"Rock Bottom at Raffrika's" by George P. Gordon the III

It was the year after I graduated from college and I was confused and lost about what I wanted to do with my life. The summer before what would've been my final year my father sat me down and said, “look, you have got to finish school."

Now at the time it didn't seem like that big of a deal to me because it was the start of year 5 and I was already thinking "nobody graduates in 4 years anymore." My thought process was that I'd take the 20 hours I needed to finish in two semesters rather than bust my ass in one. My old man didn't see it that way, so that fall semester I took all 20 hours at once.

This was a pretty arduous task for me considering that I had never taken more than 15 hours and had no qualms about dropping a class or two if it was not to my liking. But I had to do it. To make matters worse it was my first year in college with a car and I had to pay the money back which was spent by my father who made the decision for me to hurry up and graduate. I owed him a lot of money.

I wanted to keep my on-campus job but to supplement my income I waited tables on the weekend. I was taking 20 hours /week in school, working part time on campus, then waiting tables Friday & Saturday night, and all day Sunday. It was a tough schedule but I made it through.

The restaurant I worked at was a place called Rafferty's. It was a chain down south that was nicer than Applebee’s, but shittier than Chili’s (if possible).

This was Memphis, TN and only two types of people came into Rafferty's: poor white trash and ghetto clientele --jean shorts, wife beaters, gold teeth, real camouflage and jerseys--just awful.

It was nothing to be working one night and have a party of five just reeking of weed. I once had a guest at a table get up and start peeing beside another table. And of course tipping might as well have been some sort of alien custom because nobody who dined there understood it. (The servers who worked there hated waiting on the black folks that came in there, but the white folks didn't tip either.)

So why would I work there? Well, several members of my fraternity already did and the store manager, who works there to this day still, was one of my best friends. Even though I had never waited tables I knew I could get a job.

So there I was waiting tables at Rafferty's on the weekends and hating life. To give you an idea about what was on the menu at “Raffrika” (a name that my buddy Todd coined because of the large groups of African Americans that would frequent there) one word could describe it and that word would be FRIED. Chicken finger platter: fried. Club Sandwich: fried. Bread Basket: fried.

The one healthy thing on the menu was a house salad with fried potato sticks on it. But the most popular version was the Chicken Finger Salad which had a mountain of, you guessed it fried chicken. Of course we had burgers and steaks but everything else was fucking fried. (Memphis is one of the fattest cities in America)

A steak we had was called the Cowboy Steak--which was about the size of your fist and was ALWAYS ordered well done by the awesome customer base at Rafferty's. When it was brought to the table it looked like a lump of sizzling coal.

With a clientele like we had, and a menu that was unhealthy to say the least, you knew the staff had to be interesting. There was Sylvester a coke-head from the streets of Memphis and Carlos and Nebraska (yes his name was Nebraska) two brothers who were slightly off. The wait staff rapidly turned over but our fearless leader Pill Bell (Bill Bell)--A rotund redheaded, piece of shit, degenerate, thieving, drug using, womanizing (only if they were underage), and lowlife GM, was always there.

Pill Bell would steal from the servers by charging them $2 to wear the Rafferty's shirt--a shirt that was rarely washed and smelled like it was fried. He’d steal from the bar by drinking all of the Crown then buying well whiskey and pouring it back into the Crown bottles, which in Tennessee was ILLEGAL. He ran a sports gambling ring in the restaurant which again is ILLEGAL. And of course he named his daughter Britney after a then pubescent Britney Spears. The guy was a pederast.

I toughed it out though and at the end of that hell semester --1.6 GPA-- I graduated. Seeing that I didn't want to go out and get a real job, I went to graduate school. This was a no-brainer because my campus job was willing to give me an assistantship, meaning that once I became degree seeking and passed the GMAT, grad school would be paid for and I’d get $800 a month. Maybe I'd work a shift or two for extra cash but nothing crazy. That semester of grad school I had one goal and that was to kick ass on the GMAT and after taking it 3 times. I never did. I never got that assistantship.

I never finished grad school and lost my campus job because by the end of that summer I was not in school anymore. I was a non-student and a full time waiter at fucking Rafferty's.

As the months went on I was the only one left working there. My friends had moved on (they were fired) and Todd had been transferred. I had to get out of there.

One day after coming home to the foul stench of fried food, I realized that I’d had enough. I was determined to take the first job opportunity that came my way and it happened to be working for a pyramid scheme which at the time seemed legit enough. It was one of those places that advertised themselves like this:"Do you have what it takes to make 150K in your first year of employment?!?!" I was down for at least looking into it. I remember the first day the salespeople would stand around in circles shouting, "We've got juice, how ‘bout you?!?"

Now of course this was a sham but I so desperately wanted to leave Rafferty's that I'd figure I would take anything. My job was selling children's books and toys inside K-Mart, Toys - R - Us, and any other shit store in the south. We were selling this crap under the pretense that the money raised was going to a children's charity. These items looked more like dollar store reject items but people were willing to buy it because they thought it went to a good cause. And it did--sort of. Roughly less than 5% of the proceeds went to that charity, the other 95% went to that shady business and to my team.

I knew something was up when we were specifically asked to not take donations. Why not? It was a charity, right? But it was a lot easier to make it look legit if we were ACTUALLY selling these items. So by the end of the day I had to make sure I had a running tally in my head of donations so when we settled up at the end of the night it looked like the numbers matched. Meaning, at the end of the day we had to give away some of this shit. I was in essence scamming a scam company who was raising money for a scam charity.

It all came to a head when after having to drive 2 hours away, setting up a table in bumble-fuck Mississippi, and working all day, we each made $58. I quit immediately and went back to Rafferty's.

Rock bottom hit hard when I went up to Pill Bell and had to ask this horse- ass for my server job back and explain how I didn't make it in the world of selling children's books for a fake charity. I went on to sell fried food to low-lives at “Raffrika’s” for another year.