Jesy Fortino makes music under the name Tiny Vipers. But to pay the bills, she slops beans at Bimbo’s.
“You just use the spoons, and they’re predetermined amounts,” says Fortino. “You have to spread all the stuff out inside. And then squish it and roll it over. I don’t think about it, I just do it. Like a robot—bzz, bzz.”
The restaurant/bar is famous for its attitude.
“I Googled it once,” she says. “This thing called Google Earth—you ever done it? It’s amazing. I zoomed in on Bimbo’s. All these people wrote in. And some of it would be good, but some of it was just so funny bad. People were giving it zeroes, not because of the food or anything. They’d just be like ‘Those people are such jerks, they’re the worst, meanest….'”
Fortino says people think the restaurant workers are snobs. But she says customer service is overrated. Bimbo’s employees just act like real people.
“The customer is always right—that kind of stuff can get you in a lot of trouble. I mean it doesn’t even make any sense if you think about it. Especially for a bar. I mean the customer is always…drunk.”
Fortino doesn’t edit herself when complaining about bad customers. And she wants her music to be brutally honest too. So she keeps little recorders scattered around her house. That way, she can document ideas before she’s had time to overthink them.
“When you have an idea, you don’t want to destroy it before it gets to be born. I think the process of capturing it as soon as possible is really important. That’s more important than looking at it later on and saying, ‘Is this good?’ That’s not as important as ‘Is it real?’ And I’ve been trying to figure that out more and more.”
Fortino sometimes compares herself to her more conventionally successful friends. They have careers and marriages, while she works in a fast-food restaurant. But she figured fast food was always in her future.
“I’m not educated,” she says. “It would be hard for me to escape this anyway, unless I went to school.”
Joshua McNichols
