Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress

by Ginsberg, Debra

  later and studies the dish of melted ice cream.

  “Is this mine?” he asks the pantry girl. “Why’s it all melted?”

  “Hijo de puta, Gino!” the pantry girl shrieks and runs off a stream of curses in rapid Spanish.

  “You know what?” Frank says, placing the melted ice cream on a liner plate, “I don’t understand a fucking word you’re saying, so I’m just going to take this ice cream and fuck off, but if it comes back, don’t fucking blame me!”

  As Frank delivers his soupy ice cream, telling his table that it’s a special Italian blend and that’s why it’s so soft, Giancarlo walks around the restaurant with a copy of the seating chart in his hand. It is at this time of night that he wields the most power, deciding who will go home and who will stay to close. Several waiters and waitresses make slicing motions with their hands across their necks, imploring to be cut. David wants to go out dancing. Frank is planning to go out with his party of women. Tina begs another busboy to close for Jesus, who says nothing, opting instead to shrug and raise his eyebrows.

  “You two,” Giancarlo says, pointing to Gino and Sarah, “you close tonight.”

  “But I’ve only got two tables left,” Sarah whines.

  “What’s so bad?” says Gino. “We can leave together.”

  The action at the door slows. Waiters and waitresses begin giving their tables to Sarah and Gino. Sarah inherits an angry couple from Tina’s station. They’ve been waiting to order for several minutes while Tina’s been busy trying to arrange her exit with Jesus.

  “I’m so sorry about the delay,” Sarah says to their pouting faces. “Your waitress is leaving and I’ll be taking over now.”

  “Yeah, terrific,” the man says. “Can we just order a bottle of wine already?”

  “Sure,” Sarah says and hurries to the bar to get their Chianti. The bartender, however, is conspicuously absent from his post.

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  “Hey,” Sarah calls out to the empty bar, “I need a bottle of Chianti now.” When nobody appears at the bar, Sarah steals a glance at her unhappy table. She can almost see the smoke rising from their ears. She sneaks behind the bar and rummages around in the wines, unable to find the bottle she needs. Now frantic, she heads off to the wine room, hoping that she’ll be able to find the bottle in question.

  Stumbling into the darkened wine room, she almost trips across the bartender, who is seated in front of the cocktail waitress, who is doing a slow striptease for his pleasure. In the dim light, Sarah can see the outlines of some particularly lovely lingerie.

  “Oh no,” Sarah sighs.

  “Do you mind?” the bartender says, somewhat snappishly.

  The cocktail waitress hurriedly buttons herself up.

  “I don’t believe this,” Sarah says. “Can you hand me a bottle of that Antinori, please? I don’t have time for this.”

  “Why are you so pissed?” the bartender says, reaching behind him and grabbing the bottle of Chianti. “It’s not like you’ve never done anything like this yourself.”

  While he speaks, the cocktail waitress runs from the room. In the flash of light by the doorway, Sarah can see a crimson blush on her cheeks. Gripping the bottle of wine by its neck, Sarah is close behind her.

  “Come on, Sarah,” the bartender pleads to her retreating back, “it was Victoria’s Secret, for god’s sake . . . .”

  Sarah’s couple is fuming by the time she arrives back at the table. “So what did you have to do, press the grapes?” the man asks as she uncorks the wine and pours.

  At his table, Gino is whistling. He is waiting on a party of four who are asking him about steak and veal chops. Gino knows that if they order these items, he will be stuck with them for at least an additional hour.

  “I’m so sorry,” Gino says. “We have only pizza and pasta left.”

  “Whaddya mean?” his customers ask. “You’ve run out of steak? How’s that possible?”

  “Busy night, ragazzi,” Gino says. “But our pizzas are very good.”

  “Yeah? Which one do you recommend?”

  By the time he’s finished with them, Gino has not only convinced his customers to order three pizzas to split between the four of them, he’s also talked them out of appetizers and recommended a place down the street for dessert.

  Frank rounds up everybody who’s left on the floor to go sing happy birthday to his party of wild women, prompting several excuses:

  “I can’t sing.”

  “I’m too busy.”

  “My throat hurts.”

  But Giancarlo is adamant about the singing. “Everybody goes,” he says, “Vai a cantare.” Everybody trudges over to the private dining room. Frank leads, like some sort of parallel universe Pied Piper, holding a piece of tiramisu with a sunken candle sputtering on top. The song, when it comes, is grating and hideously off-key. “Tanti auguri a te,” the waitstaff sings. “Tanti auguri a te. Tanti auguri, carissima, tanti auguri a te.”

  The women clap and screech. In the middle of all this sound and fury, Sarah turns to Gino and whispers in his ear, “You won’t leave without me, will you?”

  Gino finds her hand with his own and lightly runs his fingers across her palm. “Amore mio,” he says. “Of course not.”

  As the restaurant begins to clear out, the temperature within drops by several degrees. Gino and Sarah scramble to feed their last few tables so that they, too, can leave. Sarah’s Chianti couple is considerably happier after receiving their entrees in record time. Gino’s table ravenously slices into three hastily prepared pizzas.

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  The smell of garlic still hangs in the air, but added to it now are the scents of the beach and night-blooming jasmine wafting in from the open doors. Vito sits down at a vacant table for a late dinner and is joined by the chefs and hostesses. Most of the other cooks are sitting in an enclosed space behind the restaurant, smoking and comparing notes on how the night went. Aside from Sarah and Gino, the remaining staff have begun to move in slow motion.

  Tonight there are no last-minute diners. Sarah and Gino finish within minutes of each other and take their paperwork to Vito for his signature. Vito winks at Sarah and tells Gino to get a bottle of champagne from the bar. Gino obliges and brings the bottle to Vito.

  “It’s for you two,” Vito says, winking again. “Go. Have fun.”

  One by one, the rest of the staff leave. Maggie goes home to her husband, Mario to his knife collection. Stefano and Kathy head to an all-night diner. Vito is the last to leave, after shutting down the restaurant’s computer system and turning off the lights.

  In the parking lot, four cooks are sitting on their cars drinking beer. The pantry girl and a prep cook dance a merengue to the music echoing from a boom box on the ground. Vito watches as he unlocks his car and starts the engine. Laughing to himself, he backs out of the parking lot and drives home.

  True, this scenario seems somewhat unbelievable, yet there is virtually no writer’s embellishment in my telling of this tale. And while it was extreme in the quantity and quality of its peccadillos, Baciare was only one of many restaurants that hosted such drama on a nightly basis.

  Until I came to work at Baciare, I’d always accepted an underlying sexual current as part and parcel of restaurant work.

  After all, part of the thrill of my very first waiting job in the luncheonette was that it was inextricably connected to my first romance. Almost all my future waiting jobs confirmed my belief that food, sex, and the restaurant were a combination as established as peanut butter and jelly. But before Baciare, I never sought to figure out why. Now, after years witnessing, and occasionally participating in, scenes of love and lust between the main course and the dessert, I’ve formulated a few theories.

  To begin with, many of the affairs I’ve seen conducted in restaurants were of an illicit nature, with at least one of the participants married or otherwise attached. Low self-esteem aside, I have difficulty believing that many men and women seek out relationship
s destined to be so difficult. I believe, rather, that the attraction restaurant workers so often seem to have for each other stems from the fact that they have similar personalities. As described in detail earlier, servers are a unique breed. They are addicted to a certain element of risk: every night is a bit of a gamble, both monetarily and situationally. They are gregarious: every table is a captive audience, waiting to be entertained, fed, and satisfied. They are creative: the job is literally impossible without the ability to think creatively on one’s feet. They are athletic: not athletes, of course, but the feeble need not apply. And servers seek stimulation of every kind: the restaurant is a constant kaleidoscope of color, sound, taste, scent, and movement. Put a large group of these types together and add the frantic pace of a busy night, and you’re bound to generate a charge or two. But there are other ingredients besides the gathering of kindred spirits that make up the kind of lusty fare so often served in restaurants.

  For one, no matter how large the restaurant, servers are literally on top of each other several times a shift. Physical contact is unavoidable when four people in a small space are vying for the use of one computer or reaching for the same bread basket

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  or climbing over each other to grab their drinks from the bar. Being on the short side, I’ve often been literally overlooked by swiftly moving coworkers and have been bumped, smacked, and pushed. Regardless of whether the contact is accidental or intentional, servers touch constantly and attempting to protect one’s personal space soon becomes futile.

  In addition to being in close proximity with each other’s bodies, servers also freely share their emotions with their coworkers. Because the job is so often tense and stressful, servers, who might be much more reserved and calm outside the restaurant, often vent their anger, frustration, or anxiety at each other. Little things, both negative (“I know you stole that fork from my table, you swine, I hate you, you’re evil . . . ”) and positive (“Thank you so much for taking the food out to Table Ten, I love you, you’re wonderful . . . ”) loom large in the space of a frantic moment. In this way, servers expose themselves to each other in a very fundamental way and become, in every sense, quite close.

  Then, of course, there is the atmosphere. Heat, movement, food, and drink all mix together to form a heady glow and provide perfect kindling for the flames of ardor. This is an irresistible combination for some, who simply get swept away in a tide of sensuality. To put it less poetically, a little slap and tickle in the middle of a busy shift is just plain exciting. Adding to the edginess of it all is the fact that time is limited (one has to make the most of every second), discovery is a strong possibility, and nobody knows your little secret (actually, everybody knows, but the illusion of secrecy is very strong).

  It is my belief that this atmosphere is also absorbed and processed by customers in an unconscious way. The racier the behind-the-scenes activity, therefore, the racier the mood at the table. Sarah’s customer, for example, probably had no idea that Gino had said, “I want to make love with you,” as he walked by her table, but he clearly perceived the tension between the two and it altered his entire mood. Perhaps customers simply feel more comfortable letting go of some of their inhibitions when they sense the currents eddying around them. This was certainly the case at Baciare. For a long time, the restaurant hosted a nonstop party from the back of the house to the front.

  Certainly part of the bacchanalian atmosphere of Baciare was due to the Italian element. All of the managers and at least half of the waitstaff actually hailed from various cities in Italy. In fact, one of the bartenders, not an Italian, often complained that all a prospective employee needed to get hired was a baggage tag from Alitalia Airlines. As a result, the primary language inside Baciare was Italian, spoken almost exclusively by the managers and understood by only a select few. (Although some of my non-Italian coworkers stubbornly refused to attempt even a primitive understanding of this language and insisted on mispronouncing menu items, among other things, I took advantage of what I considered a free education. After only a few months at Baciare, I had a better working knowledge of conversational Italian than of the French I’d studied in school for six years.)

  While the rigorous authenticity of the Italian experience inside the restaurant very quickly led to the formation of Italian and non-Italian camps within the staff, the customers loved everything about it. Some women literally swooned when their Italian waiter spoke to them in his native tongue. A waiter, in fact, could sling the rudest epithets at these customers and receive not only adoring glances, but very healthy tips. My personal favorite among these was the waiter who, at Christmas-time, told his tables, “Buon Natale, e cadi de la scala!” and received gushing thanks all around. Would it have mattered if his customers had known he’d told them “Merry Christmas, and fall down the stairs!”? I think not. After all, he spoke the language of love.

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  The owners and managers of Baciare took full advantage of the ongoing love affair their customers had with all things Italian, including the selection of their own dates from the waiting list. Often as guilty of various indiscretions as their staff, the managers actually encouraged blossoming affairs and followed developments with interest. This free-for-all attitude most certainly contributed to those wild nights on the floor.

  But alas, the course of true lust is often a rocky one. Although the atmosphere at Baciare remained at a feverish pitch for quite some time, there were eventually enough explosive events to cool it considerably. Angry husbands and wives started showing up at the restaurant looking to exact revenge on the lovers of their errant spouses. There were tears, threats, and some very ugly scenes. One wife, for example, almost pulled the hair out of a hostess’s head after mistaking her for the waitress her husband was sleeping with. In the end, more than one marriage was incinerated in the flames of infidelity.

  And unfortunately, sexual desire on the job sometimes leads to sexual harassment. Sadly, many of the waitresses I’ve worked with over the years, myself included, have accepted a certain amount of sexual harassment as an occupational hazard and have fended off advances, comments, and thinly veiled threats that would constitute an instant lawsuit in any other job. But sexual harassment has traditionally been very difficult to prove. For a waitress, especially, filing a complaint of this nature spells the end of her income. To protect themselves, managers and owners won’t fire the waitress but will employ one of the oldest management tricks in the book, which is to schedule the waitress for the worst shifts in the worst stations. Her income will soon be whittled away to virtually nothing, and she will have to quit and move on. Until recently, the attitude about sexual harassment among waitresses I’ve known was grin and bear it or get another job. Nevertheless, the nineties eventually caught up with Baciare, and after a couple of quiet out-of-court settlements, management was forced to rethink its informal “anything goes” philosophy. One manager actually went to the other extreme in his views and threatened to suspend any staff members who were fooling around with each other anywhere within a five-mile radius of the restaurant.

  I worked at Baciare long enough to see an entire turnover of staff, front and back. The tone of the restaurant changed somewhat over this period of time. This is to say that, on a given night, one wouldn’t necessarily find couples consummating their desires in the linen room, dry storage, and the bathroom. Rather, one might only stumble upon the cook and a waitress necking in the stairwell or wait on one couple who refused to order because she was too busy sucking his neck and he was too busy feeling his way under her blouse. So, while it was toned down, there was still plenty of heat at Baciare if one knew where to look. And Baciare, as previously mentioned, was not—is not—an anomaly.

  As a final note, I must mention that not content to rely solely on my own experiences in this particular area, I conducted an informal poll of several waiters and waitresses who have worked in restaurants all over the country. I asked these fellow servers if they th
ought temptation and desire burned just a little brighter in a restaurant, and if they did, could they provide a story or two to back them up? I got more than I bargained for, as every one of these people had several tales to tell. Among these, my favorite came from the very same waiter friend with whom I watched that provocative film so long ago.

  “I’d had a great night at my place,” he told me. “I’d made something like three hundred dollars in tips. It was very late and I wound up at this all-night pancake house. So, I’m talking to my waitress and she’s really cute. I’ve got all this money and I tell her, ‘I’ll give you seventy-five dollars right now if you give me the panties you’re wearing.’ ”

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  My friend paused here to enjoy his memory of the details.

  “Well,” I asked, “what did she do?”

  “She was kind of stuck on the logistics of the thing for a minute,” he said. “She asked me how she was going to give them to me in the middle of the restaurant. So I told her, ‘Haven’t you got to-go boxes here?’ ”

  “And?”

  “And she brought ’em out in a to-go box for me and I gave her the money.”

  “You know,” I told my friend, “only someone who had sex on Table Fifty could get away with something like that.”

  “Yes,” he added, “but I actually ended up seeing this girl seriously for about a year after that. It turned into something. You just never know.”

  Ah, yes. Sex and food. Food and sex. Together, a potent combination. Dinner never tasted so good.

  [ ]

  ten

  “hello, i’ll be your postfeminist icon this evening”