The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (18 page)

T
HE OLIVE GARDEN
was just off 635 in Mesquite, on a stretch of Americana where the restaurants were little manors, each with its own parking lot, theme, and breed of systematized friendliness. It hung just below the highway, surrounded by a variety of establishments peddling that special American blend of casual, corporate-efficient, and faux-subversive: an Outback Steakhouse (“No rules, just right”), a Hooters (“Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined”), a McDonald’s (“I’m lovin’ it”), and a TGI Friday’s (“In here, it’s always Friday”).

Phil Amlong was a manager at this particular Olive Garden. He was silver-haired, a little pudgy, a man who lived by the corporate mantra of “Hospitaliano!” Amlong never forgot that customers were to be called “guests” and that you couldn’t tell if a man was a cocktail guy or wine guy just by looking at him. He remembered how one day a nice young man from Bangladesh walked into the restaurant and applied for a job. Rais came recommended by his friend and compatriot Malik, who already worked there. Rais had no experience serving food, it was true, but the young man was good at turning personal needs into more general-sounding imperatives. He told the management that he needed a break and that he would make them proud one day. He got two weeks to prove himself. Before long, he was working double shifts on the weekends.

The new job allowed Rais to move out of his friend’s apartment and get his own one-bedroom place, on Milton Street in Dallas, for $570 a month. It was a big step to live on his own. Even without the use of a right eye, he had grown comfortable leaving the house, making his way around the city, visiting the Richardson mosque or friends’
homes. But a part of him still trembled at what Mark Stroman’s associates might do if they finally tracked him down. He had contracted a phobia without its own prefix—of these tattooed people, skinheads, maybe white people; he wasn’t even sure whom to fear—but time had convinced him that dodging them wasn’t sustainable. He had to put himself back out there, and he calculated that a restaurant, filled with people throughout the day, would be safer than a gas station. “I need to go and start doing something that will help me to overcome the fear,” he figured. “Then I thought about going to restaurants and working, because it’s a safe environment. You get to meet a lot of people, so I’ll be able to get a chance to talk to people and overcome my fear.” And it was true that if a man wished to face and transcend his fears of white people, the Olive Garden was an excellent choice.

To work at the Olive Garden is no joke. You have to know what you’re doing and bear the company spirit, lest your guests ever feel like customers. At the outset, there are menus and protocols to memorize, exams to take, and a mini-apprenticeship with a seasoned server. “You go through a classroom, basically, is what you’re doing,” Phil Amlong said. You must learn to converse with your guests as though they’ve walked into your home and you want to impress them. You need to be able to rattle off names like Ravioli di Portobello as though they were your grandma’s recipes, to know your Mezzaluna from your Vesuvio, to remember without fail which wineglass goes with which grape. Every manager adds to the standard indoctrination some personal touches. Amlong, for instance, makes sure to teach new staff that there is a first time for every wine drinker, that it often happens at an Olive Garden, and that fruity reds are the tenderest way to lose that particular virginity. He taught recruits like Rais that prejudice was the greatest enemy of tips: “If you want to be a good waiter, take off the blinders. Don’t judge people by the way they look, what religion, their sexual preference, the way they dress. You don’t judge them, you treat them like the same way, and at the end of the day you make 25–30 percent.”

At first, Rais made nowhere near that much in tips. It was partly because he shied away from conversation, skipping the customary “So, what brings you out tonight?” or “Heading to the rodeo after dinner?”—which, at this particular branch, people often were. It was also because Rais knew nothing about what he was serving, especially the alcohol. The only time in his life that his friends had experienced him drunk was on graduation night at the military academy, when he stumbled about and teased a guy in the bathroom. But his stupor had been fake: he pretended to take a gulp, then furtively dumped the wine into a friend’s glass. (“By the mercy of God, I avoided.”) He had never touched a drink in his life. But he now realized that if he wanted to make any money at the Olive Garden, he had not only to serve alcohol but also to promote it like a connoisseur.

First, he had to persuade himself that it was religiously acceptable to sell what was haram, forbidden, to drink. It required him to argue to himself that his economic survival was at stake and that God would be amenable so long as Rais planned to live better down the road. “You shouldn’t die to keep a religion” was how Rais rationalized it. He also had to learn the art of small talk, of chitchat, of local political griping. “Anybody can drop the food on the table,” he said. “It’s also, like, make them comfortable, talk to them, see what they need, communicate with them, join with their conversation. Those are the good serving techniques.” To refill his stash of utterances, he sidled up to his fellow servers whenever he saw them talking: “You have to understand the football game. You have to understand the baseball game a little bit. You have to understand what is going on in the city.” He would press them for help: “How can I do good? What I’m lagging behind? Tell me because I never served before, so I have to learn. So what I’m supposed to do?” He also picked up that, here more than back home, humor was acceptable in almost any situation. The purpose of life seemed to be the pursuit of an elusive quantity called fun. As a server, being able to make light of things could prove even more important than bringing the food.

Learning these things was not unlike learning to fly a plane or unload server memory. It was a skill set, and Rais felt most at home when coating himself with skills—and moving forward rather than hunkering down, as he had been of late.

Amlong liked to give Rais and Malik their own section of the restaurant on weekends. They worked well together: Malik the playboy, flirting and hamming; Rais the good soldier, able and earnest. They each could pull in five or six hundred a day on weekends. A few times a month, on their days off, the two of them would come in and dine together, availing themselves of their 50 percent employee discount. They served the motley parade of humanity that passes through a Dallas-area Olive Garden—local big shots, unknown to the world, who could throw down $100 for a special bottle of Amarone; the fifteen-minute celebrities of
So You Think You Can Dance?
; guests at a three-hundred-person rehearsal dinner; a foursome of elderly ladies who introduced themselves as widows, prompting Malik, who heard “weirdos,” to laugh inappropriately; a guest who interrogated Rais about what he sucked at night to get his teeth so white; a customer on whose head Malik accidentally dropped a bowl of salad; people who they discovered tipped white waiters more; a football player who wouldn’t remove his sunglasses in the restaurant and made Rais read the menu out loud, before leaving a trifling tip, which one of his friends returned later to supplement.

For Rais, the greatest challenge remained alcohol. On a good night, it could account for most of a server’s tips. Rais, devout to the bone, was also pragmatic and driven enough to decide that if one was going to sell alcohol to the godless, one might as well be good at it. He was mostly blind in one eye, but his other senses stepped up to help him get around. He saw his promotion of alcohol in much the same way: to succeed, he had to lean on abilities other than his sense of taste.

“You have to talk in such a way that you really drink that, and you know the taste,” he said. “You can tell the details—like a car seller.
Like all the ingredients, how it tastes, the flavor, if it is crispy, chocolaty, spicy—the wines, the cocktail drinks, everything. You have to memorize the description, where it came from, and what kind of body structure of the wine, what are the ingredients in the cocktail drinks. And also you have to understand the guest—what kind of mood they are in. So should you offer them a cocktail drink, or should you just offer them a glass of wine? You have to read the guest as well, according to their appearance. And if they’re not knowledgeable, if they have no idea about wine and alcohol, then you have to give them some education. Then they will feel comfortable.”

He was relying on Amlong’s advice but was also growing confident enough to write some of his own rules. And his new talent at sizing people up and schmoozing and educating folks about drinks he’d never tasted began to pay off. In some months, the mimic became the highest-grossing alcohol seller. Years later, Amlong still couldn’t believe that Rais had achieved these things while all but blind in one eye. “I never knew,” he said. “He never conveyed that.”

Two castes of people, broadly speaking, work at the Olive Garden: those passing through, maybe while in college or on the side of a more prestigious but low-paying job, on the way to bigger things; and those bound to stay there, or places like it, forever. If you look closely, you will notice that the two castes are physically distinct—in haircuts and weight classes and textures of skin. It didn’t take long for Phil Amlong and the others to realize that Rais, though he came to them needy, belonged to the former caste: he was one of those onward people who sometimes blew through their lives. Amlong knew that he would turn up every weekend in that uniform that was always so nicely starched and pressed, until the inevitable day when he would outgrow it, as he had so much else.

Rais’s contact with the more rooted underclass was an education. What struck him at the Olive Garden, making these new friends, was that the Americans he worked with didn’t share his ability to reimagine and remake himself. They seemed not to know how to
take advantage of their own, fortunate country. And they were often left to themselves, without anyone to cushion their falls or witness their triumphs.

Little things stood out to him. A fellow server wanted to lease a car but complained of having no one to cosign the agreement. Rais couldn’t understand that: “I feel that, how come they have no one in their family—their dad, their uncle?” If he had only recently settled in America and already had friends who would sign on a lease for him, how could people who had been here for donkey’s years lack such connections? Rais saw his colleagues having to beg for rides or commute by foot on major roads in the searing heat, and he wondered why their family members weren’t picking them up—especially the young women. He felt offended on their behalf.

Nor could he make sense of the draining dating lives his colleagues led, cycling through one fling after another. “Once you go through multiple partners,” he said, “then you always think that maybe the next one will be good; maybe the next one will be good. And that’s why you keep dating people to find out.”

He inquired about the family backgrounds of his colleagues. He often couldn’t believe what he heard. “Why family is not really together?” he wondered. “Yes, they come together for Thanksgiving or maybe Christmastime, but rest of the year, I don’t see the strong bonds. People ask me, ‘When is the Mother’s Day in your country?’ It’s every day. I don’t just call my mom or send some gift for them once in a year. I call them every day. And whenever I call them, I say, ‘What do you need? Do you need some money? Do you need anything? What I can do for you from here?’ Because as their son, as in the Islamic teaching, I’m supposed to wipe my parents’ feet every single day, just to show them how thankful, how grateful I am to my parents, just to give me birth and brought me this world.”

The parent-child relationship seemed very different in his colleagues’ lives. He sensed that many of them had been damaged, long before they got to the Olive Garden, by the chaos of their childhoods.
“Most of them said that there is no peace at home,” he said. “Whenever they go home, they feel no love, no affection at home. Parents are busy with their own lives. Other siblings, they’re with their own world. So they will come out on the street and hang out with their buddies, do stupid things that make them feel happy. And few of them, they said that’s why they end up doing drugs; that’s why they even end up selling drugs.”

He sometimes referred to the resulting style of existence as the “SAD life”—his acronym for a life beholden to sex, alcohol, and drugs.

A part of him wondered if it was some kind of commercial conspiracy—getting all these young people to quit school, unskilled, to create a labor force for unpalatable jobs: “There have to be some kids that drop out from college, from high school. Otherwise, some jobs, they wouldn’t get people. If everybody becomes successful, then who will populate the strip clubs or the nude bars? Somebody has to go and work there. Somebody has to go and promote the alcohol business.”

Conspiracies aside, what Rais was perhaps discovering was that the liberty and selfhood that America gave, that had called to him from across the oceans, could, if carried to their extremes, fail people as much as the strictures of a society like Bangladesh. The failures looked different, but they both exacted the toll of wasted human potential. To be, on one hand, a woman in Bangladesh locked at home in purdah, unable to work or choose a husband, voiceless against her father; and to be, on the other, a poor, overworked, drug-taking woman in Dallas, walking alone in the heat on the highway’s edge, unable to make her children’s fathers commit, too estranged from her parents to ask for help—maybe these situations were less different than they seemed. What Rais was coming to see, through his Olive Garden immersion, was the limits of the freedom for which he had come to America—how chaos and hedonism and social corrosion could complicate its lived experience.