The girl is clearly rattled, scared actually, like a little kid who has to show her dad a bad report card. No matter what she does, it doesn’t seem good enough, fast enough. The hot’s not hot enough, the cold’s not cold enough. She’s laughing at comments that were not intended as jokes and she can no longer tell the difference between biting sarcasm and biting biting. There’s an emperor sitting at the head of the table and there doesn’t seem to be any way to please him – this is my dad in a restaurant.

He’ll snap his fingers, he’ll yell “Hey!”, he’ll order items that aren’t on the menu. At a steak joint, he’ll ask for enchiladas and at a coffee shop, he’ll think he can get shrimp cocktail. The man will expect you to read his mind and he’ll send food back because, while it’s exactly the way it was described on the menu, that’s not what he envisioned in his mind. If his party of three turns into a table for ten, that will be your problem. He will always try to be funny, but humor is rarely achieved and the typical teenaged waitress will have no idea he’s a big kidder … she’ll only see him as a big butthead. Her only chance at survival is to bark back at him every time he barks, but that’s a risk very few are willing to take.

You could give this kind behavior a pass by calling it old school, and it is. Pops figured if he was paying he was the boss and he knew that at the end of the night, at the end of the waitress torture treatment, he’d be leaving a tip big enough to compensate for the sharp language, hurry-your-ass-up snapping and the seventeen times he asked for something extra or changed his mind or wanted another drink.

♦

If you thought it was a waitresses’ joy to dine out with my dad, you should have witnessed the adventure of eating with him at home. For some reason, for every meal we ever ate, I had to slide into the burnt-orange booth right next to him. He profiled me. A couple of poor eating performances and the occasional food toss or green-bean flick got me labeled for life. It was rough. He would pin me up against the back of the booth with his fleshy right elbow at the smallest infraction. A kid couldn’t even spit meat into his napkin without instant detection. My brothers and sisters would yell out, “Look what Pat’s doing!” to be sure that he never missed a nose pick or tongue stuck out at my stupid brother.

Of course, my dad would leave the table as he pleased but he always told me, “Now, you sit there until you’ve cleaned your plate.” That would trigger a game of attrition whereby I would push food around my plate and heave heavy sighs and make fake chewing noises and puff-out my cheeks until my mom got sick of looking at me.

I would pray for the night we would eat at a restaurant so that my dad had a target other than me. I never felt bad for those waiters and waitresses, they got a fat tip and they got to go home where they never had to be within elbow-striking distance of my pops. I did notice though that when we returned to a restaurant we’d been to before, the wait staff would hope to it … the power of the tip and a cranky customer.

You could learn a lot in a restaurant by being content with your Shirley Temple and watching the master put minimum-wage workers through their paces. It’s nice to have a pop that teaches you stuff.