A numbers game

"Look it's cool if you crash here. I'm going to be over at Susan's most of the week. Do me a favor though try and keep quiet, my sister sleeps in this room." Joseph pointed to the door adjacent to his

"Alright, word. Done." Cless could only agree to keep the peace.

"I have to go. Time is money, you know." Joseph left a seltzer on the dresser. "Make yourself at home, kinda." He bunked off for the twenty mile drive South.

"Promise I won't get too familiar." Cless wrapped up the meeting.

To get across town by noon, he'd have to leave in the next thirty minutes. But he reaked from the minimal air travel. What could be done with the immediate aparatus other than shower, a swish, and a comb?

The muni ride inbound was cool enough to fit in a few selfies. Checking the gumline, hairline, eyeline.

Cless made it into a cafe not far off the path towards his destination deep in the Mission . Avoiding the immediate urge to shit from the double pull, he made it to his second interview of the week with five minutes to spare, in fact the owner of the restaurant was nowhere to be seen.

He knocked out a five by ten spreadsheet, hypothetical "P and L" for a fictictious year's input, including the salaries for fake managment, level one employees, costs for goods sold, and insurances. "Can't hurt to be a little pre-emptive," He mentioned to the passing waitstaff as she folded napkins and reset the nearby seating.

Nearly twenty minutes into the appointment, Morten Shipler made his entrance. With a nearly one-hundred pound sheepdog in towe, he sat up front.  "Hey, you're early" he shot figner pistols.

"Let's take a walk, check out the grounds. Did you have coffee?" Morten cocked an eyebrow.

"Yeah, I'm still jittery, thanks." Cless held up his hand visibly shaking.

"Suit yourself. Hehehe." The two took to the stairs leading to a sprawling tiled floor outfitted with wooden butcher blocks, cabinets, stainless steel counters and overhead shelving. "This here's prep, as you can tell. We've got five people up here full time, between lunch ,and dinner. That's everytthing, veggies, pasta, pigs, and some bread production, standard." The propietor meant not to brag. The operation was impressrive, and the staff seemed vibrant.


"So, let's get down to the cafe and chat." Shipler led the way

"This is  nice, your company certainly has been around for a while" Cless felt his nose turn brown.

"Yes, it's all been very steady, I mean you can understand a fairly simple Italocentric operation, and how approachable that is by the public." Morten said.

"...and probably how cost effective those materials are" Cless said

"well most of them, you know what gets us is the labor". Morten said

"That's where we might have something more rich to discuess". Cless drew the pad from his satchel."Take a look at this..."

Cless hit play on the video he had on hand. On his device he ran the playback on on the arm.

"This is AA-101b, its an animatronic arm of sorts. I Can move it from this device with only a few swipes of my thumb. It runs on an AC input and also has some batteries. Ive got two of them back at Celes right now, and these arms run the plancha for almost 50 fish nightly."

The video revealed some late footaage of the arms swinging back and forth between mise en place, pieces of sole, fillets of salmon, and chunky tuna steaks. The arms would periodically sweep back with an underhand motion to move the fish over. They would subsequently press the surface of the fish to evenly brown and crisp the fillets. By the 4:00 minute mark, the fish had been swept on to adjacent service trays, lined with toweling to drain. The video would cut to footage of the fillets being bisected, examined, and critiqued by Cless's voice and another female voice.

"Woooaa. Now that seems new" Morten's face showed a fresh cointenance, one not reminescent of your basic interview.  "I'm glad you came by".

"Oh yeah, of course. I thought you might appreciate these. So let's get down to it". Cless opened another adjacent folder to reveal a small sheet revealing some color blocked contracts.

"Look these over."

"No that's fine, how soon can i get a pair of these robots on the plancha downstairs?" Morten went for it

"You can have these two , they've been in use for the last month for these video tests. Or you can wait until i finish the next pair, it will be about another month." Cless offered.

"Ok, then it's settled, i'll wait" Morten clapped his hands together.

"Deal. Let's go get a drink. The bar looks intense ". Cless suggested.

"Yeahwe've got this kumquat and buddha hand mojito, it's pretty nuts, pretty fresh." Morten tucked his cahir in.

"Actually I as hoping you'd let me try some of the Zepphorstram gin in a 'G and T" " Cless jestured

"What? sure , try it in the kumquat drink, that gin is awesome". Morten hastened

How goood he though, to be in the presence of just a little more class than he had witnessed only hours earlier.
.

Slang teacher

"Wha' type of shit is this" Fong snapped upon entering the room
"Oh, Tea's never seen 'Chef'" Dan rolled over in the couch, he had bits of popcorn, morning cereal and wrappers clinging to his belly.

"The ' fuck is up with the couch, it looks like a dump? And this movie?!" Fong seemed a bit shook
"What? It's cool, he won't take shit from the owner!" Tea came to the pop fiction's defense.

If you've still not seen the cinema verite "Chef". There will be some spoilers here...


"Oh cmon', get real. The chef is a total beta the whole first half of the flick" Fong barked
"Yeah! its a movie, that's how shit always goes down. Hero grows balls half way through!" Dan moaned from the sofa.

"This guy's biggest problem is his owner wants him to stick to a menu? Gimme' a fucking break" Fong started pointing at John Favreau's head while he pranced lovingly in front of his pre-teen lovechild, while John LeGuizzamo provided some legitimacy on set.

"You think anyone with more than a decade's experience would realize that a job like that is hypothetically high profile. They'd  take note of their age, market value, and overall BMI. Chef's not getting any younger here....you think that'd be the time to jack in a job on Melrose?" Fong moved from the throat.

"No, but look he's obviously got some savings, some infrastructure. How do you think he affords a stagecoah to make cubanos?" Tea brought the obvious to light

"Let me tell you something, in 2020, there was more than thirty-percent unemployment in hospitality thanks to animatronics, sensors, and tablets alone!" Fong chuckled

"If and only if, anyone with that job was going to leave a position paying more thank sixty-kay a year just so they could cook Cuban fusion on a bus with his son,  he'd also been a day trader in a former life, and had a separate penthouse in Manhattan where his crew was holding tasting menus weekly, and a catering business run by Venezuelan refugees he smuggled across in beer kegs."

"Well cmon, it's a family flick" Dan waved, his back facing the hi-def.

"Exactly, family. There's no family out there like Sofia Vergara's that would somehow let this dude go on a cross crountry rampage with some sando's" Fong had reached the peak

"Sofia wouldnt be anywhere near that dude in real life" Dan spewed

"Exactly, Chef would be on defense most of his life after forty here. Sofia would be the main reason he'd keep the job, keep kissing up to his boss, and renegotiate his salary next year." Fong snorted

"Oh gosh, way to be the realist" Tea rolled her eyes in her skull. "Fine, let's watch Bagger Vance."

"You should be in the air right now, in fact you could have left hours ago, no?"Maurice snapped
"I'm set to fly out later this morning. Should get in by 9am" Cless said.

"I'm seeing the program absolutely, but also relatively. Maybe all this stuff I'm doing won't matter in five weeks." Cless thought aloud.

"There are too many other people out there that would kill to be in this position you're in. If nothing else, you owe it to yourself to game hard here." Maurice said

"Is it that I'm being written into someone elses script? That's it isnt it, its still unfulffiling because all this is just someone else's construct. I'm not even working for my own good." Cless confesses.

"WHO'S SCRIPT? WHO IS CONTROLLING THIS SCRIPT?" Maurice yelled

"It's not me, it's my ego" Cless started to crumple.

"Then give it up. Stop. Go back home, you know where this is going"

"I can't there's too much in the pot."

"Then live here like you're immortal, press forward into the chaos. Things won't change! GET ON THE AIRPLANE, GO!"

"Got it, Ok" .

"Sure, I'm bartending tonight, my name's Cless"
"Sure, i see you, come in. Report to Robert over there, he's the dude with the ear-piece."
"Thanks"

"Youre' Cless?"
"Yes."
"That's a funny name, what is it, Danish."
"Yeah..."

"You even bartend before?"
"Of course. Hey can you lend me a black vest though?"
"Don't worry about the vest, as long as you can make a drink. That's a cool tie."
"Hey, thanks, where am I at?"

"Over there, you're with Anthony. he'll cue you up on the set up."
"Hey thanks!"
"We're meeting in forty minutes."

"Anthony! I'm cless."
"Hey, cool to meet you."

So they starte slanging, one a pro, another an amateur on a mission to get the green."
"What's a Dirty-Shirley?"

One broken shaker in the way, they split one the rest on the night.

When the dust settled and the entire holiday party had been whipped. Cless made his move to the local dance floor.

He swept accross lower Mission to downtown. Crossing vagrants, homeless, leaving half his leftovers to the night dwelers.

How to get in? It's a $35 cover. He drew the stamp onto his hand and check it out for a short while/

Nora? What was she doing here?

I wish it would rain down.

2019 is riddled with an obscene amount of unseasonal rain on the West Coast. It's an intense notion to be alive this far in the future, in Trump's America.

I feel the backbone of nostalgia, here in my Oceanside living quarters. I've weathered the storms of San Francisco, and now seek unsettled terrain back in SD. I write here and now to recall the feelings on content that the sound of raindfall bring.

I can remember the Fall of 2015 and Winter of 2016, the amount of rain we had in San Francisco. I often felt a ghost to the environment, and it's really the same now in San Diego. It's true - you can never really go home.

There's certainly fresher air, and we know the air will bring around a resounding victory.

Well let's hit the road.

"That's an easy one, the F&B will have your head in a vice before he every gives up his accounts downtown"

"No one's ever put me in any sort of sleeper hold, and we're not going to get started here. Watch and listen, dear."

The two strolled passed the gilded mezzanine, a wry reflection of the evening light spattered across the marble tiling. The floor staff moved unison, acting like a shield, keeping the reflection from hitting Cless' vision.

"Now that's synchronized. I wonder what the tasting's like." Rose fawned.