Waiter Rant (2 page)

“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?

H
onestly? 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.

Then a pretty college senior named Regan walked into my psychiatric clinic to perform her summer internship. I fell head over heels for her. The sun rose and set with this girl. When Regan completed her internship and went back to school three states away, I racked up major mileage to see her on the weekends. When I wasn’t with her, I paced inside my small apartment waiting for her to phone. To me, her voice was a form of sustenance. I was crazy about her.

We had a lot of fun, but, as Regan began nearing graduation, the mood between us began to sour and we started fighting more often. When she got accepted into a top-flight school for social work, I think she realized that I was a twenty-eight-year-old man in a dead-end job who still didn’t know what he wanted to be when he grew up. I think that scared her. Not because she was looking for some rich guy to provide for her, but because she wanted a strong, confident guy to share her life with. That was not me.

So the relationship began falling apart. As it entered its death throes my good friend Kevin, a member of my weekly hospital frat-boy poker group, was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. At the same time the psychiatric outfit I was working for was in negotiations to be bought out by a health care concern headquartered in another part of the country. By March, the irresolvable issues between Regan and me came to a head, and I decided to end it. It was a definitive moment in my life. I learned that love is only one ingredient among many in a relationship.

I picked March 27 as breakup day. Regan was coming home for Easter, so I told her I’d meet her that night at a local T.G.I. Friday’s for beers (I know, I was such a class act). At lunchtime that day, however, I got a phone call. Kevin, who was home under hospice care, had just died. Numb, I told my boss what happened and got into my car and left. I’ll never forget the drive to Kevin’s house. It was a beautiful spring day. Shawn Colvin’s song “Sunny
Came Home” was a big hit and playing over every radio station. Today, of all days, the lyrics were particularly haunting:

I close my eyes and fly out of my mind…

The world is burning down

I must’ve heard that song play three times during the drive to Kevin’s house. When I pulled up to the curb, the undertakers were carrying my friend’s plastic-shrouded body toward a waiting hearse. When the black-suited men pushing the gurney saw me approach, they stopped. I reached out and placed my hand on the blue plastic covering Kevin’s corpse. I couldn’t tell if I was touching his arm or his chest. The cancer had whittled him away to nothing. I couldn’t believe he was dead. Not my friend. Not the guy I played poker with. Not the fun-loving guy who tried to hook me up at parties. It couldn’t be. But what I felt under the shroud didn’t move. Frightened, I pulled my hand away. The funeral guys continued on their way and slid what was once Kevin into the hearse. Inside the house I could hear Kevin’s wife wailing. It was one day after their first wedding anniversary. As I watched the hearse drive away I remembered that Kevin had requested to be cremated. Those somber men were going to put my friend into a fire.

I went inside the house and gave my condolences to the widow in a haze. Her screams are something I’ll never forget. A few hours later, against the advice of all my friends, I drove to the restaurant to break up with Regan. In retrospect, that was a truly stupid thing to do. I must’ve been in some sort of state of emotional shock. To make things worse, my ham-fisted attempts at breaking up caused Regan to run into the bathroom and throw up her beer. By the time it was all over, I drove home and got stinking drunk. I had lost my buddy and my girlfriend on the same day.

Kevin’s memorial service was the following Monday. On Tuesday I showed up at work early, eager to bury the pain I was
feeling under the mountain of paperwork stacked on my desk. As I walked through the hallways I noticed everyone was looking at me funny. I didn’t think anything of it at first. It was a small office, and news traveled fast. I figured they all knew I was having a rough time and were keeping a respectful distance. The real reason for the awkward stares soon became apparent, though. Before I could even get a cup of coffee my boss walked into my office and broke the news that our clinic had been bought out by that other company. My position had become redundant. I was being laid off.

Professional gunmen have a little maneuver they call the “Mozambique Drill.” That’s when they put two rounds into some poor slob’s chest and then, just to make sure he’s dead, shoot him in the head. Well, my boss had just delivered the third shot. I could handle losing my girlfriend. I could handle losing Kevin. I could handle losing my job. But I couldn’t handle losing all three things at the same time. I was down for the count. I walked out of the office feeling abandoned and lost. I felt like that song was coming to life.
“I close my eyes and fly out of my mind / The world is burning down.”

And I almost did fly out of my mind. I had a mini–nervous breakdown, saw a shrink, and started popping Zoloft like M&M’s. I also spent six fruitless months looking for a new job. Just before my unemployment benefits were due to run out I was offered the position of marketing director for a geriatric outpatient clinic opening up in an inner-city hospital. I didn’t know squat about being a marketing rep or opening a clinic, but the job paid well, so I jumped all over it. It was hard work, but within a few months the clinical director and I had the place up and running. The staff we hired was top notch, and the senior citizens we treated got excellent care. The only problem? There were never
enough
patients.

The hospital that housed our clinic was in a bad neighborhood. Latin King gang members stabbed a kid to death outside our ER in broad daylight. A low-rent go-go bar was visible from
my office. Trying to convince nervous grandmas to come to the ghetto for treatment was a tough sell. Several other hospitals in the area had similar programs, so competition for the shrinking Medicare pie was cutthroat and fraud was rampant. Unscrupulous marketing reps trolled nursing homes in order to stuff their programs with Alzheimer’s patients and bill bingo games as group therapy. I didn’t want to play that game. Neither did my therapists. We were honest.

The reward for our righteousness was a low patient census. When you’re a health care marketer, you live and die by the census. Some days we’d have twenty patients, and other days we’d have two. I spent hours languishing in waiting rooms trying to persuade doctors to choose my clinic over others and suffered through countless sales lunches with power-mad nursing home administrators who wanted only to gobble up expense-account-subsidized food. Eventually the low census drove my corporate overlords crazy. By the middle of my second year the powers that be were calling for my head.