The Bus Boy

“Oh, it’s nothing to worry about.”
July 1992

We were fearless; we would venture into restaurants with three little kids: Kat, 8; Greg, 4; and Kelsey, 3. We ignored the glares of couples without kids who were looking for a quiet night out, walked right past them. We knew that trick of it was to keep the kids constantly occupied whenever there was any dead time, and there was plenty of that, from waiting for the our seat to waiting for the waitress and then the big one, waiting for the food. Most of the time we played it safe: going only to places where crayons and paper placemats to color were provided. Not that we were unsympathetic to couples without kids; we had after all, been in their shoes the decade before and we had no appreciation for caterwauling kids in restaurants. But I wasn’t going to let my kids ever get to that level so if you were getting ready for an Erma Bombeck type story, forget about it.
Before they even got out of diapers, I was taking one or another of them outside to explain the restaurant rules.

1) No being loud
2) No throwing or dropping stuff
3) No staring at or approaching other patrons

They were pretty good about it. As far as I can recall, there was no screeching, squealing, food chunking and no nose picking while watching other people eat.
Chain restaurants are interesting because in a way you can be in the same place wherever you are in the country. On the other hand, there is something a little spooky about having the exact same meal prepared in the exact same way in 700 or more different locations. I prefer local places like Javier’s in Sunnyside or Country Fair on Belmont or the utterly shabby, ramshackle New China Café downtown, or the Japanese place run by a very nice Korean family over on Butler Avenue.
I have a special appreciation for going out to eat because for the first 25 years of my life, I didn’t see the inside of a restaurant. Dad didn’t believe in eating out. His famous rhetorical question on the subject was, “What for?” He did stop for breakfast whenever we went to Fresno, but I suspect he was hungry or had to go to the bathroom or buy gas anyway. “Ok,” he’d say, “you can have anything you want for $1.” So there was that, and there was one other time where he had a tax client who owned an Italian restaurant in Hollywood who invited Dad and the rest of us to the place for dinner, but the food was less than spectacular and the Pepsi was room temperature. Dad just didn’t appreciate eating out, well, until Mom stopped cooking, anyway.
In any event we had been out house hunting on a hot day and we went into one of those chain restaurants late one afternoon, or very early one evening, take your pick. We were wiped out and glad to be in a nice cool quiet restaurant. It was so quiet you could have been walking into a library. The place was empty, or nearly empty; I believe there was one other party in there, a couple as a matter of fact. We seated ourselves in a corner booth with a view of Shaw Avenue. We were the only people making any sound at all. I relaxed the restaurant rules because the couple seemed oblivious to the rest of the world; holding hands and gazing into each others eyes and all that.
The waitress arrived with a basket of crayons and the paper place mats so the kids could connect the dots and color in the logo of the place. I asked for an extra place mat and began color it myself. The kids got a kick out of it. Then Grace and I distributed crackers, sipped our water and perused the menu. That’s when a bus boy approached our table.
“How you guys doing tonight?” he said, while tucking an imaginary errant strand of hair behind his ear.
“Pretty good, thanks,” I answered congenially.
“Pretty hungry!” Kat said.
“That’s great. Your waitress will be here in a minute,” he said absently. He nodded and smiled, looking somewhere just behind us. I thought he might have been looking at the cars zooming along Shaw.
He stood there for a moment. He was a heavy set man, maybe in his late 20’s. His skin had an orange tint to it and his large forehead was as shiny as his slicked back hair. His pencil thin mustache had a touch of grey. He had a mole just to the right of his mustache which came to my attention because he kept twitching his cheek as if he could throw it off if he tried hard enough.
“Well, uh, I need to get back there for a second,” he said, scratching a sideburn.
“All right.” I scooted over a bit, thinking he wanted to close the blinds. Instead he started spraying the window sills with insecticide.
“Excuse me,” Grace said, “Do you think you can do that another time? We’re going to eat very close to where you’re spraying.”
“Oh, there’s nothing to worry about.” He moved to the other side of the booth.
“I don’t want my children breathing the fumes,” she answered, smiling in a mildly menacing way.
“This?” the notion stopped him temporarily. “This wouldn’t harm a flea.” He hitched up his pants and chortled.
“Please,” I began, looking at the skull and cross bones crudely drawn with a permanent marker on the bottle.
“This stuff won’t hurt anyone. Look.” He turned the bottle on himself and squirted it into his open mouth, leaned over Grace and resumed spraying.
“You can spray yourself all you want, but spray it here after we leave,” Grace said, fully annoyed.
“All done,” he chirped merrily. He turned and walked away, moving as if he had blisters on both feet.
I’m not sure why but we went ahead and ordered, ate and I even absent-mindedly left a generous tip.
“What are you doing? The guy gassed the kids.” Grace asked incredulously.
“That wasn’t the waitress’ fault.”
“She shares the tip with him though.”
“Maybe she won’t this time.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Did you notice how good the kids did this time?” I asked as we loaded them into the car.
“Well, of course, their central nervous system was damaged.”
“Daddy,” Greg asked, ‘what’s a nervous system?”
“Nothing, Sonny Boy, Mom’s just making a joke.”
“A joke?” Kathleen said, “Was it a knock-knock joke?”
“No, it was, she was just being funny, you know.”
“Daddy’s funny,” Kelsey put in.
“Couldn’t believe the guy,” I said to Grace as I started up the engine. “He’s got the whole rest of the place.”
“Even after I asked him.”
“Not the brightest bulb that ever burned.”
“No tungsten to burn. Slow down.”
“L.A. Law is on tonight.”
We scooted down Cedar, bits of burger, fries, thousand island, root beer and pesticide rolling around in our stomachs. I thought about the bus boy-- too old to be one—trying to make his way on minimum wage and tips. “I’m too Sexy for my Shirt,” came on the radio and I wondered if he liked the song. I snapped it off, suddenly hoping that the L.A. Law re-run would be one I hadn’t seen or at least didn’t remember.