The Mexican Hat ©2012 by Joe Sixtop all rights reserved

     Conversing with Sid the bartender caused the memories to come flooding back. The shit all went down on a Saturday night. Paula, our main PM bartender, had her kids that weekend so instead of closing on the floor like usual, I got to tend bar. It was pretty busy. I got some nice tippage, all of which I kept throwing into a vessel we lovingly referred to as the Mexican hat, although I'm pretty sure it was really just a Chinese basket.
     It was a long-ass bar, not circular. We had the service well at one end of it, to-go at the other. In between those, my narrow workspace. When I was facing my barflies, I had a wall behind me. On the other side of that wall was the kitchen. There was a little window in the wall that served as a passway. And there was a swinging door to the kitchen as well, right next to the POS register, my till and that aforementioned tip recepticle, the Mexican hat.
     It was a cool shift, I got some good money. The only thing a little out of the ordinary was that we had a new cook working that night. He stuck his head through my swinging door a few times to ask me stuff. Those brief convos seemed kind of unnecessary but really, I didn't give them much thought.We eventually closed. I stocked and cleaned. I did a checkout and turned in my drawer. Even though I was a hard-core partier in those days, I wasn't that night. I clocked out and went straight home. A couple of hours later, I realized I'd forgotten to transfer the money from the Mexican hat to my pocket. Oh fuck!
     I was off lunch the next day but I got up and went in anyway. I went in at 7:00 AM, when I knew the manager and a couple of cooks would be the first to arrive. I went behind the bar with great trepidation and stared into the Mexican hat. It was empty.
     Well, what can ya do? I don't know exactly how much I lost out on but a very conservative estimate would be a hundred bucks. Fortunately, it was the middle of the month and in no way at the time was it make-or-break money for me or anything. Still, it hella sucked.
     I never found out what happened to that cashish. I strongly suspect that the chatty new cook helped himself to it from the Mexican hat after I'd left the store. Hell, maybe he took it before I left. He's the only person on that night's shift with good bar access for whom I can't confidently vouchsafe their honesty. Looking back, he stuck his head through the bar door a lot that evening. A couple of days after the incident, he consumed a shift meal at my bar and told me an unsolicited sad story about how he and his wife were having problems and their daughter has sickle cell and his car was fucking up.
     That Saturday night was a long time ago. I've worked a lot of Saturday nights since then, including this one just past. Not at my usual night job but at my usual day job; I picked up a closing PM waitshift there. Future episodes of These American Servers'll probably tell more about that. Anyway, a pretty good shift for me, decent tips and no major difficulties. Just before I left the building I asked Sid, that evening's closing bartender, if he'd done OK. He hadn't. In fact, due to a shortage in his till that he had to make up, Sid was walking with a negative twelve dollars. He had a good attitude about it, he laughed a little and said, "Oh well."
     I asked if he had any idea what happened. He didn't know for sure but shared a very plausible theory about how he'd been the victim of Dallas, an affable, overweight, kind of slovenly young co-worker of ours who's a major stoner. I don't know Dallas very well—or if he's guilty or not—but my opinion of him just improved slightly. I previously wouldn't have thought him imbued with the cunning and self-motivation necessary to steal anything.

     Are there any unusual tip jars or suspected shyster-ass motherfuckers where you work?