Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress

by Ginsberg, Debra

  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.

  [ ]

  nine

  food and sex

  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 unfolding 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 tantalizing 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 somehow 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 stimulated than just the palate. The call of the wild often seems loudest 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 entertaining 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, kissing 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 displeasure 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 defensive body language told me that “poor girl” was quite the opposite 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 during the course of the meal, because when that happens the waitress 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 numbers. 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 success 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 offending a table containing a mother and daughter.

  But this is light fare on the menu of dining dalliance. Sometimes 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 consummate 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.

  The first happened on a sultry summer evening. I was waiting on a couple who were seated in a dim section of the open air patio. I had already delivered drinks to the table and I approached them to take their dinner order. The male half of the couple looked a little flushed as I stood before them. The woman, sitting beside him with one hand below the tablecloth and the other casually holding a glass of wine, had a sly smile on her face.

  “Do you have any questions about the menu,” I asked, “or are you ready to order?”

  “I have a couple of questions,” the woman said. She began moving her hand under the table in a rhythmic motion as she spoke and the man leaned in closer to the table, looking mildly uncomfortable. “Do any of your entrees come with salads, or is everything à la carte?”

  “Everything is à la carte,” I said. “But we do have several salads and appetizers to start.”

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  �
�Great,” she said and began moving her hand a little faster. Her date began breathing heavily, his face reddening into a shade of crimson. “And can I get this pasta without oil?” She pointed to an item with her free hand.

  “Sure,” I said, wanting desperately to leave the table and whatever unseen acts were progressing beneath it.

  “Oh, good,” she said. “Well, I’ll have that, then, and why don’t you bring me one of the house salads?”

  “OK,” I said. “And what can I bring for you?” I asked her date, although I knew full well he was getting everything he needed and more.

  “Aah, uhnn . . .” he replied.

  “You know what?” the woman interrupted, without ever breaking the rhythm of her hand motion. “Why don’t you just bring him what I’m having? That’ll be fine.”

  “Great,” I said. “Can I bring you anything else?”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling broadly, “extra napkins, please.”

  The second encounter, at the same restaurant, involved a woman who was a regular patron and who had definitely had too much to drink. After groping her date at the bar, which is where she’d picked him up, she disappeared with him to the back of the restaurant, where they ended up in the ladies’ room. They might have really made a night of it had a particular waitress not needed to relieve herself. The waitress came out reporting that the two were going at it full tilt in one of the stalls, complete with groaning, moaning, and the sound of zippers going up and down.

  “So what did you do?” we asked her.

  “Well, I really had to pee,” the waitress said, “so I used the other stall.”

  “You mean they’re still doing it?” we asked.

  “I think so,” she told us.

  That information was pretty much all that was needed to turn the ladies’ room into an instant attraction. Every waiter and waitress on the floor headed over to the bathroom and listened while a busboy held the door open. The waitress hadn’t lied. The couple were still quite involved judging by the sounds they were making and the tangling of their feet visible beneath the stall door.

  Eventually, our eloquence-challenged manager was forced to go to the bathroom and break it up.

  “What I am supposed to say?” he sighed.

  “Why don’t you try using a stick?” one waiter offered helpfully. “Sometimes that works with dogs.”

  “Sing ‘That’s Amore,’ ” offered another.

  “But what they are doing really? Do I have to go there? I am a man and it is the ladies’ room.”

  “Yes,” we chimed in a gleeful chorus, “you have to go.”

  Shaking his head and muttering at the vagaries of fate, the manager reluctantly entered the bathroom and, quite politely, knocked on the stall door.

  “Hello?” he called. “Can you come out of there, please?”

  “Can you give us a minute?” the woman said, sounding somewhat annoyed.

  “No, you must come out now. This is a public place.” After repeating this two or three times, the manager, who felt he had gone above and beyond the call of duty, left the bathroom and sat down heavily at a vacant table, still shaking his head and blushing furiously. The couple exited the restaurant through the back door a few minutes later.

  What drives certain people to turn their table into a makeshift motel room? Aside from the fact that the above-mentioned couples were seriously lacking in any kind of paranoia, part of the appeal seems to be the built-in audience in a restaurant. The woman in the first scenario was clearly carrying on for my benefit as well as her date’s. As for couple number two, it’s not as if they couldn’t hear a crowd of people snickering by the bathroom

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  door. The fact that everybody knew what was going on added an irresistible naughtiness, making the encounters much more exciting.

  In the face of these public displays of “affection,” the attitude of the waiters and waitresses I’ve worked with is generally one of amusement. Occasionally, someone will take a moral high road (“Really, can’t they wait until they get home?”), but the feeling is usually that if people want to make fools of themselves in public, so be it as long as they tip well. Besides, the staff usually have much more pressing issues with which to concern themselves—their own affairs, for example.

  Before coming to work at Baciare, I’d seen plenty of affairs behind the scenes in various restaurants and been part of a few myself. As far as I was concerned, a restaurant without some kind of ongoing soap opera was an anomaly. But no restaurant ever came close to approximating the kind of steamy, volatile passion I saw at Baciare, which also won points for the sheer creativity of its staff in finding places and time to fulfill their desires. Within the first few months of its operation, this restaurant had as much of a reputation for its “scene” as for its food. Weekend nights, especially, became festivals of consumption on every level. The word orgy often sprang to mind. There were so many pairings that it soon became impossible to keep current with the various players. On any given night, there were trysts planned in the kitchen and consummated in the linen room, kisses stolen at the bar and on the cocktail patio, relationships starting and marriages ending. All of this heat made for an explosive atmosphere, and almost everybody got into the act, from the managers to the busboys. But perhaps the best way to describe what went on is to provide an illustration, the “dish,” if you will, from the menu of an average night.

  Consider the scene: It’s a Saturday evening in early summer. The sun hangs low over the ocean, coloring the water with a million blue diamonds. The restaurant, which has a prime view of the Pacific and the lightly swaying palm trees along the beach, prepares for a busy dinner. In the kitchen, a prep cook chops carrots, zucchini, and red new potatoes. Another ruthlessly hammers several pounds of steak into tenderness.

  Behind a cage, the two dishwashers take their meal break. Because he can’t find a clean fork, one dishwasher is eating a caesar salad with a steak knife. Very carefully, he spears the lettuce on the tip of the knife and slowly places it in his mouth. The other dishwasher has given up on silverware altogether and is eating chicken with his hands.

  Tonight there is rabbit on the menu, so one of the line cooks is in the kitchen stuffing several rabbits with rosemary and garlic before he ties them to the rotisserie for their final ride. After the rabbits come the chickens, whole and stuffed to bursting with herbs and still more garlic.

  In another corner of the kitchen, the sous chef, Mario, cuts an entire Pacific salmon into fillets. Using a swordlike knife from his own personal collection, Mario expertly slices the three-foot salmon in half and plucks the bones from its pink flesh. Diminutive and intense, Mario works fast and says little. He looks up from his task only when he hears the sound of the time clock punching the staffers in and out. His bright blue eyes scan the kitchen quickly to see who has come on shift and then, not finding the one they’re searching for, drop back down to the fish.

  Stefano, the executive chef, consults with the pantry cooks on the state of the desserts. He watches as they sprinkle cocoa powder liberally over the trays of fresh tiramisu and inspects a tray of the same that has seen better days. Although he leans in toward the dessert as if he’s actually going to do something, Stefano rarely touches the food. Most nights his chef’s whites

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  remain spotless, which, considering that the kitchen averages five hundred dinners a night, is quite a feat.

  In a tiny office off the kitchen, the managers have their daily conference, which basically entails sitting around, gossiping to each other in Italian, and drinking several demitasses of espresso. They insist on at least an hour alone to do this without interruption from any staff members. Rome might burn to the ground and still there they would be, blithely fiddling away.

  The last two members of the lunch crew prepare to leave. They look bedraggled and tired and stand in the kitchen staring into space, gnawing on discarded crusts lying around the bread station.

  “When’s
this torture gonna be over?” one says to the other.

  “Five minutes,” responds the other, checking his watch. “And I don’t care if the openers show up late, I’m leaving. Fuck ’em.”

  As he speaks, the night crew begins arriving for work. These waiters and waitresses are showered, fresh, clean, and perfumed.

  I must make a brief note about style here as it pertains to waiting. Waiters and waitresses don’t get much leeway in this area when they are required to wear a uniform, so some become quite creative in finding ways to make the most of their physical attributes. In this restaurant, the uniforms were designed with old Italian waiters in mind and consisted of a jacket, pants, and tie. One waitress put darts in her work jackets so that they tailored her torso. Combined with her skintight black pants, this made her look like some sort of futuristic cyberbabe on assignment from the future. A less outrageous touch employed by various waitresses involved wearing a black bra under the white shirt so that the design of the undergarment was just visible enough for the imagination to run wild.

  Waitresses also got creative with hair design and a variety of sparkly clips. Some of the waiters spent quite a bit of time on their hair, too, making liberal use of gels and sprays. Although facial hair was highly discouraged, some waiters experimented with sculpted goatees, moustaches, and sideburns.

  Makeup, as Belinda had once shown me, took on a whole new meaning as well. Every waitress carried lipstick in her jacket pocket and reapplied it throughout the night, using butter knives as makeshift mirrors.

  And of course, we all wore earrings of every imaginable design. I began experimenting with earrings early in my waitressing career. I found that if I wore fish earrings, I would invariably sell more fish, earrings in the shape of grapes or bottles equaled greater sales of wine, earrings in the shape of pasta— yes, I actually own a pair—were always noticed and invariably spurred orders for pasta.