Crazy Dave

I met Crazy Dave when I was nineteen years old. I was a waitress wearing khaki pants and a jean shirt. He was a cook wearing sagging jeans and a black t-shirt that stretched against the strain of his enormous gut. Crazy Dave wore hats in the kitchen. He tied a stained white cloth around his middle. He liked to talk about which waitresses he'd sleep with and how, his bowel movements, his ex-wife, his "hot daughter," and even his hot daughter's friends.

If Crazy Dave was making a dinner plate for someone he didn't like--a customer who gave sass, a waitress he loathed, a dishboy he wanted dead--then he would stick his hand down the back of his pants, into his underwear, and let it squirm around in there until the shrieking of the other cooks, waitresses, and dishboys grew too loud to be contained by the swinging metal doors.

If ants got into the pie--because sometimes waitresses were lazy and left pies uncovered in the cooler--Crazy Dave said, "Eh, just flick 'em off and cover it with whipped cream. No one will know."

Crazy Dave liked to fart and burp and make foul noises. He liked to yell. He liked to say fuck! and fuck you! and stupid fucking fucker!

The dishboys liked Dave. "Wow, Dave is so cool," they would say. "Dave's the best! Isn't he just so great?"

The waitresses liked Dave's alfredo sauce. He was in charge of the saute pans on Friday and Saturday nights. He made a chicken alfredo or a shrimp scampi like no one's business. "Dave's alfredo is top-notch," the waitresses would say. "Nothing else like it in the world!"

Crazy Dave was rumored to have been in jail, to be on probation, to have killed a man, to have busted up his ex-wife's car with a baseball bat. When the waitresses bent over to get bread or salad, Crazy Dave liked to yelp. Now that's a juicy ass! he'd say.

I knew enough to stay out of Dave's way. I didn't want to be on his Most Hated list, and I certainly didn't want to be on his Most Beloved List. The waitresses on the latter list were subject to his persistent offers of sex--oral, anal, and otherwise--and to a towel-whip when they happened by his station.

I never bothered Dave, and Dave never bothered me. Of course, that's not to say Dave didn't disturb me. Because he did. Often.

One time I was making a tray of salads for a big party that was coming in later that night. I had the salads lined up and was methodically thunking chick peas, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, cheese, and croutons onto the chilled plates. Dave was behind the line, bitching about this and that, saying how much of a whore his ex-wife was, and how everyone in this restaurant was a no good fucking fucker. Then an order for an alfredo came in. That put Dave to work. He was no longer idle and aimless, and he did his best work when he was talking, so he started spinning his story. The pans sizzled over the heat and the smell of garlic rose in the kitchen.

He told the other cooks that because his daughter was hot, she had hot friends. Hot young friends. They were fourteen, fifteen, maybe sixteen years old. He had a little trick he liked to pull on them, he said. He'd drink a couple beers, draw himself a bath, stack the cans next to the tub and pretend to pass out in the warm water. If they stayed long enough, the hot young girls eventually had to go to the bathroom. But what could they do? Crazy Dave only had one bathroom. One tiny bathroom. So they waited and prayed he'd get out or wake up, but when it became apparent that he wouldn't--he must have had an awful lot to drink, the hot young girls thought--they just tip-toed in and pulled down their jeans, their pink and purple and polka-dotted underwear. Crazy Dave watched all this through narrowly slitted eyes. He watched the parade of pink and purple and polka-dotted underwear and thought, Ah, now this is the life.

I was thinking about all this today--Crazy Dave, the restaurant, his stories--because my students read a story about a strange workplace and strange coworkers. They journaled about the strangest person they'd ever worked with. And I just let them talk. There were so many stories, so many interesting stories. There were knife-throwing dishwashers, there were transsexuals, there were pizza throwers who'd drink bottles of vodka during their shifts. There were people who groped, people who punched, people who stole drugs and condoms and frozen donuts.

And my God, I couldn't get over it--how there are some really bizarre people out there, how they are, at this very minute, turning small circles in our lives--preparing our meals, cashing our checks, sliding our purchases over scanners, fielding our phone calls. I couldn't stop thinking about motivation, about what makes them the way they are--from the disgusting to the perverse--and I couldn't help but wonder how many bad days, how many strikes of bad luck, we are all away from throwing knives or stealing frozen donuts. Somedays I feel like I could. I have a stack of papers to grade this weekend. Sometimes that's enough to do it.