relative with any of us and didn’t even know a single one of any of our relatives. To Humbuggers such an anomaly is as strange as encountering a visitor from an alternate universe.

Even with this powerful anti-culture so well developed, there were still born-and-raised Humbuggers who could pass for educated people on the streets of any metropolitan city. Just as one mouth-breather was chuckling mindlessly at the suggestion of having a Belgian waffle for lunch, his brother – who had never left town – might pop in with a cell phone in hand and order a grande double half-caf caramel mochaccino to go. How could two such men have possibly grown up in the same household, let alone have been spawned by the same parents? It never ceased to amaze me.

Even in siblings within a year of age and both under twenty, it was possible to see one who’s mind was free and soaring like a hawk while the other’s mind was voluntarily being crushed under a yolk of ignorance. In the great debate of nature versus nurture, I had to declare the winner to be choice.

Coffee Row, Round 1

2009-11-30T22:52:00.000-08:00

My greatest lesson in restauranting was one which I could not have anticipated without actually having owned a restaurant. Perhaps the only adversary of the restauranteur more daunting than the contractor is coffee row. This is especially true in a small town and was exponentially more so in Humbug. The conundrum lies in the fact that, by definition, restauranting is a hospitality industry. That being said, the restauranteur is often reliant upon a general sense of decency when it comes to customers not taking advantage of the hospitality offered. Humbuggers, unfortunately, had absolutely no sense of decency when it came to not overstaying their welcome.

Even before opening day I knew that coffee was a problematic menu item. Customers who order a full meal anywhere in Canada expect free refills on their coffee, so charging for each mug full was not an option. I was trying to keep prices low by eliminating table service and that meant allowing customers to retrieve their own refills on coffee. The catch 22 was that the cost savings of eliminating table service would be completely reversed by leaving someone to guard the coffee urns only to charge certain customers for refills. My solution was to charge a premium price for a refillable mug and then discount that against food orders. As simple as this solution seemed, this was Humbug.

The first half of the problem became apparent on opening day. The polarized reactions to the rather expensive, yet refillable, mug should have clued me in immediately. On opening morning, upon placing her first order for ‘regular coffee’, Earla Hueber balked at the price. When I explained that the price could be reduced by ordering food but either way the mug came with free refills, her eyes got as big as blue grease-paint coated saucers.

“Free refills?” she exclaimed.

“Uhm, yes. The price is actually discounted on any food orders,” I explained.

“Free refills?” she exclaimed again.

“Uhm, yeah. Did you want some toast, perhaps?”

“Free refills!”

She ran to the coffee urns so fast that she actually did a bit of a side slide rounding the corner. She wasn’t the only customer to react thusly and I began to wonder how they could be so excited about the idea. I shudder now to think of the horror that I had unleashed. If there is one unforgivable transgression in the restaurant industry, as I was to find, it was allowing coffee row leeches to have free refills – regardless of the cost of the first cup.

The other reaction I got was actually more difficult to cope with. Upon placing her first order for ‘regular coffee’, the crazy lady who owned the boutique next store balked at the price. When I explained that the price could be reduced by ordering food but that either way the mug came with free refills, her eyes got as big as green grease-paint coated saucers.

“Well how much coffee do you think I can drink?” she whined.

“I don’t know. As I said, though, the price is actually discounted on any food orders,” I explained.

“That mug is HUGE! I don’t want that much coffee and I’m not here to eat.”

“I’m only selling one size mug to simplify things,” I explained.

“Well I’m only paying for half,” she proclaimed.

“Then you’re not getting a mug.”

She plunked down a pile of nickels, dimes and a few quarters and demanded a mug. I told her that this wasn’t a pay what you want sort of place, and I especially didn’t want her nickels and dimes. We argued back and forth and finally I said, “Look, lady, I’m not selling coffee by the ounce here. If you want a tiny cheap cup of coffee there are fast food drive thrus for that. If you don’t want to pay for a seat then I suggest you find another restaurant.”

She was horrified. Then she stood up as straight as she could and said, “You’re coffee shop is never going to make it around these parts. We’re German!”

“It’s a restaurant! The coffee shop closed almost a year ago now!” I barked back.

And so it went, one after the other. Humbuggers either got so excited about the idea of a refillable mug that they neared losing bowel control or they demanded a by-the-ounce price and threw down nickels and dimes. There was no way in the world I was going to get the door costs covered if I had to spend hours rolling up small change, and there was definitely no way I could ever afford to pay someone to sell coffee at such anachronistic rates.

It didn’t take long to figure out why some of the Humbuggers were so excited about refillable mugs. I could barely brew the ‘regular’ coffee fast enough to keep up with their bottomless bellies. I had never imagined anyone could drink so much coffee. I started counting the number of pots I had brewed and dividing by the number of people seated and to my horror I realized that the average consumption was almost 32 ounces per person. Then I realized that not all of the cheapskates had actually left. Some of them were actually sitting, with no cup in front of them, amongst their gluttonous friends.

I spied on them to see if the cheapskates were stealing slurps of coffee from the caffeine-aholics and couldn’t spot such activity. Repeating my calculations for only those who actually had mugs, I nearly fainted when the results indicated an average consumption of 42 ounces per person – and they weren’t even finished yet. The volume of cream and sugar being used was astounding and, although I didn’t see a single empty packet anywhere, the artificial sweetener had disappeared.

I didn’t panic immediately for I was convinced that this level of consumption was impossible over any extended period of time. As the days drew on, however, they seemed to be developing increased tolerance and consumption actually crept up. That was when I first started catching some of the cheapskates (yes, they actually came back) sneaking their own tiny cups in and having their caffeine-aholic friends hook them up.

“Hey, you can’t just bring your own mugs in here!” I yelled.

“It’s just coffee!” one of them retorted.

“It’s shoplifting, even if it’s just a nickel!”

“Well you offered it for free!” another blurted.

“To those that paid. It’s not a refill if you haven’t paid for the first cup!”

“So I can’t share my coffee with a friend?” Earla Huebert exclaimed.

“No you can’t. From now on, if you haven’t bought anything you don’t sit.”

“You can’t tell my friend she can’t visit with me!” Earla barked.

“I can when she’s a thief. I’m phoning the police.” I said, heading for the phone.

And, with that, the deadbeats scrambled. I had never before seen such audacity. The coffee row caffeine-aholics actually stayed and slurped up as much as they possibly could. It became clear that they had now set their sites on drinking me out of business. To make matters worse, any morning that I didn’t keep a very close eye on them I would find wrappers for granola bars and trail mix left on the floor when I cleaned up after them. This was going too far and it seemed ridiculous that I would have to assume a vigil at their table to guard against outside food.

I did stand guard, however, and it was a more ridiculous task than I could have imagined. Within a few days I realized that not a single one of them used artificial sweetener; yet every single day the bowl of packets would be empty before they left. As if to tempt me, they each took five napkins every single day. It was obvious that they had decided this was a volume at which I could not protest but one which was still more than I had accounted for in the pricing. With each refill they took as much cream and sugar as they could stomach and used a new stir stick. The tension was mounting but there was no way that I could back down. Like a hunter I stalked them, waiting for the weak to fall behind the pack, waiting for one of them to reach for a granola bar. The average age of the group was somewhere in the mid-fifties and I knew they couldn’t consume this much cream, sugar, and caffeine on empty stomachs on a daily basis for long without it taking a toll.

One morning I decided to press the issue a little harder, but in a passive-aggressive style suitable for Humbug. I broke a magic-marker into the bowl of artificial sweetener packets, and then covered up the ink with some more packets. I have no idea when the attempt was made to grab the packets, I hadn’t even heard anyone move when I turned to grab the next urn of coffee, but when I turned around there was blue ink smeared across the condiment bar and all eyes of coffee row were on me and beaming with anger and guilt. I looked to their hands to find the culprit and, instinctually protecting the conspiracy, every single one of them put their left hand in their coat pockets. I stared at them accusingly, not saying a word, and also not putting up the next urn of coffee. Moving as one they all got up and filed out the door, finding safety in the numbers of the heard.

Although I didn’t catch anyone red handed, or blue handed as the case may have been, Earla’s husband was conspicuously absent from coffee row for the remaining two days that week. He returned the next week - although he never again looked me in the eye. I had begun to exert some control over them and I plotted my next move. If passive-aggressive was they way of these hicks then I had been well prepared, for my Catholic grandmother was the biggest passive-aggressive bitch to walk the face of planet Earth. I thought about how she might handle this situation and I could hear her sneering voice clearly.

On the morning that I planned to crush them with some down-home Grandma Spoonheim passive-aggressive venom, I made sure to be as cheerful as possible as I sold each of the parasites their refillable mug. I smiled and hummed as I filled the creamer up, not with half & half but with 18% table cream. I bustled about wiping sugar off the condiment bar with the table cream in hand, making sure that every single one of them got a good look at it. When several of them began to stare at the table cream and whisper to each other, I made my move.

“You know, you are all so lucky. I guess it must be the country air, or maybe growing up doing all that farm work. You all have such high metabolisms. If I were to drink down so much table cream and sugar, I’m certain I would have put on at least five pounds by now.”

The eyes of the coffee row women betrayed the group as they began to shift anxious glances at each other. “Thank you Grandma,” I thought, as I went in for the kill.

“None of you looks like you’ve gained a pound. It’s incredible. I have to be so careful what I have before Christmas. Once that holiday eating starts it’s impossible for me to keep my weight down. I can’t imagine how hard New Year’s would be if I put on ten pounds even before Christmas.”

Suddenly all the men clasped their wives’ hands in a gesture of solidarity. The women would not react, not betray the horror I had just unleashed, until they were well outside. Their composure was stoic and the restaurant was completely void of echo. I had not just won this round – I had completely dominated these pathetic hicks. The fear in the eyes of the husbands revealed the damage I had done. The complete lack of emotion on the women’s faces only served to illustrate the pressure that must have been brewing just below the surface. I have no idea how they held it all in, but at very least their consumption slowed dramatically. By the time they left, I calculated an average consumption of 32 ounces per person.

As I chopped and diced in preparation for lunch I chuckled at my little victory. Little did I know that the battle had just begun.

Religious Culture

2009-11-30T22:50:00.000-08:00

Every time I thought I had a good handle on Humbug, they managed to pry loose my grip. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that most Humbuggers rarely traveled outside of Humbug more than once a year - if ever. They hadn’t been exposed to the evolving tastes of the rest of the world and managed to live in denial of almost every aspect of life that displeased them. I viewed this as a passive form of suspended animation that left them existing in a displaced 1940’s culture.

It occurred to me, however, that if I were to travel back to the 1940’s I might be able to inspire at least some people to try some new flavours and unfamiliar foods. I began to hope, perhaps rather desperately, that the mere presence of some culinary alternatives might appeal to the curiosity of the more progressive Humbuggers. At very least, I thought, the younger generation might want to break out of the culinary and intellectual vacuum that surrounded them. I hadn’t yet begun, though, to understand the aggressive nature with which Humbuggers held to their antiquated ways.

Then one day the little mousy woman who had threatened to sue me over the amount of spice in her lunch came marching back in the front door. I began to wonder if she had actually managed to find a lawyer to represent her grievance but she alleviated my fears.

“My lawyer won’t take my case,” she proclaimed.

“I didn’t THINK spicy food was a crime,” I said.

“You aren’t getting off that easy,” she continued, “I have taken my case to a higher authority.”

“The supreme court?” I chuckled.

“I spoke to the priest about it!” she retorted, accusingly.

“The priest?”

“Yes, and you won’t be here long now!”

“What, exactly, is your problem, lady?”

“That food you serve is evil. It’s blasphemy!”

“Oh, c’mon. Now you’re going to have the Pope issue an edict against spicy food?”

“Food like this inspires passion!” she shouted.

“In my defense, doesn’t the Pope want you Catholics making lots of babies?”

“You can’t say things like that and get away with it!” she screamed.

“Maybe you’ld feel better if you and your husband BOTH ate here,” I laughed.

“My husband AND my son will never eat here. I’m going to spread the word about this place and make sure no good Catholics eat here. We’re German you know! We won’t stand for this!”

And, with that, she spun on her heels and marched back out. Once again I questioned the German reference. What the hell did being German have to do with refusing to try unfamiliar food? How German could these people be after five generations of inbreeding in a small Canadian prairie town? What was it about inspiring passion that upset her so? My question was soon answered when I saw her in the mall with her husband and son. Her husband was the fellow who so strongly voiced his objections to black olives and her son was Bambi. I couldn’t help but chuckle, although I’m afraid I caught her eye and she was inspired to even higher levels of rage and determination.

No matter how desperately they tried to remain blind to any signs of homosexuality in their town, some of them couldn’t remain deaf to the rumours that swirled about Marty. One day as I walked out of my office I spotted a frail little woman standing in the corner shaking. So great was the fear on her face that I glanced back over my shoulder to see if a grizzly bear was poised to attack. The only creature in her view was Marty; the big blond ostrich. I approached the woman gently.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“People say,” she choked, “that that boy is a homosexual.”

“And?” I prompted.

“You don’t deny it?” she asked.

“There isn’t anything the matter with that,” I reassured her.

“He, he,” the woman sobbed, “was a brother!”

She broke into tears and scurried out the door. I called Marty to the kitchen and apologized for not covering for him but he wouldn’t hear of it. He told me that he wanted them to know, that he felt a need for everyone to know. He was devoted to proving that they had nothing to fear from gays and he felt compelled to out himself to everyone in town.

“Fear?” I asked, “Why was that woman so afraid?”

“They think homosexuals and pedophiles are the same here.”

“What?” I blurted.

“You basically just told that woman that I was a pedophile and you are ok with it.”

“That’s ridiculous!” I said, incredulously.

“That’s part of how the Non-Gays can go on thinking they are Non-Gay,” he explained.

“Because they don’t molest children?”

“Exactly.”

“So how do they explain heterosexual pedophiles?”

“By believing that they’re gay. They don’t believe in heterosexual pedophiles. It’s all homosexuality to them; one and the same.”

And once again I found myself losing my grip on any concept of how the Humbug mind worked. What kind of slippery slope did these people live on? Believing that pedophiles were just homosexuals, that homosexuals were driven by passion, that passion was inspired by spicy food? Could these people actually be under the impression that by serving seasoned food I was actually trying to cause their children to be molested? Once again my head was reeling.

The conspiracy against me began to rear its head. There was a bookshelf in the dining area that was stocked with magazines and some anthologies that I had collected. One Sunday, as Anna was dusting the shelf, she asked me when I had started putting out religious books. I was shocked, but as I inspected the shelf I found a number of religious titles; various bible study guides, family values titles, and one pamphlet on ‘speaking in tongues’. “What the hell?” I exclaimed. I couldn’t believe that sometime, over the past few weeks, someone had actually taken the time to replace some of my books with this religious drivel. Even Anna seemed a bit surprised at my anger about this. In her defense, we hadn’t actually told her about Marty being gay and the problems this was beginning to cause.

Matters got worse when, as Christmas approached, other stores started putting up Christmas decorations. Lyle Duerr was the first to say something. One day he came in earlier than usual for morning coffee. We were alone in the bistro with almost a half an hour left before the rest of the coffee row leeches were due.

“So, you haven’t put up any Christmas decorations yet,” he said.

“I wasn’t actually planning on it,” I replied.

“It’s pretty important for retailers to get in the spirit,” he explained.

“I guess I was just hoping a restaurant might be exempt.”

“Don’t you feel that you SHOULD put something up?”

“Actually I’ld really rather not.”

“Don’t you have any Christmas spirit at all?”

“Not really. I don’t celebrate it.”

“What? Are you a joe-ho?”

“A what?”

“Jehovah’s Witness.”

“No. Although I suppose that if I were, having you refer to me as a ‘Joe-Ho’ might be a little insulting, don’t you think?”

Ignoring my question he just huffed and proceeded, “So YOU’RE a JEW?”

“I’m not Jewish either, but yet again, I find your tone a little insulting,” I answered, surprised at how insulted I felt by his inquisition.

“Well what is it then?” he demanded.

“My mother was murdered on Christmas day,” I said, staring him straight in the eye.

“Oh shit!” he exclaimed, finally dropping the topic and heading to his table.

My mother hadn’t actually been murdered on Christmas day but I had always found that to be an efficient way of ending Christmas-related interrogations. Furthermore, I wanted to turn the tide of discomfort against him because of his incredibly offensive references about Jehovah’s Witnesses and Jews. I am an atheist and have several philosophical objections to a religious holiday that idolizes gluttony and fiscal irresponsibility. There was no way I could have explained this to Lyle, however. I have never been comfortable with people who believe in an invisible man but I’ve actually found a great deal of companionship with Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses over the years at Christmas time. I couldn’t believe Lyle had so tactlessly demanded to know if I was a ‘Jo-Ho’. It just never occurred to these hicks that most people in the world weren’t Christian, let alone Catholic.

My plan backfired, however. Within days I was visited by several pastors and the town priest. All of them were horrified that my mother’s brutal Christmas day slaying might have inspired me to hate god. It didn’t matter how calmly I explained to them that I no longer believed in Santa Clause, the Easter bunny, god, or the tooth fairy – they were convinced that I had to believe in god and I was just angry that he had allowed my mother’s murder.

I found it rather suspicious that each of them used some very similar phrases in trying to sooth my ‘anger and contempt of god.’ It became quite apparent that they had actually conspired at some point, and had come to a consensus as to what was going through my head even before a single one of them had undertaken a discussion with me. It was sort of unnerving to think that the town’s religious leaders had formulated a personality profile on me without having a moment of interaction with me. I would later find that this was the way that Humbuggers formed most of their opinions about outsiders.

I finally managed to negotiate a cease fire by agreeing to put up fucking Christmas decorations. They all expressed their certainty that if I just let my heart open up to the Christmas spirit I might come to lose some of my anger toward their deity. With disgust, I ordered Jeffrey and Marty to decorate the bistro. I had no idea how glass bulbs and plastic vines were supposed to offer any sort of divine connection but was happy to put up with them if it meant being left alone.

The priest offered me the most interesting negotiation. I took the time to inquire about his dissertation on the perils of spicy food. To my surprise he informed me that he didn’t actually view the road to hell as being paved with cayenne and paprika. He did, however, indicate that those of questionable nature should stay away from intense flavours and experiences as it might open the door to other temptations. When he began to tell me about the success achieved with a diet of oatmeal and boiled potatoes at a nearby sexual reorientation therapy centre for troubled youth I threw him out. I just didn’t want to hear anymore about homosexuals being tortured in this backwards hick town.

On the plus side of my plan, I actually managed to spend one Christmas without every single person I met wishing me a ‘Merry Christmas’. They had decided that putting up the decorations was enough and they didn’t want to further remind me of my mother’s horrific slaying. I actually heard some of them rasping away in their pathetic Humbug whisper that I had found her mutilated body under the Christmas tree. The details that they filled in were quite revealing of the Humbug fascination with death.

One strange Humbug quirk that I eventually learned of was the ‘death house drive-by’. It seemed that when someone in town died, there were several people who would look up that person’s address in the phone book just so they could drive by the home of the deceased and peer at it. I presume this was so they could fill in gruesome imaginary details of the death scene. Apparently cable television just didn’t have enough channels for their entertainment.

It seemed that every aspect of life in this dismal little town was designed to aggressively stifle every aspect of human nature. People so devoted to boring bland lives that they would send their children away to be tortured were never going to try new flavours or unfamiliar foods. Others, who found entertainment in driving by the homes of the recently deceased, weren’t really the sort that I wanted in my restaurant. This place wasn’t a displaced 1940’s culture and nor was it German in nature. Humbug was a social experiment designed to emulate an alternate dimension in which Hitler had won the war. Humbuggers weren’t the victims of this experiment; they were the perpetrators of it.

The Humbug Hornets

2009-11-30T22:48:00.000-08:00

Admittedly, hockey is a passionate pastime of most prairie towns. In Humbug, however, love for the game transcends passion; ascending to stratospheric levels of lust. This isn’t to say that a single Humbugger actually plays the game, at least as far as I ever encountered, but rather that male Humbuggers seem incapable of having a complete conversation without expressing some philosophical gem about the local team or the sport itself.

The local team was called the Humbug Hornets and played in some sort of inter-provincial league of small town teams. I found it most interesting that during my time in Humbug, not a single player on the Humbug Hornets was actually a born-and-raised Humbugger. In a town that didn’t spend a penny demarcating its downtown district and not much more on repairing potholes, I was amazed to find that funds had been raised to scout, recruit, transport, and board hockey players from as far as the Eastern United States.

These young men were not just the only outsiders openly welcomed to Humbug but they also garnered a position akin to royalty. They obviously monopolized the ice time at the local arena without paying a fraction of the fees charged to local figure skaters. Furthermore, they got exclusive use of the local aquatics centre at least twice each week and no fees were ever listed in the ledger for this privilege. Local businesses were expected to offer significant discounts to the young men who carried official team cards, and also to offer up advertising space in their front windows for team-related fundraisers and events. My decision not to offer the team discounts and advertising space was not well received to say the least, but I was very surprised at how critically I was treated for offering said advertising space to a local figure skating club.

Although every young male in Humbug had been cut from the competitive hockey leagues well before coming of age to be a Hornet, every Humbug father lamented endlessly about his boy’s lack of hockey talent and time spent in front of “that damn computer”. I once made the mistake of suggesting that they spend more time developing and recruiting local talent only to be rebuked by the Humbug men with the simultaneous retort, “And lose the cup?” I decided never to ask how, under such circumstances, they expected their sons to spend their time if not in front of a computer.

I couldn’t help but wonder what all these imported young athletes thought about Humbug. It had to be a strange experience to be recruited by some obscure prairie hockey team only to arrive in town and notice a few too many people looked just a little too much alike. Adding to the awkward and tactless demeanor of the citizenry would be the plight of being boarded with a family that praised the merits of a bland diet and lifestyle. There wasn’t even an arcade in Humbug because Humbuggers seemed to think that arcades were where ‘kids smoke the pot’. I wondered where, having no arcade to congregate at, young Humbuggers went to ‘smoke the pot’.

One day I overheard a couple Humbug men discussing the team as they happened to make mention of the team pastor.

“Team pastor?” I inquired.

“Yeah, Pastor Bob,” one of them said.

“I’ve heard of a team trainer and coach, but you don’t really have a team pastor, do you?”

“Of course!” they both exclaimed.

“That’s not really appropriate, is it?” I asked.

“What the hell do you mean?” one of them demanded.

“You don’t know all these kids that well. What if one of them isn’t really religious?”

“What do you mean, ‘not really religious’?” he further demanded.

“They might not be from religious homes, you know. You bring these kids from all over the country, board them in Catholic homes, and then start making religion a part of team policy. That might make some of them uncomfortable and it would be hard for them to say anything considering how displaced they might already feel.”

“It’s just for a team prayer before the game,” he explained, “and if anything that would make them feel more at home, don’t you think?”

“Not if they happen to be Jewish or Muslim,” I countered.

The men began to laugh hardily as they both exclaimed, “Jews and Muslims don’t play hockey!”

Once again I found myself completely astounded at how tightly the Humbug mind was confined to a ten mile circle of experience. I thought it best not to even suggest that any of the players might be from an atheist home but I couldn’t help but feel bad for the misfortune of one who might be. I felt fairly certain that there had to be laws against this sort of thing but chose not to pursue the matter. I hoped that, at very least, the talent of these young players would be appropriately recognized in a place where the sport itself was a form of deity.

I’m not a fan of hockey but have none the less unwillingly absorbed all too much critical analysis of the game from my father who has played and coached the game for decades. I looked forward to hearing what sort of analysis Humbuggers put forward about each game considering their extraordinary focus on the sport. I had expected to hear something like, “They need to get one of their left handed centers on the ice when the Colts play their second line – that left defenseman is weak.” Listening to Lyle and his brother, Mike, nearly sent me into laughter.

“What a terrible game,” Lyle lamented.

“Terrible game,” Mike harmonized.

“They just didn’t play 100%.”

“They never play 100%.”

“Really phoned it in.”

“Yup, totally phoned it in.”

“It was like they didn’t even play the second half.”

“They never play a whole game.”

“Those guys gotta start giving 100% for the whole game.”

“They’ld win if they gave 100% for the whole game.”

“Yup.”

That was it. That was the best critique I heard of the Humbug Hornets the entire winter. Apparently the secret to winning in hockey is to give 100% for the whole game. I wondered what a team could accomplish if they gave 110% for the whole game. Such a team might even win two Stanley Cups in one season. Just imagine.

Regardless of how ridiculous a comment on the previous night’s game may have been, there was always some lackey harmonizing with even more ridiculous affirmations.

“Davies’ stick is just too damn long,” some idiot would observe.

“Yup, it stands to reason, don’t you know,” some lackey would agree.

“A stick shouldn’t be higher than the armpit!”

“Yup, it’s just common sense.”

“He just can’t stick handle with a stick that long.”

“Yup, anyone can see it, don’t you know.”

Over and over and over until I thought I was going to scream. Not once did I hear about screening passes or dumping the puck into the zone to avoid offsides. Matching centers to opposing lines or defensemen to forwards’ speeds was like quantum mechanics to these morons. I don’t say this as some sort of hockey guru, for I’ve never watched a game start to finish in my life. All that I know about hockey I picked up while playing Collecovision in the basement while my father screamed at the television upstairs. I wondered what the Humbug Hornets could accomplish if they practiced a little basic strategy, gave 110%, and played the whole game throughout the season. Surely they could be intergalactic champions if only they put these three things together. I can’t imagine just how much more they could accomplish if “Davies” shortened his stick.

I eventually learned why there were no local players on the team. One of the many quirky rules in Humbug was their concept of inheritance of accomplishment. In order to keep the next generation as stifled as possible, children were never recognized for having achieved much more than their parents. The greatest injustice of this rule laid in the way that dozens of otherwise very capable students were graded very harshly based on their parents’ delinquencies. As far as hockey was concerned, you could only make the team if your father had done so before you. All it took was one hack to eliminate an entire family line from the team, and thus the entire team had to be imported.

I have never been entirely opposed to organized sport but I have always favoured sports that were more inclusive than exclusive. Personally, I have no idea how anyone can sit around watching a sport that they don’t participate in themselves.

When I suggested to the Humbug men who sat around lamenting the shortcomings of the Hornets that they try playing a friendly game of street hockey to bolster community spirit in the team, they piped up with a list of ailments that ranged all the way from arthritis to erectile dysfunction.

The Brick Wall

2009-11-30T22:46:00.000-08:00

If, while seated in a restaurant, you have ever found yourself thinking about ‘what would really make this place work’ then I beg you to start reading very, very carefully. The door of a restaurant is like a transporter that magically beams you into the world of the restauranteur. Upon beaming through you see the restauranteur planting a flag emblazoned with the restaurant logo. It’s a nice enough flag but you notice that the logo isn’t symmetrical. It occurs to you that the restauranteur has made a silly little oversight so you decide to help out by pointing out this irregularity. “You know what would really make this place work,” you rhetorically say, continuing, “a more symmetrical logo.”

Now this seems like an innocent suggestion but you are deeply hurt when the restauranteur glares at you and gruffly remarks, “Thanks. I can’t imagine what I would ever do without you.” You wonder how this terrible person, who is so fortunate as to own her own restaurant, could be so ungrateful. The one detail that you are forgetting, however, is that all you had to do to get there was open the door and step through. The restauranteur, on the other hand, has just completed months of planning, investing, delegating jobs and reading regulations - only to finally arrive in Nepal, ascend Mt. Everest, and pull out a flag that was printed months earlier by a graphic artist who is apparently visually impaired. The magic door you just stepped through doesn’t exist for the restauranteur, except perhaps when it has been purchased at an exorbitant cost from a corporate franchise. The restauranteur has had to endure a much longer journey to arrive at your meeting and going back to fix trivial details is often much more arduous that you might realize.

Even after the restaurant is running, there is an endless stream of sales reps phoning, sending faxes and walking in the door in the middle of a lunch rush hoping to find the restauranteur with some idle time. There are customers demanding food, detailing their complaints, and making suggestions. There is staff who didn’t show up, others that think they weren’t correctly paid last month, and one who needs to describe a remarkably personal problem in nauseous detail. There are bills to be paid, orders to be sent, and perishables that need to be put on special. It’s important to run through a checklist of the checklists that each staff member is supposed to have checked and then check that they didn’t just check off the items without doing the work. All in all, there will be 10 to 14 hours of work to do on every single day and that’s a best case scenario where none of the equipment breaks down, the restauranteur doesn’t have to start waiting tables personally, and auditors aren’t lined up in the lobby. “Why not take a few hours to design custom floral centerpieces for the tables? That would really make this place work.”

This is not a list of complaints but, rather, an explanation as to why the average restauranteur might not seem terribly excited about your suggestions. It is the job of the restauranteur to manage all the chaos behind the scenes in order to provide the customer with a comfortable, relaxing environment in which to dine. Unfortunately there are a few too many customers who mistake this relaxing atmosphere as being the world in which the restauranteur does business. If this seems hard to believe then I suggest you start counting the number of times you see the owner of a busy restaurant sitting peacefully in the dining area, sampling the chef’s latest proposals for the menu, while serenely pondering various autumnal colour palettes that might create an even more relaxing atmosphere.

The most intelligent suggestion ever made by a customer in my bistro was that I put up large flat-screen video displays that played a slide show of various menu items. Large posters of food definitely boost sales, if only the time can be found to combine an empty restaurant, freshly prepared entrees, and a professional photographer. The hardware required for multiple digital posters running through a slideshow, however, would cost thousands and thousands of dollars up front without knowing that the added cost would produce greater added sales. In the end it is far more cost efficient to stick with the oldest and most proven marketing trick used in the food service industry; free samples.

The most ridiculous suggestion ever made by a customer in my bistro was that I strategically place several scuba attired mannequins throughout the dining room. The customer who suggested this cited a very successful seafood restaurant in Vancouver that had successfully employed this tactic. I won’t even begin to analyze this suggestion.

The most perplexing suggestions ever made by customers in my bistro came from born-and-raised Humbuggers. As with their analysis of hockey, they had an incredible knack for stating the obvious as though it were some sort of epiphany. Trying to change the preconceived notions of Humbuggers was like beating my head against a brick wall.

One day a rather sophisticated-looking Humbug woman walked into the bistro. When I describe her as a sophisticated-looking Humbug woman, what I mean to say is that she wasn’t wearing rubber boots. She walked up to the register and ordered an English toffee latte.

“I don’t have English toffee syrup,” I explained, “but I have a very good caramel.”

“You’re out of English toffee?” she asked.

“Actually I don’t carry English toffee.”

“But you’ve ALWAYS had English toffee,” she proclaimed.

“No, I’ve never had English toffee.”

“I have been having English toffee lattes here for years!” she exclaimed.

“No, I’m sorry. You are thinking of the Humbug Coffee House.”

“This IS the Humbug Coffee House.”

“No, this is the Humbug Bistro. It used to be the Humbug Coffee House, but they closed almost a year ago.”

“This is the Humbug Coffee House. I come here almost every week and have an English toffee latte. What kind of game are you playing with me?” she demanded.

“I assure you, ma’am, that you do not come here almost every week and have an English toffee latte. The Humbug Coffee House closed almost a year ago now. I opened up three months ago and this is now the Humbug Bistro and I have never seen you before,” I explained, becoming impatient.

“Why did the coffee house close?” she asked.

“I assume because the most regular customers only came in once per year.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” she blurted.

“Well, you think you are a regular, but you haven’t been here for at least ten months.”

“This town needs a coffee house!” she proclaimed.

“Apparently not,” I retorted.

“Well you should put up a sign that this isn’t a coffee house anymore!”

“The canopy says Humbug Bistro,” I explained.

“But I was on the sidewalk. I didn’t see the canopy.

“Every pane of glass has a full width, one foot high, yellow strip that says ‘bistro’.”

“I didn’t notice. You should put a sign on the sidewalk.”

“You mean like the sandwich board you stepped around to get in here?”

She looked back out the front door and seemed legitimately surprised to see a sandwich board on the sidewalk. I could see the steel spring that was her Humbug mind under great tension as she tried to reconcile the duality of my bistro existing where the coffee shop still existed in her psyche. A vein began to bulge in her forehead and, fearing that she might have an aneurism, I interjected,

“Would you like to try a caramel latte?”

She agreed. As she sipped her caramel latte I could tell that she was becoming more comfortable. Eventually she slipped into a very thoughtful expression and then it happened. Her mouth opened and out poured those dreaded words, “You know what would really make this place work?” I took a deep breath and found the courage to ask.

“What would really make this place work?”

“You need to advertise that this is a bistro now.”

“You mean like the 27 feet of signage outside the repeats the word ‘bistro’ 5 times?”

“Well people here don’t know what a bistro is. You need to tell them there is food here.”

“You mean like the 10 signs in the window indicating today’s specials and the waffles?”

She showed no indication of embarrassment at having missed at least 33 square feet of signage and just continued to bend the steel spring in her cranium. Looking for something that I had obviously missed, she finally hit upon an idea.

“You need to put up a menu of all the food you sell,” she announced.

“Like the one in the foyer, or on the wall beside you, or by the cash register?”

“Well,” she said, further bending that spring, “you should advertise in the paper.”

“Ma’am, this town only has a few thousand people. Several dozen of them knew what colour I was painting the back hall even before I opened the doors – they had a great discussion about it at the hardware store. I’ve had no fewer than fifty people apply for jobs here and, as near as I can tell, they are directly related to at least half of the population. How can anyone not know that there is a new business here? If they have driven down Main Street and haven’t seen the new canopy or the 27 foot long banner across the windows then how big would the newspaper have to be to run an add large enough for them to notice?”

“Well you could put a picture up of your food. You should have a poster outside like at the movie theatre so they can see the food you have. Have you ever thought of that?”

“Actually, it had occurred to me that the people of Humbug might be somewhat unresponsive to printed words. I’ll give the picture idea serious consideration.”

She beamed quite proudly about having solved my problem. After all it was, admittedly, quite the accomplishment for this illiterate dolt to have surmised that the other illiterate, backward, inbred hicks might need me to draw them a picture. The only problem left for me was that not only did I not know how to draw a picture of a ‘sammich’ but I also didn’t plan on adding Velveeta to the menu.

Lyle Duerr was often generous enough to share his profound business insight with me. I was always eager to get retail marketing tips from a man who didn’t want to expand the traffic in his store so I paid his advice great heed. He was often the first coffee row leech to arrive and often took the time we had alone in the store to analyze my business tactics with me.

“You know, Heather,” he began, one morning, “I won’t claim to know your business but I think there is something you should know.”

This was his way of saying, “You know what would really make this place work?” I so loved his original format that I was compelled to acquire his input. “What’s that, Lyle?” I asked.

“You seem to be a lot more experienced in business than the last owner but I have to tell you that he was a lot more attentive to his customers.”

“Not to kick a dead horse Lyle, but there was no last owner. I bought the furniture from the coffee shop but I didn’t buy the business. We just both happened to lease the same location.”

“Well there you go again about this not being a coffee shop anymore. There are already enough restaurants in this town and you’re not going to make it until you accept that this is the town coffee shop – no matter what you call it.”

“Thanks, Lyle, but as you said, I have a lot more experience in business than the coffee shop owner. The numbers on this place require daily sales of at least $800 for it to be a viable going concern. There just aren’t enough people in town to do that volume in coffee. That’s why there isn’t a coffee shop in town anymore.”

“You wouldn’t need that much in sales if you didn’t have any staff. You wouldn’t need any staff if you stopped serving food. If you focused on coffee you could work alone and keep just about every penny that goes into the register.”

“There are two problems there, Lyle. The first one is that I wouldn’t get to keep just about every penny that goes into the register. The second one is that the coffee house DID focus on just coffee and had a negative cash flow the entire time it was in operation. The volume just isn’t there in Humbug.”

“But he was only open about 40 hours per week. If you stayed open from eight in the morning to about ten at night, seven days a week, you could easily double his volume and actually make money.”

“Let me see if I have this straight: Fire all my staff and run the place by myself for 98 hours per week?” I sneered.

“Exactly!” he exclaimed.

Apparently Lyle had never heard of the only word in the English language that uses each and every vowel once, and only once, and in alphabetical order: Facetious. He actually seemed to think that the cost of goods on coffee was zero. I’m not sure where he thought the cream came from – perhaps he thought that I squeezed it from my left tit. He must have thought that the sugar rained down from my happy thoughts and that a cup fairy made daily deliveries. I have no idea why I never thought of running the store by myself for 98 hours per week.

Only a week later I was pleasantly surprised when I walked into his hardware store to pick up some plumbing parts for my dishwasher that, according to his proposed business model, never required repairs. In the center of his store there were two pallets of big red plastic jars containing a value brand of coffee grounds. I made my way back towards his throne, trying my best to appear lost amongst his merchandise.

Now I say I made my way back towards his thrown because all three of the Duerr businessmen in town had created, for themselves, thrones within their stores. This isn’t to say that they sat upon gold and jewel encrusted high backed chairs, but rather they built these ridiculous turrets from which they could survey their mighty retail empires. Entering any of their stores you could find them perched on high in obviously homemade platforms, cheaply finished with painted plywood fences. Mike Duerr’s store was the silliest, for the ceiling wasn’t nearly as high as his brothers’ stores, so he actually had to duck down as he mounted his thrown to keep from bumping his head.

As I passed beneath Lyle’s thrown he leaned down and acknowledged my position beneath him by offering assistance.

“Can I help you find anything, Heather?”

“Well, I was kind of thinking about that coffee you have up front.”

“What for?” he asked.

“To sell in my restaurant, of course.”

“Don’t you sell sort of fancy coffee?”

“Yeah, but since it barely costs anything I figured you’ld give me a pallet of that crap for free.”

The look on his face was priceless. He never again suggested that my cost of goods on coffee was zero.

Wer ist Deutsch?

2009-11-30T22:44:00.000-08:00

In Canada there is a great deal of racism directed at and immigrants. It seems that many Canadians feel that their family, ever since arriving in Canada, has been somehow jilted by foreigners. Oddly enough, however, there is just as much racism directed at the native population. This paradox has always been all too apparent to me, being of mixed native and foreign descent. While my mixed ancestry provides me with a very strong sense of Canadian identity, most Canadians identify themselves as anything other than Canadian by telling a long tale about their ancestors’ origins. If you are ever at an international conference and ask someone what nationality they are and that person starts to talk about their grandparents then you are most likely face to face with a true Canuck.

Humbuggers take this uniquely Canadian idea of national identity in an unusual direction. By tracing their entire family tree back to the six founding families of Humbug they somehow manage to find pride in thinking that they are completely German while at the same time overlooking the implications of such a genetic bottleneck. To make matters worse, they seemed to know almost nothing about German culture, history, or geography.

Whenever outsiders were baffled by the unusual behaviors of Humbuggers, the typical Humbugger would justify their backward ways by saying, “I’m German!” This was a sort of trump card in Humbug which declared the holder immune from any requirements of social grace or tact. When I once questioned the Humbug affinity for dipping fried potatoes in ranch dressing, I was told, “That might not be the way most people do it – but we’re German!”

What the hell did being German have to do with unusual choices in condiments? Yet once again I found myself looking around for hidden cameras. I desperately longed for Allen Funt to leap from his grave and tell me to smile so that I could know that the joke was over. It rapidly became apparent that rather than holding themselves to the high standards of a 2000 year old people who had been integral in the development of European culture, these mouth-breathing varmints had actually started to use their heritage as an excuse for their behaviors. Nonetheless I decided to play into their displaced pride wherever and whenever possible.

When baking apple danish I elongated and sliced them and called them strudel. I added some zuckerkuchen to the baking display until I got tired of explaining what it was. They instantly rejected any German egg noodle dishes that I attempted. For a few weeks I even replaced the sweet chili pork with schnitzel – only to be shocked when several Humbuggers actually asked me what ‘skanitzel’ was. At least they didn’t complain about the spice, although I was ashamed to serve something so bland. None of my efforts had the slightest effect on the coffee row leeches, however.

When I commented on the inappropriate volumes of coffee consumed by coffee row, Gord Hueber simply declared, “We’re good German!” When I chastised someone for being too aggressive about inquiring where I was ‘FRUM’, the inquisitor invariably said, “Maybe you don’t care where people are FRUM, but I’m German!” As I became increasingly abrasive towards coffee row for not ordering food, Dan looked at me and said, “Maybe you don’t think this is a coffee shop anymore, but we’re German!” I knew that few Canadians viewed themselves as actually being Canadian, but in all my travels I had never run across a population who was so thoroughly and consistently convinced of a such a displaced sense of nationality.

To add to their delusions of being ‘good German’, they had erected signs on the highways out of town which read, “Auf Wiedersehen.” Considering their hostile attitude towards non-Catholics and people who didn’t look quite like themselves, I found this rather unnerving. I continually found myself feeling as though these people were trying to produce the culture that might have developed in Canada after World War II if Hitler had won. They were small town Canadian people in every way, with almost none of them having spent more than a total of a few months outside the confines of the little shire – but they had this uncanny and unshakable affinity for the Fatherland.

Despite my philosophical, if not moral, objections to their social experiment, I continued to try to find ways to play into their displaced pride. One day, as Lyle and Mike were leaving, I waved and said, “Auf Wiedersehen!”

“What?” said Lyle.

“Auf Wiedersehen,” I repeated.

“What the hell does that mean?” he asked.

“It’s like ‘see you later’ in German,” I replied, incredulously.

“Well how the hell would I know that?” he bellowed.

“You regularly tell me how German you are!”

“Well just because I’m German doesn’t mean I speak German. This is Humbug!”

“You can’t leave town without seeing the signs that say ‘Auf Wiedersehen’!”

“Oh! That’s how you say that?” he exclaimed, turning to leave.

I wondered who had come up with the idea for the signs if even Humbug’s leading German businessman didn’t seem to know a single word in German. I began to shudder every single time I heard them refer to themselves as German or speak about how doing things in some backward uncultured way was ‘good German’. One Siesta Saturday the ‘sophisticated’ lady who enjoyed English toffee lattes returned. I was glad to see that she was still not wearing rubber boots. She ordered her latte and decided to try the ‘bah-ja’ burrito.

When I placed her order in front of her, she requested cutlery. I didn’t find the request odd at all for I had seen plenty of people, even outside Humbug, choose to eat a burrito or slice of pizza with cutlery. It seemed that she thought I found her request awkward, however, for she offered an explanation.

“I know this isn’t how you eat a burrito,” she said, “but I am German!”

The references just never stopped. They said they didn’t like spice because they were German, but they had an incredible palate for garlic which they also explained as being ‘good German’. The only menu item that sold in decent volume to Humbuggers was garlic toast, but they had requested so much garlic in the garlic spread that I actually had to warn outsiders to scrape off most of the visible garlic. The remaining butter still left a pleasantly strong garlic flavour for most other customers.

As December approached, the downtown merchants let me know about a plan they had to help boost Christmas sales. They designated a particular Friday evening as ‘Midnight Madness’ so that all the stores could stay open to create a festive shopping environment. It was the first time that I had ever heard any of them trying to do anything to boost traffic – let alone anything that involved them cooperating with each other. I was so encouraged by the concept that I told Lyle that I would be happy to stay open to midnight for the event, even if all I got were coffee sales.

“Oh, you don’t need to stay open to midnight,” he replied.

“But why would I close earlier than everybody else?” I asked.

“Nobody is staying open to midnight. Most of us close at 11.”

“Uh, call me crazy, but if it’s called ‘Midnight Madness’ then shouldn’t we all stay open until midnight?”

“Nah,” he replied, “That might be what city folk would expect, but we’re good German.”

Suddenly I had an epiphany. I realized that when Humbuggers used the word ‘German’, what they actually meant was ‘stupid’. Further, when they said something was ‘good German’, what they actually meant was ‘fucking stupid.’ I began to laugh so hard that I had to go hide in the kitchen. Marty followed me and when I explained my realization to him we both lost control of our laughter.

Finally I had found something about Humbuggers that could make me laugh. I removed my German offerings from the menu, realizing that what these people really wanted was ‘stupid food’. I never did determine exactly what constituted ‘stupid food’, but as near as I could imagine it had to be deep fried, bland, and served with ranch dressing. I never again shuddered when they referred to themselves as ‘German’ but I did have to learn to control my laughter.