Waiter Rant (18 page)

Yes, I can be bad. And I have a long memory. I might not exact vengeance right away. I can wait till your next visit, or the one after that, but don’t kid yourself, eventually vengeance will be mine. Like Dr. Lecter, I have infinite patience. I’ve never spat in a customer’s food, but I don’t claim I never will.

Be afraid.

I
sigh and stare out The Bistro’s front window. I didn’t get much sleep last night. For the past few months I’ve been spending every spare moment getting that book proposal together for my agent. Before and after every shift, I sit down at my desk and try coaxing words and sentences into doing my bidding. We’re supposed to start submitting to publishers this summer, but I’m suffering from a case of writer’s block. That’s not a good thing. I have a deadline. The pressure’s on. I stifle a yawn. I was up until two
A.M.

On the other side of the plate glass it’s a bright Sunday afternoon. The restaurant’s doing a brisk business. Customers swilling wine and smoking cigarettes crowd the outside tables. Teenage girls with exposed midriffs cluster by the pizza joint across the street and pull shaggy-haired boys off their skateboards with the gravity of their adolescent abdomens. While the boys posture and playact being cool, I notice the girls swing their hips with an awkward tentativeness, like they’re carefully acclimating to their new bodies’ power. Claude, the neighborhood homeless guy, stands next to them, oblivious to their presence. Wearing an army field jacket despite the early June heat, he slowly chews a slice of pizza and stares off into space, quietly contemplating some distant part of his private universe.

I tell one of the bus girls that I’m running to Starbucks for a cup of coffee. When I step inside, my favorite barista, the redhead with the ponytail and ivory skin, pours me a small coffee without my asking. Another young girl, an obvious trainee, is standing next to her.

“How are you today?” the redhead asks, smiling broadly.

“Good,” I reply, pushing two singles across the counter. “How are you doing?”

“Same old stuff,” she shrugs, handing me my coffee. “Different day.”

“Tell me about it.”

I take a sip of coffee. The hot liquid feels good going down my throat.

“Coffee,” I sigh gratefully. “The lifeblood of tired men everywhere.”

“Why do you say that all the time?”

“I read it somewhere, and I liked how it sounds.”

“Oh…How are things across the street?” she asks.

“Not bad. How’s things here?”

“You work across the street?” the trainee interrupts.

“Yeah.”

“At The Bistro?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re the sad man in the window!” the trainee exclaims.

“Excuse me?”

“Whenever my mom drives past that restaurant, she calls you the sad man looking out the window.”

Flummoxed, I stare at the girl for a moment. Then I recover. “Nice to know I’m a local legend,” I say.

“Oh,” the trainee blurts, “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“It’s cool,” I say reassuringly. “Good luck.”

“Thanks, mister.”

I nod at the redhead and wink. “Take it easy on the newbie.”

“I will,” she replies. “Have a good night.”

The moment I walk back into The Bistro, Beth runs up to me. “Can you void something for me?” she asks.

“Whaddya screw up this time?” I reply, my mind elsewhere.
Sad man in the window?

“I put all my new table’s appetizers on the wrong check.”

“Outstanding.”

“Please fix it for me.”

“If I had a dollar for every void I did for you guys, I’d be driving an Aston Martin.”

“Please…” Beth pleads.

What table?” I ask.

“Twelve.”

“I’ll get right on it,” I say, waving her away.

“Thanks.”

I walk over to the POS computer and open up the program to fix Beth’s mistake. I make just as many screwups ordering food as any other waiter in the place—but I have the manager codes, so they never notice.

As my fingers fly across the touch screen I watch Beth recite the specials to a table. Even though she’s only a few years older than the teenage girls outside, there’s nothing awkward about how she moves inside her own skin. Aware of her feminine power and careful how she wields it, Beth carries herself with a quiet dignity that seems to have escaped many of her peers in this era of Internet gonzo porn. This may stem from the fact that Beth almost wasn’t pretty. When she was a small girl, a dog mauled her face. It took several reconstructive surgeries to put her back together. Today the only evidence of Beth’s trauma is a tiny scar above her left cheekbone. Her plastic surgeon should get the Nobel Prize for Medicine. I think that incident taught Beth, on some level, a lesson about what truly constitutes beauty. When they’re young and beautiful, some girls get lost inside a self-centered world. I think Beth learned early that physical beauty is fleeting, and that, in an odd way, made her more beautiful.

“Can I get on the computer now?” Saroya says grumpily behind me. “I’ve got three tables to put in.”

“Sure,” I say, keying a few more commands into the system. “I’ll be done in a sec.”

Saroya lets out a long, controlled sigh. She does that whenever she’s impatient. With me, that’s often.

“Chill, baby,” I say. “I’m almost done.”

“Chill this,” Saroya says, digging her sharp nails into my biceps, “I need to get in there.”

“You know I love it when you grab me like that,” I say, my voice dropping to an Elvis Presley bass.

“Hurry up.”

“Why so grumpy?” I ask casually. “Trouble in paradise today?”

“What you mean?” Saroya replies.

“Problems between you and lover boy?”

“Ugh,” Saroya says, throwing up her hands. “He’s acting like an asshole.”

“I guess the honeymoon’s over then.”

Saroya just glares at me. Knowing I’ve said enough, I exit out of the computer and give her a wide berth.

Saroya’s been having a tough time. Eight months ago she and her daughter moved into Armando’s condo. Even though everything seems to be going well, I know there are some serious readjustments going on in that household. Armando’s become an instant daddy, the girl is sharing her mother with another man for the first time, and Saroya’s relationships with the most important people in her life are changing. Conflict is inevitable and normal.

Saroya and Armando, however, are very connected to each other. Besides the obvious physical attractions, I suspect there’s something deeper at work. Armando’s mother died when he was a baby. It’s a subject he never talks about. Saroya’s father was a policeman in Nicaragua. He was shot and killed when she was five years old. It doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to understand that these types of events have an effect on people. It’s not surprising
that a little boy who lost his mother hooked up with a little girl who lost her father. That may sound a little pat, but I’ve found that many successful relationships have a bit of shared trauma at their center. They both have good heads on their shoulders. I think they’ll be fine in the long run.

Felipe, The Bistro’s dishwasher, hustles past me, carrying a bus tub of onions up from the dry goods area. Felipe’s a major pain in my ass, literally. Whenever my hands are full, he takes advantage of my defenselessness and tries sticking his finger up my butt. Since I’m wearing pants it’s not going to happen, but I swear to God, I think I’ve had my sphincter tickled more times than a two-dollar Bangkok whore. Now Felipe isn’t gay, mind you: this is just another example of the homophobic grab-ass games Spanish kitchen workers love to play. I do get my revenge. Like a patient sniper waiting for the perfect shot, I wait until Felipe’s in a position of utter vulnerability—usually when he’s carrying dishes or standing on top of the stove cleaning the ventilation grates. When the opportunity presents itself, I grab a pair of tongs or a pepper mill and…well, you know. I smile inwardly. If the customers knew where that pepper mill had been, they would never bug me for fresh ground pepper. I’ll skip the obligatory salad-tossing analogy.

But Felipe’s got a story, too. Leaving his wife behind, he’s working in the United States so he can help pay for his son’s legal studies in Honduras. Sometimes he gets terribly lonely, and sadness gets the better of him. Once he got so depressed that he didn’t show up to work for a week. Sometimes Felipe goes over to the dance halls in Corona, Queens, to have a few
cervezas
, dance in the arms of a pretty girl, and try to forget that home is two thousand miles away. I always laugh when I hear radio commentators blab about how “easy the immigrants have it up here.” Work in a restaurant for a couple months. You’ll think differently.

As I return to the front I exchange greetings with a high-powered yuppie couple eating salmon and tuna at table 16. They’re good regular customers who’ve always been nice to me, but I’m
worried about the woman. When I first met her three years ago, she was an adorable, sexy, and vibrant-looking blonde. Back then she was dating a distinguished-looking, if a tad arrogant, man a few years her senior. After they broke up, however, something inside this lady went off the rails. Even though she’s still pretty, she’s become one of those joyless, obsessive-compulsive health nuts who tracks every calorie in and out of her body and lashes herself to a StairMaster seven hours a day. Maybe adipose tissue is the vital ingredient missing from this woman’s life.

Eventually she hooked up with another distinguished-looking, if a tad arrogant, man a few years older than her. No surprise there. But the blonde’s old boyfriend still eats at The Bistro. Whenever he comes now, it’s with his wife and kids. His children are preteens, so the old boyfriend must have left or cheated on his wife and family to be with the blond woman, and now he’s returned to them. But what’s really interesting is that this man’s wife looks like an older version of what his ex-girlfriend is now becoming—an intense-looking, scarily thin, über-fit blonde. I wonder if that occurred because type attracts type or because there’s something about the old boyfriend that induces this reaction in women. I can’t help but wonder, What’s the story there?

I might never find out. Since I get to watch people only during the time it takes them to eat a meal, all I get to see are snapshots of their lives. Sure, I observe people’s expressions, listen to their conversations, maybe even glimpse a bit of their past, but I’ll never know the fullness of who they are. I see scores of people every day, and most of what makes them who they are remains a mystery. And I love a good mystery. Like Philip Marlowe, I love figuring out people’s stories.

I guess that’s why I’ve been a big reader since I was a kid. My father and mother certainly encouraged me. My dad, a high school teacher, was always thrusting books into my hands. Somewhere in the family photo albums there’s a picture of two-year-old me sitting in my father’s lap as he’s reading aloud from the
New York Times
. Of course, I couldn’t understand anything
Dad was telling me about Richard Nixon, but I understood early that there was something magical in the power of words. To me, words were like incantations that could conjure fantastic worlds in the mind and take me to places I had never been. I devoured books, hunted words in dictionaries, and was a library junkie by the time I was eight. I read
Star Wars
before I saw it in the movies and devoured all of Ian Fleming’s books by the time I was thirteen. I picked up most of what I know about grammar and usage by osmosis. I also had two great English teachers in high school. They taught me that reading literature could teach you about the “universal human experience.” Maybe you’ll never hunt another man through the jungle, my teachers told me. Maybe you won’t climb Mount Kilimanjaro or watch a bullfight in the afternoon—you don’t have to. The world’s a big place. You can’t do or be everything, nor should you. Life is bigger than any one man. But when you read about other people’s lives, when you read their
stories
, you catch a glimpse of a world bigger than your own. You may never travel a hundred miles from where you were born, but if you read stories, you’ll get to see the entire world. You’ll enter into the Great Mystery.

Inspired by their lessons I toyed with the idea of becoming a writer when I was in college. In my naïveté, I thought I could tell some stories myself. I penned several chapters of the Great American Detective Novel in my dorm room and showed it to a person whose opinion I valued highly. He told me my writing wasn’t very good. Crushed, I never tried writing anything more complicated than a term paper or business report.

Then life did what life did, and I became a waiter. At first it didn’t occur to me to write down the stories that came through The Bistro’s doors every day. Sure, I had read
Kitchen Confidential
and Debra Ginsberg’s
Waiting
, but those people were
writers
. My college critic’s words still burned in my ears.
This isn’t very good
. Who was I kidding?

Then I discovered the Internet.

I didn’t go online until long after everyone else had jumped
on the digital bandwagon. In 2004 I discovered a new phenomenon called blogs, online diaries containing mostly mundane but occasionally fascinating tidbits about people’s lives. Loving stories, I couldn’t get enough of them. Then an idea began germinating in my head. I have a million stories from the restaurant. Maybe I should start telling them. So I opened an online account, and Waiter Rant was born. For the first time since college I began to write.

My initial foray was less than successful. Like most bloggers toiling unappreciated in the needle-in-haystack vastness of the Internet, I became frustrated that no one was reading my stuff. I think three or four people came to my site a week. My comment counter was firmly set at zero. I figured that my college critic was right. I must suck as a writer. I gave up.

Then, five months later, for some unknown reason, I started writing again. Blogging, with its diarist orientation, turned out to be ideally suited to recording those little snapshots of life that flash past me inside The Bistro. Within a month my writing got noticed. I was linked on a popular Web site, and, before I knew it, my Web site was getting hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of hits a day. I was interviewed by the BBC and the
New York Times
. I had a real audience. People were also telling me something I never heard before—“You’re a good writer.” It was nice finally to get some encouragement, and from thousands of people. By the time I wrote my three hundredth story I began to figure out why I had resumed writing.