The track lights reflected off the sheets of copper covering the wall behind the percolators and when I turned around a group of customers walked in, the line creeping toward the door. Good. Finally. Tips. I’ve worked at this cafe for six months, and I swear I’m like the stripper with the best boob job when it comes to getting the biggest tips possible from every type of customer.

A couple on a date? Talk to the guy. Make him feel important. He’ll want his girl to see him drop at least two dollars in the tip jar.

A mom with a kid slung on her hip? Put the coins in her hand first and then the dollars on top of them. It’s the opposite of what most people do, but that way she won’t be able to slide the coins in the tip jar without also letting go of the dollar. It’s a gamble. She could shove all of it in her purse, but it’s worth it. It’s insulting when someone drops in pennies.

The first customer is an older lady, with gaudy golden earrings dangling from her lobes.

“What can I get for you?” I ask. Before she can answer, I compliment her earrings. She touches them and smiles. She’s mine.

She doesn’t know what she wants, so I recommend a cappuccino. I always recommend a cappuccino.

While I’m steaming the milk she’s eyeing the pastries and cakes, all individually wrapped or covered under glass domes in front of her.

“Do you make the cakes here?” she asks.

“No ma’am, we don’t. We get them from Costco.”

Every few days the owner, Robin, makes a trip to Costco, the wholesale grocery/furniture/automotive warehouse where he can buy everything in bulk. He pulls up to the curb and waves us all out, loads our arms with boxes of apple danishes and lemon poppyseed muffins and chocolate cakes and we spend the rest of the shift wrapping everything in clear plastic wrap and setting it on the bar for the customers while Robin retires to his barstool in the back of the cafe, calculator and torn sheets of paper from his legal pad in front of him, counting all the money he’s about to make. The chocolate cake costs him $16 at Costco. We divide the cake into 14 slices and sale each slice for $8.25.

Robin’s a prick.

The woman orders two miniature brownie bites instead of the cake, and while I grab them with the pastry tongs and place them on her plate, Anna – the other barista working this shift – steps over to the cash register and rings her up. Damn. I like Anna. She works hard and is easy to talk to, but she just lost us a tip. Women should never ring other women up in a tip-dependent business. They’re too competitive, too catty. Besides, I had gotten the lady to touch her earrings.

Two hours later the lunch rush is over. I take advantage of the lull to change the CD. We have four CDs we’re allowed to listen to when Robin is here. The same four CDs over and over. They’re all opera. I hear opera in my sleep now.
I changed the disc, and when I stand up from behind the counter, Robin motions me over.

“John, could you come here please?”

Robin has a lot of idiosyncrasies that get under all of our skins, but the one that annoys me the most is the way he says my name in every sentence. “John, could you…?” “John, did you…?” “What is the total in the register right now, John?” I walked around the corner of the coffee bar and to the back of the cafe where the liquor bar was. Sunlight never made its way this far back, and the leather couches and chairs gave the place an air of pretentiousness. This was Robin’s domain. He was the guardian of the couch. Customers could not sit on it if they were drinking coffee – only if they paid for alcohol. We weren’t allowed to sit on it, even during our break

“John, what did you tell that customer?”

“Robin, what did I tell what customer? About what?” I asked.

“About the cake, John. What did you tell the woman about the cake?”

“I told her we got it from Costco.”

“You cannot tell customers that, John.”

“What do you want me to tell them?

“Tell them we make them here.”

I was getting annoyed. Just a few days earlier, Robin had given me my Christmas bonus, $50 cash, and told me not to tell the others about it. “I’m giving you one because you’re honest, John.”

I was the only employee there that didn’t regularly doctor my shift drink with alcohol (others were always careful to not use the bottles Robin had marked levels on with a Sharpie) I did ring up soup for lunch and eat a sandwich instead several times. My hypocrisy’s not lost on me, but I justified my sin with the same reasoning I use when bringing a bag of Reese’s Pieces into a movie theater instead of paying $4.75 for a box of air there. Sometimes two wrongs make a right. My sandwich instead of soup lunches aside, I didn’t steal from Robin or take advantage of him, and he knew that, and appreciated it.

“Robin, remember how you told me you appreciated my honesty? It goes both ways. I don’t lie to you, and I’m not lying to them.”

“John, this is a business, ok? This is not your church.”

Fuck you, I thought.

“We are here to make money.”

“I’m not going to lie so you can make money. If she wants the cake, she’ll buy the cake. She wanted brownies instead.”

He looked at me and I looked back. He tapped his pencil on the legal pad.
“Maybe this is not the best place for you. Maybe you’re not a good fit, John.”

I stood up, folded my apron, put it on the bar in front of him and left.

I walked down Vendue, past the fountain, and to the wooden swings overlooking the harbor. It was cold and I wished I hadn’t left my shift drink sitting beside the register. I thought about going back to get it, and decided the conflict wasn’t worth it.

What now? I thought.  There were at least four other coffee shops I could try to get a job in. But I didn’t want to work in a coffee shop anymore.

I called my parents, which is something I still do, even at 26, when I don’t have any answers. I told my dad I had either just been fired or just quit, I’m not sure which one. He asked if I wanted to come up to Buffalo. I didn’t. My parents want me to move closer to them. Moving back closer to my parents would feel like my life was slipping backwards even more.

“What do you want to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I know what I liked to do. I liked my job before. I liked working at the church, but I can’t do that anymore.”

“You could get a job at another church,” he said.

I didn’t think I could. I still went to church, a lot actually, but I could tell that when the staff there looked at me they saw “the guy who used to work at a church but his wife left.” And the truth is I was scared to death of having another job where my income depended on the morality of someone else.

I really just wanted to write. I wanted to talk about everything that had happened, the shit-storm of the last two years, I wanted to put it all in print, all the rage and the hurt and hope and pain, I wanted to fill a page with my glorious fury, to go on a book tour, to have a dust jacket where some literary critic said my book was a “whiskey-fueled confession that stirred the soul.” I wanted to send a copy to my ex-wife. I could sign the first page. “Thanks for the story.”

“Maybe I could go back to school?” I said.

“If that’s what you want,” he said. “We’ll try to help.”

The next day I walked back to the cafe to get my paycheck. Robin was sitting at the bar.

“John, could you come here please?”

I sat down on the same stool I stood up from the day before.

“John I would like to give you your job back.”

I knew what he was thinking. I knew that he had so much employee turnover, and that every time he had to train someone new it cost him several hundred dollars. He saw me as the lesser of two evils, the most profitable choice to make.

I knew I needed the job. Rent would be due in less than two weeks and I had no clue where it was coming from without two more weeks of work and tips. There aren’t many high paying jobs in Charleston for religion majors and seminary dropouts. And I knew Robin was hating that he lost one of the only employees that’s put up with his shit for more than three months.

“Robin, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s for the best that I don’t work here. Maybe I’m not a good fit.” I was determined that if I was going to put up with more from him he was going to have to pay me more than the price of a slice of fucking cake. It was my only hope of dignity.

“I will give you fifty more cents an hour.”

It still didn’t put me above the price of a slice of cake, but it was moving in the right direction. I looked at the bar, at the bottles of Grey Goose and Bushmill’s. The liquor bar was the holy grail of tips. I’d wanted to work there since I started. I’d never tended bar before, but it was low volume, and seemed like a good place to start.

“Can I train on the bar?” I asked.

He hesitated. There are only two employees he lets work the bar. “Next month, you will start training on the bar, John” He held out his hand and I shook it.

“But what about the cake?” I asked, getting ready to leave.

“You tell them we get it from a local bakery.”

“I can do that. But if they ask which one, I’m going to tell them the one at Costco.”

I walked out of the cafe before he had time to change his mind, the opera’s basso profundo providing a perfect soundtrack.

The baristas and bartenders and waitstaff that worked that day all met at the Griffon around midnight when they finished closing the register and mopping the floors. I joined them, since I was once again employed.  Dave, the owner, saw the long-as-hell-day look on everyone’s  face, sat our drinks down in front of us and waved his hand when we gave him our credit cards.

“This one’s mine. Cheers”

We drank and laughed and listened to Jacob bitch about how Robin almost fired him that day, even though we all knew he deserved it for showing up to work drunk, again, or for sarcastically telling Robin how much he missed him every half hour when he called to get a cash register total. We threw darts in the corner beside the fireplace and smoked cigarettes and stayed until the house lights came on. Once outside, we unlocked our bikes from lampposts, flipped our jacket collars up against the 3:00 am chill and went home. I pedaled down Queen Street, rode around Colonial Lake to Ashley Ave. and dodged reflections of street lights in puddles.

****

I know that it sounds strange now, but that night, and others at the Griffon just like it, were some of the most vivid reminders to me that life was still sacred. Spending time with people who were more concerned about finding some reason, any reason, to laugh after a grueling day serving a bastard of a boss and Europeans just off of cruise ships pretending they didn’t understand the concept of tipping was such a good relief – and such a stark contrast – from my years spent working in churches. It felt good sharing the night with people who wanted to talk about something other than the latest Chris Tomlin CD. Those nights, filled with pints and darts and bought shots and bike locks tempted me back to community.

I think some of my friends – mostly the professional Christians – would say that those nights were a cheap substitution, or just a glimpse of what community is supposed to be. They’ll say that we’re living among people of all sorts of beliefs, but we’re designed to be in community with those like us. I’ve been on both sides of the fence, and I can say that sometimes I think they’re right. I understand, or at least think I understand, what it means in the Bible when it says we’re supposed to be in this world but not of it. But I also know that when I moved to Charleston I started going to this large church in Mt. Pleasant and they were into prophecy – which was new and weird to me – and one night while everyone was singing during one of their prophetic times a staff member who didn’t know me looked at me from the stage and told me God had made me a zebra, and my stripes were black and white, and He made me to run with different crowds. That felt right, but she also told me I had a yellow truck, and mine was green, normally, except for the pollen that was covering it, so I didn’t know what to fucking do with that.

Now that I think about it, that’s a good representation of why Christianity is so frustrating to me. It seems so simple – I mean it seems like it’s supposed to be so simple – but we constantly make it confusing, and we can’t seem to agree on what to do with it.
I’m supposed to love God. I do. I blow it, at least on a daily basis, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it or feel any satisfaction when I do.

I’m supposed to love my neighbors. Everyone. The people who are nice to me and those that aren’t. My friends Brandon and Petey that have always stuck by me and my friends that didn’t when I needed it most. I’m supposed to love my ex-wife that slept around, and the leadership team at the church that fired me when they found out. I’m supposed to love Leroy the homeless man, Robin and his $8.25 slice of Costco cake, and all of my friends that are gay, or straight, or have addictions to something whether it’s caffeine or pornography or celebrity gossip. I’m not always good at that.

I understand that Jesus came, and He was full of grace and truth, and I understand that there’s a difference between love and acceptance, even though some people like to pretend there’s not. I guess I just want to err on the side of grace. Sometimes I think that my friends that are vegetarians are a lot better at that than my friends that are Christians. They’re definitely better at it than me.

I want to be more like them. I want to be better at looking beyond people’s faults and seeing who God sees. I want to look at my friends who are constant drunks and see the pain that they’re trying to escape. I want to look at Robin and his dollar god and see that maybe he grew up poor or maybe he’s scared he can’t keep covering the tuition at his kid’s private school. I want people to look at me and see that even though I put up walls and act defensive it’s really because most of the people I cared about judged me for something I didn’t do and kicked me to the curb. If I didn’t learn to say “fuck you” I would have stayed there.

I want to understand more fully that sin isn’t an instant or an act, it’s a condition we’re all born into. Since it’s so easy to point to the big sins that God talks about the most – the one He’s the first to mention is pride. I know that’s a big one for me. My bet is that anyone who thinks they don’t struggle with pride is pretty deceived.

I want to spend more nights laughing and throwing darts.

****

Two months came and passed and I still hadn’t started training on the bar. It turns out I didn’t have blonde hair, or breasts, and Robin thought that would be bad for the late night martini crowd. I sat down on the barstool beside him. He tapped his pencil on his legal pad. I stood up, folded my apron, put it on the bar in front of him, and left.