The Cilantro Thief

Ronnie used to drink vodka mixed with Coke while he was at work. The pop was free. The disappearing vodka was another story. Sometimes Ronnie would drink other alcohols to cover his tracks -- gin, rum and occasionally some sort of whiskey. When Ronnie got hired at the Old Oak Tavern it was agreed that he would be the closing cook. Next to the position of breakfast cook, it was the most difficult to fill. It required someone trustworthy. The night cook was responsible for closing out the till, settling the credit card machine, counting the cash and depositing it all in the safe situated beneath the floorboards of the dry storage room at the back of the Old Oak.

Ronnie was an old high school friend of Minnie, who was married to the Old Oak's owner George. Every few years George would struggle to fill the top positions in his tavern, as restaurant work is not for the faint of heart and employee turnover rates are typically high. Whenever he found a good employee, he tried to keep them around. He paid well and treated his staff with respect so that they would return the favor. Ronnie was a hard worker and always showed up on time for his shifts -- 5 p.m. until close which was sometimes midnight depending on the season, and the customers. He was talented too. Ronnie could fashion a cordon bleu that looked and tasted like it was made at a top New York bistro. He usually conjured his ideas for dinner specials at home late at night, inspired by reruns of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations or The Naked Chef. He'd always modify the recipes though, never copying, to reflect his own artistic sense. If a dish called for a finishing drizzle of balsamic reduction, Ronnie would finish his with cilantro-pesto. If garlic aioli were involved, Ronnie would sub horseradish sauce. Ronnie had a keen eye for color and chose plates that served as colorful canvases for his entrées. On weekends Ronnie would show up three hours before the rest of the night crew so he could prep enough garnishes, sauces and sides that he wouldn't have to leave the line except for a quick bathroom break, or a few drags from one of his co-workers' cigarettes if the night were especially stressful. Ronnie kept his drinking to a minimum while at work. Most shifts he'd spend the first couple hours hung over from the late nights of drinking he'd do at home after work, but as the years passed Ronnie couldn’t go for long without a drink otherwise the shakes would set in.  

It was mid-April when George hired Sandra to be the new manager. On a rainy Saturday afternoon Sandra took her two nieces to have lunch at the Old Oak. They sat off the side of the mahogany bar in a cozy booth and ate chicken tenders with French fries and ranch, the three of them dressed in velour leisure wear accessorized with more rhinestone than anyone in the small town of Oakwood, population 800, had ever seen. The twin seven-year-olds spent most of their time at the pinball machine and candy crane in the arcade nook off the back dining room. Sandra sat nestled in the wooden booth, munching and scrolling on her phone, taking note of the odd busyness that filled the rustic knotty pine-paneled dining room on this brutal mid-western spring day. “Where did all the people come from?” Sandra wondered, gazing out the window at the rain turning to sleet as it pierced through fog and collected atop the windshields of the cars parked on the street, knowing that tourist season was still a month and a half away. After they finished their meals, Sandra went up to the bar to pay the tab when she noticed the help-wanted ad George sat penning, erasing and rewriting on a yellow lined legal pad as he slurped and swallowed hot coffee with satisfying aahs. Sandra smoothed her frosted blond locks and introduced herself with an added apology for the interruption. She looked George in the eye and gave a firm handshake, her painted pink fingernails glistening in the neon green light of the open sign that shone down from behind the bar. Sandra explained that she was moving the two hours north from her place in Eau Claire so she could be closer to her brother and his kids who'd recently lost their mother due to a rare form of brain cancer. George, sympathetic and fond of pretty women, and tired of placing help-wanted ads in the local paper, took the bait. Sandra started working on Monday at 11 a.m.

The first item on George's most recent to-do list, that he hoped Sandra would be able to fix, was the too-high food and beverage costs. It seemed that even in the off-season when he ran a tight ship he couldn't account for the in-the-red costs when at the end of each workday after the till had been counted, the credit card settlement printed, and the checks that customers wrote were tallied -- the day's total profit always seemed to be in line with the number of customers served. He'd gotten the cooks to minimize food waste by weighing each portion of deli meat that was used in the grilled sandwiches, adding only two slices of cheese to each burger, and making sure that each steak was not a mark higher than ten ounces and when it was, a sliver of meat was removed and added to the next day's soup. The alcohol cost was accounted for as best as it could be based on beer and wine sales, and the number of kegs purchased. The only thing that was difficult to keep track of was the liquor, as there wasn't a proper system in place to account for whether the bartender was pouring single or double shots. Sandra assured George she'd be able to devise a system of accountability that would streamline everything -- the food and beverage costs as well as the side-work the employees were to do at the end of their shifts thus enabling George to get his money's worth from the labor cost.

When summer arrived along with extra employees, Sandra tried to keep a handle on the out-of-control juggernaut that was the Old Oak in peak season. Customers lined the crumbling sidewalk outside the shake-shingle tavern, waiting sometimes upwards of forty-five minutes just to get a table. Hungry beachgoers were always the first to show up, for as soon as the sun dipped below a forty-five degree angle the north winds, constant on Lake Superior, turned sunburns into uncomfortable chicken skin, and called for more layers, greasy food and salty margaritas on the rocks. Ronnie always rolled his eyes when the customers arrived in droves around five-thirty. By eight-thirty he'd feel like he'd run a marathon. Night after night Ronnie and three other cooks would squeeze themselves into the tiny kitchen -- a line of two grills adjacent to a bank of deep fryers on one side flanked on the other by a long butcher block table with shelving above that held two microwaves and two toaster ovens. There they worked like bees, swarming and buzzing in place, dosing whatever creative energy they had onto the plates for hungry tourists and occasional locals who dared enter the Old Oak in summer.

When the last of the customers would leave, usually by 11:30 p.m. as the kitchen closed at ten which allowed enough time for folks to finish their meals, order second or third rounds of drinks, and dessert, Ronnie would exhale out the night's stress and the crew would begin the deep clean and restocking that needed to happen to prep the kitchen for the next day of insanity to repeat itself. Ronnie was genuinely fond of most of his coworkers, though he hid it through his sharp sarcasm and cynical wit. He was reclusive when not at work, but a loner at heart, he was content. Forty-seven years old, never married and without kids, he preferred to keep his options open, or so he said. And yet none ever materialized to give him a chance to prove his interest. Ronnie wasn't attractive. Overweight with stringy long black hair that was balding faster than it was graying, he was self-conscious and ashamed of his body, so he kept it wrapped up too-baggy clothing that would scrape the ground and catch on door handles. When the temps hit ninety in the humid summers, he'd pull out his cargo shorts and oversized button-down short sleeves that made him look like a displaced rapper.

For weeks Sandra had been trying to catch Ronnie with his hand on a bottle. She was growing impatient but was certain it would happen one night after the waitresses had gone home. After the chairs had all been taken down following the hour-long floor cleaning frenzy during which the staff would change the cable radio to heavy metal and turn up the volume. After the garbage was emptied into the maggot infested dumpster out back. And after the till was counted. Sandra would feign leaving for the night and then return fifteen minutes later to catch Ronnie with his mitts around a bottle of Absolut. She'd fire him on the spot and put her boyfriend Jason on the line instead. Together they would rule the roost, and their dreams of early retirement would be become a reality in a matter of months -- the two of them lounging in Adirondacks beside a Florida pool sipping daiquiris and planning their evenings out, their bank account filled with the money they would skim every night from the Old Oak's profit. What happened instead was divine intervention, for Ronnie had grown tired of Sandra's pretentiousness and her salty and unskilled criticisms. He was ready to quit. "Ronnie, you need to scale back on the balsamic." "Ronnie the aioli is too garlicky." "Ronnie don't put cilantro in the salsa, not everyone likes it.” After each admonishment Ronnie would breathe out his anger with a smile atop muffled curse words that would roll off his tongue at such a low resonance only the roaches could comprehend. Ronnie, skilled at his alcoholism, knew the ploys of everyone around who'd like to catch him in the act. He'd grown able to detect dishonesty in others. Ronnie reasoned he wasn't doing any harm. He compensated for his end-of-the night drinking and the costs incurred by never eating meat at work. He calculated the difference in price that his part-time vegetarianism saved his boss and drank his allotted nightly meal comp instead. When the servers and kitchen helpers dined on burgers, fish and chicken wings at the end busy shifts, Ronnie would eat salad and banked his perks in vodka. And besides, Ronnie knew that his conscience and stalwart reliability to show up for every single scheduled shift were worth more than slightly in-the-red costs.

It was a Saturday night in mid-June, three hours after closing, and Ronnie, back at home, had finished two episodes of The Naked Chef, and was half-way through a bottle of Smirnoff when preparing a late-night meal of lime marinated tilapia, he realized he was out of cilantro. Ronnie threw on his cargo shorts and descended the rickety wooden steps of his second-floor apartment -- a one bedroom above the antique shop that stood kitty corner to the Old Oak. With his iPhone in hand, so that he could check score of the Detroit Pistons in overtime against the L.A. Lakers on the west coast, he turned the key to the Old Oak's back door to reveal Sandra hunched over the safe that was hidden away in the floorboards of the dry storage room just past the rear entryway. Ronnie knew he'd hit the jackpot of accolades and a pay raise, when all he wanted was a few sprigs of cilantro. With a sardonic chuckle he swiped to video mode on his phone to lend proof to his discovery.

Next day after Ronnie gave his statement to the local sheriff and delivered the video evidence, he was rewarded with three extra dollars per hour. George ordered a new automatic liquor dispensing system for the bar and enacted a new rule: all employee meals (and drinks) must be paid for. Within a week the food and beverage cost conundrum was solved. And Ronnie, committed to getting sober, was given time off to check himself into rehab. After completing his residential treatment, he returned to work at the Old Oak and from then on, he was in bed by 12:15 a.m. so he could wake up early to tend his new herb garden and go to AA.