Dear Consumer Affairs,

JakeoftheFoliage - One of the most deranged men I've ever met was a pizzeria owner in San Francisco. We'll call him Sam. Sam hired me as a waiter under the caveat that I would help him write a movie script: the inspiring true story of his emigration to the coast of California, where he married, opened a restaurant, and discovered the American dream.
Fresh out of college, I jumped at the gig with the tenacity of 23 year-old living on a steady diet of Ramen and whiskey.
This initial enthusiasm served to blind me from fully appreciating how creepy my new boss was. You see, Sam had recently undergone surgery to reduce the size of his nose, so for most of the time I knew him half his face was wrapped up in bandages. In effect, it was hard to talk to him without feeling like I was a mobster in some violent street gang. Additionally, Sam liked to show me pictures of all the teenage girls he had slept with, which he stored in his cell phone by the dozens. Both jealous and disgusted, I nonetheless massaged his ego with approving grunts and comments like, "Oh, she's smoking. Sam, you dog, you!"
That the pizzeria itself was but a front for one of Sam's sordid, clandestine operations did not occur to me at first, though it should have. The restaurant had no appreciable clientele to speak of and Sam paid all his employees in cash, including his bitter-beyond-words chef and the restaurant's head waiter, an ex-wrestler who checked his hair in the mirror and winked at himself every ten seconds. Also, the pizzeria was next door to a strip club called Cherries, and the dancers frequently popped in between shifts, disappearing into Sam's downstairs office and re-emerging a few minutes later stuffing small mysterious packages into their purses.
One day Sam's wife came in to the restaurant, looking grim and suspicious. She approached the counter and asked where Sam was. Sam, of course, was in his office with a stripper, but I decided this probably wasn't the best thing to tell his wife.
The phone rang. It was Sam, who was watching us on surveillance monitors.
"Jake!" he said, "Pretend it's not me, act like I'm a customer."
"Why, yes sir, we do have pepperoni."
"Tell my wife I went down the street to get a cigar."
"Yep, we're open all afternoon. Okay, ba-bye." I hung up.
"Where's Sam?" His wife asked.
"Sam went down the street to get a cigar."
Behind her, on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, a stripper ran by, looking every bit as awkward as a latex and fishnets-clad girl in full sprint should. A few moments later, Sam came strutting into the restaurant, a cigar in his mouth.
"Hey, baby," he said to his wife, feigning pleasant surprise.
Later, Sam explained to me that he had an emergency trap door exit in the ventilation ducts of his office for just such occasions. He also informed me that I had passed "the first test" and had, by deceiving his wife, earned his trust.
For the rest of the afternoon he outlined the scenes from his adolescence and early adulthood that he wanted included in the movie script. As we walked the streets of North Beach I took notes, about Sam's repressed sexuality in his native country, his first unrequited love, the loss of his virginity to a gypsy. I'll never know how much of it was true, or whether the stories were in fact largely shaped by the storyteller's pathologically romanticized interpretation of his own life. Either way, I was charged with the duty of translating these memories into screenplay form over the following weeks.
In the meantime, I continued to work in the restaurant during the day, tending to the bedraggled customers who for some inexplicable reason chose Sam's pizzeria for their lunchtime destination.
A week to the day after the imbroglio with his wife, a young woman about my age came into the restaurant looking for Sam. To say nothing of the general feeling of emotional chaos and gloom she cast upon me, the walls, and the cheese and tomato sauce in the kitchen behind me, the young woman was crying, her tears muddied by onyx eyeliner.
Also, she was pregnant. Late term.
"Where's Sam?"
The phone rang.
It was a similar canard as last week only this time the woman knew the drill.
"Just tell him my lawyers are still waiting for an offer, otherwise we go back to court." She turned to leave, then stopped and looked back at me. "You know about the surveillance cameras, right?"
I nodded.
She shook her head and left. Sam came out and slapped me on the back.
"Who's she?"
"Ah, just an ex-girlfriend," he said, dismissively.
After a few more inquiries, I learned the woman used to be a waitress in the restaurant, before Sam got her pregnant and fired her.
"Is that going in the movie?" I asked.
He looked at me, curiously. "Of course not!"
A week later I tendered my resignation, citing irreconcilable moral differences. I like to think I quit because of the ex-girlfriend, but in reality it had more to do with what I found in Sam's office. One day I'd gone looking for him, to discuss the $100 he'd shorted me on my first payday, and found the door to his office slightly ajar, with no Sam inside. What was inside was a wall of surveillance monitors, covering several dozen angles in the dining room. Among them, the undersides of the tables, which afforded a great many remarkable views of the guests' crotches.
As Sam explained when I confronted him on it, "Up-skirt shots are big money on the Internet!"
I got a kick out of this quote, so I included it in this, my anonymous letter to the Department of Consumer Affairs.