Waiter Rant (16 page)

“Excuse me,” a silver-haired lady asks as I walk by the table. “Are you the manager?”

“Yes, madam,” I reply cautiously.

“There’s a hair in my salad.”

“I’m terribly sorry, madam,” I say, picking the offending plate off the table. “I’ll get you another one right away.”

“Don’t bother,” she says. “To tell you the truth, I’ve completely lost my appetite.”

“Oh dear.”

“Cancel our orders,” the woman’s outraged husband says. “We’re going to leave.”

“I’m very sorry about this, sir.”

“You should be,” the husband says. “I’ve never seen something so awful in a restaurant.”

If this guy thinks a stray hair’s bad, he’d never be able to stomach the squirrel story. Maybe I should tell him about the “phone booth of sodomy.” No. Better to leave him in ignorance. He couldn’t handle the truth.

“Again, sir,” I repeat. “My apologies.”

The couple get up and leave. I take the salad back to the kitchen for a postmortem. Moises and Armando gather around and watch as I pluck the hair out of the salad and hold it up to the light. For a moment I feel like David Caruso on
CSI Miami
. The hair’s long and silver. It’s the crabby woman’s own hair. Case closed.

“Bitch,” Armando grunts.

When customers complain about a hair in the food, it’s often one of their own. If you see a short and curly one? Well, that’s one of ours.

“What about their entrées?” I ask. “Can we give them to someone else?”

“No,” Armando says, shaking his head. “No one else ordered the same thing.”

“Shit.”

Armando cooks up the trichotillomaniac couple’s food and offers it to the kitchen staff, but everyone’s too busy to eat it. The food grows cold and eventually gets thrown into the garbage.

Now that’s disgusting.

W
hen the Italian poet Dante described the center of hell in his poem
The Divine Comedy
, he got it wrong. The epicenter of Hades isn’t Satan trapped in a block of ice munching on Judas Iscariot like an everlasting carrot stick. The center of hell is a restaurant on Mother’s Day.

“I want the window seat,” the man says, flanked in the doorway by his wife and mother. It’s hard to hear him over the din of a busy restaurant.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I reply, powering my voice over the noise, “but that table’s been reserved.”

“I’m friends with the owner,” the man says. “Tell him I’m here.”

I fight the urge to roll my eyes. Friends of the owner don’t negotiate with waiters. Friends of the owner wordlessly slip under the velvet ropes and slide into the best seat in the house. If you have to say “I’m friends with the owner,” you’ve already told me you’re out of your league.

“I’m afraid Fluvio’s not in,” I reply, keeping my voice friendly but firm. “And the people who reserved the window table made their reservations months in advance.”

The uptight trinity of husband, wife, and mother stare at me
like I just sold a busload of Jerry’s Kids to white slavers. I can tell they’re not used to hearing the word
no
.

“But Mother wants that table,” the man snaps.

“I can’t give you that particular table, sir,” I say. “But I do have some lovely tables in the back.”

“Unacceptable,” the man says, panic shading his voice. “Mother wants to sit in the window.”

I wince internally. Whenever I hear a guy refer to his mother in this way, the theme music from
Psycho
starts playing inside my head. This guy is in his late forties and is still hungering for his mother’s approval. He probably always will be. I toy with the idea of telling the man it’s time to cut the cord but decide that would be out of line.

“I’m sorry I can’t accommodate your request, sir,” I say.

The man’s gray-haired mother lets out a disgusted snort. A brittle, skinny woman with black button eyes, she probably dressed her son up in sailor outfits.

“This is ridiculous!” her daughter-in-law hisses. “We said we’re friends of the owner. Give us the table.”

The man’s wife impatiently taps the spiked end of her high heel against the hardwood floor. She looks like a younger, Botoxed, and overdieted version of her mother-in-law.

“Sorry, madam,” I reply sweetly. “But that’s not possible.”

The daughter-in-law stops tapping her shoe. Three sets of eyes start drilling holes in my skull. They probably think that staring will cause me to cave in and give them what they want. That’s the modus operandi of customers when they realize they can’t bully you.

I pick three menus off the hostess stand. “Please follow me.”

“So you’re giving us the window?” the man asks with deluded hopefulness.

“Sorry, sir, I’m giving you a table in the back.”

Face registering disappointment, the man looks at his mother and shrugs.

“I guess we’ll take it.”

“This way, please.”

As the unhappy procession trails behind me, I listen as the wife laces into her husband.

“You should have made reservations earlier!”

“It’s not my fault, Mary Anne.”

“We should go somewhere else! Look at your mother. She’s so unhappy!”

“There’s nowhere else to eat at this hour.”

“Goddamnit, Roger. You can never do anything right.”

After I seat the happy family I cast a glance back at the table. The mother’s clutching her purse to her chest defensively, regarding her environs with barely concealed disdain. I feel a small surge of sympathy for the man sandwiched between two hyper-critical women. He’s screwed.

I sigh inwardly. I’ll be dealing with many more uptight people before my shift’s over. Mother’s Day, you see, is universally despised by waiters. It’s not that we hate motherhood, but this calendar-mandated paean to the virtues of motherhood has a tendency to make people’s unresolved childhood issues bubble to the surface. For an endless variety of reasons, people harbor powerful and ambivalent emotions toward their mothers. We’ve all met people with sky-high psychotherapy bills who complain incessantly about their maternal figures. But, as Sigmund Freud pointed out over a century ago, negative emotions directed toward Mom have a tendency to induce tremendous guilt. The floral and greeting-card industries gleefully exploit that guilt in order to separate us from our money. The psych-op warfare specialists who design Mother’s Day commercials have got us all brainwashed that we’re horrible people if we don’t load Mom up with flowers, cards, and expensive gifts on the big day. Like Christmas, Mother’s Day has become a socially and economically mandated display of forced goodwill and cheerfulness. Not taking Mom out to a restaurant on Mother’s Day is like Ebenezer Scrooge pistol-whipping Tiny Tim on Christmas morning. By the time the second Sunday in May rolls around, people are caught up in a
near-religious frenzy, hoping to expunge a year’s worth of guilt by being extra nice to Mom on this
one
day. Mother’s Day has evolved into a Yom Kippur for guilty children everywhere. Taking Mom out to brunch used to be an appreciative gesture. Now it’s a guilt-expiation liturgy. Because of this dynamic, customer expectations have become so outsize and unrealistic that restaurants are under immense pressure to make everything perfect.

Customer expectations have to take a backseat to the cold reality that Mother’s Day is the busiest restaurant day of the year. Restaurant owners, eager to make killer profits, often overbook reservations and extort customers with overpriced holiday menus that make price gouging by the oil industry look benign in comparison. So when customers’ hopes of childhood redemption break upon the rocks of a noisy, overpriced, and crowded restaurant, they have a tendency to take out their frustrations on their server. On Mother’s Day, waiters become psychological punching bags.

A short while later I’m standing near the POS computer printing checks when something small and soft thumps into my leg. I look down. It’s a four-year-old boy. He’s as cute as a button and grabbing his crotch.

“Batroom,” the child gurgles.

“The bathroom is in the back to your right, sir,” I reply, talking to him like an adult. Hey, it works with my friend’s kids.

“I need to go pee-pee,” the boy insists, making a face. I look around for the kid’s mother. No dice.

I forgo traumatizing the little tyke with my thousand-yard stare and escort him by the hand into the men’s room.

“Can you get on the toilet by yourself?” I ask.

The boy replies by dropping his pants and hopping on the porcelain bowl. He’s wearing Spiderman Underoos. How cute.

“I’m okay,” the boy says, swinging his stubby legs in the air.

“Very well, sir,” I say, closing the door. “I’ll be outside.”

Back at the POS computer I watch the men’s room out of the corner of my eye and silently pray the kid doesn’t fall in the toilet.
That’s the last thing I need today. By the time my last check prints out the little boy pokes his blond head cautiously out the door. I walk over to him.

“Everything all right, sir?”

The boy points to the sink. “Can’t reach.”

“This,” I mutter to myself, “is not in my job description.”

I open the faucets, make sure the water temperature’s safe, and pick up the little boy. When he’s done washing his hands, I put him down and hand him a paper towel. Hands dried and germ free, I lead the little boy back into the dining room so he can reunite with his mother. She isn’t hard to find. She’s the most frantic-looking woman in the restaurant.

“Here you are, madam,” I say soothingly, putting the child back into his booster seat. “He was a big boy and tried to use the bathroom himself.”

“I’m so sorry,” the mother says, looking incredibly relieved. “He was playing under the table. I didn’t notice that he was gone.”

“No problem, madam,” I reply. “I’m keeping my radar set low today.”

“Thank you, waiter.”

“You’re very welcome,” I say. “Happy Mother’s Day.”

When I turn around, Beth is waiting for me.

“We’re running out of champagne flutes,” she blurts.

“How can that be?” I reply. “We cleaned thirty of them this morning,”

“Beats me, all I know is I don’t have any for my tables.”

“But we only seat fifty people. Did we break half of them?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“All right,” I say. “I’ll go downstairs and find some more.”

“Thanks.”

I take a quick look around the restaurant and figure out why we don’t have any champagne flutes. Every adult customer is drinking a mimosa. The waiters must’ve gotten confused. I said only
mommies
were supposed to get complimentary mimosas.
Oh well. It’s cheap sparkling wine and no-frills OJ anyway. It won’t break us.

I race downstairs and pull a box of champagne flutes out of storage. Since I know they’re filthy, I hand the box to Felipe, the dishwasher.

“Amigo,” I say, “I need these glasses
ahora
.”

Felipe pulls a flute out of the box and holds it up to the light. The glass is crusted with brownish spots. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re mimosa remains from last year.

“Mierda,”
Felipe grunts.
“Cinco minutos cabrón.”

“Fast as you can, brother.”

“Dios mio,”
Felipe mutters angrily. I don’t blame him for being miffed. The pile of dishes in the sink’s taller than he is.

When I return to the front of the restaurant, I discover that the hostess is seating a couple with two teenage sons in my section. After introducing myself and making the obligatory “how nice you look today” noises, the mommy of the hour asks if we serve eggs Benedict.

“I’m sorry, madam,” I reply. “We do not.”

“How can you not have eggs Benedict on Mother’s Day?” the woman’s husband sputters angrily.

“Oh honey,” the man’s wife says, placing her hand on his arm. “It’s okay.”

“We’ve never made that dish here,” I explain apologetically. “But we have lovely pancakes, omelets, French toast, and our regular lunch menu as well.”

“You have eggs, right?” the husband asks me.

“Yes, sir.”

“You have butter?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bacon?”

I can see where this conversation’s going.

“Not Canadian bacon, sir.”

“But you have regular bacon, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then I don’t see what the problem is. Tell the chef to make my wife eggs Benedict with regular bacon.”

“Sir, I…”

“Just do it.”

I feel the man’s impatience break over me like a wave. My smile starts to buckle. My emergency waiter programming kicks in and instructs my auxiliary systems to redirect psychic energy to my emotional shields. After a second my waiter smile reenergizes.

“I’ll ask the chef if he can accommodate your request, sir,” I reply.

“Thank you, waiter.”

I look over at the man’s teenage sons. They appear to be looking for a hole to swallow them up.

I head into the kitchen. It’s a madhouse. Everyone has an intense look of concentration on his face. It always amazes me how the kitchen staff keeps track of fifty orders simultaneously. I could never do it. Fluvio, of course, is nowhere to be found. He was in early this morning to go over the seating chart but escaped under the pretense of taking his wife and son to brunch. I don’t blame him for running away. I’d’ve bailed, too, if Fluvio had let me. I actually tried to get the day off, but Fluvio just chuckled evilly when I asked.

“Yo, Armando!” I shout. “Can you make eggs Benedict?”

“Today?” Armando asks, not looking up from the entrée he’s plating.

“Yes, today.”

“No fucking way.”

“That’s what I thought, Armando,” I say. “At least I can tell the customer I talked to you.”

“Tell that asshole to make eggs Benedict at home.”

“I will.”

I march back to my four top and deliver the bad news. I edit out Armando’s commentary.

“That’s ridiculous,” the man says.

“I’m sorry I can’t accommodate your request, sir,” I reply. (That’s waiterspeak for “you’re shit out of luck.”)

“Now listen here—”

“Honey,” the man’s wife says firmly. “Let it go. Remember your anger-management exercises.”

“Yeah, Dad,” says one of the man’s sons. “Chill.”

The father takes what’s probably a series of court-mandated deep breaths while the mother orders for the table. Bacon and mushroom omelets for everybody. Thank God. I smooth everything over by delivering extra mimosas to the table. Now I understand why my waiters are giving away so much free booze—they’re medicating the customers. Now that I think about it, that’s a good idea. Next year I’ll put Thorazine in the orange juice.

I look at my watch and grimace. It’s only one o’clock. Truth be told, I could use some medication myself. I’ve got eight hours and three hundred customers to go. I don’t know how I’m going to make it. I head over to the kitchen to fix myself a little pick-me-up.

Beth is way ahead of me. Sitting on her haunches with her back pressed up against the kitchen wall, she’s drinking urine-colored liquid out of a pint glass filled with ice.

“Let me guess,” I say. “Red Bull and vodka.”

“Just Red Bull,” Beth replies, trying to look all innocent.

“Sure.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Nope.”

“I’m hurt.” Beth pouts.

“So how much Grey Goose did you put in there,” I ask, pointing at the pint glass.

“About two shots,” Beth replies, her face breaking into a mischievous smile.

“That’s what I thought.”

“You’re not mad, are you?”

“Not today.”

Normally I don’t like waiters drinking on the job. I remember how Inez used to slurp Chardonnay and 7-Up out of a pint glass until she got a serious buzz going. I’m sympathetic to the fact that
servers occasionally have to medicate their aches and pains while on the job. I wouldn’t have minded Inez’s drinking so much if she hadn’t gotten drunk and combative with the customers all the time. Normally I never drink on duty, but today, with my knees and soul crying out in pain, I decide to make an exception. I pull a cocktail shaker off the shelf, fill it with ice and Bloody Mary mix, and add a liberal helping of vodka.