Sympathy for the Guy Sitting On My Phone Tap

PLEASURES OF BEING THE PRIME SUSPECT

Not that I have much sympathy for him, but what was it like for the poor mope listening to my takeout Chinese orders, baby-talking girlfriend, screaming matches with you-know-who, my parents complaining about something and everything, and the meets with customers who needed product before the party?

I’m not admitting anything. What’s to admit?

Lawsuits flying. Fists flying in the restaurant.

Getting fired as the general manager. Going to the hospital for stitches after a kitchen brawl.

Italians as restaurant business partners not getting along, on a hair trigger, ready to blow it all up. What could possibly go wrong?

Say that somebody was dealing, that he was using, that he was going through the seven-year-long breakup he confused with being in love.

Say that he was hanging by his fingernails in grad school, supposedly working on a Ph.D.

Say that the prime backer of his blackjack career was fat city, with too much free money not to take a flyer on new restaurants. Say that one night the man’s brother-in-law broke into the Nob Hill apartment, pissed off about everything including not being respected or taken seriously and he’d show everybody what being taken seriously meant, and he tied up the backer’s teenage daughter on a chair and lay in wait for him, and when he came home, he jumped him armed with a billy and they beat each other bloody, crashing all the way down the stairs and through the door and into the street, and the neighbors called the cops, and the brother-in-law did eighteen years for attempted murder and kidnapping.

But now say serious money was financially involved in that beautiful, new waterfront restaurant, where his partner told him to fuck off and stay out. Say that the judge was going to rule whether or not the business would go into receivership, pissing off everybody. Well, wouldn’t it be good to show that the business partner, who had invested everything he had into the operation, didn’t know how to run it? Who cared if it cost money in the short term, it was the long term that mattered. So it would be good to have it demonstrated to the judge that the restaurant’s assets were being mismanaged. How to do that? Show decreasing receipts. How to decrease receipts? Bring the business to a halt, that’s how. Flood the house with deadbeat patrons, recruited from the newspaper ads run for the purposes of doing a sociological study. Meet the unwitting participants week after week at a hotel near the waterfront, pay them cash to sit at their tables and order little or nothing. Then please fill out the study as to workplace attitudes of employees under stress. Also have somebody’s father and brother hand out phony discount coupons to the restaurant, cause a little chaos on the floor. The local television nightly news reports on the scam, they mention the freebie offer comes courtesy of some fabricated entity known as The Friends of San Francisco. So what if the ace celebrity investigative reporter calls from the newspaper, wanting to ask a few questions? Somebody says, I have admired your work, which was true, though not in the moment. And then the FBI gets in touch with some information. Tells somebody he’s a racketeer. He hires lawyers, sure, and wait…

Well, what somebody does is, he does the same so-called study at a restaurant solely owned by his backer. Totally legitimate, right? Suck on that, figure that one out. They film his meetings.

Somebody throws out the typewriters and all the survey materials. What study?

Not that any of that happened, of course.

Because that would be really crazy, wouldn’t it? Who would believe it? Who would call that racketeering?