Waiter Rant (10 page)

The use of “Uncle Toms,” however, isn’t limited to Amici’s. Fluvio has his own control issues, so he has his own spies. And he has spies spying on the spies! For example, he’ll call me and ask how things are going at the restaurant. After I tell him he’ll call Max, the head busboy, and ask him what
I’m
doing. When he gets off the phone with Max, Fluvio will call Armando and ask what we are
both
doing. There are times when working at The Bistro feels like living in Stasi-saturated East Germany. At this point everyone’s so sick of Fluvio’s distrustfulness that I’m able to run Fluvio’s “Uncle Toms” like double agents and stay informed of his machinations and plans. That Fluvio fancies himself a shrewd operator and master manipulator plays right into my hands. He’s neither, but I let him think he is. Fluvio telegraphs his intentions the way a poor fighter telegraphs a punch. You can see him coming from a mile away.

I take a long drag off my cigarette. I haven’t thought about Rodolfo in years. Caesar eventually fired him, of course, but I’m sure he’s whoring himself out at some other restaurant. I should feel sorry for him, but I don’t. The craving for recognition and respect can tempt people who don’t have much to look for dignity in all the wrong places. It’s the reason why criminals romanticize their stupid brutishness into codes of honor and respect. The early Mafia rationalized preying on Italian immigrants by pretending they were protecting them. Omertà, my ass.

I look around the alley I’m standing in. It’s a part of the restaurant customers never see. Literally the mouth and anus of the restaurant, it’s where deliveries come in and garbage goes out. It’s also a place where tired guys try catching a break before returning to their never-ending routine. Some restaurants instruct their staff to use the service door when entering and exiting the building. God forbid people should see the servants.

Years ago I saw a painting of Catherine the Great, the czarina of Russia, touring the wintry Crimean countryside in her imperial sleigh. In the painting clusters of well-fed villagers stand in front of prosperous-looking buildings and cheerfully wave to their passing sovereign. In another part of the painting it’s revealed that the buildings are actually cheap facades erected to fool the czarina into thinking her subjects are happy. Hidden behind the plywood theatrics are the actual villagers, starving, dressed in rags, and freezing to death in the cruel Russian winter. Legend has it General Potemkin, the military governor of the Crimea, had these fake settlements built to curry favor with the czarina—hence their name—Potemkin villages.

As I look around the dirty alley I’m reminded that restaurants are culinary versions of Potemkin villages—manufactured glitz facades hiding a hot and turbulent reality that customers never want to see. Behind every restaurant’s jewel-box exterior there’s an overflowing Dumpster in the back. Patrons don’t want to know that illegal immigrants are cooking their meals or busing their tables. They don’t want to know that the staff’s working for an amoral ogre. They don’t care that the bus girls might not have enough money for food or that their waiter’s sweating the rent. Most customers care about only one thing—getting what they want when they want it. They watch celebrity chefs on the Food Network and think that restaurants are magical places designed to jerk off their taste buds. They don’t realize restaurants are places where people struggle to make a living. I’ve found that most people are cravenly indifferent to what happens in the back alleys of affluence—whether it’s behind a restaurant or a Wal-Mart.

I drop my cigarette to the ground and grind it under my heel. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on people. I still have a healthy core of outraged self-righteousness left over from my seminary days. When I go out to eat, I just want to forget my problems, too. But then again I don’t act like a complete shit.

As I head back inside, the shock of warm air cues my frozen
earlobes to start throbbing with pain. If I had stayed outside another minute, I’d be suffering from frostbite. For the thousandth time I curse the hold nicotine has on me. Years ago, trapped in my apartment by a blizzard and out of smokes, I walked three blocks in waist-high snow to buy a pack at a nearby gas station. It was a hellish, out-of-breath, forty-five-minute round-trip. At one point I feared being overcome with exhaustion and dying in the snow, my corpse hidden until the spring thaw. Like I said—it’s a stupid habit.

Once upstairs I head into the kitchen. As I help myself to a small bowl of soup I notice ground meat browning on the stove and Ernesto chopping up cheese and tomatoes on a cutting board.

“Tacos?” I ask.

Ernesto gives me a thumbs-up.

“You the man, Ernesto,” I say, carrying my soup into the dining room.

I eat my soup and continue reading the newspaper. Outside the wind howls. After a while Ernesto emerges from the kitchen with a platter laden with tacos. Finally. I’m starving.

“Mucho gusto tacos!”
I yelp.

Ernesto gives me a look. “How long you work here?” he asks.

“Six years.”

“And your Spanish still sucks.”

“True,” I say, grabbing a taco off the platter. “But if I was a busboy in Mexico City, I’d learn fast.”

“I’d love to see you in Mexico City,” Imelda says, laughing. “You’d get your ass kicked.”

Ernesto shouts downstairs to the prep kitchen that lunch is ready. Bedlam breaks loose as Eduardo, Felipe, and the other kitchen guys run upstairs. Soon everyone’s running around—grabbing sodas, Tabasco sauce, knives, forks, and napkins—then settling into their chairs to devour lunch. Everyone’s famished.

A few minutes later The Bistro’s alive with the pleasant noise of people enjoying good food and good company. Of course, the
front door chimes. A man and a woman walk in off the street, trudging slush on the newly polished floor.

“Are you open?” the woman calls out.

I get up and walk to the front of the restaurant.

“Yes, we are,” I reply pleasantly. “Two for lunch?”

“Yeah,” the man barks. “We want to sit in the back.”

The staff’s eating in the back. If I pop a customer in the back, they’ll get uncomfortable and rush to finish.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I reply. “The back’s closed. I have a lovely table in the window, though.”

“We need to sit in the back,” the woman says, looking around uncomfortably. Call me cynical, but over the years I’ve noticed that people who cheat on their spouses patronize restaurants at odd hours. Maybe that’s the case here.

“Well,” I say, “if you don’t mind sitting with the staff. They’re having their lunch.”

“When will they be done?” the man asks.

Now I’m angry. The staff deserves to eat like human beings.

“When they’re finished.”

The man shrugs like I’ve said something stupid. “So when will that be?”

“Probably not soon enough for you,” I snap, activating my thousand-yard waiter stare.

The couple turn around without saying a word and walk out into the windy frigid air. Watching the staff eat might mean peeking behind the facade of the Potemkin village. That might be too much reality for a pair of yuppies to handle. Or maybe I’m right about the cheating thing.

“What happened?” Imelda asks as I sit back down.

I look around the table. Moises is telling a joke. Pilar, another bus girl, is showing Lourdes pictures of her newborn baby. Felipe looks tired, and Eduardo’s stuffing his teenage gut with as many tacos as he can. These guys have been doing weekend food prep nonstop all day. They deserve to sit down and enjoy their food. They are men and women—not peons. This isn’t a yuppie plantation.

I think about the struggles some of my coworkers have endured to live in this country. Ernesto had to pay a human smuggler—a mule—$10,000 to get his son up from El Salvador. Moises flew his family in one at a time, while Lourdes and Imelda bounced all over the country looking for work until they settled here. When you’re a native of this country, you sometimes get blasé about what this country stands for. It’s like living in New York City and never going to the top of the Empire State Building. The United States has a lot of problems, sure, but when you work in a restaurant, you realize there are millions of people willing to risk everything to chase the American dream.

“Nothing happened, Imelda,” I answer. “Nothing at all.”

I finish my lunch. Eduardo gets up to take his plate to the dishwasher. He grabs my plate, too.

“Thanks, man,” I say.

“No problema.”

Once Eduardo walks out of earshot, I whisper to Imelda. “Hey, does Eduardo have a winter coat?”

“Yes, he does,” Imelda replies.

I look at the snow billowing outside the front window. I think about the delivery guy from the Thai restaurant, the day laborers huddled on their street corners, and the Russian villagers shivering behind their Potemkin villages. My teeth almost start chattering in the imaginary cold.

“Good,” I say. “He’s gonna need it.”

I
t’s the first Saturday in April. The middle-aged couple at table 23 polish off $200 worth of food and wine and ask for the check.

“Here you are,” I say, placing the bill in the politically correct center of the table.

“Thank you!” the woman purrs. “That was a fantastic meal.”

“Yes, it was,” the woman’s husband says. “Please send our compliments to the chef.”

“I will, sir.”

“And you!” the woman exclaims. “You’re a great waiter.”

“Thank you, madam,” I reply, executing a slight bow.

“It’s been years since I’ve had such good service,” the woman continues raving. “Isn’t that right, Andy?”

“Yes, dear,” the husband replies. “He’s the best waiter we’ve had in a long time.”

A sudden feeling of unease settles over me. It’s not that I’m uncomfortable with praise—far from it; it’s just that experience has shown me that customers who heap verbal tribute upon their servers often do so at the expense of financial tribute. Operating under the gravely mistaken assumption that my landlord will accept utterances of “Good job” or “You’re the best” in lieu of
government-backed currencies, these customers assign a monetary value to their laudations and deduct it from my financial compensation. We waiters call this “the verbal tip.”

“Here,” the man says, handing me a credit card. “And thank you again.”

“I’ll be right back, sir,” I say. I go to the register and run the credit card. After the receipt prints up I return to the table.

“You’re all set,” I say, handing back the check holder. “Have a lovely weekend, and please come again soon.”

“Oh, we will,” the woman gushes. “And we only want
you
to be our waiter.”

“Thank you, madam.”

“Thanks again,” the man says. “Great job. Excellent service.”

The couple get up and head for the door. On their way out I overhear them tell Fluvio what a great waiter I am. After six years working together, Fluvio and I bicker and disagree on many things, but the receipts don’t lie. I’m the best waiter he has. It kills him when customers remind him of that fact.

The couple give me one last wave good-bye. Smiling my best fake waiter smile, I wave back. The moment the couple goes out the door Fluvio and I race toward the table. Fluvio gets there first and scoops the check off the table.

“The tip’s going to be shit,” he says, grinning.

“Probably.”

Fluvio opens the check and giggles. “It’s shit.”

“The verbal tip strikes again.”

“They left you less than eight percent.”

“Jesus,” I mutter, “worse than I thought.”

Chuckling, Fluvio hands me the check. The couple left me $15. Verbal tippers are the fucking bane of my existence.

“Assholes,” I grumble.

“Great waiter, my ass,” Fluvio crows.

I look at the check, shrug, and put it in my pocket. While I’m annoyed, it’s not the worst fate that could have befallen me. They could have been impolite customers and left a bad tip. That
would have been a lose-lose scenario. At least this couple didn’t take a toll on my psychological well-being.

In seven years I’ve developed my own ideas about how and why customers tip. It’s gotten to the point where I can tell how much money I’m going to make off a customer within ten seconds of meeting them. It’s like I can see the tip percentage floating over their heads.

Tipping’s origins are somewhat lost to history. Some believe that the practice developed in the tavern houses of Europe, when men would throw the bar wench a few coins to ensure the ale kept flowing. (Even back then it was hard to get a bartender’s attention.) Many people erroneously believe that the word
tips
had its start as an acronym for the phase “to insure prompt service.” If we hewed to a literal interpretation of that ideal, then customers should be tipping the waiter
before
the meal is served. That certainly wouldn’t fly with today’s dining public, and I’ll bet it didn’t fly in the 1600s either. Besides, the notion that
tips
is an acronym for “to insure prompt service” is just as patently absurd as the belief that
fuck
is an acronym for “forbidden unclean carnal knowledge.” It sounds good, the facts kind of fit, but it isn’t true. It’s an etymological urban legend. According to the dictionary, the word
tip
is derived from English thieves’ slang word
tip
, meaning “to pass from one to another.” The notion of a
stock tip
or
racing tip
descends from the same slang word. At some point the word acquired the definition it has today, a customer giving a service provider a gratuity. In the United States, after some initial opposition, tipping for service became an established practice sometime after the Civil War. Despite all the confusion about tipping’s origins, one thing’s always been true—waiters often get
fucked
on the
tip.

When you stiff servers on the tip, you’re really screwing them over. Waiters in the United States, with few exceptions, are
not
paid a salary. We don’t even make minimum wage. In the state of New York, tipped workers are paid $4.60 an hour. That’s below the state’s minimum wage of $7.15 per hour. The expectation is
that our tips, coupled with our small hourly wage, will raise our compensation to the state minimum-wage level. Some rare states like Oregon allow waiters to collect the full state minimum wage of $7.80
plus
their tips (I want to move there). If you’re working in a Nebraska diner, however, you’re only getting $2.13 per hour. The laws vary from state to state, but, suffice to say, waiters need tips to survive. Ever wonder why waiters get pissed when cheapskates stiff them on the tip? If your boss arbitrarily pulled money out of your paycheck, money you needed to feed your family, then you might get a sense of the rage involved. Waiters have one of the few jobs where their compensation depends on the whims of their customers.

And believe me, waiters get stiffed. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen patrons walk out of the restaurant without leaving a gratuity. When it happens to me, I usually grin and bear it. I’ve come to the conclusion that waiters have to put up with the bad tips if they want to be around for the good ones. But not all waiters are as patient as I am.

A few years ago I was working a slow weekday shift at The Bistro with Allie, my girlfriend at the time. Two young women were seated in Allie’s section. Allie, who was a very good waitress, doted on the young ladies. Running Allie ragged, the girls ended up ordering a hundred dollars’ worth of food and wine. After they finished their meal the girls asked for the check, hurriedly stuffed a wad of bills into the check holder, and raced out the front door. Allie, sensing something was amiss, ran to the table and frantically counted the money they had left.

“Did they leave enough to cover the bill?” I asked, following close behind.

“Yeah,” Allie said, her face flushing an angry red. “But no tip!”

“Goddamnit,” I said, pissed that Allie was going to be in a bad mood the rest of the night. “If they can’t afford to leave a tip, then they can’t afford to eat out.”

Allie wasn’t listening to me. Alllie was running toward the front door.

“Wait a minute,” pleaded Brian, our old assistant manager, putting himself between the homicidal server and the front door.

Allie pushed Brian aside, opened the front door, and ran into the street. I followed her outside and yanked her back onto the sidewalk.

“Allie,” I pleaded, “don’t get run over because those two cows stiffed you.”

Allie spied her customers sprinting down the street. Jumping up and down, she screamed, “THANKS A LOT, YOU CHEAP BITCHES!”

It might be my imagination filling in details after the fact, but I swear all activity froze mid-motion at that instant. Even the cars stopped rolling down the street. Faces captured in a moment of time, every pedestrian on the street was looking at Allie.

“You cheapskates!” Allie bellowed. “Never come here again!”

The young women laughed, flipped Allie the bird, and continued on their way. I pulled on Allie’s arm, worried that she was going to run those girls down and beat them into a puddle. She could do it, too.

“Not worth it,” I cautioned. “Not worth it.”

“I could
kill
those bitches!” Allie said, her voice cracking. At that moment her anger transformed into tears. The financial consequences of not being tipped suck, but there’s an emotional and psychic toll as well. Not getting a tip
hurts
.

I can relate to Allie’s pain. A few weeks ago, following house policy, I added an 18 percent tip to a ten top’s check. The host, who had seemed happy with the service all night, got upset when he saw the automatic gratuity.

“You’re not worth eighteen percent,”
he sneered.

I remember how much that man’s words stung. That man assigned me a monetary worth and felt that he didn’t owe me a penny more. He must’ve confused the practice of tipping with bidding for an item on eBay. I felt objectified and demeaned. I somehow maintained my composure and informed the gentle
man he could discuss alternative payment arrangements with the local constabulary. The man left my 18 percent.

“Let’s go back inside,” I said to Allie, who was crying on my shoulder. “It’s all over.”

After work I took her out to a bar and medicated her with several Chardonnays. Several patrons who witnessed Allie’s earlier meltdown came up to offer consolation and support. One of the well-wishers told us an interesting fact—our tip-challenged girls were
waiters
at a nearby restaurant. Sigh. No one brings it to you like one of your own kind.

Servers don’t always remember good tippers, but we sure as hell remember the bad ones. The emotional pain and embarrassment of getting a bad tip burns that customer’s face into our brains—much the same way a trauma fuses the most trivial details surrounding an accident into a victim’s memory.

When I started working at The Bistro, I had a customer who always tipped me 8 percent. It wasn’t just me or something I was doing—he tipped all the waiters 8 percent. After one abysmal tip too many, I confronted him.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said. “Was there a problem with the service?”

“No,” the man replied. “Why do you ask?”

“You left me an eight percent tip,” I replied. “The customary tip is fifteen percent. I naturally assumed I was doing something wrong.”

“Gee, Dad,” said the man’s teenage daughter, looking embarrassed.

The man glared at me like a bully who’s just discovered that the person he’s picking on has a black belt in karate.

“I’m sorry,” the man said, quickly pulling his wallet out of his back pocket. “I made a mistake figuring the tip.” The man dropped a few dollars on the table, dragging my tip total up to 13 percent. I took it.

The next day Fluvio got an angry e-mail from that customer, claiming that I had embarrassed him in front of his daughter and
a restaurant full of people. Bullshit. I had called the guy on his cheap-ass ways, and he didn’t like having his character exposed for all to see. Fluvio and I had a big fight over that one. To make a long story short, Fluvio posted a directive that any server who complained to a customer about a tip would be fired. Fluvio was right, of course. It’s a no-win scenario. They’ll just spread their special brand of parsimonious misery at another restaurant. After that incident I never directly criticized customers over their cheapness again, expect when they asked me to.

One night I served a young couple on a first or second date. The man, a take-charge sort of guy, ordered a mess of expensive food and a pricey bottle of wine. I gave the couple great service, so when I saw the 9 percent tip the man left me, I was slightly aggravated. As the couple got ready to leave, the man excused himself to use the men’s room. When he was out of sight, his date waved me over to the table.

“Can I ask you something?” asked the woman, a very sexy redhead.

“Of course, madam.”

“Did my friend tip you enough?”

Smiling, I opened the check holder and showed it to her.

The girl’s face turned redder than her hair. She reached into her small purse and pushed a crumpled twenty-dollar bill into my hand.

“Sorry about that,” she said.

“Thank you, madam,” I replied, slipping the money into my pocket.

The man returned from the bathroom with a bounce in his step. Stupid bastard thought he was getting lucky that night. I knew better. As soon as the couple stepped outside the girl said something to the man and quickly walked away, her arms folded across her chest. The guy stood in the middle of the sidewalk looking like an artillery shell just landed on his head. Served him right.

Listen up, guys—sometimes girls will ask the waiter how much you tipped. They use it as a litmus test. They think that if
you’re not generous with the waiter, that means you won’t be generous with them—whether that generosity is financial or emotional. Besides, bad tippers suck in bed.

Why do people tip what they do? Why are some people good tippers? Why are some people bad tippers? Studies conducted by sociologists suggest that the quality of service a customer receives isn’t the biggest factor determining a waiter’s tip. Roughly 70 percent of what predicts a customer’s tipping behavior is the social norm of tipping itself. Society tells us that the standard tip is 15 to 20 percent. Since people usually follow the herd, the odds are good that 70 percent of all diners will leave the socially accepted monetary amount. Any waiter who’s ever given a customer bad service but has still gotten a good tip knows this dynamic’s at play. If tips were based solely on quality of service, then waiters would’ve gone extinct a long time ago.

I know what you’re thinking. Seventy percent of a waiter’s work is done before we even get near a table. So why am I bitching about bad tips? I’m bitching because there’s still that other 30 percent of the dynamic that influences tipping to deal with. Think about it. If you get a 70 on a test, you’re getting a D! Having only 70 percent of your customers leave average tips is like you’re getting a D, too. A server has to get 80 to 90 percent of his customers to leave tips in the 15 to 20 percent range. To do that, a waiter has to have a firm grasp of the oddities, pressures, and subtle expectations that might increase or decrease a gratuity.