So, once again, I decided to leave the restaurant. This time, however, I did so assuming that, sooner or later, I’d be back. I looked at it more as a sabbatical this time and less as an escape from a trap I’d gotten myself entangled in. I had no illusions that I was going off to become some kind of literary star. In fact, my time floating in and around the book business had shown me that authors who became rich and famous from their writing were rare birds indeed. The concept of making a living from my writing alone was one I still couldn’t wrap my mind around.
My last shift was lacking in any kind of fanfare. It was such a nonevent that I had to remind my manager to prepare my separation papers at the end of the shift so that I could receive my last
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paycheck. Nobody was particularly sad to see me go, although some were extremely envious. (There is always that whiff of parole in the air when a fellow server “gets out.”) Perhaps they thought I’d be back soon. Had they given voice to that thought, I wouldn’t have disagreed with them. The rate of recidivism in servers is pretty high, after all.
What actually struck me about that last shift, though, was not leaving at the end of it but arriving for work some five hours earlier. I had come up in the service elevator like I usually did and tarried behind the restaurant in the few minutes before my shift began. Back there with me were a couple of cooks sitting on overturned milk cartons, smoking and inspecting their splattered aprons. There was a busboy eating the staff meal with his hands (all the forks were still dirty because the dishwashers were on a break) and the bartender, also smoking, stocking liquor for the night ahead from the outside storage unit. I buttoned my shirt collar and straightened my tie. These were the same motions I’d been going through for twenty years and I did them without thinking. After I donned the jacket I worked in, I checked my pockets for the night’s essentials: lipstick, wine opener, order pad, pen, mints, and a dollar’s worth of loose change. I was joined by another waiter who, after an hour on shift, was already taking a cigarette break.
“What’s it like in there?” I asked him.
“Slow,” he said, shrugging. “Nothing yet. The book looks good, though. Should be a busy night.”
“It’s my last night,” I told him.
“Oh yeah?” he answered. “Cool.”
“I’m working with you tonight, chapparita,” the busboy said through mouthfuls of chicken and gestured toward me with a greasy finger. “We’re making good money.”
“Okay,” I told him. “Fine with me.” I applied the night’s first coat of lipstick using the blade on my wine opener as a mirror and checked my watch. The waiter stamped out his cigarette on the ground, exhaled the last of the smoke in his lungs, and followed me into the kitchen.
I punched my time card and all five of my senses sharpened to the immediate assault. Behind the rumbling sound of the dishwasher I could hear knives hitting meat and marble. A radio was tuned to the Allman Brothers’ “Whipping Post” and the souschef was singing along loudly and off-key. There was water running and waiters screaming for silverware. The air crackled with curses in four different languages. I smelled coffee, steaming vegetables, and garlic. A busboy rushed past me with an armful of fresh bread and dusted me with a fine layer of flour. As I was brushing the white crumbs from my black pants, a sweating waitress came into view. It was only five o’clock, I noted, and already she had splotches of coffee and red wine on her jacket. Not a good sign.
“Oh, good, you’re here,” she said, slightly out of breath. “Can you take table forty-two? They were seated a while ago but I haven’t been able to get to them because I’ve been slammed, but they’re in your station anyway. They need bread. And they look like they’re ready to order. And they’re probably a little pissed because nobody’s been there yet but it’s not my fault.” She disappeared in a whirl of bread, butter, and olive oil.
I sliced bread for table forty-two and felt a familiar surge of adrenaline through my body. In moments, I’d be out onstage again, performing my own show. Although I had a clue about how I’d be greeted by table forty-two, I had no idea what the rest of the night would bring. After twenty years, the anticipation of going out to that uncertain audience still caused a butterfly flit. There wasn’t anything in the world quite like that moment of expectation, I realized. Every night, at least for one moment, I got to be sixteen again, with everything fresh and the promise of excitement just outside the swinging doors. As I prepared the bread basket for my first table, I knew I would miss that moment
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for as long as I was off the floor. It was a little epiphany but an important one, nonetheless. One can’t really ask for more at the beginning of a dinner shift with a station already full and at least one table in a bad mood.
I finished work on Waiting shortly after that last shift, but the book wasn’t published for a year after that. In the interim, I had plenty of time to work myself into a full-scale panic over the kind of reception it would receive. After all, there’s nothing like anticipation to fuel paranoia. Once again, it was authenticity that I worried about. I didn’t expect that any reader would have had the exact same experiences as I since Waiting is essentially a memoir, but I hoped that those experiences would echo those of the reader. In addition, I really wanted other servers to be able to relate to what I had written about restaurants and a life spent waiting.
As soon as it was published, Waiting proved to be an entirely entertaining experience with a dash of the absurd thrown in for good measure. Just before the book was released, I taped a segment for the game show To Tell the Truth. For those not in the know, this is a game where a celebrity panel questions three people, one who is telling the truth about her/himself and two impostors who are lying as effectively as possible. As my two impostors attempted to absorb my personality during the course of the day, we watched a parade come and go in sets of three. As well as we three waitresses who had written a book, there were three women who lived with a horse and three naked cowboys who sang country music. There were three plus-size models in lingerie, three female boxers, and three policemen who played in a rock band. In the spirit of the game, nobody would admit to who was real and who was an impostor. As Debra #1, Debra #3, and I were riding the elevator down to the studio, we were accosted by three medieval knights in full regalia.
“Ah, you waitresses,” one of them sneered convincingly, “you never claim any of your tips.”
“Yes, we do,” said Debra #1 who was, in reality, a housewife who had never waited tables. “We claim all of our tips.”
“Get out of here,” the knight said, “you know you don’t claim tips.”
“And I suppose medieval knights do?” I said.
“You said it!” cried Debra #3, a comedienne who had actually waited tables. “What do these riffraff know?”
Soon after this, I taped a short segment for another television show. The interview was held in a restaurant and the reporter, who had not read Waiting, kept badgering me to admit that all waitresses spit in their customers’ food. When I wouldn’t, the reporter sighed heavily and, off camera, asked me to get him a fresh glass of lime soda. “This one has little black spots floating in it,” he said disgustedly, gesturing at his glass. As I approached the kitchen to refill his glass, a waitress leaned over to me and whispered, “This is exactly the kind of person who gets his food spit on regularly.”
I heard from very few of my old coworkers when Waiting finally hit bookstore shelves, but those who did write to me seemed to like the book very much. I heard from my friend who’d had sex on table fifty and who had once asked his waitress to place her panties in a to-go container. “I read the ‘Food and Sex’ chapter first,” he wrote. “Boy, did that ever bring back memories. This book has to be more fun to read for those of us who were there. It makes me realize how many friends I’ve left behind over the years.”
Shortly after this, I received an e-mail from a waitress I’d worked with who’d gone through both her pregnan
cies at the table. “Thank you for writing about what I’ve been trying to do with my family and with waiting all these years,” she said.
A waiter I’d worked with for years and complained to endlessly about the kickback-taking hostess Angela, who never seated tables in my section but filled those of the waiters around
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me, wrote me a letter and said, “The book was really funny. I wish you had thrown some bile Angela’s way. After all, she probably cost you about five thousand per year.” He was in a position to tell. Most of my loss was his gain!
By far the biggest response to Waiting, however, came from people I had never worked with and never met but who felt immediately familiar with me, my family, and, especially, the restaurants I wrote about in the book. Some servers wrote to me saying they were sure of the identities of the restaurants I mentioned and named a few of their best guesses. I did a guest spot on a local radio show and one of the producers told me breathlessly, “That thing with the spoons . . . I thought my restaurant was the only place that never served spoons with coffee!”
Many of the interviews I did for Waiting in both print and radio began with the interviewer stating that he or she had waited on tables for a number of years. All remembered the experience vividly and a few of the interviews turned into chat sessions where we shared war stories and laughed about the foibles of human nature. And when I made appearances for book signings and readings, all of those who attended were either servers themselves, had waited tables at one time or another, or had relatives who waited on tables. One gentleman asked me to sign three copies of Waiting, one for each of his waitress daughters. Another purchased copies for all of the waitstaff at the restaurant where he was the manager. And a third asked Maya and Blaze (who I considered my entourage and who came with me to as many engagements as possible) to sign his copy of Waiting as well.
There were a couple of responses from waitresses that I found quite humbling. One Seattle waitress wrote to me and told me that she had been burned out and completely sick of her job until she read Waiting. “I did not know how badly I needed a fresh perspective until I read your book,” she wrote. “You helped me to remember that although I may not have a ‘real job’ I certainly have a real life.” I met the second waitress at a book signing in New York City. “I bought a copy of your book,” she said, “and all the waitresses I work with bought a copy, too. It’s our bible.”
Everything about the response I received to Waiting and the tour and interviews I did to promote it was fun, intriguing, and rewarding. It was like working a particularly profitable and pleasant shift with a huge staff of interesting and intelligent people. I heard a whole new batch of stories that could have easily happened at some of the places I’d worked: For example, a man who asked where the television was located because he’d read in a dining guide that the restaurant offered “game in season”—and a woman who ordered “the corkage” (the fee the restaurant charges to open wine the customer brings in) complete with French pronunciation, mind you, because it seemed like the most reasonably priced item on the menu.
What pleased me the most about the response I received, though, was that both servers and nonservers alike could relate to my experiences. Indeed, there was a commonality to those experiences that even I hadn’t seen the full scope of when I wrote Waiting. When I read the letters and e-mails, and shared stories with people at signings, I felt that I had managed, at least in some way, to write authentically about those twenty years at the table. For that, I was not just happy but grateful.
Of course, there have been detractors as well (Nothing’s ever perfect, is it?). I tried not to take the criticism I received too much to heart, especially when it was based on a “I didn’t like it and I don’t like her” kind of feeling. After countless appearances at tables where, no matter what I did, I simply could not please my customers, I had developed a slightly thicker skin. At least, I realized that sometimes it’s just about chemistry. There will never be a way of pleasing everybody. There was one criticism, however, that I feel compelled to answer. There were a few com
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ments stating that I seemed defensive and negative about the profession of table service in Waiting and that I felt the need to justify my years as a waitress. In one sense, this is true. I still believe that, despite the large numbers of men and women who make their living in this profession and despite the proliferation of restaurants of every kind in all parts of the country, waiting tables does not have the aura of respectability found in other jobs—even those within the restaurant itself. Perhaps this is because the job is considered unskilled—something that anybody can do—unlike, for example, the profession of chef.
While I was writing this book, in fact, and in the months following its publication, I noticed that chefs were becoming a new breed of celebrity on the landscape. Various chefs have become iconic figures for a large slice of the public, filling out a territory once occupied by very few. Chefs now have their own TV shows, bestselling books, and films about their lives. Their restaurants have become destinations on vacations, and the language and style of cooking has become its own cottage kitchen culture. Is this a profession to aspire to? Yes, indeed. But one would be hard-pressed to uncover a celebrity waitress in this revered kitchen culture. Indeed, I don’t believe we’ll ever see the day that we choose to travel to a restaurant because of the national reputation of its servers. I don’t disagree that chefs have a job that requires both skill and talent, yet I do believe that the job of server (at least if the job is done well) requires quite a high level of skill as well. The fact that I’ve rarely seen this acknowledged in any meaningful way over my years at the table may account for some defensiveness.
As to the charge of negativity, I have to plead innocence. Despite its many difficult moments, waitressing has served me very well indeed. I could never have spent twenty years in a job I hated. The flexibility and kaleidoscopic range of experiences I found waiting tables allowed me the time and the material with which to write. More important, it allowed me to live comfortably while raising a child as a single parent. Really, could I have asked for much more than this? Should it turn out that I can’t make a living from my writing alone, waiting tables is one of very few jobs I would consider taking. And this brings me back to the real end of this story.
I have not returned to the table since the publication of Waiting. This is not necessarily because I haven’t wanted to but because I haven’t yet had to. Other writing assignments have come since I completed the book and I’ve been able to support myself as a writer at least for the time being. I can speculate endlessly about the future but time has taught me that this is an amateurish exercise at best. Recently, my father (a real restaurateur at heart) began developing a concept for another new restaurant. I am quite sure that, as we have in the past, my entire family will in some form or another be involved in this project. (“What about Blaze?” my father asks. “Surely he’ll be needing a job soon.”) Whether I end up at the soda fountain again or scratching out notes on an order pad, I can rest assured that, in some fashion, I will be waiting. I’ve learned that there really isn’t a true end to waiting. There is only the beginning of what comes next.
About the Author
Debra Ginsberg is the author of Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress and Raising Blaze: Bringing Up an Extraordinary Son in an Ordinary World. She is a graduate of Reed College and a contributor to NPR’s “All Things Considered” and the San Diego Union-Tribune Books section.
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waiting
“Ginsberg’s book successfully weaves examples from her twenty years as a waitress with explorations of the sociopolitical implications of the American class structure. Her triumph, in this book, is that she shows us how the beautiful and the base coexist. That tension is what makes the job, and the book, so compelling.”
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nbsp; —P or tland Oregonian
“A lively and insightful look into restaurants. . . . Ginsberg is such a charming and talented writer.”
—San Fr ancisco Chr onicle
“Ginsberg writes positively but not Pollyannaishly and has told an attractive story about coping with a life that has been different than what she expected.”
—Ne w Y o r k Times Book R e vie w
“As this account shows, there’s a lot of life in the waiting game.”
—Business W eek
“This book is more than a saga about workplace woes. The better story is the one in which Ginsberg relives her personal struggle, waiting for her life to ‘happen.’ ”
—Associated Press
“Funny and ultimately satisfying.”
—Enter tainment W eekly
“[Ginsberg’s] poignant, gently written stories of waitressing are metaphors for life.”
—Dallas Morning Ne ws
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