Show me the money!

Big news, people.

The Martini Shaker, home to so many shameful evenings and questionable ethics, has been sold. After a good year or so of sliding down the cliff side of bankruptcy and poor management, the venue has folded its hand and given in. It means a new name, a new menu, a new look—but most importantly, it means that all the dirty little secrets that went unpublished thus far (for fear of the health inspector or the Boston Police Department coming down on our heads) are fair game. We shall begin our trip down memory lane with a classic relic of full-scale disgrace in the Martini’s recent history: Halloween 2009.

The evening began innocuously enough. Alice and I showed up early to help tape the tacky Bacardi-sponsored decorations to walls and mirrors and begrudgingly shove ourselves into our mandatory costumes, the DJ arrived with his equipment, and all the dining room tables were whisked away to any spare space in the building.

We opened the doors, the usual refuse poured in decked out in his-and-hers costumes and skanked out variations on anything and everything, tossing the twenty-dollar covers at us faster than we could slap on wristbands. For five straight hours we saw nothing but the occasional bad dance move as we looked up from taking cash, counting it, and handing off wads of it to a manager when the feeble moneybox started to overflow.

As the end of the night drew near, the crowd thinned and my makeshift coat-hanger-wrapped-in-saran-wrap fairy wings were beginning to seriously pinch my shoulder blades. Last call came and went, and I stayed, helping clean up as I sipped a monster rum and coke from the bar. I left with the rest of the staff around 2 am, and we competed on the crowded downtown street for cabs—an impressive feat on that particular night of the year.

It wasn’t until the next morning when, nursing a rum and coke headache and lying in bed, that my phone buzzed on the nightstand and it became the most momentous Halloween of them all.

It was Alice, working the brunch shift.

After we had all left for the night, the post-Halloween dawn breaking and my body glitter glinting off of all of my clothes, we had been robbed. Not just angry-employee-siphoning-off-funds robbed, but good, old-fashioned, held at gunpoint robbed.

Apparently.

The story came together in bits and pieces, but here was the general gist we managed to cobble together: Jared, a manager at the time, had been downstairs in the office counting the nights money and locking it away in the safe at around 3:30 or 4 am. Suddenly, a man in fatigues and a ski mask burst into the room (through the locked doors upstairs, and the door to the basement that is supposed to be locked, and the actual door to the office) and demanded that Jared hand over the dough. The way it was told, the masked gunman was quite the sweetheart, apologizing and shaking during the entire encounter, and only tied Jared up for good measure before bounding into the night. Oh, that is, after he disabled our security camera system. Undoubtedly a straight-A student in burglary school.

Now, this was all well and good as it spread like wildfire along the Martini grapevine, and tales of the ligature marks on Jared’s wrists and his two-week vacation soon after were all accepted with nary a whisper of doubt. The original sum the staff understood to be stolen—after harassing the other managers nonstop for information—was a petty $1,600.

The truth? Try adding another zero. Now the elaborate robbery began to make some sense.

Weeks passed and no progress was made on the case. Jared began spontaneously offering a clean-cut version of the story without being prompted, and soon the familiar Martini theories began to emerge. Wouldn’t it make sense for our penny-pinching owner Jack Bugiardini to orchestrate the robbery, allowing him to take a profit under the table while insurance paid for the theft? Wouldn’t involving Jared, a single father with bills to pay and a financially colorful past be a simple way to up the authenticity?

Why yes, yes it would. Even stranger was Bugiardini's uncharacteristically stoic response to the robbery.

It’s likely that we’ll never know whether or not Jack Bugiardini managed to rob his own establishment that night, with the help of someone on the payroll. But for those of us who have seen enough CSI reruns to guess that the ligature marks on Jared’s wrists were in the right spot to be self-inflicted, it set the Martini soaring to new heights of sleazy.

And that, as Sherlock Holmes once mused, was the curious incident of All Hallows Eve 2009. Or something like that.

Persian cucumbers or bust

My first month or so at The Shipyard now behind me, there are a few things I have learned.

Working the early morning shift means two things, primarily: I never, ever will have time to down a cup of coffee before sprinting to catch the bus at 5:45am. Second, the customers who arrive promptly when the store opens are, for the most part, on the ripe side of 60 and tend to pay in exact change that’s plucked from a tired looking Ziploc baggie.

They are also the decorated veterans of grocery shopping. They know what they’re looking for, how they would like their things bagged (“in a plastic bag, inside of a paper, and then inside of this reusable one I brought please.”) and they know that you will never completely understand what they mean. “I know this cereal is here,” one woman told me, a determined and flustered cloud settling over her head. “I always get it here.”

Now, this is probably true. She looks like she has her wits about her, and her nails are long and pink and sharp looking. Her earrings tell me she has money, and people with money are always right when it comes to things like cereal, right? This is when we smile and nod and offer to check in the back to see if the item is temporarily out of stock.

Magic words, people. Now, I’m not insinuating that I want the search for a specific kind of cereal to be unsuccessful, not at all. However, I’ve found that helping people in this setting gives you about .003 seconds to determine if the customer is going to be difficult.

The other day I was working in the produce section, unloading cartons of strawberries onto the shelf, when a confused looking elderly gentleman approached me.

“The smaller cucumbers,” he says.

I give him my best quizzical customer service eyebrows and put down the box of strawberries.

“They are…smaller. Than these.” He points disgustedly at the normal sized cucumbers nestled innocently next to the broccoli and zucchini.

“Oh, the Persian cucumbers?” I ask. “They should be right over…”

I turn to where these lovely varietals usually sit, and find nothing. “You know what? It looks like we might be out of them for today,” I tell him. “But we might have some more coming out. Would you like me to check in the back?”

He says nothing, just stares for a second. He turns and walks away.

“Aaand that’s a no,” I mutter as I return to my strawberries. Chef, a coworker next to me putting up another box, snorts out a laugh and we went back to work. No more than five minutes later, the gentleman was escorted back to us by another coworker, who informed us he was looking for Persian cucumbers. Apparently the man had taken it upon himself to search the back stockroom himself for this salad staple and had been promptly redirected back onto the floor.

By this point, Chef had a box of standard cucumbers in front of him, and was stacking them a few at a time. The man hovered over his shoulder for a second, huffing a few open-mouthed breaths, then, seeing the cucumber he wanted in Chef’s box, reached down over him and snapped it from the pile. He tossed the cucumber in his basket and shuffled away.

Now, to be clear, I love the customers who come through the Shipyard. But this is mostly standard behavior, it seems, and to be expected if you’re putting up something like a box of new green bananas. People expect the very best produce, and will sniff it out faster than sharks in blood-infested waters.

When it comes to feeding ourselves, we take no prisoners. And absolutely nothing is going to prevent us from finding that cereal that we know is there. Nothing, you hear me?