TRACEY’S REALITY CHECK

As August sets in, the restaurant biz goes into a month-long torpor thanks to families going away for the month and the staffs of any given eatery or bar nearly go insane from the sheer boredom of having little to do. At the barbecue joint, rather than succumb to the monotony we pass the hours by engaging in idiotic discourse and inventing new, horrible drinks.

During one of our nights of boredom-fueled invention, Jeff the bartender whipped out a bottle of Captain Morgan Tattoo — a truly vile concoction if ever there was one — poured a series of shots for the staff and a couple of regulars, demanding that they experience the utter awfulness of its flavor. We all downed the swill, grimaced in distaste virtually in unison, and Jeff summed it up beautifully by stating that this was something you’d drink just before you went out to rape someone. With that in mind, he set out to create mixed drink that would in some way be as offensive as the Tattoo, so he mixed Abita root beer and the heinous liquor to create the “Date Rape.”

Today is another one of those dull-assed motherfuckers, and Jeff once again got it in his head to experiment with mixing drinks, this time trying to learn some of the elixirs found in a cocktail manual that we have behind the bar, in this case a foofy beverage dubbed the “Zombie Cristophe.” I scoffed at that and urged him to come up with something more offensive than the Date Rape, but he doubted that there could be anything more offensive than that. I thought for a moment and then suggested the “Auschwitz.” “Nah,” said Jeff, “Too historical.” I quickly countered with “the Aushwitz CHILD-MOLESTER!” Jeff pondered briefly and was about to shoot that one down when I blurted out “the TRANSVESTITE Auschwitz Child-Molester!!!”

Jeff grinned broadly in assent, but Tracey, our waitress/goddess, chimed in with a much needed reality check: “That’s not so much offensive as a case of (PUTS ON CHILD VOICE) ‘Well, that’s distracting while I’m being molested. In a death camp.”