Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress

de br a ginsberg

For these Ginsbergs
:
Mel, Rosalind, Maya, Lavander
,
Bodine, Déja, and Blaze
—
with my lov
e

acknowledgments
v
introduction
vii

1.
the luncheonette
1

 


1. 3.
   the back of the house
   45
   

 


2. 4.
   working the fantasy
   69
   

 


3. 5.
   the art of waiting
   105
   

 


4. 6.
   molotov cocktail waitress
   133
   

 


5. 7.
   in the family way
   159
   

 


6. 8.
   a diner in california
   189
   

 


7. 9.
   food and sex
   211
   

 


1. “hello, i’ll be your postfeminist icon this evening”
   241
   

11
.
still waiting
259
epilogue
287
About the Author
Praise
Credits
Cover
Copyright

About the Publisher

On a particularly hot and sticky night in August 1998, I stood in front of the display kitchen in the restaurant where I worked and waited for my food to appear. The cooks, sweating, frantic, and bad-tempered, shot me dirty looks.

“Table Five?” I questioned, smiling. “A lasagna and a spaghetti? Coming soon?” I shot a backward glance at Table Five. They were craning their necks as other waiters walked past their table with steaming plates. They were hungry, their water glasses were empty, and they were starting to get very foul looks on their faces. In the twenty minutes since I’d made their acquaintance, I’d learned that this particular couple were hash
ing out a divorce settlement and, for all intents and purposes, hated each other. I knew that if I didn’t get them their food within five minutes, I was doomed. My tip would disappear. They’d ask to see the manager. There would be an ugly scene. Through no fault of my own, I would become another casualty of their divorce.

The cook muttered something bitter in Spanish. Although I didn’t understand the exact meaning of the words, I hardly needed a translation to figure their intent. A recently hired coworker noticed my despair and shook his head.

“It’s bad tonight,” he said.

“Like every Saturday,” I replied.

“Yeah?” he said. “How long have you been doing this?”

It took me a stunned moment to answer him. I took another look at Table Five. The soon-to-be-ex-husband made eye contact with me and raised his hands expectantly. I smiled and pointed to the kitchen. Turning back to my coworker, I said, “Twenty years. I’ve been doing this for exactly twenty years.”

I watched his mouth drop open and wasn’t sure which one of us was more horrified. My coworker, I realized, had not even been born by the summer of 1978 when I had my first job wait
ing on tables in a luncheonette.

“How old are you?” he asked, baffled.

“Does it matter?” I said, casting another desperate glance at the kitchen. “It’s been twenty years and I’m still waiting.”

The restaurant business has been part of my life since childhood. When I was a kid, both of my parents worked in the restaurants of several Catskill Mountain hotels in upstate New York, my father in the dining room and my mother in the bar. My mother’s stint as a server didn’t last very long at all. By all accounts, including her own, she was the worst cocktail waitress in the history of time. No matter who her customers were, my mother was never comfortable serving other people. Every time she approached a new table, she felt she should be sitting at it instead of waiting on it. Her service reached its nadir one night when a guest ordered a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. My mother placed the bottle and corkscrew on the table, asked the guest, “Can you open this?” and fled from the table. This was basically the end of her career as a waitress of any kind. My father, on the other hand, lasted considerably longer as a waiter.

Every night, he’d come home with stories of the various acts that still played the circuit of Brown’s, The Concord, and Grossinger’s. While most of these showpeople couldn’t really be
considered headliners any longer, I’d hear names I recognized and be moderately entertained.

Ever mindful of the sweet teeth in his family, my father also brought home treats. On Saturday nights, he’d arrive with a vari
ety of confections wrapped in thick white napkins. We regularly sampled and fought over petits fours, chocolates, and gateaus, learning, in the process, how to tell apart the styles of different pastry chefs.

Far more intriguing than the sweets, however, were the sto
ries my father told of the customers and the restaurant staff. After his shifts, he would sit at our big dining room table with my mother, drink coffee until late into the night, and discuss the denizens of this world while I listened avidly. There was Jerry, his demented busboy, who shouted, “Coffee? Coffee? Who wants coffee? Raise your hands.” There was the chef who regu
larly threw ladles of mashed potatoes at upstart waiters. And there were a succession of elderly couples who shared every detail of their lives with my father. The most fascinating charac
ter was Carmen, a cocktail waitress gifted in the art of hair and makeup, who was casually drifting into the more lucrative busi
ness of prostitution.

My father’s tales began to form a colorful quilt in my mind, each story its own square to be called up and viewed at will. Although I never visited any of the dining rooms my father worked in, I envisioned them and the minidramas that happened within them in great detail. My father’s job was certainly a unique one in my peer group. My classmates all had fathers who disappeared into offices and performed nameless, faceless tasks. Not a single one of my friends had a parent who waited on tables for a living. None had heard any stories even remotely similar to the ones my father brought home.

Of course, there was also the money. My father came home with his pockets full of fives, tens, and twenties, which my
mother would smooth out and pack away. Sometimes guests staying at the hotel for a week or longer would tip my father at the end of their stay. In those cases, he would bring home a stash of tiny manila envelopes and scatter them on our kitchen counter. Bulging with cash, these envelopes all had his first name carefully inscribed on the front, testimony to the level of familiarity between him and his customers. My father did quite well indeed. By 1978, he was supporting a family of five children quite comfortably on tips alone. This in itself was something I found quite impressive.

All in all, I viewed the whole concept of waiting tables as exciting, glamorous, and somewhat mysterious. It was a vision that would persist long into my own adulthood. And, although my father’s stint as a waiter didn’t last longer than a few years, he always maintained that it was “honest” work. And, hey, you couldn’t beat the money for the hours you put in. Ultimately, every one of his four daughters would share this view. While my brother has always held table service in the same regard as my mother, my three sisters and I have all supported ourselves wait
ing tables for varying lengths of time (although I still hold the family record for duration).

When my parents rented a luncheonette the summer I turned sixteen, providing me with my first experience waiting tables, I was instantly hooked on the excitement, the hustle, and the money. The rest of the package—exhausted feet, customers bent on denigrating their waitress, sexist boneheaded managers, and occasional misanthropy—would come much later to form a love/hate relationship with what would ultimately become my living.

Perhaps if my father had been a fireman, car salesman, or lawyer, I would never have considered waiting on tables as a source of income, but I suspect I would have been drawn to it regardless. I have been a writer longer than I’ve been a waitress
and, as such, a perpetual student of the human experience. My father’s stories only confirmed what I’d already guessed: that I could only write what I knew and that I would know nothing without experiencing it directly. I wanted my own stories and saw no better way to collect them. This was a belief that has remained true for me even though the novelty of waiting has worn very thin. In fact, this notion is doubtless responsible for the fact that I’ve come back to waiting time and again for two decades.

Over those two decades, I have walked countless miles back and forth and have worn through enough shoes to stuff a land
fill. I have met literally thousands of people, heard as many tales, and witnessed scenes of high drama and wild comedy. I have made many dear friends, men and women I couldn’t have met at any other place but the table. I have even taken several nonwait
ressing jobs offered by people I waited on. Through waiting, I met my son’s father. It was again waiting that enabled me to support and raise my son as a single mother. In all these years of waiting, I have developed self-reliance, resilience, and the ability to manage high levels of stress, all of which have become invalu
able life skills. Truly, there has never been a dull moment at the table. And the stories I have gathered there are colorful, passion
ate, absurd, and intimately human.

It is my turn, now, to share them.

But while all the events and tales in the following pages are absolutely true, my interpretation of them is entirely my own. And while I believe that many of my experiences will be familiar to any reader who has ever waited on tables or eaten in a restau
rant, they are indelibly colored by my own opinions. Therefore, in order to protect the privacy of those who may not share my sensibilities, I have changed the names, identities, and (occa
sionally) locations of all who appear here save for myself and my immediate family. For those who find themselves here in some
fashion, I can only say this: There are some experiences we all must share simply by virtue of being human. Waiting—in what
ever form it takes—is one of them.

My coworker’s innocent question on that Saturday night sparked a flood of memories. In sifting through them I realized that, while still relatively young, I have already lived a very interesting life, due in no small part to the job in question. In truth, I could not have predicted a better result when I first embarked on this journey.

And now, twenty years later, I am able to view the almost certain disaster of Table Five with a well-practiced trick.

I am, during these times, able to send myself into a brief fugue state. During this moment, the timpani of clattering plates and forks, the noise of conversation, yelled commands, espresso machines hissing, meats sizzling, frying, and roasting, and wine
glasses clinking all fade almost to nothing. The restaurant takes on a strange out-of-focus glow and begins moving in slow motion. Time itself halts. Within this pocket, I am able to clear my mind of the fact that Table Six wants an olive, an onion,
and
a twist in his martini, that Table Seven wants the salad
after
the main course, and that I will have to apologize profusely to Table Five when and if their meals arrive. Instead, I know that I will soon be finished with this shift and I will go home with upward of one hundred dollars in cash. In less than two hours, I will be home and able to do whatever I please. As an invaluable bonus, I will also have another experience to add to a rich and varied store.

In the meantime, I’m just waiting.

It’s a very slow Friday night.
I’ve had precious few tables and the evening promises to be a bit of a wash. I check my watch for the tenth time. Only eight-thirty. Although the night drags interminably, I know better than to ask my manager to let me go home.

“You don’t know,” he’ll say, “it could get busy. This is Friday night.”

I know it won’t get busy. The rush is over. Tomorrow he’ll be complaining about skyrocketing labor costs. I fold napkins and wait. The hostess finally saunters over to one of my tables with another deuce. I’ve had nothing but couples sharing soup and salad tonight. My check average is going through the floor. When I cash out, my manager will complain about this too.

I approach the table and sense trouble immediately. Right off the bat, the drink order is problematic.

“I’ll have the cabernet,” she says.

“No, you don’t want that,” he says.

“Yes,” she repeats firmly, “I do.”

“You want the Chianti,” he says, “it’s very good here.”

“I don’t want the Chianti. You can have the Chianti.”

“We’ll have two cabernets,” he says to me, smiling. He acts like he’s trying to pacify her, and she looks pissed off already. Somehow, it’s going to end up being my fault.

By the time I return with the wine, they’re all geared up for a fight.

“I want the special linguini with extra mussels,” she says.

“Instead of the shrimp?” I ask.

“No, I want the shrimp. But I also want extra mussels. Can you do that for me? I don’t care, I’ll pay extra. Whatever it costs.” She’s giving me a steely-eyed stare, just daring me to say no or even waver in my response.

“No problem,” I tell her pointedly. “Would you care for a salad or appetizer?”

“I don’t eat salad,” she says. “Just the mussels. You’re going to bring me the extra mussels, right?”