When I turned 16, I set out to find a job that would give me enough hours to pay for gas money and weed but not too many hours to conflict with my schedule of driving around and smoking weed. My first attempt at employment was a McAllister’s Deli, which fired me within a week for failing to attend a staff meeting (I may or may not have been stoned and forgot about it).

I asked my well-connected older brother if he would put in a good word for me at (what appeared to be) a nice restaurant in a suburban outdoor mall called the Blue Crab Cafe where he knew the owner, Don Sherbert. My brother’s referral meant I didn’t even have to interview for the job. Don just gave me a date to show up in an all-black outfit. I was to become a busser.

The Blue Crab is essentially a locally owned Bonefish or Carrabba’s. The food is....fine. Everything is either fried or swimming in melted cheese, but they play jazz music and dim the lights to give the illusion of fine dining. Don also goes to great lengths to lure local celebrities and business people to dine there, so the clientele remains “upscale” as he likes to call it.

His most noteworthy marketing strategy is to name menu items after rich or semi-famous customers: the Greg Simpson Cajun Pasta, the Mia Guzman Cosmopolitan, the Jamie Alexander Strawberry Cheesecake. My brother has an item too, the Filet Mignon. But if these patrons ever fall out of favor with Don - which they often do - he replaces them on the menu. They disappear like they never existed.

Don’s other marketing strategy is to exclusively hire pretty girls as hosts and station them at every entrance to hold doors open and greet guests. The attractive hosts are a stark contrast to Don who has twiggy legs that miraculously hold up his spherical torso and blood-flushed head with gel-spiked hair. He looks like a walking tomato.

“I already told your bro he owes me a trip to Vegas for hiring you,” Don said to me in the kitchen when I showed up for my first day as he gulped Diet Coke from a paper cup.

“Chef will show you what to do,” he said, gesturing to the executive chef at the center of the line. “Don’t make me take your bro off the menu.” He tossed his paper cup in the trash and dipped out the swinging exit door of the kitchen to do what he does best: schmooze customers.

My time at the Blue Crab turned out to be a transformative period of my life. I worked there for several years, through high school and college summers, meeting some truly outrageous people: fiends who ripped lines of meth off the server stations in the middle of a lunch, secret lovers who fucked in the linens closet, undocumented immigrants who shared their stories of what it was like sneaking into the country. I’d get high with my co-workers in the parking lot before our shifts and party at dumpy apartments after we got cut. It was a real community that I genuinely loved - even when it got dark.

One of the servers I really got along with, Eric, was a strict vegetarian but would upsell steaks to customers as if it was his favorite thing to eat. It was like listening to a gay man pimp a woman, and he was extremely persuasive.

“The New York strip is great, but the waygu here is unlike anything else you’ll find anywhere in town,” he’d say with an affecting tone. “It’s just sumptuous.”

Eric was covered in tattoos which you’d never know because his uniform concealed them. I liked him because he had a dry and cynical sense of humor. Don liked him because he was one of the restaurant’s highest earners. He hated Don because he never gave him time off, even when he was the best man in his cousin’s wedding.

“I can’t afford to not have you here,” Don told him like it was a compliment.

One day Eric just didn’t show up to work, which was out of character for him. After a few hours calling to check his whereabouts, we learned that he’d overdosed on heroin and died. After his passing, we all got together to grieve at one of our coworkers’ houses in the woods and proceeded to get absolutely blasted drunk.

The longer I stayed, the darker the place appeared. The drugs, the booze, the employees who tried to start another career and came crawling back. The work was a physical and mental grind, but one thing that united us was our contempt for Don.

None of the rules Don enforced on his employees applied to him. One minute he’d scream at us for sneaking a piece of bread, and the next minute he’d plow his fingers into a bowl of fried onions and stuff his chubby cheeks. He’d leave a mess at his table and berate us if we didn’t clear it. The attention he’d give to female employees correlated precisely to how attractive he deemed them. He’d remind us that he was “the owner” who “signed the checks” but never contributed meaningfully to the operation. He was an asshole, and what’s worse was he thought he was the absolute shit. “I’m smarter the average bear,” he loved to say.

Eventually one of my coworkers found a way to channel these experiences into something productive - or at least cathartic. He created a private Facebook page called “The Don Sherbert Fan Club” and made me an administrator. The group immediately took off. The stories that employees posted were fucking hilarious. Like the time there was a snow storm and Don offered stranded servers a ride home in his Range Rover but left before the shift ended. Or when he would make us all wash the ceiling between the lunch and dinner rushes because as he put it, “I don’t pay you to stand around.”

It was one of those online spaces that was also experienced in real life because we would talk about it at work together all the time. “Did you see what so-and-so posted in the fan club yesterday?” became a common refrain. And of course any time Don did something foul, we’d turn to each other and say “That’s going in the fan club.” It gave us a sense of agency even if in actuality we had none.

I moved on from the Blue Crab after college, and with it, the fan club. But then one morning a couple years later as I was having breakfast, I got a call from Don, which was already weird. I hadn’t spoken to him in a long time, and I forgot he even had my number.

“Hello?” I said.

“Good morning, Scott. This is Don Sherbert.”

“Hey Don. What’s going on?”

“So I just found about this Don Sherbert Fan Club on Facebook.”

“Oh!” I chuckled nervously. “You found about that, huh?”

“Yeah I don’t think it’s fuckin’ funny, bro!”

The fact that he called me “bro” still kills me to this day. Like it was an attempt to reach me as a young person.

“You know I could sue you, right?” he hissed into the phone. “This is defamation of character. I already spoke to my lawyer about it, and you’d be liable since you’re one of the owners of it or whatever.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Don,” I said. “We were just having a little fun. It’s not even public.”

“I don’t give a fuck! You need to take that shit down right now, bro. I’m not playing around.”

Again with the “bro.”

“Ok, I’ll take it down.”

“Good,” he said. “Now!” and hung up.

Because I didn’t have the access to remove the page myself, I had to call my friend who created it to ask him to do it.

“No way!” he said. “That shit is a treasure. We can’t take it down.”

“Dude, he was really pissed. I’ve never heard a grown man say ‘fuck’ so many times. He said he’d take legal action.”

“Ughhhhh,” he groaned. “Ok.”

I went to the Facebook Group one last time and skimmed some of the stories. One by one, I watched them disappear as my friend deleted them. When I refreshed the page a few minutes later, I got an error message confirming that it was indeed gone forever, and the little bit of power we thought we had against our shitty boss vanished with it.

While deleting the page may have seemed like damage control to Don, I do have the pleasure of imagining him sitting down at a booth in the Blue Crab with a bacon blue cheese burger, logging into Facebook, and reading every last one of those posts before slamming his laptop shut and calling me to throw his little tantrum. Knowing he knew exactly how much his employees hated him was a perfect parting gift - the ultimate grand finale of the page.

So consider this the final entry of the Don Sherbert Fan Club. May it rest in peace in digital paradise.

*The Blue Crab Cafe is not the actual name of the restaurant from this story, nor is Don Sherbert my former boss’s actual name. Don’t sue me, bro!