Waiter Rant (21 page)

Of course, I’ve skied booze’s downhill slope more than once. I’ve done the blackout thing. I’ve thrown up on the subway. I’ve felt cold porcelain on my cheek while prostrate on the floor of a filthy men’s room. I’ve acted just like some of my more difficult customers. Most of that shit happened before I turned thirty. Now I like to drink but hate being drunk. I try imbibing to the fine edge of happiness and then stop. Two drinks are my normal limit. If I go to a party, I ask for half-strength margaritas or light vodka and cranberries. At my brother’s wedding reception I sucked on watered-down scotch-and-sodas all night. I hate feeling dizzy. I hate throwing up. I’m afraid of getting cancer and throwing up from the chemo. I’ve seen cancer patients driven mad by nausea. I’d probably kill myself before throwing up for hours on end. But I smoke cigarettes, so I’m just as full of shit as everyone else.

I take another sip of my drink. Lately I’ve been drinking past my limit. That worries me. After years of watching good and bad people suffering from addictions, I came to the conclusion that everybody, and I mean everybody, narcotizes their pain somehow. I don’t care if you think the pain comes from insufficient parenting, frustrated dreams, the human condition, or the wages of Original Sin. Everyone tries to deaden it somehow.

I hear a woman laugh. It’s a sexy, crystalline laugh that forces my head to turn. The laugh came out of a lithe woman wearing high heels and a leather miniskirt. She’s sitting on one of the tables against the wall. A young guy’s clumsily nibbling her neck. The woman’s in her late forties and still a knockout. I know her. She’s a bad drunk. She goes home with a different guy every other night of the week. Her conquests are usually younger men. She’s
slept with half the waiters in town. She made a play for me once. I felt sorry for her and shined her on. She called me a fag. I look at her carefully. Her good looks won’t last forever. Eventually booze will ruin them. Men will stop being enchanted and start being repulsed. Soon she’ll have only liquor to numb her pain.

I’ve seen people get addicted to crack and booze, religion and sex, money and power. People can get addicted to shopping and exercise, chocolate and soap operas, surfing the Internet, and even throwing up. When happiness and peace are scarce, people will turn to artificial means to shut off the jabbering in their brains. Waiters aren’t free from pain. They suffer from aching joints, bad backs, bruised egos, tattered nerves, and emotional angst.

I look at my reflection in the mirror. A lonely-looking guy stares back at me. I never drank every day until I became a waiter. Doctors say one or two drinks a day are actually good for you. That may be true. Maybe I’m drinking more because I’m older. Maybe I’m drinking more because I’m a slacker waiter watching his life amount to nothing. I’m thirty-eight years old and waiting tables. This writing thing is a crapshoot. I’m still struggling with the proposal. If this doesn’t work out, I’ll have nothing going on, nothing to look forward to. That scares the shit out of me.

Beth and Dawn order another round of mojitos. They’ve gone from sober to trashed in half an hour. They’re chattering away on their cell phones. They’ve forgotten I’m even there. That’s okay. They’re young girls. They like to party. They’ll get annihilated, sleep it off, and go back to work the next day. I’ve always said you can’t diagnose alcoholism in someone until he’s twenty-seven. Before then everyone’s a situational drunk. When you’re in your late thirties, however, like Crackhead Pete and me, things are very different.

Crackhead Pete eventually met a pretty girl. They started a business, and he got most of his drinking and drugging under control. He’s not the same desperate character I met years ago. It’s a nice reminder that no one’s beyond redemption.

I smile ruefully to myself. I gave Pete a lot of shit when I was his boss. I joined the chorus of people calling him a crackhead. Now he’s got some of the things I want but don’t have. What a kick in the ass that is.

“Arthur,” I say a bit loudly, “another drink, please.”

“You gonna go past your limit tonight?” Arthur asks.

“Yep.”

Arthur makes my drink and slides it toward me. I know I’m breaking my own rules. I want to join Beth and Dawn in obliviousness. I feel like there’s a dead zone in my brain keeping me disconnected from the human race. I want to get drunk like my customers. Behind me the sexy alcoholic laughs. Suddenly, I don’t feel sorry for her. I realize I want to fuck her, too. When people are desperate and lonely, they’ll try to connect with anything. I prop my head up on my elbow and start lapping my third drink. I’m in a bad place. The café transforms from a pair of comfortable jeans into a straitjacket. My head swims. The Iceman’s coming. I need anesthesia.

I don’t want to think anymore.

D
espite my hangover I show up early for my shift the next day. I have to. Fluvio is at Bistro Duetto getting ready for its grand opening. It’s lunch on a beautiful Fourth of July. The Bistro’s crowded. If it were up to me, I’d still be in bed. But since I never cut any other hungover waiters slack, I’ll never hear the end of it if I call in sick. Waiters are like arrogant teenagers, always sniffing the air for the slightest whiff of hypocrisy.

Thick-tongued and feeling like someone stuck an ice pick into my occipital lobe, I try to ignore the clatter and bustle of a holiday lunchtime crowd. I try to imagine I’m cocooned inside a muffling force field that blots out the nerve-fraying shrieks of children and softens the pain banging inside my head. After a few minutes I realize my therapeutic visualization isn’t working. The acetaminophen I took earlier isn’t doing the trick, either. I’ve already exceeded the maximum adult dosage. If I take any more, my stressed liver’s going to slither out my navel.

I look outside The Bistro’s plate glass window. Crowds of people throng the sidewalks soaking up the vitality of the summer season. A beautiful woman in short shorts and a diaphanous T-shirt strolls past. As I covertly watch the muscles under the tanned skin of her legs stretch and contract, a couple
of high school boys spoil my view by pausing midstride to gawk at her, too. I’m slightly annoyed. I’ve been looking at women longer than these boys have been alive. They need to learn a little discretion like me. Who am I kidding? On some level, men are always fifteen.

“Hey,” Beth says, walking in the front door. She looks terrible.

“My, my,” I cluck. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

“Gimme a break,” Beth grumbles. “You got hammered last night, too.”

“Not like you, darling,” I say. “I wasn’t dancing on tables.”

“Was I?”

“The video I took will be all over the Internet tomorrow.”

Beth flips me the bird. “You’re full of shit.”

“At least you got home all right.”

“I didn’t get home,” Beth groans. “I’m wearing the same clothes I had on last night.”

“How delightfully skanky.”

“I washed my shirt in a sink, so I’m not totally skanky.”

“Don’t sweat it,” I reply. “I had no clean pants this morning, so I ironed the ones I’ve got on with Febreze.”

“Ew.”

“They’re so dirty I thought they’d get off the floor under their own power and commit suicide.”

Beth laughs. I like it when Beth laughs. Her face lights up with a radiance that could dispel the darkness of human sin. Even hungover she’s still pretty.

“How many on the books tonight?” she asks.

“About one-fifty.”

“Ouch,” Beth says, wincing, “Why can’t tonight be a slow night?”

“It’s always busy when you’re hungover,” I say. “This business is like a merciless god.”

“I don’t know how I’m going to make it,” Beth groans.

“The wages of sin is death, young lady,” I say with mock seriousness. “Now hurry up and get ready. You just got a table.”

“Already?”

“Like ripping off a Band-Aid, honey. Dive in and get the pain over with fast.”

“Ugh,” Beth says, shaking her head. “Can you believe it’s July Fourth already?”

“I know,” I reply. “Valentine’s Day seems like last week.”

“And I haven’t even been to the shore yet,” Beth says. “Where does the time go?”

“Tempus fugit, kid.”

“I guess.”

Beth heads to the back to get ready. She’ll be all right. Beth has the best work ethic of any server at The Bistro.

The front door chimes. A young woman of twenty-five walks in. She’s wearing a big smile on her face.

“Remember me?” she asks.

I flip through my mental Rolodex of faces. “Sophie?” I say carefully.

“You remember me!” the girl yelps.

I remember. Sophie. She was a bus girl when I started at The Bistro six years ago. She was nineteen back then, another college freshman hustling to make a few summer bucks. Much to my surprise, she had a schoolgirl crush on me. Fluvio used to tease me about it.

“Of course I remember you, Sophie,” I say, coming around to give her a hug. “How’ve you been?”

“I’m great,” Sophie says. “I’m starting my second year of law school.”

“You’re going to be a lawyer?” I say. “Good. You can defend me when I blow this place up.”

Sophie laughs. We give each other a hug. I catch a whiff of her perfume.

“You look great, Sophie,” I say, as we pull apart. “Very grown up.”

“Ugh!” Sophie says, putting her hand to her cheek. “Do you remember the hairdo I had when I worked here?”

“Something with pink in it, I recall.”

“Oh, you do remember.”

“Hard to forget.”

Sophie’s hair is now long and professionally styled. I notice her clothes fit very well. When she worked at The Bistro, she wore bulky clothes that obscured her figure. Now, baby fat long dissolved, she moves with the grace of a self-assured woman. I feel my pulse quickening. I realize I’m feeling desire. There’s a minor argument between my id and superego before the portcullis of my self-control comes crashing down. I try to remember that this girl’s fourteen years younger than me. I’m feeling what all men feel when they realize the little girls they’ve known are growing into women. It’s a feeling I’ll be experiencing until they plant me six feet under. I try and remember Lew Archer’s old adage. “When a man gets older, if he’s smart, he likes his women older, too.” That’s good advice, though I wonder how Ross Macdonald’s fictional detective would have fared working around nubile twenty-year-olds every day.

“Are you still with Allie?” Sophie asks.

“Oh,” I say, waving my hand, “we broke up two years ago.”

“You guys went out forever,” Sophie exclaims. “What happened?”

“Things change,” I say. “But it’s all good. Allie’s engaged.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, the wedding’s next year.”

“Wow,” Sophie says.

“How about you? Any boyfriends?”

“Yes,” Sophie says, with a slight blush. “One guy. It’s pretty serious.”

“Good. I’m happy for you.”

Sophie giggles the giggle all women giggle when they’re in love. “Thank you.”

“Listen,” I say. “Go in the back and say hi to the guys. Many of them will still remember you.”

“I’d like that,” Sophie says.

“Go ahead.”

As I watch Sophie walk toward the kitchen my stomach clenches. Seeing her happy and confident throws my constrained life into sharp relief. When I worked in mental health, the elderly patients always resented the younger ones. I’m beginning to understand why. Young people seem to have their whole life ahead of them. Their options seem limitless. As I get older my limitations are starting to pile up. I remember looking recently at an advertisement for the NYPD and realizing I was too old to apply. Not that I want to be a cop, mind you, I was just aggravated that I had become old enough to be excluded from something. But I try to look on the bright side. At least I’m ineligible for the draft.

Young people are starting to remind me that I’m caught up in the swift current of time. When I watch those girls outside The Bistro or see Sophie turning into a young woman, it’s not just about sex. I’m beginning to grasp, not in an intellectual way, but in a deep-in-my-bones way, that I’m getting older. Sophie’s another reminder that time is unstoppable, that life does not wait. Sometimes, when I consider this little bit of existential angst, I feel like I’m turning into a lonely middle-aged man. A poet once said that “time is the fire in which we burn.” I’m not old by any means, but after seeing Sophie, I feel myself getting a little crispy around the edges.

Sophie comes back up front to say good-bye. We exchange e-mail addresses. We’ll probably never see each other again. That’s not because we don’t care about each other. It’s because our lives will travel on different trajectories. Sophie thinks we’ll be buddies for her entire life. That’s sweet. One day she’ll realize that friends float in and out of your life with astonishing rapidity. This is especially true in the restaurant business. You can work next to people for several years, know all their aspirations and fears; but once you move on, the odds are heavy you’ll lose touch. I’ve learned to be glad to have known people when I knew them. Artificially extending a relationship beyond its natural course is usually not a good idea. Ever wonder why girls dump their boy
friends after they graduate from college? That’s why. As Sophie walks away I contemplate the fact I was in high school when she was born. Now I’m thirty-eight, and she’s in law school.

Lately the passing of time has been very much on my mind. I’m scared that time’s moving too fast. I think that’s why I got upset in the bar last night. That’s why I drank so much. I was trying to anesthetize myself. Maybe I’m having that midlife crisis I hear everyone talking about. I look at the summer tableau milling around outside The Bistro. The fact that another season’s slipping by only accentuates my feeling of loss. I shouldn’t be surprised I feel the way I do. I think time flows differently when you’re a waiter. It flows faster.

Waiters live outside the normal time-space continuum. To waiters, people with nine-to-five jobs are alien creatures. When you’re getting out of bed, we’re just crawling into ours. When you’re fast asleep, we’ve only just begun to party. Waiters are, when you think about it, creatures of the night. At first it’s all very romantic, but after a while the evenings smear into a blur of darkness and neon, causing the months to pass by like days.

There are some benefits to this vampiric existence. Since we’re off when most people are working we never have to wait in line at the mall, there’s always a seat at the movie theater, parking spaces are bountiful, and we know all the cool places to be on a Wednesday night. As I mentioned earlier, we usually work evenings, we have the days free to pursue those romantic stereotypical interests like writing, acting, modeling, etc. The truth? A lot of waiters spend that free time sleeping.

Because of our schedule, it’s very difficult for waiters to maintain relationships with so-called “normal” people. This is a problem for anyone who works in the restaurant industry. To give up working a Friday night in order to hang out with your nine-to-five buddies can be a painful hit in the wallet. A waitress friend of mine recently gave away a Saturday night shift so she could attend her friend’s wedding. Not only did the waitress spend money on a dress that she could use only once, she also
lost the bulk of her week’s income. Because she was out so much cash, she couldn’t afford to give her friend a big gift. She spent the wedding reception embarrassed that she couldn’t give as much as the other girls in the bridal party. People who’ve never worked in the restaurant industry need to understand that when servers take time off to be with their friends, they’re actually giving a gift worth hundreds of dollars—the gift of their time. When you factor in the lost wages, that waitress probably gave more financially to the newlyweds than all the other bridesmaids. Because that gift wasn’t money stuffed into an envelope, the bridesmaids cattily said that my waitress friend was cheap, and the waitress was hurt by their comments. I consoled her by saying that that’s what happens when women swim in the unmarried, bitter, and over-the-age-of-thirty pool. But I digress.

The converse of the time dilemma is also true. If waiters want to socialize on Monday or Tuesday night, they have to understand their friends might be stressed out after a long day at work. My friends understand my schedule and lifestyle, but when I visit them, they’re half asleep by nine o’clock. I have to be conscious that our schedules belong in different universes. Sometimes they get angry that I don’t attend some of the parties they throw, but they also realize every time I come on a work night I’m automatically losing $200. That’s an expensive party.

The difference in schedules really hurts romantic relationships. Waiters often hook up with people in the restaurant biz because they’re the only people who have the same kind of schedules. Waiters who become couples often try to get the same days off. If they work at the same restaurant, that can rapidly become a problem. If they decide to break up, the atmosphere on the dining room floor can quickly become toxic. Every restaurant manager’s had to deal with this headache. Maintaining relationships is even harder when one member of the couple leaves the restaurant business or hooks up with someone outside our merry little clan. It’s hard to maintain a relationship when you’re working Saturday nights and your significant other’s sitting at home alone. My
schedule was one of the reasons my last relationship fell apart. My ex got sick of spending New Year’s Eve alone and celebrating Valentine’s Day a week late. I don’t blame her. Besides, I was always cranky around the holidays.

When you’re a waiter, you observe the holidays from a different perspective. You become part of the machine separating people from their money. After a few years waiting tables, commercialism hollows out the holidays and turns them into just another day on the calendar. That’s a problem.

Since earliest recorded history humans have used holidays to mark the passage of time. The Druids celebrated the harvest, the Romans partied during the winter solstice, and the Incas commemorated the movement of the stars. People use significant days to orient themselves in time. How many of us have said, “I remember that happened before last Christmas” or “Was that before or after 9/11?” Holidays remind us where we are in the year. Desensitization to the holidays is another reason time flows faster for waiters than for regular people. Anyone who’s ever waited tables has experienced the “Is it Mother’s Day already?” sensation.

Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a different dimension, separated from normal reality by an imperceptible but impenetrable barrier. I can see what the normal people are doing. I see my friends getting married and their babies getting older. I see girls like Sophie growing into young women. I see the pages of the calendar turn. It’s during moments like these that I hate being a waiter. I get paranoid, thinking that the restaurant business is a trap designed to bleed away the most productive years of my life. I feel like a jealous ghost watching the living. Sure, being a waiter has given me a different perspective from which to view life. In some respects having that different point of view has paid off. People often think of that perspective as living on the “edge,” moving outside the boundaries of normal experience. But if you think living on that edge is an exciting adventure, try it for a while. It gets old fast.