Montie’s Turn

Chapter 1I looked down at my list, with a sigh. I had one more interview today and I’d be done. Today had gone well, so far. I’d interviewed seven who would be good servers and identified two or three who could be hosts. It seemed pretty good, seeing I’d interviewed more than thirty people in the last two and a half days. We were hiring staff for the Shaded Parlor Boston. It would be just a few blocks from the State House, and everyone was excited about it. Clayton Industries was expanding into Boston, which was a good city to start a bar in, especially a bar like the Shaded Parlor. Boston had been voted the most alcoholic city in the US several years in a row, mainly because of its Irish heritage and St. Patrick’s Day, which was the ultra-holiday here. But the Shaded Parlor wasn’t your average bar where you could walk in, slip up onto a stool at the long oak counter, and order a pint or two. We advertised ourselves as A Purveyor of Alcoholic Libations, and you were met at the front door and ushered to a table by the host or one of the servers they designated. There would be more than two dozen tables here, but some of them could be separated into smaller units. There were also discussion seats, which we also called Dating Chairs: two chairs that shared one arm to hold drinks but faced each other in opposite directions so you were looking at the person you were drinking with. We’d normally assign about six tables to each server plus an extra server who served as a trouble shooter in case things got hectic. Each server could handle sixteen people at most. Jean stuck her head in the door. At the moment she was my assistant, but when everything was in place, I’d hand it over to her and she’d become the General Manager. She’d spent a few weeks in Baltimore at our prime venue to see how things should work. “Ready? This is the last one out here,” she asked. “Here’s her resume.” I took the resume and scanned it. “Send her in.” Jean backed out and a tall woman with perfectly styled long light brown hair walked in. I was immediately impressed by her finely fitted three-piece gray suit. Her height also drew my attention. She must have been the same height as Vivienne, who stood over most women with her five foot nine and a half inches. This woman had a thin face with amazing eyes that seemed to see right through me. She held her hand out to me. Her eyes showed a little surprise. Was she expecting a man to interview her? “Welcome,” I said, shaking the perfectly manicured hand. The handshake was strong and steady. I introduced myself. I looked at her resume again. “Patric Flanagan? Is that like Patrick with a k at the end?” “No.” She smiled the warmest smile I’d seen in ages. “Patr-eece, as if there was an E at the end.” Her voice was gentle and smooth. Rather low, but definitely feminine…sort of Bea Arthur or Cher-ish. My stomach flipped a bit, which was unusual. I never reacted to interviewees like that. It wasn’t right. “Interesting,” I commented. “Let me look at your resume a moment.” I studied the paper, more to keep from staring at her than to get the info. Why couldn’t I look away from her? I never reacted to a woman like that. I mean, I loved looking at women, even touching them when the situation was appropriate, but never in an interview! I focused on the resume in my hand. She’s been a server at three high-end restaurants in Boston and was currently a host at a major hotel restaurant here. She had been there for over four years. She had graduated from Northeastern University the same year I got my bachelors at the University of Pennsylvania. “And you want to leave the Hyatt?” I asked. I finally glanced up at her as she began to answer. “Yes, I do. I’ve been there almost five years and have reached the top of my pay-grade level, the next step would be upstairs into management, which would take me away from the real people, except every now and then.” “Yes, I understand what you’re saying. I’d feel the same way if I didn’t get to go to new Parlors every few months.” “Then, you must have an incredible job.” The smile on her face included a lot of glow in her eyes. “Have you ever been to a Shaded Parlor?” I asked. “Yes, I was at the one in Los Angeles, right after it opened, and I was highly impressed. My friend, that I was with, and I decided then that it would be an ideal place to work. When I saw your ad that you were opening here and were looking for servers and hosts, I think I was the first to call in.” She blinked and smiled in a sort of flirtatious way. “I was incredibly impressed by the LA host, too.” “Really? When were you there?” “Within the first two weeks of its opening.” That was the same time I were still there. She gave me a small, almost apologetic smile. Was she flirting with me? “Really?” I asked. “Yes. We went back three times then, but you were so busy. You did seat us once, but you probably wouldn’t recognize me if you even remembered. I wasn’t dressed like this.” I smiled. “We were quite busy there. And if I remember correctly, it was extremely hot and humid. A three-piece suit would never last there. You’d melt as soon as you got out of your car.” “Very true. I have a friend who’s working there now, and she is totally enamored of her job.” “I won’t ask you who she is, but we’re very happy with the Los Angeles Parlor.” “Jan loves her job,” she said. We both smiled at each other. Jan. I’d have to remember that. “Well, Patrice,” I began. “You can call me Pat if you’d like,” she said quickly. “All right, Pat. We expect a lot here.” “I’ve got a lot to give,” I could have sworn she winked. My stomach did another flip. “I’m not afraid of work. I probably do more than I should. In fact, I tend to look for things that aren’t done,” she added. We chatted about her likes and dislikes of her current job and then I asked how she’d like to change it. All of her answers pleased me. She was a very good candidate. She didn’t slam her job or the management, but simply said how she thought it would work better. She had good ideas. “And you think you’d be happy working here?” “I’m sure I would. All of the people I’ve met so far here seem pleasant. It feels like the right place to be.” As we talked on, I could feel her assessing me, but then, I was used to it by both women and men. But when she did it, it didn’t bother me, I almost liked it. Oh, my God! Was I flirting back at her? I was flirting with a job candidate! “Thank you for coming in, Pat. I’ll be making decisions by Friday, and I will call you one way or the other. It looks hopeful.” We concluded the interview. We both stood and shook hands, but she held on longer than necessary. I smiled at her, and she squeezed my hand that she hadn’t released yet. It was very gentle. She also gave me a very warm smile in return. “Thank you, Ms. Cleaver.” “Montie,” I told her. She smiled again and continued. “Thank you, Montie. I feel good about today and look forward to your call. I think I would be very happy working for Clayton Industries, and I will give it a lot.” “I think that’s a good possibility, Pat.” She nodded to me, looking straight into my eyes, grinned, and left the room. I sat back down, trying to figure out what was going on with me. I never reacted like this to a job interview. Get it together, Cleaver! Stop ogling job candidates. That wasn’t your job. Your job was to evaluate the way they might fit in at Clayton, not how they’d fit in your bed! Whoa! Why are you even thinking that? This is a job, Montgomery, not a dating game! * * * * I’m J. Montgomery Cleaver, Vice President of Expansion for Clayton Industries, Inc., the power behind the Shaded Parlor and all its subsidiaries. Now, you might think that’s quite an achievement for a thirty-nine-year-old woman, but I have to admit I slept my way up the ladder. The J in my name stands for Justine, the name of my great-aunt, but I’d never associated myself with that name. To say I didn’t like it would be an understatement. My Great-Aunt Justine Montgomery is a rather well-to-do woman, who lives just outside Washington, DC. My mother tried to suck up to her by naming me after her. She had hoped to gain some of her aunt’s wealth by doing so, either for herself or for me, but it hadn’t happened yet. Mom is still hoping and waiting. Maybe when Aunt Jussy passed on, something would show up, but not right now. What it did do was make me the target of family jokes, everyone calling me Little Jussy or Jussy Junior. Aunt Jussy, or Fussy Jussy, as many called her, is not a well-liked woman. It will never be who I am, so to distance myself, I became J. Montgomery, or Montie to my friends. But enough about me for now. Jean walked in the door. “So, how did they go? Do we have a staff?” “I think we have the beginnings of an excellent one.” “That last woman was very nice. She was out there for a while, but let the others come in first. She was easy to talk to.” I had to laugh, or was that a giggle? “She sure was. Almost found myself flirting with her.” “Really?” Jeannie stopped and raised her eyebrows. She wasn’t sure how to take that. But then, neither was I. “Flirting?” “Almost. Just barely. Not quite. It will pass. I’d never flirt with a job candidate. I’m not worried.” I quickly made my pile of job forms neater than it already was. “We’ve got to go through these. JuliAnn will want a report later.” “Ms. Clayton seems like she would be a hard boss to work for…even though all the folks in Baltimore said they loved her.” I smiled to myself. “She knows what she wants. I guess that’s why she seems hard. She’s sure she’ll get just what she pictured. But there are ways around her.” I didn’t want to reveal just how I knew about JuliAnn Clayton. “Fill me in so I can get this job right.” Jean said as she pulled all the interview papers from the previous days out of a folder, “What about working for Ms. Morningdale? She seems nice, what little I’ve seen of her.” “Don’t be fooled. She’s the real boss of this whole thing, of both JuliAnn and me, even of Allen.” “I’ve heard rumor that this was all her money.” “It’s no secret. She had dinner one night at the Flaming Table in Baltimore and took JuliAnn and Allen aside afterwards and told them she’d fund them if they wanted to take it to other cities. So they took it to San Francisco, then Paris, LA, Barcelona, and now here.” “Then on to Athens?” “Dallas and Atlanta first, then Athens, and maybe Sydney, Chicago or some other place in the Midwest.” “Wow. And you start every one?” “Sort of. JuliAnn and Vivienne find the venues together, get them remodeled with all the legal stuff done, then they usually hire the General Manager. Borden and I come in and hire and train the rest of the staff: the hosts, servers, and bartenders. Allen finds chefs and trains them. We’ll all be here for the opening and stick around for at least two more weeks. After that, JuliAnn and Vivienne go off looking for the next place, while we get ready to get the next one running.” “Incredible.” “I think JuliAnn wants to have them all up by the end of next year. It’s their fifth anniversary and then they’re going to retire.” “Retire? They’re not that old, are they?” “Vivienne is just turned sixty and JuliAnn is almost fifty.” “Neither of them look that old. And they’re married to each other?” “Yes, they were married four years ago.” I looked down at the pile of interview forms. “Let’s go through these applications,” I said, changing the subject. “You met them when they weren’t nervous and I asked them questions, so let’s compare notes.” “Fine with me.” “Once we have our team of servers, we turn them over to Preston and he chooses which ones will work at the Flaming Table, too. He has a way of explaining it to people so they don’t get scared.” “I’d never work there,” Jean said. “I don’t know how they do it.” “I wouldn’t either, but if you were making that kind of money, you might reconsider.” “Reconsider working nude? Being naked where everyone can see?” “Well, the upstairs dining room is off limits to everyone who isn’t a paying diner, and we ask people to leave their phones down at the front desk. Once you get used to your fellow servers also being naked, it takes some of the fear away.” “Nope. Not me.” “Even for five or six hundred an evening?” “Is that what they make?” “Not from us. We pay four hundred a dinner and most diners leave the twenty percent tip.” “And the price of the meals up there is?” “It’s fifteen hundred for a table of two. That’s at least a three hundred tip between two servers, but a lot of people leave a lot more than twenty percent, so it’s about a two hundred dollar tip per server up there. I mean, if you can blow fifteen hundred bucks on one meal, you’re not going to count pennies over a tip. A lot pay two thousand even.” Jean nodded as she sat down with her stack of notes. “All right, let’s get started. What did you think of Jennifer?” “I thought she’d be a good server, and she has that cute smile.” “I agree, and she’s easy to talk to. We can put her here.” Jean nodded and I placed her application on the far corner of the table. “Branden?” Within a few minutes, we had four piles: yes for server, no for server, yes for host, and no for host. Then we went through the yeses, which we separated into Definite and Maybe. All the server yeses would meet with Preston and let him sell the Flaming Table to them. “We’ve got sixteen definite servers. Should that be enough?” Jean asked. “We just have to schedule them to make sure we’re covered every afternoon and evening.” I flipped through that stack, then tapped it on the table to even it out. “I’ll call everyone Friday morning.” The one thing that sets us apart from other places was that people knew they would be welcomed here, no matter how they lived their lives. All kinds of people came to the Shaded Parlor. Anyone who could afford one of our drinks was welcome here, no matter how they presented themselves. As long as they didn’t offend anyone, everyone was more than welcome and should feel comfortable. JuliAnn had started to establish a leather bar but realized that there were others who needed a place to congregate without being made fun of or ostracized, people like drag queens and kings, transgendered people, homosexual professional athletes, newly arrived foreigners, and politicians. Even straight white people at this point in time. We had the best alcohol money could buy and we always served small portions of the appropriate snacks for each drink, be it salty, savory, or sweet. There were no barrels of salted peanuts for everyone! We weren’t the type of place where you could sit at the bar and guzzle bottle after bottle of everyday beer. You could go to the nearest convenience store to get that at a much cheaper price. In fact, people seldom got drunk at a Shaded Parlor because they really couldn’t afford it. In addition, if a person did imbibe too much, and had no one to help them get home safely, we’d take their keys and show them to one of the three small rooms upstairs that contained full-sized beds. They could stay there until they woke up and could drive home safely. We had high-priced designer beers. We even made sure that each Parlor had bottles of Sam Adams Utopias, which is made in limited quantities yearly and sold for over four hundred dollars a bottle. Of course, the Utopia is so rich and syrupy that you’d swear you’d have to chew the dark malty brew. JuliAnn had placed a standing order with the Sam Adams Company to provide ten bottles of Utopia to each Shaded Parlor yearly. I understand each Parlor sold out within a week as soon as they announced its arrival. Of course, none of that came close to the bottle Vivienne gave her wife for her birthday last year. It was a bottle of Brew Dog End of History. It’s a Scottish brew with an alcohol content of fifty-five ABV, which is higher than your average whiskey. Whiskey is usually forty to fifty percent ABV. I understand it cost her twenty thousand dollars for that one bottle. It came in a taxidermied squirrel. JuliAnn hasn’t dared open it yet that I know of. It would have to be a very, very, very, extremely special occasion. I heard rumor that she said she’d open it on her fifty-fifth birthday in honor of its ABV. Our buyers were always looking for new, highly sought bottles of every liquor and wine. Our different venues were forever vying to be the only one that had a certain label. The servers here were trained to accommodate just about everyone’s tastes. At the door you’d be greeted by a host who’d been trained to treat you like an emperor or sovereign. Each server had to go through a full week of training to serve in the Shaded Parlor. The first thing they had to learn was that the customer was always right, no matter how atrocious their demands and how heinously they acted. We had a soundproofed room in the back with a boxing bag where servers, and occasionally hosts, could go, put on a pair of boxing gloves, and vent their frustration and anger so it would never spew out in front of a customer. Clayton Industries was started by JuliAnn Clayton and Allen Fortren, two friends, both homosexual, with dreams for the future. Allen had recently graduated from culinary school and had the idea for a totally different restaurant. JuliAnn wanted to run a bar, particularly a leather bar. So they worked together and finally came up with the concept for the Shaded Parlor and the Flaming Table. But the Shaded Parlor was going to be open to people outside the leather community, so to satisfy JuliAnn’s propensity for that world of leather, the Baltimore Parlor also included the Stone Cold Cellar, a marvelously fully furnished b**m play space in the basement. It was a full service membership club with its own small soft drink and protein bar. No alcohol was sold down there. JuliAnn gave classes and lectures regularly. If the city for a venue could support a Cellar, that was also included. All three were extremely successful. The Flaming Table might seem over the top expensive to some, but not only did you get five courses of the most superb food available, such as Wagyu beef directly from Japan, lamb from New Zealand and caviar directly from Russia, but the servers were naked. Yes, nude: Without clothes. Well, almost. They had on a tuxedo shirt collar with a bow tie and cuffs with cufflinks. They wore a vest, that had such thin front panels that the entire chest of your server was on full display. There was also a small apron that barely hid the bellybutton. Servers were freshly showered, all chests were shaved, and crotches neatly trimmed. And…your food wasn’t just left in front of you on the table; your server fed it to you, bite by bite, much akin to what you’d see in old movies about Roman times. On top of that, your dessert, which was usually an ice cream or a pudding-like dish, was eaten on your server, or actually, off your server. You’d be able to lick it from their chest or stomach. Yes, I’ve eaten it off other places, too, but you have to ask permission first. Also, the Table was off limits to anyone who wasn’t a paying customer. No one could just walk in and see what was happening, or snap pictures. Phones were not allowed in the Flaming Table. Once our servers were comfortable with each other’s nudity, they worked better together. Preston had started out as a server in Baltimore, then became a sous chef, a trainer and now my Assistant. He usually traveled with me to help choose and train the servers. He also had a female counterpart, Allison, who helped train the women. Allison was Baltimore’s favorite server. The way she let her double Gs dip into the food and allowed her diner to lick it off was always a big hit.