Donald James
The five o’clock rush hour traffic on Uptown 23rd Street is speeding by as we talk on the patio. All manners of lousy mufflers and aggressively large trucks attempt to disrupt the conversation. These people are leaving work. Here, we are talking about doing the work. Donald James is undeterred by the racket, a testament to anyone who’s spent their working life in the service industry. “Anything that involves being berated by people, I consider the service industry,” he chuckles.
The gentle and genial tone of his voice somehow rises above the clatter while he talks about his start at Bed, Bath & Beyond. It’s one of those front of house/back of house gigs where you have to stock and labor, then turn on the customer service voice when someone asks what aisle the Dyson vacuum cleaners are on.
Developing this skill led to his first foray into the restaurant sector of the industry, the bakery counter at Cheesecake Factory. Donald didn’t actually make the cakes. “There’s literally a cheesecake factory, like in Willy Wonka,” he laughs. But, learning how to macerate strawberries for the sticky sweet topping was enough to pull him deeper into the food world.
Eventually, he found a home at The Press where he started waiting tables and began cutting his teeth as a bartender. It’s an art figuring out how to be a vital cog in the delicate machinery of a restaurant, and he quickly picked up how to become a strong piece in it. “When you’re serving tables, you don’t have to show out and be more dynamic, you just have to take the extra steps. ‘I’ll run this plate, I’ll run this food’ instead of just waiting [to serve] your own food or your own drinks,” Donald explains.
Under the tutelage of Freak City punk rock legend and fellow bartender Ross Adams, Donald’s strengths grew. “He taught me how to work behind a bar and maneuver and be like, ‘I’m busy, but I see you,’ how to take care of people when it’s going to be thirty minutes before their food comes out,” he relates.
Before long, Donald was approached to be a manager for The Press. “That was cool. How many times have you worked under a Black manager?” he asks. And it’s a very good question. “They make it that way,” he replies when I give my answer of one. “I’ve watched restaurants hire ten new people. With the averages of Oklahoma, one or two might be Black. You’ll watch those Black people phase out so fast, they become shadows immediately.”
“There’s a fear of Black people. There’s weird standards Black people have to meet for the larger cosmopolitan society. I think when people go into Black spaces, they have this really outrageous idea in their mind of Blackness. They want a Tyler Perry play to be happening in front of them,” Donald ruminates.
Getting the manager gig gave him many new things to juggle and, just as he was starting to find his groove, The Thing happened. You know the one. The Press, like most businesses, switched to a to-go model. There was a certain smear of misery that everybody was experiencing. “It felt like working at McDonald’s. It wasn’t like going up to a table saying ‘Y’all, what’s up? How you doing? I’m happy you’re here. I’m happy to be happy with you.’ Now it’s like, ‘Give me my food.’ ‘Run this out to my car.’ ‘Find me in the Plaza District and bring me my dish.’ It’s like, damn, this is different.”
After months of boxing food for underpaid delivery drivers, the shutdown magically lifted and the curtain was opened to another new landscape. “When America reopened,” he says with a laugh, “it was really, really scary. People were more aggressive and they were becoming more than needy. Why you out here acting like this? Why you getting mad about a gratuity fee? We all saw those Instagram stories about servers making only $2 an hour. You hearted and shared that shit.”
In the end, Donald doesn’t let it dominate his creative passions. Many people know him by his radio name, Don Data. He hosts the KOSU 91.7FM show “No One Man” on Friday nights from 11 p.m. to midnight. He spins everything from hip-hop to rock to folk music. In addition, he’s also a prolific drummer, currently playing with Lust Online, with whom he just returned from a summer tour.
The traffic next to us is thinning out. Like the tail end of a busy dinner rush, the cars are like servers bussing the last of their tables so the dishes can get back home to the dish pit. Tomorrow, they’ll do it all again.
