Waiter Rant Read online

  Of course, I get slowed down by an eight top of little kids suffering from every food allergy known to man. I am beginning to think yuppie parents lie to their offspring, telling them they’re suffering from food allergies when they’re actually not, hoping to con their hypercompetitive children into eating whatever trendy diet promises to help them grow into big, strong, overly self-esteemed junk bond traders.

  “I want French fries!” one little brat yells in psychologically healthy protest.

  “We have French fries, young man,” I reply, trying to keep the smile from falling off my face.

  “Dylan can’t have French fries,” his mother says. “He wants zucchini fries instead.”

  “We don’t have zucchini fries, madam,” I reply.

  The soccer mom’s surgically altered perky nose scrunches up. She looks at me like I’ve crawled out from under a rock.

  “The waiter I had last time got them for us,” she says.

  I want to find “waiter I had last time” and snap his neck. This lady’s eating into my precious time. I can feel the wedding party’s eyes crawling up and down my back. They’ve been nibbling on bread and water for twenty minutes. I feel bad for them. If it was my rehearsal dinner, I’d be pissed, too. I’ve got to get over there.

  “I’ll ask the chef what we can do,” I say.

  “You do that,” the woman snaps.

  I run to the kitchen to ask Fluvio if he can make some zucchini fries.

  “Get the fuck out of here!” he screams.

  I return to the table. “I’m sorry, madam. The chef regrets that he cannot make zucchini fries.”

  “I want to speak to the manager,” the woman barks.

  The last person I want to deal with is Sammy. He’ll probably want $5 just to talk to this lady. To humor the woman, I disappear in the back to make it seem like I’m looking for the manager. After a minute I return to the kiddie table with the bad news.

  “This is outrageous,” the mother sputters.

  “Madam—”

  “We’re leaving.”

  “Madam, I—”

  “Waiter!” I hear a voice cry out from the wedding party. “Can we have some service over here?”

  “Right away, sir!” I yelp.

  I disengage from the zucchini-obsessed mommy and give some attention to the twenty top. They hand me two bottles of expensive champagne. That means I’ve got to scrounge up twenty champagne glasses and some ice buckets pronto. I race over to the coffee station where we store them.

  “Minnie,” I say to the cute Iranian girl who brews all the cappuccinos and espressos. “Do you have twenty champagne glasses?”

  “Not clean ones.”

  “Can you help me, please?” I plead. “I’m in the weeds.”

  Being “in the weeds” (otherwise known as being “in the shit”) is waiter lingo for what happens when the demands put on a server exceed his or her ability to fulfill them. This can happen when a waiter’s new, incompetent, or placed in an impossible situation. For me it’s all three.

  “I’ll help you,” Minnie says, smiling.

  “Hey, Ahmed,” I call out to one of the busboys, “could you get me two ice buckets for table six?”

  “Fuck you sharmout,” Ahmed snarls, using the Arabic equivalent of maricon. I guess a waiter’s sexual orientation is the subject of speculative interest among the bus people as well as the kitchen staff.

  “Elif air ab tizak!” I shoot back. That’s a nice way of saying “A thousand dicks your ass!”

  Since Ahmed is virulently homophobic, my words hit home. As I watch him turn red I’m grateful I memorized a few Arabic comebacks. I was rehearsing that one for three days. When you work in a restaurant, you can never go wrong with remarks about anal penetration.

  “Fuck you!” Ahmed repeats.

  “Ahmed,” I reply, “if you’re gonna live in America, you’ve got to learn to say something besides ‘Fuck you.’”

  “Fuck you!” Ahmed yells, storming off.

  “Wow,” Minnie says, as she steam cleans a glass. “You speak some Arabic?”

  “Only the dirty words.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  I grab a bucket, fill it with ice and water, and drop a champagne bottle inside. Minnie runs ahead of me to put the champagne glasses on the table.

  The rehearsal party’s table is set up like a long rectangle with nine people on each side. The bride and groom are seated cutely next to each other at the far end of the table. As I approach, Ahmed sneaks up behind me and slams into my back. The ice bucket I’m holding slips out of my hands and crashes onto the table. The champagne bottle shoots out of the bucket like a torpedo firing out of a submarine. It smashes down the length of the table—targeting the bride-to-be’s bosom.

  “Oh shit!” I cry out.

  The slick bottle bounces off the bride’s boobs, hits the floor, and skitters off into oblivion. Everyone’s dripping with ice water. The bride’s expression transmutes from shock into pure rage.

  “You idiot!” she screams.

  Saying “I’m sorry” seems pointless, so I don’t. I turn around. Ahmed’s laughing smugly.

  “Fuck you!” he mouths. “Fuck you!”

  Sammy comes running over. Speaking rapid-fire Arabic, he orders Ahmed and the other busboys to reset the table. Before I can go looking for the champagne bottle, he grabs me by the elbow.

  “You’re a moron,” Sammy hisses. “You better smooth things over with that table.”

  “I’m a new waiter, and I’ve got forty customers,” I plead. “I need some help.”

  Sammy looks at me coldly. “Sink or swim, motherfucker.”

  I stare at Sammy in shock. I’ve worked for some real jerks in my time, but they’ve all been the smiling-on-the-outside/scumbag-on-the-inside types. Sammy’s a bastard up front.

  “Fine,” I say, yanking my arm out of his grasp. “I’ll handle it.”

  A few seconds later, as I’m scurrying on my hands and knees looking for the errant bottle of bubbly, the owner decides to make an appearance.

  “What the hell’s happening here?” Caesar huffs.

  At first glance, you can tell Caesar was once a handsome and powerfully built man. While the remnants of his youthful vigor occasionally peek out from inside his black eyes, you can tell the ravages of time and alcohol are pulling down the scaffolding of his once good looks. Vain for almost seventy years of age, Caesar decided to combat his thinning hair by shaving his head completely bare. A fastidious dresser to boot, today he’s sporting a white silk shirt, a red silk tie, gray slacks, tasseled Italian shoes, and a double-breasted blue blazer. If he added a monocle to his ensemble, he’d look like a dissipated version of Colonel Klink.

  “I’m looking for a champagne bottle I dropped on the floor,” I reply. “It rolled under the tables somewhere.”

  “Smooth move,” Caesar says. “Real good.”

  “Could you help me look for it?” I ask innocently. “I’m really pressed for time.”

  The owner’s eyes retract into his skull. “You think I’m going to help you?” he hisses. “That’s your job, peasant.”

  Behind me I hear a diner gasp. Suddenly I’m aware that I’m on my hands and knees before a man who thinks nothing of insulting the people who work for him right in front of his customers.

  “Forget it, Caesar,” I say. “I’ll find it.”

  “Stupido,” the owner says, walking away.

  I continue to search for the bottle. It’s disappeared. The rehearsal dinner’s freaking out. To this day I think a customer at another table stole it. I dart out of the restaurant and run to a nearby liquor store. They have the same champagne at eighty bucks a bottle. I put it on my credit card and run back inside.

  The table’s so touched that I bought a replacement bottle with my own money that they calm down. I get a grip on my section and bring everything under control. When the dust clears, the rehearsal party leaves me a $200 tip. They were nice people. Even after spending
eighty bucks on the champagne and tipping out the bus people, I’ll still make a small profit.

  Finally the night ends. The other waiters and I assemble at a back table and drink cheap white wine out of pint glasses while we wait for Sammy to accept our cash-out—the money and credit card receipts we accumulated during our shift. Sammy, being a petty tyrant, won’t let any of the waiters leave the restaurant until everyone’s cash-out matches to the penny. At the end of every shift, Sammy always eats a dish of vanilla ice cream dripping with chocolate sauce. He won’t even look at our receipts until he finishes. Deliberately lingering over his dessert to remind us of his importance, Sammy’s end-of-the-night shenanigans usually tack twenty minutes onto an already long day.

  “C’mon, Sammy,” my brother moans. “I’ve been here all day, and I want to go home. Stop stuffing your face.”

  “Just for that, I take care of you last,” Sammy says, smiling mischievously into his ice cream.

  “Screw this,” my brother says, tossing his paperwork next to Sammy’s dish of ice cream. “I’m going outside to have a cigarette. Call me when you’re done.”

  “Suit yourself,” Sammy chuckles.

  “Wait,” I tell my brother, grabbing my Marlboro Lights. “I’ll go with you.”

  “Sit down,” Sammy says. “I didn’t say you can leave.”

  “What is this, Sammy?” I reply hotly. “The military?”

  “Kind of,” Sammy snorts.

  “What do you want?”

  “Caesar was pissed you messed up that table’s champagne,” Sammy says, once my brother’s out of earshot.

  “Hey, I bought a new bottle with my own money.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Sammy says, shaking his head. “Caesar told me to give the bride a hundred-dollar gift certificate out of your money.”

  “What?” I gasp. The price of the champagne combined with buying this woman a gift certificate means I’ll have worked this entire hellish day practically for free.

  “That’s the deal,” Sammy says. “It’s out of my hands.”

  “Goddamnit.”

  “There’s another thing,” Sammy says, an avaricious glint forming in his eye.

  “What?”

  “Caesar wanted me to fire you. I didn’t out of respect for your brother.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So give me fifty bucks.”

  “Are you kidding?” I ask. “You want another bribe?”

  “It’s not a bribe. Let’s say it’s a gift—for my birthday.”

  “No fucking way. Fire me if you want. No more bribes.”

  Sammy looks at me, a cautiously surprised expression on his face.

  “Suit yourself, newbie,” he says. “Suit yourself.”

  When I get home at two A.M., there’s a message from Sammy on my answering machine. He’s taken away all my lucrative dinner shifts and replaced them with a motley assortment of low-revenue lunch gigs. To add insult to injury, he’s making me work Sunday brunch tomorrow. That means I have to be back at work in seven hours. As I toss and turn in bed, anxious because I know I’m returning to that hellhole, one question keeps looping through my mind.

  How the hell did I end up becoming a waiter?

  Chapter 2

  The Sacred and the Profane

  Honestly? I never thought I’d be waiter when I was in my thirties. When I was eighteen years old, I dreamed about becoming a Catholic priest. According to the life schedule I had mapped out for myself, I was to be ordained a priest at twenty-five, consecrated a bishop at thirty, inducted into the Sacred College of Cardinals at forty, and assume the Throne of Peter to universal acclaim soon after that. I even had my pontifical name picked out. I’ll bet I was the only teenager in the Northeast doodling prospective versions of his papal coat of arms in his notebook to keep from falling asleep in physics class. I was a religious geek.

  If the thirty-one-year-old me could travel back to 1986 and tell that pimply-faced kid that he’d be working in a restaurant asking “You want pommes frites with that?” instead of running the archdiocese of New York, I’m fairly certain that kid would have broken out bell, book, and candle and singlehandedly tried to cast my unclean spirit into hell. Let’s just say that being a waiter wasn’t in that kid’s plans.

  Full of theistic fervor, I began my assault on the Vatican by enrolling in a college seminary—an undergraduate program designed to prepare young men for the priesthood. Operated under the auspices of a major Catholic university, my college campus was sandwiched between an affluent suburb and a decaying, poverty-stricken city.

  The seminary was an interesting place. Intellectually stimulating and emotionally gut-wrenching, it was one of the most formative experiences of my life. While the other kids on campus were getting stoned, having sex, and basically having a great time, I was absorbing the arcane language of metaphysics, learning how to comfort people in times of sorrow, and immersing myself in the life of the Church. I spent so much time praying in chapel that my seminary mates whispered that I was a mystic. There was talk that I’d be sent to Rome for theological studies. My bishop said I was destined for great things. I was an ecclesiastical up-and-comer. I was also a self-righteous little shit.

  Girls were verboten, but that was okay because I was afraid of them anyway. Since I was planning to dedicate my life to God, I did my best to avoid the inconsiderately buxom sources of temptation buzzing around campus in their tight T-shirts, leg warmers, and big hair. But biology always trumps theology, and by the end of my freshman year I was madly in puppy love with a co-ed named Gwen. Since I was in the seminary and ignorant of women, the relationship flamed out quickly. I was devastated. The first time your heart is broken is always the worst. I eventually got over it.

  The seminary ended up breaking my heart, too. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always thought the priesthood was full of good men trying to make a genuine difference in the world. I still do. But as my time in the seminary wore on, it became obvious that the institution was also a hiding place for emotionally stunted head cases. While most of the priests I met were men struggling to do the right thing within an imperfect system, I also met quite a few individuals who used the priesthood as a home base for their sexual acting out—gay or straight. When the sexual abuse scandal rocked the Church in the late 1990s, I wasn’t surprised at all. Years of bad karma and church politics were simply coming home to roost. The chasm between the ideal of what I thought the priesthood should be and what it actually was ended up being too much. When I got older, I began to realize the Church doesn’t have a monopoly in the hypocrisy and stupidity department. It’s everywhere. But since I didn’t have the experience back then to give me a sense of perspective, I got angry. That anger coupled with the realization that celibacy wasn’t a viable lifestyle choice caused me to leave the seminary after I completed my fourth year of undergraduate work. Studying theology in the Eternal City wasn’t in the cards for me. That’s just as well. By the time I had made up my mind to leave, the whole process had transformed me into such a cynical, bitter, angry person that my leaving saved Church officials the hassle of kicking me out.

  Unlike most of my divinity school comrades, I didn’t major in philosophy or religious studies. Some tiny realistic part of my brain knew I’d never be a priest and influenced me to get my degree in psychology. After I graduated from college I got a job working at a psychiatric and drug-rehabilitation facility that catered to the rich, famous, addicted, and confused.

  Basically I was the guy in the proverbial white coat. My biggest job was to clap rich people in restraints whenever they engaged in self-harmful or violent behaviors and give them a chance to “take a time-out.” (How I’d miss that option when I became a waiter!) Often we’d discover that the soft leather restraints the hospital used were missing. An internal investigation concluded that staff members were taking them home for kinky extracurricular activities. When we got them back, we would wash them in hot water. Twice.

  When I wasn’t busy hog-tying
patients, escorting them to electroshock therapy, or going insane with boredom on interminable suicide watches, I played Ping-Pong in the staff room, liberated food from the cafeteria, and hit on the nurses. I also became tight with a group of perpetual frat-boy staffers who lived to go to the shore, play bad golf, ski, and lose their money in weekly poker games or trips to Atlantic City. Even though they teased me about my seminary background, these fellows provided me with the “regular guy” peer socialization I missed out on in college. I actually enjoyed my job. The pay wasn’t great, but I found the work stimulating. I was even making my first forays into the administrative side of health care. Then the whole thing collapsed.

  The hospital and its corporate parent were accused of running a criminal operation. Allegations of insurance fraud, keeping patients against their will, and administrative callousness that resulted in the suicide of a former patient prompted Diane Sawyer to expose the whole can of worms on national television. Law enforcement got involved. Soon after Prime Time Live aired, I arrived at work to discover FBI agents carting boxes of paperwork out of the administrative offices and conducting interviews with the staff. The patients and their families saw this, and, within weeks, the patient census dropped from 270 to 70. The facility rapidly became a shell of its former self. Arrests were made, indictments handed down, lawsuits filed, and, of course, the layoffs began. I was among the first people to lose their job.

  I found the whole experience very unsettling. It was like thinking you worked for the Peace Corps only to discover that you were actually an unwitting goon in the health care version of the Mob. After the seminary I had hoped to find a healthy and stable environment where I could figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. No such luck. It was the second time in my life that dysfunctional and corrupt people pulled the rug out from under me. First the disappointment of the seminary and now this.

  I was twenty-four when the hospital laid me off. Afterward I floated from job to job; I ran group homes for the mentally retarded and residential programs for traumatically brain injured adults. Eventually I became the office manager for a small outpatient psychiatric clinic. During this time I took the test to become a Secret Service agent, thought of becoming a stockbroker, toyed with the idea of going to medical school, interviewed to be a cop, and flirted with plans to get my master’s degree in psychology. Of course, none of this amounted to anything. Nothing could hold my interest or ambition.