Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress

by Ginsberg, Debra

  Chefs and cooks are an interesting breed. They work in a controlled frenzy, often producing mass quantities of food with individual specifications for each dish. They have a small space and a limited time frame in which to operate. They are responsible for producing food that is not merely edible but tantalizing and attractive. And they do all of this, literally, in the fire. I have worked with very few real chefs who didn’t consider what they did an art form and who weren’t truly disturbed if they turned out plates that were obviously below par. But most chefs receive very few accolades. They can’t stroll around gathering compliments from the guests who eat their art. Instead, a chef has only the server as a link between him (or, rarely, her) and his “public.” Unfortunately, servers are often too busy with their own problems (usually that their food is coming out too late) to care about the chef ’s efforts. In many cases, the chef is correct in assuming he is underappreciated. More often than not, I’ve seen a chef place a particularly beautiful dish on the line only to have the waitress cart it off without so much as a smile to acknowledge his efforts. Clashes between the chef and his crew and the waitstaff are therefore routine.

  So it was no surprise that while there were some internecine wars among the cooks, they were united on one point: they hated the waitstaff. Waiters and waitresses were considered money-grubbing scum who had no clue to how hard the kitchen worked for them. In my long career as a waitress, I have seen variations on this theme but have never experienced its absence, whether the chef was a talented and experienced artist or a third-rate cook. At any rate, the cook’s level of expertise matters not; if he wants to, he will make a waitress’s life hell and no amount of skill on her part will save her. On the flip side, a waitress who gets on the cook’s good side will invariably experience less stress and make a lot more money. I saw ample evidence of this at Yellowstone and have never forgotten it.

  For as depressed as I was over my own job, I felt a deep, unmitigated pity for the waiters and waitresses, many of whom had no prior experience in a dining room. From my vantage point in the pantry, I watched them slam through the kitchen doors, frantic and sweating:

  “Where’s my oatmeal?”

  “No, no, I wanted over easy, not scrambled!”

  “Anybody seen my toast!?”

  “I can’t find the Thousand Island dressing!”

  Full trays of food were dropped regularly. Many waitresses broke into tears on a daily basis.

  As befitting our lowly station, we kept pretty quiet in the pantry, but the cooks were relentless, torturing the waitstaff at any opportunity. They were generally a scary lot, hardened by their service at the hotel. Singularly unfriendly and crude beyond anyone’s expectations, these men made a game out of ignoring the waiters and harassing the waitresses. One popular trick (a crowd pleaser to this day) involved putting up a thermonuclear plate on the line and waiting for the waiter to touch it barehanded. Invariably, after the waiter shrieked in pain, the cook would smile and say, “Careful, it’s hot.”

  The cooks called the servers by number as the dishes came up, often delaying delivery of a particular order until the frenzied waitress gave up waiting for her food to come up and headed out to the dining room to apologize for the lateness of a meal. The moment her back reached the door, the cooks called her number and then berated her for not arriving at the line sooner. Server number nine, a lissome beauty from Tennessee and a particularly slow waitress, experienced this maneuver several times. In the middle of the lunch rush one day, her orders began stacking up and dying slowly in the window.

  “Number Nine, pick up,” a cook called. After a few minutes, he repeated the call. “Anyone seen number nine?” As if they’d preplanned it, all the cooks (and there were several behind the line) launched into a version of the Beatles’ “Revolution Number 9,” repeating, “Number Nine, Number Nine, Number Nine. . . .”

  Number Nine never picked up her food. She had left the dining room, the park, and the state—the first of many to flee.

  Of course, the cooks were not immune to the call of nature and many of them were wolfishly on the make. More than once, I walked into the cavernous cold storage unit and found a cook rubbing pelvises with a waitress. This, too, was a scenario I would see duplicated in various forms in the years to come.

  The waitress-cook combination, however, is one of the few that allows the front of the house to fraternize freely with the back of the house. The waitstaff are part of their own unique power structure, one that resembles the feudal pyramids of medieval times. At the bottom of this pyramid are the busboys. Busboys have a symbiotic relationship with their servers. In a full-service restaurant, a waitress cannot perform her job without her handy slave cleaning her tables, delivering bread, and refilling water glasses. On the other hand, the busboy cannot make any kind of decent night’s wage if his waitress’s tables tip badly due to slow or inattentive service.

  Hosts and hostesses are a cut above busboys. In some restaurants, the host or hostess is given a considerable amount of power by virtue of the fact that he or she controls the reservation book, the holy grail of the dining room. The hostess is the first person to greet the guest and the first to make an impression. A hostess can “get you in” at the table you want at the time you want. A hostess can also present a waiter with a section full of deuces or a section full of large parties. Sometimes, power corrupts. Although this was not the case at Yellowstone, I would work at a restaurant many years later that was almost controlled by a cartel of cash-hungry hostesses. These lovely ladies took tips at the door from guests wanting specific tables and actual kickbacks from waiters desiring profitable parties. I’d spent years listening to my father complain about kickbacks in the hotel restaurants where he worked, and I refused to knuckle under. As a result, for several months I received whatever was left over after the prime tables had been seated. No amount of complaining or accusing helped my situation, even though there were plenty of other servers in the same position. The hostesses denied everything up and down, and management backed them up (management, it turned out, was actually having affairs with the hostesses, but that’s another story).

  Servers are in the middle of the dining room pyramid and take up most of it. Often, they are the only connection between the guest and his food. Therefore, they alone deal simultaneously with the front and back of the house. Servers, too, are responsible for controlling the wild variables everywhere in between: disgruntled busboys, rapacious hostesses, hungry guests, surly chefs, and profit-minded managers, just to name a few.

  Managers and owners make up the top of the dining room power structure. As I’ve already pointed out, salaried middle managers often make less money than the servers they police, leading to resentment and abuses of their power. It’s very easy for a manager to impose punitive measures on a server without ever being held accountable. The schedule is key. Failing to comply with a particular manager’s sense of subordination can guarantee a week of lunch shifts or, worse, brunch. A week of such shifts can easily cut a server’s income in half. Regardless of whether the manager is also the owner or just one of many supervisors, however, he or she is likely to have an eye on cash flow. Customer service is always important but must lead to financial gain for the restaurant. The last thing on a manager’s mind is how well the server is doing, monetarily or otherwise.

  This may all seem self-explanatory or, possibly, irrelevant to the average diner. But consider the following scenario. You arrive in a restaurant and are seated immediately. Right next to the rest room. Your waitress arrives at the table promptly to take your drink order, but you wait an interminable time for your bread and water. Your salads arrive quickly, but you grow old waiting for your entrees, which, when they arrive, are only lukewarm. You complain to a manager you see walking by your table and he apologizes profusely. Your waitress is replaced by a waiter who brings a you a free dessert but seems harried and overburdened. Your dining experience is ultimately not a good one. Here are some of the possible reasons wh
y.

  The hostess who seated you is saving a better table for a guest who has already slipped her a twenty-dollar bill for the privilege. Your waitress is at odds with her busboy, who feels she stiffed him the last time they worked together, so he’s not bending over backward to help any of her tables. Stressed out by this fact, your waitress complains in the kitchen that everything takes too long. The chef responds by holding up her tickets or neglecting to tell her when her food is ready. The manager hears your complaints and fears you’ll never be back to sink more money into the restaurant, so he removes the offensive waitress from your table and substitutes a waiter who already has too many tables because he kicked back to the hostess earlier and she’s seated his entire section with parties of six. This waiter can’t be bothered with you and your free dessert. In fact, the manager has told him how unhappy you are and he’s sure you won’t be tipping well.

  The structure has slipped. The network has become unbalanced. Everybody suffers.

  Despite my intentions to make the best of it, I hated everything about Yellowstone. My work in the pantry could only be described as drudgery. I worked from 5 A.M. until 2 P.M. five days a week and loathed every minute of it, shrimp and all. As waiters and waitresses dropped out (the high attrition rate was something the orientation packet didn’t mention), I learned that I could move “up” and join their ranks, but I opted to stay in my designated area. If possible, the waitstaff was even more miserable than I was. What’s more, since they didn’t exactly rake in the cash, they were worse off financially.

  I was moved out of the kitchen occasionally to serve breakfast from behind a hot buffet. One Sunday morning, I watched a large group of foreign tourists file into the dining room with cameras. Before they brought their plates up to be served, they all stood and took several photos of me and my pantry mate as we stood behind steaming trays of hash browns and scrambled eggs. My pantry mate turned to me as the flashbulbs snapped and shook her head in disbelief. “Oh. My. God,” she said.

  “Oh, honey,” a waitress said, walking by, “this happens all the time in here.”

  Aside from Susie, whom I rarely saw, I made no friends. Despite the fact that Yellowstone was the ultimate melting pot, employing people from every state in the union, it seemed like a sociology experiment gone horribly wrong. Employees formed into cliques, seeking out others from their home state. A class structure in miniature appeared within weeks of the summer season, based on geographic region, race, and level of education. There was absolutely no sense of commonality aside from the fact that nobody seemed to be having a good time.

  I called home whenever possible and complained bitterly. My parents were unsympathetic. Stick it out, they told me. I had several long conversations with Ray, who was now looking a lot better than he had a few weeks earlier. In fact, I was starting to wonder what had possessed me to leave him in the first place. After smugly reminding me that he knew I was too soft to make it at Yellowstone, he told me that he was planning to drive from Oregon to Massachusetts, where his parents lived, and he’d be happy to come pick me up along the way. I was very tempted and began weighing my options.

  To pass the time when I wasn’t working, I did what everybody else did to fill the hours—I drank. Because of the altitude, it was easy to get drunk with very little effort, so I drank silly cocktails such as Amaretto Sours and, since I was so often hungry, lingered over the garnish. To balance my lack of machismo, I bought a cowboy hat and wore it into the hotel bar. Most of the time, I sat at the bar by myself and talked to whatever bartender happened to be on shift. Sometimes, though, I just sat and watched the tourists, who seemed to have come from points other than Earth.

  Any notion I might have had of visiting anywhere as a tourist perished at Yellowstone. As if big Hawaiian shirts combined with cowboy hats weren’t bad enough, visitors felt compelled to call attention to themselves in an astonishing variety of ways. Like employees, guests were cautioned to respect the free-roaming wildlife around the park. Respect, however, was last on the list of some of the idiots I saw. I watched with horror one day as a woman actually kicked a bison to get it to stand up and fit into a photo her husband was taking. Still another tourist crammed his camera into the face of a moose who, it turned out, was guarding her young. Extremely unhappy with the intrusion, the moose charged the tourist right out of the village. In the dining room, waiters regularly got requests for elk burgers or bison steak.

  “Doncha have any of that? What kind of a place is this?”

  “Oh, mama,” one waitress sang, “don’t let yer babies grow up to be tourists . . . ”

  During my tenure there, I left the confines of Lakeshore exactly twice. Once was to go to dinner with Susie and her politician fiancé, who had flown in from Washington, D.C., to make sure she was all right. Susie insisted that I come with the two of them to a restaurant he claimed was “the best in Montana.” Thus, we drove for hours in his rented car to Pray, Montana (a town so named for the plethora of clasped hands adorning just about everything), and ate chocolate-covered strawberries in a chalet-style restaurant with tuxedo service. We were literally blinded by a furious blizzard on the way back to the park. It was early June.

  “What kind of godforsaken wilderness is this, anyway?” Susie’s fiancé demanded.

  “I didn’t ask you to come here,” Susie snapped.

  “I wouldn’t have had to come here if you hadn’t run away,” he retorted, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

  The two of them then commenced arguing about their relationship while I pictured myself as a statistic. Summer kill, perhaps.

  The second outing came after I’d more or less made up my mind to leave Yellowstone as soon as possible. I decided I needed to take at least one hike through the wilderness, since it was certainly the last time I’d ever have the opportunity. One of my pantry mates and I, along with her roommate and a guy who was looking to be anybody’s boyfriend, set out on what was supposed to be a day hike through some of the prettiest country in the park. Like everything else at Yellowstone, the hike turned into the type of disaster one usually refers to later as “a learning experience.” The boyfriend wannabe had decided to take control of our direction, stating that he was an experienced hiker and, well, a man, after all. Foolishly, we let him lead us way off our designated course. On the way to nowhere, we passed yet another boneyard. This time I knelt down and touched a skull on the ground.

  “Can you tell what animal this comes from?” I asked Boyfriend, who examined it carefully.

  “It seems to have the specific markings of a Lakeshore kitchen worker,” he said, deadpan.

  Bones soon gave way to animal prints in the earth.

  “Do you think these are fresh?” my pantry mate asked tentatively. As we looked at each other, trying to decide whether the droppings we were standing in came from bears or bison, a powerful thunderstorm broke over our heads. As rain pelted down on us we realized that our metal-frame packs were the highest points around. If we managed to escape the bears, Boyfriend pointed out, we would most likely be electrocuted. The four of us then squeezed into a two-man tent and proceeded to drink the three bottles of wine that my pantry mate had the foresight to bring, reckoning that if we were going to perish in the wilderness, we were going down with smiles on our faces. In the tent, Boyfriend got assigned to me by default as my pantry mate and her roommate soon started making out with each other on their twelve inches of space. Shrugging at fate and giggling hopelessly after the last wine bottle was emptied, Boyfriend and I fell asleep wrapped in a damp embrace.

  The next morning, still alive but extremely hung over, we became hopelessly lost hiking out and managed to walk an extra fifteen miles through bear country before we reached the main road at sunset. All four of us bent down and kissed the macadam.

  Ray arrived in Yellowstone three days later, in the middle of the night. I worked my scheduled shift until 2 P.M. the next day and then walked into the office. A woman behind a gray metal desk looked u
p from a stack of ancient-looking files and exhaled a lungful of menthol cigarette smoke in my direction. She was wearing a cowboy hat. The plastic shingle on her desk advertised not her name but her department: Personnel.

  “Help you?” she said.

  “I’ve decided to leave the park,” I replied.

  “That’s too bad.” It was quite obvious that she’d said these same words many, many times. “When were you thinking of going?”

  “Now,” I told her.

  When I got back to my room, Ray was rested and ready to go. “Are you sure you want to come?” he asked, knowing full well what my answer would be.

  “Just drive me out of here,” I said.

  I had lasted four weeks at Yellowstone and come away with two hundred dollars, a cowboy hat, and a strong desire never to see the inside of another bar as long as I lived. As we left the park behind and I watched the Grand Tetons come into view, I felt exhilarated, as if I’d pulled off an amazing escape. I also felt strangely guilty.

  My journey across the country with Ray took almost four days. It was a trip punctuated by truck stop waitresses and hallucinations. Sometimes the two were interchangeable.

  It was my job to plan our route with the aid of several maps that Ray had brought along. This is how I learned my United States geography. Wyoming led into Colorado, which led into Kansas and then to Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio. . . . Until we got to Missouri, all I could talk about was my Yellowstone experience, attempting to process it in my own mind before it became forever distorted by memory. Ray was still smarting over the fact that he hadn’t been hired and was uninterested in my tales. He had one question: “Did you sleep with anyone while you were there?” and once that was answered to his satisfaction, he stopped listening, preferring instead to dwell on the state of our relationship and whether or not it was going to last into the following year.