Suburban Selangor At Shakey’s
The cockroaches came later. But at Shakey’s, you didn’t always know what life served up.
I sought refuge from the lull of a three-month college break. Defying the voices questioning my adulthood, I engaged a self-envisioned rite de passage in, of all things, waitering. Shakey’s Pizza (in the all-famous SS2 ‘square’, presently named Shakey’s Chicken & Pizza) was to be the factory of the maturity I was confident resided in me. Dormant, unacknowledged. Hmmph.
The first item on the agenda on ‘potty training’ for waiters at Shakey’s is knowing and memorising the table numbers. This is table no.1, this is no.2, this is – okay, I got it. I was then introduced to my uniform, a yellow polka-dotted shirt, “to be worn with dark pants, please” (and which remain unwashed for a good quarter of a year, the quarter I was there – taking it back home was too much trouble. Alright, enough ‘self-characterisation’ for this piece, let’s move on). Then came: put the dirty plates here, slot back the trays and cutlery there, always wait five minutes before taking an order (but you may ask them for drinks first), slot the keyed-in order slips in here, and never never keep your tips for yourself (yes you read that right). Put them in this little box and at month’s end we’ll split it between everyone (‘it’ being, fyi, usually no more than RM10 and ‘everyone’ being slightly more than ten people). Hey it was going to be fun. Rich fun.
Some members of my motley crew of fellow-waiters you shall meet next. There was a Chinese guy with an always-serious face (kinda like a plastered-on frown), and for whom being polite and courteous always seemed a strain (know such a someone?). There were five Mohawk-haired Malay teens from the East coast. They prepared the food and loved to regularly scream and shout their angst with the world (or thereabouts). The manager was a middle-aged lady who scolded the Mohawk bunch every other two hours and who one day hid a box of chocolates from one of the assistant managers. She was semi-paranoiac about people taking - for free - more of the good things in life than they ought to (especially if they didn’t pay for them), so she took pains to ensure that they didn’t.
There was also this guy whose pa-pa was ‘loaded’ (Malaysians love this term, don’t they?) yet who, for various reasons I could never guess, wanted to wait on tables for a while. I once saw him trying to avoid his girlfriend, while he and I were doing the afternoon post-lunch shift. He was ducking here hiding there, putting chairs tables walls between him and the outside, where she was. Interesting.
“We should try to have helicopters to rush people to the hospital, like they do overseas”, I mused one day, my thoughts emerging from and commenting on a news report about a guy who’s body and car were wrecked in a road accident.
“Aiyah, why bother lar?! Going to die means sure die one!”, he responded in sophisticated predestinarian manner. I think he was serious.
“Then why do you bother taking pills when you’re ill?”, I asked. I was genuinely curious as to whether he was being merely indifferent, inconsistent, or both (I was, in good Malaysian fashion, relegating for now the possibility that I’ve misunderstood or misinterpreted him). Chiefly, I was wondering how many people adopted such quasi-philosophical views pertaining to the restoration of human health.
“Ahhhh.”, was his mutter cum grin. And that was it.
The cockroaches would come pretty soon.
(But before that) Did you know that Shakey’s could pass for a hub of religious and agnostic abstraction? I’m not referring to the time when two girls spent up to six hours (with only one pizza and Pepsi) reading and studying the Bible, a not unfamiliar phenomena in urban Malaysia (or urban anywhere, for that matter). There could be some socio-religious significance here as I can’t recall seeing Buddhists, Hindus or Muslims sitting in public places pouring over their Scriptures; I only see Christians do it. (There’s gotta be something in religion, I’m sure. Thousands of years of religious longing/expression couldn’t just be our neural circuits evolving and screwing with us, could it?). I’m side-tracking, sorry.
But no, I’m not referring to this. I have in mind, instead, the restaurant music, the cassette-emergent sounds everybody hears in the midst of the chow. My colleagues (especially the Mohawks) were crazy about Alternative (and everybody say, “To what?”) music so one simply couldn’t get enough of this stuff. Malaysian imports, sigh. Every few hours a day I was bombarded by songs being droned out in a skeptical, almost sardonic, manner, like the artist performing it was doing so against his tired, messed-up will. Morisette, Oasis, The Raspberries (or was that Cran? did it bleedin’ matter?), Amos (not the cookie-man), Osbourne (Joan, not Ozzy), the Fighting Foos (this isn’t quite right but I was seeking alternatives), etc. These things get to you. He is a fool who proclaims music as neutral – try to listen 24/7 to YELLING like what you get from Axel Rose (yes, a non-Alternative ‘artist’ but he’s a still a good example of cultured noise) and/or ‘lyrics’ like:
(Such questions normally presuppose a false, often stereotypical, preconception of God; are we talking about the creator of the universe? Yet why even believe in a creator to begin with? A creator according to which creed (Islam, Christianity, Judaism, etc.)? Is this an intra-monotheistic debate on the nature of God or) I’ll just help myself to another of those buffet sausages (say I, the lover of cooked edible things freely available, thus putting the wannabee apologist on hold – now you now how some waiters mentally handle the excitement of 9 to 5). Unsurprisingly, when one works in the food industry, food is usually free, whether your boss agrees with this social practice or not. So here I was munching on unrecorded additions to my part-time (and pathetic/pitiful) pay, whilst I waltzed up to this old guy bringing his – wife? (too young), niece? (possible, but weird given the dirty look floating in his eye-brows), daughter? (oh God please no), two decades younger girlfriend? (bull’s eye) – his new fling to Shakey’s for a Hawaiian Delight, an SS2 favorite, probably for its ‘rightness of fit’ (not too pricey like the Delight, nor spicy like the Beef, or pointless like the Vegetarian, or plain - like everything else).
We, the waiters, the insignificant social-commentating shadows who make Shakey’s shake, concluded here was a cheap-o and a cheat-o, bringing a bimb-o out for lunch (of course we were probably wrong, but let’s face it we were probably right). Both were parasiting on each other for ego-boosting or pleasure-fulfilling ends, to discard when no longer functional, viable or if boredom (plain, stealthy, unpredictable, overpowering) sets in. Use it, then lose it. I hope God wasn’t like this.
“Just
a SLOB like one of us?”
(I doubt it, Joannie, but then again I haven’t done as much serious theological research and thinking as you have. Just a question, though: Why would you think that God is a slob? What ‘tips you off’ to such a thought? And the ‘Trying to make His way home’ part, well, I have a dog who occasionally dashes out to rub his fur on the liquid leftovers from the garbage truck, loses its trail in the process, and can’t tell my house’s gate from other hundred on the street – are you implying that God could be lost like that, say, on the way back to Heaven? Actually - given that you have the Christian faith in mind - what, really, is so uninteresting about the proposition that maybe we need a Perfectly Loving Person to give us some light, some ‘way out’ of our self-destructive mindset and behavior? In a word, some grace? And) the buffet and the Pepsi promotion? Yes, ma’am, for an additional $1.50 you get infinite refills.
“Oh, this kind of nonsense, ah?”, the workingwoman whose order I was taking quipped, partially to me, absolutely to her friend (she was referring to the Pepsi promo, I hope). They – like all of us – have made it an art to exude wariness of marketing drives driving consumers to absorb the loads of soft-drink crates at the back of the store, something the restaurant themselves value so little they’re willing to give away two (heck, take six) bottles for every delivery order made. They, the women, both chuckled in a bored sort of way. Ah stupid silly drink campaign to get us excited over their food. Tsk tsk tsk.
They took a few seconds. Mumbled something about anythinglaranythinglar. Then ordered the nonsense.
The cockroaches would come soon, from the equipment of an ISO9000-certified company. But at Shakey’s ‘practical contradiction’ was an ironic truth (not unlike one who assumes the existence of God only to mock and, subsequently, deny Him – good one, Joan).
Notice, though, that I haven’t said much about the food and drink. But, c’mon, was Eat Man, Drink Woman primarily about eating and drinking (in the sense of the intake of calories through the usual three-times-a-day meals?) Did Bailey’s Café elaborate on the Coffee of the Day? How often did the cast of Cheers even mention the beer? You do not wish to confuse medium with message and I shall not be guilty of misleading you to do so. Let’s move on. We haven’t reached the roaches yet.
(Penultimately) One busy day, a day when my glasses moistened up from the accumulating sweat around my eyes, a day when some cheesed-off dude came up to me and asked, “Is this table service or self-service?” (read: “Are you punks gonna serve me or am I gonna have to be your worst psychological menace ever?”) – don’t people realize that there’s a negative correlation between the throwing of rhetorical threat-veiled questions and the enjoyment of a meal?
…a hot day when the coolest question was, “Is there going to be more chicken in the buffet?” (read: “Move! You lazy third-class cheaters of the innocent restaurant-frequenting public with your glitzy glamorized eat-till-you-drop pack of lies advertisements!”) – oh you’ve never seen the hawks circle the meat in suburbian restaurants? Do you think hunger provokes such surveillance? Or something else?
…on this busy day I watched whilst a father misbalanced the one-pebble-two-sparrows act of ‘feeding myself’ and ‘feeding the post-infant kids’, blew it and spilled some pasta sauce on the floor. One of the kids cried, both parents sighed in angry exasperation, everyone else looked from their food to this new mess and back to food again.
What do you do when something like this happens? What do you do when you are in a position to humble yourself, to clean up someone else’s mess, with said someone being helpless to do so himself? And he knows it. I’ll tell you what I did, I got down on all fours (like the famous Cinderella scene) and cleaned up the food on the floor till it became self-effacingly obvious that my hands were getting dirty from such acts of meek surrender to the call of duty.
Yeah. Right. Hah.
You might be asking me: Do you do it for the glory of being able to say, “No problem”, when he embarrassingly thanks you and apologizes for the milk (in this case, almost literal) spilt? Or do you do it because you – golden oozin’ hearts of Selangor unite! – loooooovvvvvve helping people??
Take a wild guess. What do I sound like, a saint?
But this is one of those perks of waitering, isn’t it? You don’t have to admit that you’re an attention-seeking jerk who wouldn’t bat an eyelid for the unfortunate but who’d give his right arm for the chance to bask in cheap glory. You get the spotlight of true servanthood (and the tag of virtue that comes with certain notions of this – why else do politicians do that shoveling-the-dirt-into-the-new-tree thing, and why are people SO surprised if a ‘famous person’ does something unquestioningly selfless?) with neither the degradation of slave-like servitude nor the despicability of only pretending to serve.
Waitering, therefore (I have concluded), could become a kind of mask. It didn’t merely cover up the sedimentation of our hearts, but actually presented them as quite full of sunshine. If only we could ‘productize’ something like this.
But not everyone bothered to mask themselves. Especially their pain.
Sometimes a woman comes in with her child. She always looks kinda drained, sad, exhausted. And I’d wonder – we all did - where her husband (assuming he’s still around) is. Was he so busy his wife had to take the kid out by herself? Why not just wait another evening? Was it a promise she keeps to her child (and herself) to stave off the crouching pain of an increasingly non-resident husband? Whatever helps, ma’am. The Kid’s Meal brigade’s always here for you.
Oh, but we’re finally here.
The cockroaches came streaming out one hot afternoon. It was lunch hour. Lots of people racing for the $14.95 all-you-can-gluttonize buffet. But in came a 40-ish guy with a 30-ish lady. What a sight. He’s talking loud, waving his hands this way that (as if the more excited or grand the gestures, the more seriously worth taken the ideas). She’s playing the part of Pretend To Be Enchanted (Because Soon Cometh The Cash), but she didn’t realize that the dough had something else in stored for her that day. A small pan pizza was ordered, Loud-Mouth kept loud-mouthing, Miss Enchanted remained none other. Here came the drinks. No starters, so there was a 15-minute window between drink and dough. His hands kept in motion (like in those Bruce Lee shows where the guy dazzles the opponent with his hand movements, the same hands which later bust butt), her eyes and smile still fixed, amazingly resilient. Amazingly plastic.
And then the pizza came. The pan was put on a cork plate. It looked delicious, trust me. But no one knew that soon the food chain was about to be twisted. Two individuals of (contrived) sophistication were about to be undone by an inferior (and most uncultured) species. The glass of superficiality and pretentiousness was about to be shattered by the utter reality of the dirt-in-the-dough. Because not fifteen seconds on the table and maybe a dozen baby roaches came streaming out like those flesh-eating beetles in The Mummy. Heated up by the oven, their corky home all cooked up, they ran and they ran…out, out, and away!…like solid ripples on a sea of table, washing over the islands of napkin, sauce and salt; like aliens from a saucer (literally?) they swarmed out in hordes from the mother ship, to the edge and beyond. “Aaaaaaaaahhhhh!”, screamed the ex-Enchanted, no longer plasticized in awe, “Shit! Shit! SHIT!!” shouted Mr. Ex-Big Hands Bigger Mouth, no longer obsessed with articulation and gesticulation. There was my manager, the self-declared defender of everyone’s rights not to enjoy more than they should, her head bopping up and down (like a spoiled Japanese doll), babbling in a rhythmic softer-than-usual tone, “Sorry sir sometimes our supplier doesn’t spring clean sir sometimes these things happen sir we try to make sure that everything is clean sir but sometimes sir sometimes sorry sir sorry sometimes - ”
(Most of the time – I’m giving you the non-politically correct version here - we’re too lazy to ensure all our pizza cork-plates are home-free of six-legged freaks, why because we really don’t give a shit about the hygiene we serve or our image, come to think of it we really don’t enjoy playing butler to our customers [who make more money than we do, damn it], the results of which are displayed not only in this roach-race you just green-flagged but also like that time when this dude called in and asked for pizza delivery service to his place in God-knows-not-where and one of our ‘highly trained’ assistant managers told the guy who picked up the call – me, the one looking for the treasure of adulthood in the ‘food industry’ – he told him i.e. me, that the customer was out of his spaghetti-brained mind for even implying that his place of residence was within the sacred sphere of Shakey’s delivery. The customer heard the A.M. saying that and proceeded to fire away at yours wish-hadn’t-picked-up-phone truly, threatening to go over there and make a ‘helluva’ noise – his exact words – but in the end settled to declare (triumphantly) that he will call Pizza Hut instead. As if it was like pouring coals on our heads to know we just lost a client to a competitor. And all this time, Mr. Assistant Manager - who’s just fascinated with that golden star on his shirt pocket – keeps saying on and on, “Dia bodoh lah dia!”. And in case you think I’m crapping you, I’m not. People’s actions don’t always make sense, surely you don’t disagree. Anger, ignorance, the need to appear ‘in charge’, or stupidity and irrationality – plain and simple - can bring out the nonsensical in us. The completely nonsensical. Quarks don’t have causes, why should we? Restaurants, like this one I worked in, are just one loci of human absurdity. Don’t you think so? Sir?)
But back to the roaches and “Shit! Shit! SHIT!”
The lady, still half-screaming, backed out of her seat and half-ran to the exit. The guy continued with Triple-S whilst ‘storming’ out, making sure that his stride reflected the appropriate amounts of outrage, offended-ness, and the right to be as obnoxious as someone who’s been served a Cork Cockroach Pizza can be. My manager kept bowing in apparent (but probably non-existent) apology. There was nothing else to do. Life and lunch goes on. The other customers, like in the case of the fallen food, stared for a while, probably thinking with relish and relief and fat loads of smug, “I’m glad I’m not the one attracting all this humiliating face-losing shy-shy attention”. And turned away.
It’s been almost six years since I’ve left Shakey’s. But it hasn’t entirely left me. There would be many other places which not only fed people’s guts, but also their eccentricities, their skepticism, their falsehoods, their numbness, their indifference, But my first job, being the first of something, retained that special ‘extra’.
And so the cockroaches came quite a while back. And I’ve learnt not to be, as I was in Shakey’s, all that taken aback with what came out of life’s menu. Whether or not I, or anyone else, ordered it. Or ordered at all.