Box Girl (14 page)

A good cocktail waitress (I am using the antiquated word “waitress” because we were all girls), would have always known the specials and would have always let her tables know that they could also order off the much more expensive dining room menu, in addition to the relatively cheap bar food menu. But that was another area of my server brain that just didn't fire: I absolutely hated selling.

I have always lacked that inherent salesperson get-up-and-go. I never up-sold a thing. If a customer asked for water, I never even let them know that we also had six-dollar bottles of Pellegrino and Evian. I don't think I once asked a table if they'd like “coffee, tea, espresso, desserts?” The words echoed throughout the night from other servers, but the only time I'd suggest a table have dessert is if they were my friends and I wanted to eat some of it.

Not only did I lack salesmanship, but half the time, I'd talk people out of stuff. “Oh god, no, you don't want that,” I'd say, about the fresh mint tea. “It tastes like hot toothpaste.”

Behavioral studies say that servers can increase their tips by one, or a combination, of the following: touching a person lightly on the shoulder, writing “thank you” on the check, introducing themselves by name. I never did any of those things. My name alone was a disaster. “Lila-what?” it typically began. It never ended quickly. “How do you spell it?” “Where does that come from?” “Where are you from?” “What are you doing out here?”

When the managers started posting customers' Yelp reviews on the employee bulletin board in the back, I dreaded the name thing even more. From then on, if my tables asked my name and I thought my service hadn't been so hot, I'd say,
“Jennifer.” If I was fairly confident it had been good, I'd say, “Lilibet. L-I-L-I-B-E-T.”

After only a few months, my cheap black work pants acquired a giant hole in the crotch, similar to a pair of chaps, and could only be worn under an apron. I told myself I wasn't going to spend money on new ones because I was going to quit. I told myself this for almost five years.

What I didn't know that first night at the diner, staring out the window onto an empty Lincoln Boulevard, was that those girls, who so kindly invited me along and who I so quickly dismissed, would become my sisters. My best friends. The backbone of my new life in Los Angeles. I would quickly learn every horrible presumption I made about them—and everyone else at the restaurant, for that matter—was totally unfounded. Almost none of the girls were actresses, and the ones who were worked hard at it. Not to mention I myself would eventually become “one of those girls” who, from time to time, went on auditions. Two of the girls were in nursing school, and a couple others were getting master's degrees. Almost all of them were transplants like me, from the East Coast, the South, the Midwest. They were smart, interesting, independent women. And sure, one of those master's candidates was a former Hooters waitress, but who doesn't want a former Hooters waitress as a friend?

There were the sisters from Tennessee, Kathy and Victoria, who had moved to California to get away from Memphis, too nightmarish after both their parents had died. There was Madison, whose dad
arrested
O.J. Simpson—she can remember when the police helicopter landed in her cul-de-sac in Calabasas to scoop him up in his SWAT gear. I need
no other reasons to be friends with someone. There was Jill from Oklahoma, one of those actresses who was really dedicated, and was also one of the funniest people I had ever met. One of the first nights we worked together, she told me a story about her pet dog eating her pet bird, and somehow she made it seem absolutely hilarious. I was sold. There was Noelle, one of the nursing students, who possessed the sort of calming presence and Gandhi-like advice that kept us all sane. In the chaos that is a restaurant job, Noelle was our human Xanax.

And then there was Junko (
Joon-koh
) who was from Japan. Junko was everyone's favorite employee. She was like a life-size My Little Pony. Her eyes were giant, almond-shaped, sparkly. Like a real pony, she was less than five feet tall. Though she had lived in LA for almost ten years and was completely fluent in English, she still sometimes had a tough time. The L's and the R's were, of course, a problem. There was an employee named Hillary that caused her all sorts of trouble. When Junko heard I was from Connecticut, she said, “Oh I love Connecticut! There are so many Bambis!” (She thought
Bambi
was the word for deer.) One time, she told us about a Japanese tradition in which everyone stays up all night on New Years Eve, and when the sun rises on the first day of the New Year, they all go outside and start crapping. (She meant clapping.) The language barrier sometimes caused problems while waiting tables as well. One night, Junko was waiting on an Italian man with a heavy accent. He ordered a
Chivas
(Regal, the Scotch whiskey), and twenty-five minutes later, Junko returned to the man's table with a
sea bass
.

The governess for all these girls was a gray-haired gay man named Jeffrey. He had worked at the restaurant for almost twenty years, and on his off days, he worked at a perfume shop. Nightly, he would bring us chocolates and perfumes and give us advice about men. He was like our very own
Golden Girl
.

Like Sophia, Jeffrey was never short on snark. I once asked if he and his husband ever went out to Rage or any of the other gay bars I was always passing on Santa Monica Boulevard.

“Oh, no, we don't go out dancing anymore,” he said. “Now we just lie around and complain.”

One night, Jeffrey answered the phone at the front desk because the hostesses couldn't get to it in time. A guest asked if she could get a reservation.

“MmmHmm,” he said, never parting his lips.

“At eight o'clock?”

“MmmHmm.”

“For two?”

“MmmHmm.”

“Do you have valet parking?”

“MmmHmm.”

“Thank you.”

“MmmHmm.” He never spoke a word. Later that night, the manager went up to him and said, “I just seated the ‘MmmHmm' party.”

We did these things to keep ourselves sane, especially during the recession. We leaned on each other during the recession because, as the economy went south, so did our business, and with that, our morale. A new memo from corporate appeared daily, one in English and one in Spanish—a
MEMORANDUM
, or the much more fun-sounding
MEMORANDO
.

“Employees are no longer allowed to consume espresso drinks during their shift, or beverages that require tea bags, milk, or chocolate sauce. If you would like to have an espresso-based drink during your shift, you may purchase it through the bartender at your forty percent employee discount.”

A week later: “Due to tough financial times, the employee discount has now been reduced from forty percent to twenty-five percent.” On that memo, an anonymous employee drew a graph with the “employee discount” running along the X axis
and “morale” running along the Y, our collective mood dropping incrementally with the decreasing discount.

These memos went on for months:

“Employees are no longer allowed to use chopsticks, those are for guests only.”

“Employees are no longer allowed to use the linen napkins in the bathroom. Paper towels will be provided for you in the back, which you can bring into the bathroom for your personal use.”

At least, from a writer's perspective, each night at the restaurant was an adventure in idiocies uttered from the mouths of unsuspecting strangers. Where else could I hear things like, “So when I was in AA,” from a man drinking a Kettle martini, up, with two olives, said with no sense of irony at all? Like my very own Easter egg hunt, I never knew when I'd wait on golden eggs like this particular mother-daughter pair: They both had heavy Japanese accents, and the mom barely spoke English, so her daughter ordered for them. She said, “I'll have a Diet Cock, and she'll have a regular Cock.” About twenty minutes later the daughter signaled for me, motioned toward her mom, and said, “Could she have some more Cock please?” I had to walk away.

While situations like this were hilarious, others were more tedious. Waiting on large groups of women was what I feared most. Inevitably, one of them would wave me over in a panic, flailing her arms like she was stuck in a riptide, only to have me stand there for ten minutes while she and her friends discussed what to order, saying things like, “Now Meg, is it you or Karen who's not doing fried right now?”

“I'll give you ladies a few more minutes to decide and I'll come right back,” I'd say.

“Oh, no no no, we're ready,” one of them would demand.

Then they'd start ordering.

“No, Cind, that's too much tuna I think. Haven't you read about this mercury poisoning?”

“No I haven't,” Cind would say.

“It's all over the news. Just yesterday I read something else in the—where was it? I can't remember.
The Times
. No, not
The Times
. It was the Huffington Post. No, that's not right either. It was—oh hell, Cindy, I can't remember.”

All this while I'm still standing there, shifting my weight from side to side, scribbling furious little circles into my pad.

Once they finally got their food orders in, then they'd start specifying how they'd like their waters. Women were always particularly fussy about water. They wanted their water with no ice, or with ice and a lemon, or with ice but no lemon, or with light ice and two straws, or . . .

After sending me to various corners of the restaurant fetching a laundry list of items: a black napkin (“I just detest lint!”), a side of brown rice (“Much healthier than white!”), and more hot water for their green tea (“Good for cellulite!”), I'd finally get to drop the check. This, one would think, would be the best part of this whole operation. It was not. With large groups of men, one person would typically pay for the whole bill, or two would split it. With women, it got dissected down to the dime.

After much discussion and several minutes of iPhone calculating, seven credit cards would be tossed on the table. But the check would not be spilt evenly—no, no—because, as Karen emphatically noted, flicking a French-manicured nail against the check, she did
not
have a miso soup.

As irritating as these scenarios could be, they also provided endless amounts of entertainment for the employees. We'd place bets on how many ways a group of ladies would split the check—“I've got the over on five ways”—and we'd scatter like field mice when certain regulars arrived.

“Jill, you want 64?” I'd ask. “It's all yours.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I'm exhausted.”

Three minutes later, Jill would return from table 64, shaking her head and laughing. “I'm going to kill you.” I had pawned the weird British guy off on her, the one who always sat at the same table and ordered a Kirin and a tuna “ta-ta.”

One regular I avoided like he had SARS was a German man who always ordered half ice tea, half Diet Coke. Like that's a normal thing to order. To make matters worse, he was an incredibly bad tipper. I am not sure why Europeans pretend they don't know it's customary to tip twenty percent in American restaurants and continue to throw a pocketful of linty change on top of the bill. It's like, you know what? We're on to you. We know you know better. You're not fooling anyone, Hans.

In order to make this man his half ice tea/half Diet Cokes, I'd have to go all the way to the kitchen in the back to fill the glass with half ice tea, and then I'd have to go all the way to the bar in the front to have the bartender fill the rest of the glass with Diet Coke.

The bartender, Ted, was older than both my parents. He was a purist when it came to cocktails, believing drinks should be served neat—or, if one must taint the well, with water only. None of this club soda business. Ted was known to say, “What in the hell is this, a goddamned bachelorette party?” to a group of guys who ordered Kamikaze shots or mojitos. Invariably, when I placed the half glass of ice tea on the bar and asked him to add some Diet Coke, Ted would say, “Well what in the hell is already in there?”

“See that man at table 68, the one in the neon windbreaker? He wants a half ice tea/half Diet Coke.”

“Well that is the craziest damned thing I've ever heard.”