Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (30 page)

As I had predicted, Adrian soon canceled orders for Dominic’s cakes. Dominic, however, did call me for a date. Ultimately, we ended up seeing each other for almost a year. Dominic had a few talents. He was a very hard worker and a good businessman, and he made a Linzertorte to die for. Unfortunately, he was also pecu
liarly old-fashioned when it came to women and believed in tradi
tional roles for males and females, which bordered on outright sexism. This attitude also led him to assume that I had an imme
diate need to provide Blaze with a father. Dominic was the first man I’d dated since John and I wasn’t even sure if he was the

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right man for me, let alone my son. At any rate, I wasn’t about to let him experiment and audition for fatherhood with Blaze.

“He’s two years old,” Dominic would say. “He shouldn’t have a bottle anymore. He needs to be potty trained. Why don’t you put him in day care?” It was a rude awakening to one aspect of single motherhood and a call for me to put as much distance as possible between myself and a similar situation in the future. This, I assumed, virtually assured that I’d spend a long period outside of any other serious relationship.

Perhaps, when he first met me, Dominic mistook me for an image of some diner waitress he had in his imagination: a poor working girl struggling to raise a kid on her own and desperately in need of a man to fix everything for her. I couldn’t fault him too much for this. For a brief while, I thought I was that waitress, too. In any case, though, I’d been paving my own way for much too long to become the “girl” Dominic was looking for. The end of our relationship, when it came, was not pleasant. Anything started at Hoover’s, it seemed, was destined for failure.

After the local sheriff showed up for a “till tap” to make good on bad debts, Adrian managed, through witchcraft, we all assumed, to sell Hoover’s. The unsuspecting buyer was unaware of the curse on the place and he eliminated popovers from the menu to boot. After accusing Adrian of falsifying the books, the buyer and Adrian actually came to blows one day when Adrian refused to renegotiate the sale. Adrian sued the buyer for assaulting him and won a settlement. He, too, showed up later in a restaurant where I worked and insisted that I wait on him.

“Hey!” he shouted drunkenly, although he wasn’t drunk at all, just mad as a hatter. “See this girl?” He pointed at me. “I taught her everything she knows!”

“Do you
know
that guy?” my manager asked me incredu
lously as I hung my head in abject embarrassment.

“I used to work for him,” I answered.

“That’s a relief,” my manager said. “By the way he was talk
ing to you, I thought maybe you used to date him.”

Hoover’s itself maintained a certain aura of madness and drama that drew customers for quite some time. Without Adrian’s unique brand of insanity, however, it just wasn’t as much fun. Slowly, business died. Today, Hoover’s is no more, having been replaced by an upscale restaurant specializing in designer salads and fresh fish.

As for me, I leaped from the sinking ship as soon as I saw the opportunity. I headed for a new Italian restaurant that arrived in town with a sterling reputation and the promise of big money. Ironically, it was Adrian himself who pointed out this restaurant while it was still under construction.

“See that?” he said one morning. “There’s a big fancy Italian place coming in there. They think they’re going to do so well. I’ve got news for them. They’re never gonna make it in this fucked-up town. Not with their overhead.”

Not surprisingly, he was completely wrong about this.

Desperate to escape the vortex that was Hoover’s, Maya and I both climbed over construction rubble and bits of pink Italian marble to apply and interview at the new place. Once again we took the tag team approach, with one of us interviewing while the other sat with Blaze. These people, I realized, were serious. There were four separate managers conducting interviews and quizzing us on our knowledge of wines, fine dining, and Italian food. They spoke of “teams,” “expansion,” and “opportunity.” It sounded a bit like they wanted to take over the planet rather than open a restaurant, but I didn’t care, I just wanted to be hired. There was a second interview and then a third. All my ref
erences were rigorously checked. Finally, after I’d almost given up hope, I received a call inviting me to “join our team at Baciare.” There would be three weeks of training and testing before the restaurant opened and could I be at the site at ten

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o’clock the next morning to complete the paperwork? I said I’d be there with bells on.

My sister, told that she didn’t have enough experience, was not hired. She was destined to suffer through another nine months of hell at Hoover’s before her release.

Despite its obvious mental tolls, I still look back on my Hoover’s experience with great amusement, even fondness. There was something almost sublime in the insanity of each shift. I also learned a great deal about human psychology and crisis management working at Hoover’s. These were lessons that would stand me in good stead later, in every area of my life. There were other advantages as well. Hoover’s afforded me the ability to start over in a new place with a new child and a new life. Maya and I made enough money there to buy ourselves a car, some furniture, and a little peace of mind.

And there was also something quite beautiful about Hoover’s. Every day I walked outside at least once and stared at the ocean, which was close enough to be practically in my lap. The crazy pink and green curves of Hoover’s provided a perfect frame around the horizon whether it was sunny or stormy, blue or gray. When a smiling waitress and the smell of popovers and fresh coffee were added to this tableau, Hoover’s seemed, however briefly, like a little piece of heaven. Surely, I think now, this is why Hoover’s was always so busy despite the darkness behind its pastel exterior.

After all, everybody loves a diner.

[ ]

Several years ago,
a waiter friend and I rented a video after a shift and went to my house to watch it. After much debate, the film we’d decided on was
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover.
My friend and I settled in on the couch for a comfortable evening. As the tape played, we found ourselves moving closer to the TV, our jaws dropping in amazement at the scenes unfold
ing before our eyes. Filmed in vividly colored detail, the story revolved around characters in a swank restaurant. There were scenes of greed and food, revenge and food, violence and food. Most pervasively, however, there were scenes of that most tanta
lizing of combinations, sex and food. There was sex in the kitchen, sex in the bathroom, sex at the table. My friend and I looked at each other. Although the reality portrayed in the film was clearly bent, we were both thinking the same thing: had the filmmakers visited the restaurant where we both worked? Surely, we thought, they must have.

“You know,” my friend told me with the seriousness of a weighty confession, “I had sex on Table Fifty.”

“Right on the table?” I asked.

“Right on the table.”

“And?”

“Well, the sex wasn’t that great, it was a little rushed, but it makes working there so much easier.”

“And why is that?” I asked.

“Well, every time I see someone seated at that table, I know what happened on it. I know that they don’t know, and some
how just knowing
that
and remembering
it
makes my night go a little smoother—if you know what I mean.”

I thought about this for a minute and then I asked him, “So, who’d you have sex with on Table Fifty?”

“Ah,” he said, “
that
I cannot tell you.”

With few exceptions, the restaurants I’ve worked in over the years have all been breeding grounds for amorous liaisons. There seems to be an almost chemical reaction that occurs when food, alcohol, and heat are combined in an enclosed space with the freewheeling movement of people in a restaurant. More is stimu
lated than just the palate. The call of the wild often seems loud
est in a restaurant, where it is heard by those sitting at the table as well as those waiting on it. For me, one of the most entertain
ing aspects of table service has always been watching the parallel mating dances of staff and patrons. The convergence of these very primal urges creates drama of the highest order and, often, true comedy. It’s an irresistible combination.

Of course, one expects to witness a certain amount of romance from patrons who are out on a date. It’s almost too easy to identify the couples who will be headed to a bedroom as soon as dinner is over. They are holding hands at the table, kiss
ing over the appetizers, whispering in each other’s ears. Waiters and waitresses train themselves to understand body language as carefully as the spoken word. Therefore, we can tell by how close patrons sit to each other, how he touches her arm and pulls out

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her chair, how she feeds him little pieces of chocolate cake, and (the surefire one) how little she eats of her dinner, which way things are headed. For example, a couple on a date early in their relationship will either both have garlic in their meals or request that it be entirely removed from their dishes. There are also telling questions such as “Does it have a lot of bones?” Nobody wants to be seen picking apart a chicken if planning later to strip naked in front of a virtual stranger.

It’s not always this subtle, however. There was the man who gestured to his date and told his waiter, “She says she’ll have sex with me if I get her drunk, so line ’em up.” And there was the woman who received a pearl earring and necklace set from her husband over dinner. Thrilled, she gave him a squeeze and said loudly, “Blow job for you tonight, honey!”

Inevitably, there are couples who seek to embroil their server in their personal sexual politics. Several times, I’ve had the dis
pleasure of serving a table where the man is overtly flirtatious with me with the express purpose of irritating his partner. The desired effect is almost always obtained in these instances. For example, after her husband had commented separately on my eyes, hair, and figure one evening, a wife once told me, “Don’t take him seriously, honey, it’s got nothing to do with you. He’s just trying to piss me off.” To her husband, she added, “Why don’t you leave this poor girl alone?” Her bitter tone and defen
sive body language told me that “poor girl” was quite the oppo
site of the way she viewed me, though. The best a waitress can hope for in this situation is that the couple won’t make up dur
ing the course of the meal, because when that happens the wait
ress always becomes an instant enemy.

Of course, borderline flirtations are not limited to male patrons and waitresses. There are plenty of female customers who ditch their dates and leave waiters with their phone num
bers. And generally, waiters who come on to their customers fare
better than customers who come on to their waitresses. One waiter friend of mine (and all his male coworkers) had great suc
cess with the following trick when he worked in a small Italian restaurant in Alaska. When waiting on a table comprised entirely of women, my friend would offer a free dinner to anyone at the table who was wearing a teddy and was willing to prove it. Without fail, my friend claimed, women unbuttoned their blouses, showed off their lingerie, and ate for free. My friend got to see a number of teddies over six months before finally offend
ing a table containing a mother and daughter.

But this is light fare on the menu of dining dalliance. Some
times passion just can’t be denied and couples in a restaurant will cross all conventional boundaries—overwhelmed by lust or merely the need to be naughty in public—and find a way to con
summate their desires at, under, or near the table. Although I’ve personally witnessed many instances of this kind of trysting, two in particular stand out as shining examples.