A Christmas Gift For You Continued.....

The stories of Jerry's dysfunction were legendary around the restaurant. Stories of him strolling onto the office at 2 o'clock on Saturday morning and "borrowing a couple of thousand dollars from the safe so he could take whatever hangers-on he had dredged up out of the bar to Lake Tahoe for the weekend. This story I know to be true because I was the manager who opened the safe for him on night. There was the story that goes a couple of years after he had opened IRS agents walking in the door on a Friday night about eight P.M. , chained up the front doors, seized all the cash registers from the bar and the restaurant, demanded that the office safe be opened and seized all the cash in there as well. They even made the waiters and cocktail waitress' turn over any cash they had collected for their shifts. Jerry was five minutes ahead of them stashing cash from the safe in one of the walk-in freezers. My favorite "dysfunctional Jerry" story has to do with the time he decided to take his latest dalliance to Reno for the weekend. He had rented a limousine to drive them there and to return them back to Sacramento on Sunday afternoon. They we going to dine, drink, gamble, and party all weekend at least that's what Jerry thought. Everything was going swimmingly right up until the discussion over a late dinner turned to the sleeping accommodations. Apparently Jerry's date was under the impression that there was going to be separate sleeping accommodations. Imagine that, Jerry had found a woman with some semblance of moral turpitude. I would have wagered that Jerry didn't see that one coming. The full story of what transpired between the two of the was never fully revealed, but the gist of it was the the young lady got the room and Jerry got the boot. Somewhere around nine-thirty the next morning about the time the restaurant go going for Saturday dinner a cab with Nevada plates pulled up to the rear entrance . Jerry climbed out of the back of the cab wearing the same clothes he left in the night before, a little rumpled and minus the tie. Jerry ran into the morning shift manager as he was staggering towards the back door barking at him to pay the cabdriver "Whatever he wants". While the manager was negotiating a monetary settlement with the cab driver he couldn't help but to inquire how he ended up in the parking lot of a restaurant in a different state at seven-thirty on a Saturday morning. The driver said that Jerry hailed him down and told him to take him to the nearest liquor store, which if you've ever been to Reno you know isn't too far in any direction. The driver drove Jerry to the nearest liquor store, Jerry told him to wait for him and to keep the meter running. A few minutes later Jerry emerged from the store bottle in bag in hand, climbed back into the cab and told the driver to take him to Sacramento. It was at this point that the driver said he took a long pause before asking what seemed to him to be a reasonable question ; " Do you happen to know where you are sir ?" With the use of several explicatives fired out in a drunken slur Jerry told the driver he knew exactly where he was and he knew exactly where he wanted to go. HE then proceeded to pull out a large fistful of what the driver said appeared to be $100.00 dollar bills and shook them at the cab driver. The driver said it looked as if Jerry had enough to make it worth his while so he thought he would take a drive. The driver said Jerry never said a word directly for the next ninety or so miles until the cab driver needed directions once they were close to Sacramento. "He just sat back there, stared out the window, and mumbled disparaging comments about women in between drinks from the bottle he had bought all the way from Reno to Sacramento". Jerry is the only person I've ever known who has taken a taxi from Reno, Nevada to Sacramento, California.