054: Michael

I was only a minute or two late for my shift, but as I dodged through the kitchen buttoning my waistcoat, I could that see Michael was already in my section.

He bobbed around over the heads of the seated diners, like a reed in the wind. His hair was slicked back at the sides so that you could see the ridges where the comb had passed through it, and he wore large, yellow-tinted glasses that made him look like an insect.

When he noticed me staring, he tapped his watch and shook his head.

Restaurants bring all kinds of people together; flotsam dragged together by the tide for a season or two before drifting apart again. The waiters were mostly teenagers, working the summer, or filling gaps between other things. None of us really knew each other. We had little or nothing in common and we didn’t socialise beyond a quick beer after closing time, rushing home to snatch a few hours sleep before the breakfast shift brought us together again.

But everyone — from the chef to the kitchen porter — hated Michael. There was something about the way he grovelled and wheedled with the customers. It was too servile, too fawning, too much.

He had been hired as a bottom-rung waiter like me, but was much older and — as he would mention with every second breath — he used to run his own restaurant, El Sol. El Sol was still open, still doing business, just a few streets away. It was a shabby place with saloon bar doors, wallpapered with bullfighting posters and postcards from Alicante and Madrid. A weathered woman in a faded flamenco dress snapped castanets at you while you ate.

Why he no longer owned the restaurant was a matter of much speculation, but it was widely accepted that Michael had a weakness for fruit machines, and it was his habit of feeding the takings into the slots that had eventually cost him the restaurant and forced him back to waiting tables.

It was sad, sort of pathetic, but I felt no sympathy for him. As far as he was concerned, he was of the restaurant owning class and was entitled to treat the rest of us like shit.

I scowled while he oozed over a couple of women seated at a corner booth in my section. Older women were his favourite, his speciality. He had a sense for them, for anyone who’d be susceptible to his oily Spanish charm.

His skin was a deep terracotta colour, pitted and folded like old leather, and he was constantly preening and adjusting, smoothing his hair, pulling at his cuffs, tightening his tie. Despite his age, he moved between the tables like he was on roller-skates.

He finished with the two women and danced towards the kitchen, jabbing me in the ribs with his pen as he slid past. “Imma taking that table, OK?”

“No,” I said. “That’s my section.”

“Uh-oh, I donna think so,” he said, shaking his head. “You come late. I never take this in my restaurant. Issa lazy.”

“This isn’t your restaurant. And that’s my section.”

“You wan’ I take it to the manager?”

I narrowed my eyes at him.

“Fuck-a you too,” he said, and stalked off towards the bar.

I scowled at the back of his waistcoat and went to work.

It was a slow evening and we were empty by ten.

The waiters sat around drinking beer. Michael sat on his own, off to one side, counting his tips on the bar, putting the coins into little piles. I wondered if they’d all end up in a fruit machine like the rest of his money, but I was on the breakfast shift the next day, so I finished up quickly and left.

The sea was high, slapping against the harbour wall. I said goodbye to the porter who was lugging bins down to the street and walked on through the town. El Sol was still open, bright lights and fandango guitars blaring, a few diners still brooding over their wine and scraps of paella. The woman in the flamenco dress was there too, sat at the end of the bar. She looked tired and old.

Something moved behind me. Michael stepped out of the shadows.

“You like it?” he said, waving his cigarette.

I said nothing, but he went on anyway.

“This is my place. Is good place.”

The bright windows illuminated him, shining off of his glasses and the oil in his hair like a child before a Christmas tree.

I turned to leave, but he stepped closer and touched my arm.

“You wanna know how Michael does it?” He leaned towards me, his tiny black eyes looking at me over the top of his yellow-tinted glasses, as if divulging great and important secrets. Up close, I could see how thin his hair was on top, his head shining through the black strands.

“I tell you the secret.” His voice became soft and confidential, like he was gargling with oil. “You gotta make them lurve you.” He gave an elaborate wink and grinned. “You gotta make them wanna take you ‘ome.”

I shrugged. With his waistcoat undone, his belly poked out and he seemed shrunken, much smaller out here on the street where there were no customers to lean over.

A bell clattered, and a group of men came chattering out of the restaurant, laughing and slapping each other on the back. The woman in the flamenco dress got down from the bar. Michael stepped sideways, so that I was between him and the restaurant. The woman turned the sign in the window around, so that the smiling, sombrero-wearing bull was now saying ‘Está Cerrado’ instead of ‘Está Albierto’.

I turned to say something to Michael, but he was already walking away, the coins rattling and clinking in his pocket.

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Tom Cornfoot is a writer, designer, and illustrator. He’s spent over 30 years carefully developing a style of handwriting that’s almost illegible, doodling, and never getting around to learning to play the guitar.

These stories are plucked from the air, like everything else. There’s no consistent link or thread, unless of course you find one, in which case, it was entirely planned that way.

Words and pictures © 2025 Tom Cornfoot

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