Not Exactly What I Had in Mind Read Free Page B

accommodate all these people!”
    “Oh. Well. I tell you what we’ll do. Just Pepper and I’ll take a table for two — make it for three. Great-aunt Mae April don’t want to eat anything, but she’d like to sit there and look around. And the rest can all go on down to the Chock Full O’ Nuts — they like that better anyway. Oh, I see Great-aunt Mae April has already found us a table. We don’t even need to bother you. But I appreciate your interest.”
    Going in with a Seeing Eye Dog
    Once I was at a cocktail party when a very successful unsighted stockbroker came in with her dog, which went right over to the coffee table and ate a nice Brie and two dozen bacon-wrapped water chestnuts. No one said anything. Pretty much anything a Seeing Eye dog does, it does quietly, so its master either doesn’t notice or need not admit to noticing, and it can get away with it.
    In a restaurant, the dog will take care of everything. It will silently clamp its jaws on the maître d’s ankle. The maître d’ will hop around and wear an expression of outrage, but if he says anything at all it will probably be no more than “M’sieu! Your dog!”
    “Ah yes, Shiva,” you say. “I don’t know what I would do without her.”
    Shiva will then lead the headwaiter and you to whatever table she chooses. If people are dining there already — as may well be the case, since a dog prefers a table with food on it — Shiva will seize each diner in turn by the ankle until they all leave. Then she will clean their plates, and both of you will be sitting pretty.
    Just be sure not to cry out “WHAT!?” until someone tells you the size of the check.
    It will be noted that this essay has dealt primarily with fancy restaurants’ first line of defense. That is because, once you have fought your way past the greeter, it is a simple matter to dispel regular waitpersons’ antagonism. You just raise your voice every so often to say “national talent search,” “some lucky unknown,” “we’ve got Meryl and Warren already, that’s not the problem,” and “a new face for the second lead.” Unless this is such a deluxe place that it doesn’t hire show people but only dyspeptic foreign men. In that case you bring along one of those surf-casting reels, a good treble hook, and plenty of line. Eighty-pound test is plenty strong enough, since dyspeptic foreign men seldom jump high enough to bring their entire weight into play.
    But how do you get them close enough to hook them? Well, my friend Jim Seay, the poet, says, “One of the things that separate class from trash is what kind of bait you use.” I like to cast one of Emma’s blueberry muffins. See, the reason waiters in high-dollar places are dyspeptic is that they are never around any good, solid, family-style food that fairly nice people can afford.
    That’s what I meant earlier when I said something about restaurant service personnel eating yesterday’s bait. I meant things on the order of Emma’s blueberry muffins. What did you think I meant? Spring lizards? Hey, restaurant service personnel are human beings. The only reason some of them turn mean is that they have to work in places where everybody just played racquetball with Cap Weinberger.

I Had to Get into It with a Wrench
    I GOT MYSELF ONE of these talking wrenches. Even though I see it as a bad trend, things taking on the power of speech. Cars talk, cameras talk, even airports talk:
    “This — miracle — electronic — passenger — shuttle — will — be — delayed. Some — person — has — interfered — with — the — proper — closing — of — the — perfectly — calibrated — doors. Unless — that — person — removes — all — portions — of— him — or — herself from — the — doorway — we — will — sit — here — until — every — flight — has — departed. It — is — all — the — same — to — me. This — miracle …”
    Why doesn’t anybody come up with cars,