I’m going to stop you right there, and it won’t throw me one bit.
I ordered this meal with the Dressing of a Thousand Islands and this is plainly ungarnished. You’ll have to send it back, and I don’t even mind saying so, for I am Gareth the Bold, son of Gene the Audacious, and I fear no confrontation.
Make no mistake, waiter: Each house I enter is my house, and you will turn the music down to an appropriate volume and it will be an album everyone here might enjoy.
You may have heard of my exploits at the Breakup of Brooklyn Heights, where they say I scarcely blanched at her open intentions to play the field a little bit and only asked four or five times why she was calling it a “meeting.”
Indeed, you are speaking to a man who has never begun an email with “sorry for the delayed response,” just as my father, Gene the Audacious, never began a letter with ”the post office keeps losing my mail.” I begin each of my emails like this: “RECKON WITH ME!”
People trip over themselves to plug headphones in on the subway when I pass. It’s not a class judgment thing. They come with the phone, I know you have them. And were you to leave your ringer on I would be the first to let you know that phones only ring because they were initially locked in place in the house so you’d have to hear it from across the room and now that they live in our pockets and vibrate there is no earthly need to let them make noise, I do not care if you are old and lack the dexterity to flip the little thing; if you are old you should be more aware than anyone that times have changed.
In fact, Gareth the Bold tells everyone over sixty at Thanksgiving that they’re painfully out of touch, I do not wait for them to say anything weird first. I even told my father, Gene the Audacious, this. He told me to fuck off and pass the venison if I wanted to watch TV while I was home. I will never surpass my father, and this is part of what it means to be a son. They told me at the Breakup of the Bronx Zoo that I had become my father, which I took to mean I had become assertive and classy and well-adjusted.
All my supers have fixed that loose faucet!
Anyway.
Okay, you know what, just leave the salad, it’s fine. And take away the other table setting, I’m eating for one.
Also, I should tell you now that I believe tipping culture is bad for the economy.
Graham Techler is a New York-based writer and comedian. You’d be doing him a real solid by following him on Twitter @grahamtechler or on Instagram @obvious_new_yorker. A real solid.
