Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (3 page)

Besides all of this, I was sadly behind all of my friends in valuable life experiences. Tenth grade had been very eventful for many of my peers. Valerie Grossman, for example, had con
ducted a forbidden affair with a Puerto Rican boyfriend and had actually gone all the way (several times). Christmas vacation found her trotting off to Planned Parenthood for a diaphragm after a much-whispered-about pregnancy scare. The boy I’d spent the whole year pining over was graduating and going into the army. I had a sense of life passing me by as I stood on the sidelines and watched. I needed to catch up. I needed some excitement. I needed a job.

After more nudging, my father struck a sort of compromise. “You want a job?” he said finally. “Well, I’ve got one for you. You can work in the luncheonette.”

The luncheonette he spoke of was located in the middle of Maxman’s Cottages, a bungalow colony. Along with hotels such as The Concord, Grossinger’s, and Kutscher’s, the bungalow colony was something of an institution in our city of Monticello in upstate New York. Most of the summer tenants made the two-hour drive up from the city en famille right after school let out, and settled in. The fathers usually went back down to the city to work during the week and left the wife and kids until the week
end. Some bungalow colonies actually had themes: vegetarian, for example, or Hassidic. Maxman’s (which had seemed to have the sole theme of making as much money as possible from its renters) housed a diner, game room, “casino,” two pools, and a grocery. After Labor Day, the whole thing shut down. The owners of Max
man’s rented the bungalows and the diner out for the summer and stored enough nuts to last them through the frosty winter months. Many of the tenants had been coming up for years, effec
tively transporting their own neighborhoods upstate. While these makeshift communities enjoyed their peak in the 1950s and ’60s, there were still hundreds throughout the Catskills in the late ’70s.

Looking for a change of pace and wanting eventually to open their own restaurant, my parents had decided to rent the lun
cheonette for the summer. It wasn’t quite a “real” job, I reck
oned, since I’d be working for my parents, but it was close enough. The promise of adventure loomed large.

My father was very creative when it came to the menu. He devised daily $1.99 lunch specials for the kids who attended day camp in the community. One day it was a burger, fries, and a soda, another day it was grilled cheese sandwiches and pick
les. After a few weeks, he tried new twists on old themes. After breakfast one morning, he instructed me to make a sign saying, “Today’s Special: Las Vegas Hot Dogs.” What would those be? we all wanted to know. As my father dumped the dogs into the deep fryer instead of cooking them on the flat grill, he pro
claimed, “There you go, Las Vegas Hot Dogs. Come and get ’em.”

The luncheonette had a beautiful old soda fountain that reminded my father of his childhood days in Brooklyn diners, so he taught me and my sister to make lime rickeys and egg creams (which contain neither eggs nor cream). We had an ancient milk-shake machine in which my father made malteds. We served cof
fee and brewed Sanka. After a couple of weeks of trial and error, our basic menu was complete.

It took very little time to become acquainted with the denizens, most of whom were quite friendly and liked the idea of a family running the luncheonette. For me, the local color was made con
siderably brighter by the addition of a large group of teens around my own age. The girls were primarily a catty bunch, concerned mostly with their hair and their tans (with the possible exception of fifteen-year-old Lori Zucker, who gave impromptu seminars on the art of fellatio from one of the luncheonette’s corner booths. “You should really learn how to do it,” she would say, “you won’t believe how much the boy likes it”).

The boys, however, were a different story. To me, they all seemed like incredibly cool guys from the city who knew much more about life than I did. (My main source of information regarding love and romance at that point was
The Thorn Birds,
a book I’d read so many times it fell apart at the spine.) The first few weeks of summer saw old romances reignite and new ones form. I was a totally fresh face in the crowd and was, to my plea
sure, immediately sized up as a potential girlfriend.

My burgeoning popularity with the lads at Maxman’s didn’t mean that their parents were any less demanding when it came to their meals. As one of the luncheonette’s two waitresses (my sister Maya, thirteen at the time, was the other), I was the canary in the coal mine. My father preferred to remain behind the counter or in the kitchen. Nobody, he reckoned, was going to beat up on an innocent little sixteen-year-old. He was mistaken. For me, the luncheonette was a radical introduction into the vagaries of human nature as it pertained to service. Everybody who ate at the lun
cheonette was a regular. Everybody liked their meals just so and none were afraid to voice their opinions.

There was Mr. Grubman, for example, who loudly informed the community at large that he had a bypassed intestine. Mr. Grubman ate as if trying to find a spot in the
Guinness Book of Records,
yet the hefty Mr. Grubman could eat only certain items. Whole meat platters disappeared down his gullet, followed by whole cheese platters. “I need my protein,” Mr. Grubman said. “You got any more of this?” My father was rarely able to keep up with Mr. Grubman’s appetite.

Then there was little Ricky Scalini. Most mornings, Ricky hoisted himself atop a counter stool and, with the worldliness and inflections of a Scorsese character, demanded, “Gimme a bagel and coffee. Cream cheese.” Ricky was four years old. Ricky’s mother, Baby, sometimes accompanied her son. She chain-smoked and drank Tab. My father was anxious to please her because, he
confided, they’d gone to the same high school. “She was a hit
ter,” my father said.

By far the scariest character, however, was Sophie Zucker, grandmother of the sexually precocious Lori. The mountainous Mrs. Zucker ate in the luncheonette almost every day, but she really hit her stride on the weekends.

Saturday nights were our busiest. We worked until three o’clock Sunday morning. The owners of Maxman’s booked fourth-rate Catskill comedians who showed up and gave incredi
bly weak sets. On Saturday nights, the last set ended well after midnight. We served food throughout the night, and after the show ended on a Saturday night, the luncheonette would fill up with a ravenous crowd who ate their way into the wee hours.

Since we were serving dinner while the shows were going on, we got to see the acts only in bits and pieces. One popular joke involved the comedian holding out his hand, fingers splayed. “Pick a finger,” he told an audience member. “Wait,” he continued, shaking his hand vigorously, “let me mix ’em up.” The locals roared with laughter and ate our hamburgers, roast pork on garlic bread (a favorite among Jewish patrons interested in flaunting the laws of kashruth), chickens baked from my mother’s memories, and submarine sandwiches. We served mostly in plastic baskets, but sometimes, on Saturday nights, we used real china.

Sophie Zucker was usually first in line for the roast pork on garlic bread, and every time she ate it, without fail, she called me over. I always approached her table with a sense of dread.

“Duhlink,” she said in heavily accented English, “ask your fuhdder to put a little more meat on the samvich. Please, duhlink, look at dis.” She held the sandwich open. It always seemed as if there was more than enough meat on the sandwich and on the towering Mrs. Zucker to feed a small country of starving children. Yet, somehow, there was never enough meat for Mrs. Zucker.

The first time this happened, I’d carried the sandwich back to my father in the kitchen, where he was sweating over Mr. Grub
man’s platters, and told him that the sandwich didn’t meet Mrs. Zucker’s needs.

“Bullshit,” my father replied, “there’s half a pig on that bread.” He rearranged the sandwich with slightly more pork and sent it back out.

“No, no, duhlink,” Mrs. Zucker said, raising her voice. She went off on a minitirade about how people should get their money’s worth, how she wasn’t going to pay for such a measly sandwich, how she wasn’t going to be taken advantage of. The whole thing became very personal. “You should tell your fuhd
der,” she shouted. “Tell him!”

Mrs. Zucker terrified me and I had no doubt she could snap me in half like a twig had she wanted to. I had more trepidation, however, about facing my father with the sandwich again. But my father knew where his garlic bread was buttered. Mrs. Zucker got more meat on her sandwich that night. But every Sat
urday night until Labor Day, no matter what the sandwich, Mrs. Zucker demanded still more meat.

Serving in the luncheonette was much harder than I’d imag
ined. Pleasing my father was even more difficult. Although I would hesitate to call him a taskmaster, he was a perfectionist. And of course, he was much more exacting with his daughters than he would have been with a nonrelative. There was his atti
tude toward cantaloupes, for example. When he discovered that I’d wrapped a halved cantaloupe and stored it without removing the seeds, he gave me a fifteen-minute lecture on why the seeds should be removed as opposed to simply instructing me to take them out.

“Doesn’t it make sense to take them out?” he asked. “Can’t you see that this melon will rot faster if you leave these seeds in there?”

“I guess,” I said.

“You guess? I don’t think you understand this and I want to know why not, because if you don’t understand, you’re going to put another melon in the fridge with the seeds in and it’s going to go bad and I’m going to be very upset about that because it’s just a waste of good fruit.”

For my father, the luncheonette was not an opportunity to have some summer fun and he wanted to make sure that I knew it was
work
. He wouldn’t tolerate sloppiness of any kind and what
ever we prepared had to go out looking as good as possible, can
taloupes included. My father also hated idle hands. It had taken us two weeks to scour the previous tenant’s dirt from the interior of the luncheonette and shine it up the way my father wanted before we served that first cup of Sanka. After we opened for business, I spent hours polishing the counter and the soda fountain.

We all came home bone weary every night. Our dinner rushes on Friday and Saturday nights were exercises in endurance. My sister wasn’t quite as adept at dealing with the long hours and constant running as my father and I. In fact, we could set our watches by her tearful interludes on Saturday nights. She’d start looking weepy, commence sniffing, and finally hit the wall and burst into tears and we’d know it was 11
P
.
M
. I didn’t mind the late hours, and the running produced an endorphin rush that would later become singularly addictive. It was the tough cus
tomers, the ones who sent back my father’s meals and made my sister cry, who bothered the hell out out of me. Late at night, in the privacy of my room, I complained to my journal. It was too hard, I wrote, and I hated being bitched at and treated like an idiot.

I took complaints very personally, as if they were barbs directed specifically at me and my family. I couldn’t understand why basic civilities seemed to be all but abandoned when people sat down to eat. Between my father’s glowering looks when
things weren’t going smoothly and the lack of respect on the part of our customers, I began to think the summer was going to become more like an extended punishment than the adventure I had hoped for.

There was, however, a single factor that, by the middle of July, changed my entire attitude and made working at the lun
cheonette not only bearable but irresistible. That factor was Steve, the boldest and best looking of Maxman’s eligible boys. I first noticed him when he walked by the luncheonette’s windows, tossing his long hair and a handful of quarters in the air. He sat in a corner booth with a group of other boys, playing cards, plotting strategies to obtain beer, and shooting sidelong glances my way. At first, I was too shy to talk to him and merely smiled when he insisted his hamburgers be very well done and his french fries be “burnt.” When he leaned over the counter and took my hand in his one afternoon, my heart began a crazy flutter.

Of all the strapping youths looking for a summer romance at Maxman’s, Steve was the one who persisted the longest and most insistently in seeking my attention. He sat at the counter at the luncheonette every day, drinking Coke, eating his burnt fries, and cracking wise, until I agreed to take a swim with him on my break. He was a self-proclaimed “bad boy” from Long Island who dazzled me with tales of selling joints on the subway for pocket change. His reputation was only enhanced by Lori Zucker, who informed me, once Steve and I had become an item, “I don’t know how far you go with boys, but let me tell you, if it’s not very far you can forget about Steve.” He had a dimpled chin and wore thick braided gold chains and shirts open to his waist. Like everyone else in the summer of 1978, his hair was feathered and he spent at least a half hour drying and styling it.