One of the scariest things that ever happened to me was when I was working at Red Robin. I was around eighteen and I worked as a host. I answered phones, opened doors, and seated people. The job wasn’t strenuous.
One night, the phone rang. It was fully dark outside. My shift was almost over and my mom was picking me up because I still didn’t have a car of my own. She was waiting in the parking lot when the store phone rang.
I picked up with a chirpy greeting and slammed into a horror movie when a gruff voice informed me that he could see me. He had a shotgun pointed into the building and I’d see brain matter sprayed across the walls if I didn’t do what he said. My brain froze in blind panic. I couldn’t believe this terrible thing was really happening to me.
The restaurant was all windows, visible on all sides by the parking lot except for the kitchen. He could be looking in from any direction, shotgun leveled on customers, or coworkers, or me. “Do you hear me?” he asked.
I stared in blank terror, not answering until he yelled, “Do you fucking hear me?!”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Do you have a cellphone?”
“Yes,” I was so transfixed with fear it hadn’t occurred to me to lie.
“Give me the number.”
My mind suddenly whirred into panicky circles. I couldn’t give some crazy man my phone number, I needed to do something else but I couldn’t make up a number either because my head was pounding with adrenaline. My frightened head latched onto the only other number I had memorized.
I rattled off my mothers phone number.
“You’re going to hang up the phone, walk to the back dumpster with your cell phone in your left hand, and I’m going to call you. No one has to die tonight.”
I stood shaking with the phone pressed to my ear.
“Hang up.”
I hung up the phone. I was trembling, but I knew there was no windows in the kitchen. If I got to the kitchen I’d be safe, and that’s where he told me to go so I could make it there if I just held it together.
I made it to dry storage and met one of the assistant managers exiting. I broke down in sobs and started garbling in incoherent fear. He looked utterly flabbergasted by this, as I had the reputation of being the most level headed of the host staff.
He asked me to wait at the bar. He rushed off to try to finish what he was doing so he could deal with me. I was too scared to leave the kitchen hallway; I huddled as close the end of the bar as I could get without leaving the safety of the wall.
I was sobbing when the bartender looked over and saw me. She gasped in outrage and had me into the managers office in a blink, arms around me asking what was wrong, what was wrong.
I was finally in an enclosed room with a locking door. The gibbering in my head calmed to the point that I relayed the whole thing to the bartender. Near the end, the manager returned. He had my mother in tow.
She was furious, hearing the tail end of my death threat call. Apparently, while sitting in the parking lot she’d received the call I had been too scared to get.
The man had asked if she was me, and she was instantly combative. She didn’t tell him anything, just demanded to know, “Who’s This?” He hung up.
He’d called back once just saying my name and she’d angrily asserted, “No.” He hung up.
My mom was furious and confused and marched into the building. Part of her anger was that I’d given away her phone number. She’s a violently private person. My manager had been making sure the servers knew they didn’t have a host when my mom burst in on a mission of vengeance. He quickly escorted my rampaging mother to the back room and they were both in time to hear I’d received a death threat.
My mom rounded on my manager demanding to know why they hadn’t called the police and he pleaded that this was the first he was hearing about it. The police were called.
My mom and I waited in a booth while my nerves jangled with anxiety. No one had checked the cars outside for shooters and now I was sitting here exposed, surrounded by windows. She tried not to be mad about me giving her number given my emotional state, but she wasn’t thrilled with me.
A police office showed up an hour later. I answered her questions and my manager asked if I wanted anything. Everyone at the table looked astonished when I requested a root beer float. But by god, I wanted one.
The officer assured me that most events like this did not happen on site, that the caller wasn’t here. I didn’t believe the dowdy woman sitting across from me had even bothered to do a security sweep but I drank my float and tried to forget the darkness of the night staring in from all those windows. The clear line of sight on me from every side. The image of brain splattering against the glass divider. I drank more root beer.
I got a day off to calm down. On closing shifts after that my heart would pound when the phone rang and the bartenders all agreed to be on phone duty for me. A private investigator came in one day and I recited the whole event again. He’d been hired by the company as Red Robin’s nation wide had been targeted by the same caller.
The investigator told me he was working on it. That dozens of other businesses across the country had been called. He told me that if I’d given the caller my real number I would have been subjected to sexual assault over the phone.
I was starting to feel stupid. Everyone I told was so sure that he’d never even been present. That I’d never been in danger. The only thing I could console myself with was that many other girls had given him their number, but I hadn’t. I started forcing myself to pick the phone back up on closing shifts.
A few months later I was notified that he’d been arrested. The private investigator hired by a fast food restaurant had done what the police force hadn’t and tracked him down to a small town in the Midwest. My testimony was one of dozens used to convict him and for a while I received checks for 0.23 cents as reparations for the mental distress.
