I celebrated my twentieth birthday in the endless state of Kansas under a blistering June sun. The car Ray was driving had no tape deck and received only AM radio stations. For hours, all we heard were songs by Toto (appropriately enough), which drove Ray nearly insane. To this day, I can’t hear “Rosanna” without having an instant vision of the parched grasses and endless highway running through Kansas. By the time Missouri came into view, I had been without sleep for three days and my hallucinations were interfering with my ability to read the map or even sustain a conversation. I looked up at one point and saw an entire chorus line of prunes in martini glasses dancing across the shimmering horizon.
When Ray and I crossed the state line into New York two days later, we had run out of things to say to each other that wouldn’t lead to an immediate argument. Somewhere in Pennsylvania, he had descended into knight-in-shining-armor mode and was convinced that he’d saved me from a fate worse than death. I was, in his mind, totally ungrateful for all his efforts. What’s more, he had taken to grilling me about my feelings for his friend, a topic that even in my altered state I was totally unwilling to discuss. It was probably mean-spirited on my part, but I felt he was overwhelmed by thoughts of his own significance in the grand scheme of things.
As a way of centering myself and deflecting the conversation away from the two of us, I asked Ray to drive into my old hometown of Monticello. I wanted to drive by my old high school and my old house. I wanted to swing by Maxman’s and see if the luncheonette was still there. Ray had always been a bit of a sucker for nostalgia, so he consulted the map and fearlessly drove into my past. I was surprised to see that so much of the terrain was unchanged. My old house was still exactly where we’d left it, the only difference being that there was a stranger in front of it mowing the lawn instead of my father. Ray kept uncharacteristically quiet while I looked at the house and let myself drown in memories. We were less successful when we looked for the luncheonette. Whether we were on the wrong road or it really was gone I wasn’t sure, but Maxman’s seemed to have vanished, Brigadoon-like, into the mists of time. Although I thanked Ray for taking the time to visit, I found the whole detour a bit depressing, as if too much of my life was impermanent and subject to the illusion of memory.
As we headed to Massachusetts and Ray began his transformation into the role of prodigal son, I was sure of almost nothing. I didn’t know then that I would find his family pleasant but extremely strange. Nor did I have the foresight to predict that within days I would become so suddenly homesick and fearful of becoming beholden to this family that I would take the last of my money and board yet another bus back to Portland. I couldn’t know that I would spend five days on this bus, during which I would have plenty of time to consider the mistakes I had made in the previous weeks and weigh the damages against the rewards.
I did, however, come to a realization that had been building since I first set foot in the Yellowstone kitchen. I felt that at twenty years old, I still knew nothing and had experienced very little of what I considered real life. I hadn’t been able to rely on myself long enough to stick out my job at Yellowstone. I saw my inability to turn the experience into a successful adventure as something of a failure. Therefore, I reckoned, I was something of a failure. It was a difficult conclusion to come to at an age when the state of one’s self is usually of paramount importance. Now more than ever, it seemed, my future consisted of a series of tales waiting to be told. And as was usual for me, I was in a terrific hurry to get on with it. Certainly one of the supreme ironies in my life has been my lack of patience. And although I didn’t fully understand it at the time, learning to wait gracefully was a lesson that, for me, had only just begun.
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four
working the fantasy
There are many questions I am able to answer with ease. “What do you recommend this evening?” for example, or “Which one of your chardonnays is the most buttery?” (as if even 1 percent of those asking know what buttery means in any context other than toast). I can even come up with quick responses to other, more complicated questions such as “What is the meaning of life?” (which is what customers always say when I ask them if they have any questions and neglect to add “about the menu”). There is one question, however, that still gives me trouble: “What do you do?”
Sometimes this question is asked by a customer who follows it with “I mean, when you’re not here,” as if serving them is not really “doing” anything. Strangely enough, most of the waiters and waitresses I’ve worked with share this point of view. Most of them feel that it’s not quite socially acceptable to say “I’m a waiter.” Usually the response is more like “Well, I’m an actor/artist/model/ teacher/musician....” They never seem able to admit that waiting is actually their profession. It’s a temporary living at best.
In my experience, those who have never waited tables sometimes express a strange sort of fascination when I tell them that I work in a restaurant. Comments have ranged from “I’ll bet you meet lots of rich single men doing that” to “How can you stand to have people order you around?” It’s not that much of a stretch to assume that this job isn’t considered one to aspire to.
Perhaps this is why “a real job” is commonly accepted restaurant slang for anything other than waiting tables.
I have fallen prey to the same sort of social shiftiness in my career as a waitress. When I enrolled my son in school for the first time, for example, I was required to fill out an emergency information card that asked for my occupation. I debated long before I finally admitted to being a “food server.” I was convinced that my son’s teachers would have a rather low opinion of a single mother who worked as a waitress, especially since his school district was rather a tony one. I was actually waiting on most of the parents of his peers on a regular basis.
Lately, though, I’ve been able to get around this quandary. These days, although it’s still the most profitable, waitressing is just one of many jobs I hold. Others include reviewing books for my local newspaper, freelance editing, and working in a special program for preschool-age children. In conversation, I usually list these others as what I “do” and then add “and I also work in a restaurant.” My hope is that by the time I get to the end of this list, whoever I’m talking to will be so dazzled by the myriad of other more socially acceptable jobs I have that they won’t even notice the waitressing angle.
On the other hand, I sometimes throw the waitressing out first just to see what kind of reaction I get. After twenty years serving the public, I’ve developed a sixth sense about the social standards of various people. I know that some of the people I encounter in my neighborhood, through my son’s school, or even wait on consider restaurant work low class—something that immediately places me in a different social stratum. On the flip side, there are people who automatically feel more comfortable with me as one of the working class when they learn that I’m a waitress. My years of waiting tables are solely responsible for my ability to tell who is who.
Aside from the social repercussions, there are several reasons why table service isn’t uppermost on the list of desirable prospective jobs. For one, there are rarely medical or retirement benefits. For another, it gets more difficult to cope with the physical demands of the job after a certain number of years. And depending on the restaurant, there is always the chance you will be replaced by a younger, firmer version of yourself. There is no possibility of advancement, either, unless one is trying to get into management (and few restaurant managers make more than waiters in good restaurants). For all these reasons, waiters and waitresses are primarily a transient bunch, and in my experience I’ve found that with few exceptions they are not only waiting on tables but waiting to get out of the business. They are putting themselves through school or making a few extra bucks on the side. They are in the arts or trying to open their own businesses. Occasionally, they are waiting to be “discovered.” Even the elite few who do consider themselves professional waiters or waitr
esses (called “lifers” in the business) usually have something else on the side that they’re waiting for, such as the dream of opening their own restaurant.
Although I’d waited tables at Maxman’s, worked at Yellowstone, and even made a few sandwiches in the campus coffee shop, I didn’t begin what I considered an adult version of this waiting game until after I graduated from college. My sense of accomplishment at having attained a diploma was tempered by the knowledge that I would shortly have to start paying off four years of student loans and the sneaking suspicion that, after what I considered a grueling term of study, I had very little in the way of marketable skills. Somehow, I couldn’t see that my degree was going to open any doors I’d care to walk through.
I should explain.
I had graduated with a B.A. in English literature, one of those majors that, in my mind, guaranteed that I could either hold my own at a cocktail party or go on to graduate school. Most of my classmates were going the latter route, having considered themselves pre-law, pre-med, or pre-education. For me, a life of academia was never in the cards. I’d always thought of my college education as being pre–real life. Over the course of four years, I’d been able to cover my tuition with a complicated combination of scholarships, grants, and loans. Nevertheless, I had been completely responsible for my own upkeep throughout and took full advantage of every work-study program that was thrown my way. Almost all of my classmates came from families that could afford to send their kids to this exclusive and pricey college. Yet, for whatever reason, most of my peers attempted to disguise the fact that they were covered financially if for some reason they couldn’t scrape enough money together to buy books one semester or purchase new skis or throw a party with five kegs of beer. This was an attitude that bothered me in a subtle but insistent way. It seemed to me inherently dishonest and a little spoiled. The thought of racking up more loans and spending more years in this type of rarefied atmosphere was a bit repugnant.
Besides all of this, I had just finished writing my first novel. As far as I was concerned, I was officially a writer. Not only was I sure of this, but I wanted to write what I wanted to write—an attitude that had already caused some consternation among my professors. Being a writer came with certain responsibilities, to my mind. For one, I was under the impression (in an only vaguely conscious way) that suffering was a key element in the development of a decent writer. I figured I wasn’t going to experience any true suffering (at least the kind I considered valuable) in graduate school. Nor, I figured, was I going to find it in an office job, which seemed like the logical next step.
I had spent the previous two months working for a temporary agency, moving from one office to another, and I considered the life of an office drone a fate worse than death. My days were spent crossing and uncrossing my legs, digging papers out of files, calling strangers on the phone who didn’t want to speak to me, waiting for lunch breaks, coffee breaks, any break from the stifling routine. And the office gossip was the most deadening of all: petty sniping, humorless jokes, and grade school–style flirtations. I was offered a couple of permanent positions at entry-level wages, but I ran from them as fast as I could. My plan was to get lucky and sell my novel. At some point, I would be discovered for the big talent I knew I was. In the meantime, I had to have heat, electricity, and a phone (there were limits to the amount of suffering I felt I needed). To finance this life I’d designed for myself, I would most certainly have to work somewhere.
Waitressing still had the same glitzy appeal for me then as it had when I was sixteen. Only this time I wasn’t going to settle for a coffee shop or a Petit Morsel. I would go for the big time, I reckoned, and make a lot of money.
There were other considerations as well. I wanted to meet people who were living real lives. Up to that point in time, I’d always felt like an observer of my own life. It was as if I were just moving my piece around a game board. The outcome had already been determined and I was just watching—and wait-ing—to see how it turned out. Waiting tables was a way to become part of what I’d always seen as the outside world. And, of course, it would only be temporary.
With all of this in mind, I put my diploma away and applied for a job I saw advertised in the paper. The Dining Room of a Prestigious Club, the ad said, needed Waitresses with at least Two Years of Fine Dining Experience. I felt absolutely no qualms bluffing about my experience. None of the restaurants I had worked in could be remotely considered fine dining. But I had a college degree, after all. I figured I didn’t have to know brain surgery to open a bottle of wine (and, actually, one doesn’t have to know brain surgery to open a bottle of wine, but, as I soon learned, one really does have to know how to open a bottle of wine in order to get that cork out with anything resembling grace).
I was called in for an interview with Carol, the overbearing matriarch who ran the Dining Room. I could tell immediately that Carol hated me on sight. Moreover, I suspected she knew that my résumé was mostly fakery. Nevertheless, she brought the food and beverage manager over to complete the interview. The F and B man was Hans, a strange Swiss import, brought in recently (I later found out) to improve the Dining Room’s bottom line. Hans interviewed my breasts, apparently finding them quite qualified. I was hired.
I had the great good fortune to be assigned to a waiter named Deane on my first training shift. Although Deane was less than pleased to have a new waitress follow him around (almost every waiter hates training new hires, as it is nearly impossible to maintain the type of internal rhythm necessary to get through a shift when you have to stop and explain everything to another person who is usually hanging about like a spare part), he was happy to provide me with a quick dossier on everyone on the waitstaff. There was a group of older waitresses, he told me, who had been working at the club for years and had a steady stream of regulars. These women would never accept me, Deane went on, as they were generally unwilling to deal with any kind of change in the landscape of their work. They had names from another era (Thelma, Agnes, Ethel) and hairstyles to match. Most of them worked breakfast and lunch, Deane told me, but a few held the coveted dinner shifts, which were very difficult to get. (In any restaurant, dinners are the money shifts, with Friday and Saturday nights being the best among them. Waiters who are unable or unwilling to move from lunches—the purgatorial training shifts—to dinners are considered inept or simply insane.)
For the rest, Deane explained, there were a coterie of older waiters (most of whom, he claimed, were gay like himself ) mixed with younger women like myself who had been hired by Hans. I began to get a sense of what Hans felt was a better “bottom line.”
Deane also took it upon himself to warn me that the diners I would wait on were all members of the club and that there was “a reason they are called members, if you know what I mean.” They were very wealthy, old (sometimes ancient, Deane stressed), bitter, racist, sexist, and generally in ill health. So many of them had dentures, he said, that they were forced to gum their steaks to death. “Tapioca,” Deane said, “is a very popular item here.” Because I was so new to the job and eager to make a good impression, I purposely disregarded this bit of information, storing it for later use should I need it.
Finally, Deane showed me around the labyrinthine corridors and rooms that made up the club’s dining facilities. The main dining room was made up of two vast rooms decorated in muted institutional beiges and olives and separated by a shortened wall. The bus stations (where coffee, trays, dishes, silverware, and frantic food servers were kept) were hidden from the diner’s view behind similar walls. Two ballroom-size banquet rooms were located just off the main dining room on one side. On the other side, a short passage led to the Men’s Bar, a darkly paneled atavism containing leather chairs and plenty of ashtrays. Although women were allowed in the Men’s Bar, they were forbidden to enter its subdivision, the Card Room. Cocktail waitresses were the only females permitted to grace the Card Room, where relics of another age (the Civil War, maybe) smoked, drank highballs, pla
yed poker, and feebly grabbed at the backsides of said cocktail waitresses. Oddly, there was actually a set of waitresses, I learned, who preferred to work the Card Room.
The kitchen, which serviced all these areas, was very clean, very white, and large enough to get lost in. All the chefs were meticulously attired and all boasted formal training. (A couple of them, I noticed, were quite good-looking and one of them was a dead ringer for Bruce Springsteen. Deane informed me that “Bruce” was in the middle of a hot affair with a married banquet waitress and that this was the scandal du jour.) Obeying the usual rule of thumb, however, the chefs more or less detested the waitstaff with few exceptions.
Contributing to the whole Upstairs, Downstairs feel of the club were the stringent rules that all food and beverage employees were required to follow. We had regulation uniforms and shoes (which were hideous in every way), which we were to wear only in the Dining Room. We had to enter the club not only by a separate entrance but by a separate street, following a long corridor connecting two buildings. We were not to be seen in street clothes anywhere near the dining rooms. Thus, we were all assigned a space in a locker room to change. There were specifications for hair length (above the shoulder or tied back for women, very short for men), nail polish (forbidden), facial hair (moustaches only for men), and earrings (posts only). We were provided with one meal per shift, but it had to be eaten near the locker rooms, in a staff dining area far away from the Dining Room. We were not permitted to enter the club for any reason other than work.
Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress Page 8