The following is part of a serialized story, Everyone Thinks I Dream of Chocolate. You can find the first chapter here.
I remember a day when a customer kept coming up to Dick while he was in the middle of making chocolates.
“Can I have the number 5?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah sure.”
With a grunt, he went into the kitchen to make the sandwich. I took off my own gloves and rang the customer up. After he paid for everything, he went to go sit down in the eatery and I went back to making some chocolate-dipped marshmallows. A few minutes later, I heard Dick coming out into the eatery area from the kitchen’s back door.
A couple of words, muffled by distance. Dick came up to the counter, his face scrunched up and eyes wide, bulging out of his sockets. His mouth was puckered up, teeth clenched, tongue pressed firmly to the roof of his mouth. From it, I heard a combination of hissing and cursing.
“Everything cool?” I asked.
“Mother fucker wants ketchup.”
“Oh.”
“He saw the ketchup packs up here but he wants it in a goddamn cup.”
“Ugh.”
He walked back over. I heard the cup of Ketchup being set on the table.
“Thanks,” said the customer.
“Have a nice day.” Dick usually spoke in emphasized tones. Each word came with its own distinct pause and verbiage. It had the sinister playfulness of a carny and the underlying threat of a mechanic who had your car in one hand and your balls in the other.
Usually, he had no reason to speak like this. That was just the way he spoke. Today, however, he was holding himself back.
To most people, this exchange would be innocuous enough but I understood. At the end of the day, Dick and Lou were chocolate people. They became sandwich people by circumstance and necessity. Even when the restaurant was at its most successful, it was always running at a loss. It was the chocolate that paid the bills.
One could look at it like Dick and Lou were running two businesses, one successful and the other failing. It was better to look at the Sandwich shop as a kitchen that had means to help supplement the rent. With that perspective, the Sandwich shop wasn’t the worst business investment, especially when considering that it was made in desperation.
Still, they were running two businesses. Even if it was a front, the rest of the world expected us to run the Sandwich shop with the same level of courtesy and customer service they would get anywhere else. Even if inconvenient, our actions there also reflected the chocolate shop.
The biggest pain is that helping people with sandwich orders is directly in conflict with making chocolate. Chocolate is temperamental. It requires specific timing, temperatures, and conditions to make a successful batch of anything. If chocolate was a person, they would be a diva, jealous of this new person that required our attention.
Staying away from the table for even a minute can result in a failed batch. If we left too long so the chocolate hardened and set at room temperature, it would bloom with a chalky cloudy texture. If the chocolate had become even a degree too cold, anything we dipped in it would also bloom. To avoid this, we had to reheat the chocolate. That meant waiting for several more precious minutes. Every time we had to help a customer, we had to take off our latex gloves and put on a fresh pair when we got back to our workstation. It added up in time and wasted resources. On the worst of days, you could tell how many sandwich orders we had based on the lack of chocolate on the rack was and the overfill of latex gloves in the.
The worst-case scenario was when we had finished helping a customer and returned to our work. We would find that the chocolate needed reheating so we did. We then put on new gloves. We would dip two or three items into the newly heated chocolate when an unassuming bystander would come to the counter and ask,
“Can I have grilled cheese?”
“Sure.” I would say. What else could I say?
That day, however, a customer came up a third time asking for some napkins. Then, a fourth time asking for a refill on his soda. On the fifth, they asked for a refill on the ketchup.
“Oh my god,” Dick said. He said it as a child annoyed at his friend. “Just use the packets.”
Stunned, the customer blinked several times, as if to wipe away the reality that had just taken place.
“Do you always talk to customers like that?” She didn’t say it in the usual way a person reacts after being disrespected. Rather, it was a pure form of incredulity.
“I do when they’re being annoying.” It was an insult but Dick also said it with a boyish charm. I imagined he used to talk to his teachers the same way. With this charm, I have come to the conclusion that it is a key factor in his attraction to trouble and ability to get out of it.
“Well, aren’t you afraid of people leaving bad reviews on your store?”
“Fuck no. I don’t care about Yelp. Plus, this isn’t even our main business.”
With a finger wrapped in chocolate and latex, he pointed to the store across the way. “That is.”
“Oh. Chocolate,” the customer said as if they had just forgotten everything.
“Yeah. Come on. I’ll show ya.”
Dick took off his gloves and tossed them in the trash can. He walked out the gate and the customer followed him to the store. In five minutes, she had bought 30 dollars worth of product.
Previous
10. Dick’s Cheese
Danger Wonka 