Not Exactly What I Had in Mind

by Roy Blount

  It was the other half of the saucier’s role that Ferrell never warmed to: walking past the tables in a mauve-and-magenta uniform, making snippy remarks to the customers and tossing his head. Intellectually, he knew this was essential in such a fancy place. But in his heart he craved customerhood for himself so fondly that he derived no pleasure from making it unpleasant for the favored few who were able to attain it.

  Then one day the chef keeled over permanently, and as it happened he landed on the sous-chefs, although they had been warned repeatedly not to hover. And poof: Ferrell was entitled to a big white hat and imperious ways.

  Now he was cooking. But not yet dining. He would race through his duties, hop into evening wear, and dash round to the front entrance, only to be told, “Je regrette, mais la kitchen is closed.” Catch-22.

  To make matters worse, the maître d’ would come back to the kitchen and taunt him: “Eh, Chef Ferrell, how come you nevair take a table, eh? Oo-ha-ha. You no like le coo-keeng, eh? Heh-heh-hehhhh.”

  Then one evening, as Ferrell was stirring just the right amounts of cockle-muscle extract, minced mussel cocks, and les petites choses inquiétantes et maladroites de la mer into the bouillabaisse polonaise, he paused, inhaled the bouquet, gazed fondly into the vat, and realized he didn’t need a table. He could eat all the bouillabaisse he wanted. So he did. The whole vat.

  And he left Le Haut Falutin, adopted his saucier (whom he allowed to wear Levi’s and required to be fresh but civil), and opened his own place that is all kitchen: patrons are charged prix fixe (eighty-five dollars, lunch; whatever Ferrell feels like charging, dinner) to wander from pot to pot stirring, inhaling, and tasting.

  Dressing Up Like Michael Jackson

  The bad news: headwaiters are catching on to this one. You’ll have to field a stiff battery of questions to prove that you can talk the way Michael Jackson actually does when he is out with his high-life crowd:

  “Why do you wear that glove?”

  “I got this from Mickey Mouse. Only he has to wear two of them because nobody wants to see mouse fingers.”

  “Are you, in fact, Diana Ross?”

  “No, you’re thinking of Carl Lewis, who is Grace Jones.”

  “Were you just born knowing how to move like that?”

  “No. It’s from high-school football. I was at an inside linebacker slot, see, and this pulling guard came at me, about two hundred thirty pounds and going hunhf-uffa, hunhf-uffa, and I thought to myself, How’m I going to show him I’m bad? So, I did this little spin, you know, um ch’coot’n — wooo — ch’ch’ch’ch’cootn’-pah: unh! And he missed me. And he still does.”

  Lowering Your Expectations

  What is so wrong, really, about a table situated so that the bartender has to be constantly reminded not to forget himself and dry his hands on your dinner companion’s hair? In some parts of the world, people eat bugs.

  Sponge Baths on the Way Over in the Taxi

  Restaurant service personnel are extraordinarily sensitive to what scientists call phewomones: tiny (it goes without saying, tiny, but I mean truly tiny) ionized particles that are given off by the skin and moist membranes of people who are not quality. A recent study showed that whereas the average person cannot sniff out unpalatable people without the aid of visual clues such as wristwatches obviously costing less than $1,500, the average career waiter can do it blindfolded and while eating yesterday’s bait.

  Getting Physical

  Baird Roxie is not particularly built, knows no martial arts, and does not want any trouble. But he can handle himself in a restaurant. When he is welcomed by an icy look, he seizes the headwaiter by the scruff of the neck in such a stringent way that it includes the Adam’s apple. Then in a calm, firm voice he says, “I’m Mr. Roxie and here’s my major credit card, which as you see does not expire until 9/87. When I turn loose of your neck, I’d like you to say hidy graciously to Jennalynn Russet, as fine a woman as you’d ever want to meet. And then I want you to walk us on over to a comfortable table. And then I want you to go tell your sommelier not to come high-nosing over here with a wine list that looks like an album of wallpaper samples but just to bring us some of your house red, which ought to be fine if the house is worth a shit,”

  Baird Roxie always gets good service. It helps to be accompanied by Jennalynn Russet, who is perfectly willing to crouch behind the headwaiter so he can be floored by a slight push on the chest, if necessary.

  Affecting Extreme Nonchalance

  While chewing a toothpick (which suggests that you may have eaten already) and wearing a feather in your hatband, stand out on the restaurant’s doorstep, facing the street. Rock back and forth from heels to toes, contentedly, and hum a tune such as “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time.”

  After a while, the door will open slightly:

  Pretend not to notice.

  It will close.

  Continue to rock and hum.

  The door will open again, slightly wider. An eye will be visible.

  Don’t pay any attention.

  The door will close again.

  Keep on humming and rocking.

  Finally, the door will open enough for the headwaiter to stick his head out, which he will do. In a moment, he will speak:

  “I say.”

  You look around. Regard the headwaiter’s head as if trying to determine whether you have seen it anywhere before. Shake your own head: You haven’t. Face the street again.

  “I say,” says the headwaiter.

  Look around again. “Sorry, stranger, I don’t believe I know you.”

  “Well! I am this establishment’s headwaiter!”

  “That a fact? I’m Corky Severingham, from Lake Waste, Arkansas.” Resume humming. This time the door is slammed. But after a few seconds it opens again.

  “I say! Am I to infer that you are interested in dining at this establishment?”

  “Hm? Oh, no, thanks, I don’t think I’d … Okay.”

  Several people come dashing up the sidewalk. “And this is my wife Pepper and her brother Treat and his wife Rosareece and these four are the babies, they’ll need high chairs, but Treat and Rosareece’s boy Toomey there just needs a bib and a bowl of applesauce, and the same goes for Momma’s aunt Mae April here. Momma couldn’t come herself, she’s got a board meeting back home, but she asked us to bring her some of those real thin crackers. Let’s see — nine, ten, eleven, and take away Momma — that’s ten of us, but we’ll need a table for twelve because we like to have a busboy sit on either side of this batch of little ones here and kind of keep ’em down to an uproar. Now don’t you go rearranging a lot of tables for us; we’ll do that. …”

  Meanwhile there is no way the headwaiter can grab all that many people of different sizes, so at least two-thirds of you will get in. “My good man!” the headwaiter will cry. “We couldn’t possibly accommodate all these people!”

  “Oh. Well. I tell you what we’ll do. Just Pepper and I’ll take a table for two — make it for three. Great-aunt Mae April don’t want to eat anything, but she’d like to sit there and look around. And the rest can all go on down to the Chock Full O’ Nuts — they like that better anyway. Oh, I see Great-aunt Mae April has already found us a table. We don’t even need to bother you. But I appreciate your interest.”

  Going in with a Seeing Eye Dog

  Once I was at a cocktail party when a very successful unsighted stockbroker came in with her dog, which went right over to the coffee table and ate a nice Brie and two dozen bacon-wrapped water chestnuts. No one said anything. Pretty much anything a Seeing Eye dog does, it does quietly, so its master either doesn’t notice or need not admit to noticing, and it can get away with it.

  In a restaurant, the dog will take care of everything. It will silently clamp its jaws on the maître d’s ankle. The maître d’ will hop around and wear an expression of outrage, but if he says anything at all it will probably be no more than “M’sieu! Your dog!”

  “Ah yes,
Shiva,” you say. “I don’t know what I would do without her.”

  Shiva will then lead the headwaiter and you to whatever table she chooses. If people are dining there already — as may well be the case, since a dog prefers a table with food on it — Shiva will seize each diner in turn by the ankle until they all leave. Then she will clean their plates, and both of you will be sitting pretty.

  Just be sure not to cry out “WHAT!?” until someone tells you the size of the check.

  It will be noted that this essay has dealt primarily with fancy restaurants’ first line of defense. That is because, once you have fought your way past the greeter, it is a simple matter to dispel regular waitpersons’ antagonism. You just raise your voice every so often to say “national talent search,” “some lucky unknown,” “we’ve got Meryl and Warren already, that’s not the problem,” and “a new face for the second lead.” Unless this is such a deluxe place that it doesn’t hire show people but only dyspeptic foreign men. In that case you bring along one of those surf-casting reels, a good treble hook, and plenty of line. Eighty-pound test is plenty strong enough, since dyspeptic foreign men seldom jump high enough to bring their entire weight into play.

  But how do you get them close enough to hook them? Well, my friend Jim Seay, the poet, says, “One of the things that separate class from trash is what kind of bait you use.” I like to cast one of Emma’s blueberry muffins. See, the reason waiters in high-dollar places are dyspeptic is that they are never around any good, solid, family-style food that fairly nice people can afford.

  That’s what I meant earlier when I said something about restaurant service personnel eating yesterday’s bait. I meant things on the order of Emma’s blueberry muffins. What did you think I meant? Spring lizards? Hey, restaurant service personnel are human beings. The only reason some of them turn mean is that they have to work in places where everybody just played racquetball with Cap Weinberger.

  I Had to Get into It with a Wrench

  I GOT MYSELF ONE of these talking wrenches. Even though I see it as a bad trend, things taking on the power of speech. Cars talk, cameras talk, even airports talk:

  “This — miracle — electronic — passenger — shuttle — will — be — delayed. Some — person — has — interfered — with — the — proper — closing — of — the — perfectly — calibrated — doors. Unless — that — person — removes — all — portions — of— him — or — herself from — the — doorway — we — will — sit — here — until — every — flight — has — departed. It — is — all — the — same — to — me. This — miracle …”

  Why doesn’t anybody come up with cars, cameras, airports that listen?

  It used to be, you heard from insentient objects only in writing. Sign on a Laundromat washing machine: “I Am Out of Order. Please Use One of My Buddies.” Once I was served a baked potato with a little triangular cardboard notice stuck in it that said, “I Have Been Rubbed, Tubbed, and Scrubbed. You May Eat My Jacket.”

  But we’ve moved on beyond that, today. I understand the National Tuber Council is developing a baked potato, for fern bars, that addresses the diner aloud:

  “Hello. My — name — is — Tatum — and — I — am — your — choice — of— potato — for — the — evening. May — I — suggest — that — the — best — part — of — me — is — my — …”

  Jacket! In a baked potato’s mealy little mouth, at least butter would melt. What kind of person, the potato may sense, would go ahead and eat an entity that says, “You may eat my jacket”? Jimmy Carter on TV was a talking baked potato. Ronald Reagan is a talking siphon (of juices into coffers), ageless, impermeable; and he thrives.

  Machines are calm; they don’t raise their voices; they have no shame. What are you going to do? Yell, “Don’t take that tone with me”? The machine is programmed to reply, “This tone — is — based — upon — thorough — testing. It — is — designed — to — be — ingratiating. If — you — are not — ingratiated — you — are — not — statistically — relevant.”

  And yet I bought a talking wrench.

  I’ll tell you why.

  I can use a little guidance when I’m handling a wrench. Especially when I’m reaching up underneath something at an awkward angle. I get turned around. Straining away at an intractable nut, I stop and think: “Am I just making this tighter?” And once I stop and think, I am lost. Left, right, clockwise, counterclockwise run together like worms in a bucket. And I lie there thinking, in an ever-widening swirl, of all the different ways in which my life needs direction. My heart wrenches. I don’t know which way to turn.

  Then too, I like the word wrench. Good straightforward Anglo-Saxon, sounds like what it means. (In a deep structural, hard-to-hear way, I register the w.) Compare semiconductor. Which is it, then: does it conduct or doesn’t it conduct?

  There is something not just handy but also hand-in-hand about a wrench. How do we stop a mechanical scheme that staggers human scale? We throw a monkey wrench into it. A spanner in the works. Might it be feasible to “turn” (in the counterintelligence sense) a talking wrench?

  At first I just kept the new wrench on top of the refrigerator, and acted naturally around it. When kitchen conversation came round to high technology, I would speak my mind. Then I’d take the wrench down, show it to people. “I respect a good wrench,” I’d say. “Nice heft to it. What kind of heft you think there is to a semiconductor?” I didn’t address the wrench. I was waiting until we had something to talk about.

  Then one day, taking apart the bottom of the dishwasher to find out what was clogging it up, I got into a wheels-within-wheels situation: one thing that loosened in one direction; inside another thing that seemed to loosen in the other direction or at least shouldn’t be loosened until the other thing was loosened, and beneath both things was some other fixture that was threaded into a socket even more profound, and beneath that was probably something that if I ever got down to it (not that I wanted to) would turn the whole kitchen. And all of these things were under viscid water. I groped around in there with the wrench, and got a purchase, and tugged, and nothing happened. And I stopped to think. And here came that old vertigo.

  “Am I going in the wrong direction?” I said out loud.

  “Mfrlg,” said the wrench.

  I disengaged it and brought it up.

  “Flplfph,” it said. “Yeah.”

  “I am? Going in the wrong direction?”

  “If you ask me. Course if you want to go on ahead and start breaking and stripping and binding up things within things within things …”

  “No!” I said. “This is exactly the reason I got … you. I’m always — ”

  “So go the other direction,” the wrench said. “Ain’t but two.”

  “Right,” I said. I stuck the wrench back down in there and felt its jaws catch hold. And I turned the other direction, hard, with faith.

  “Nnnng,” I said.

  “Nnnn-nnng,” said the wrench.

  “Nnnn-nnnng,” I said.

  “Mfrlgph,” said the wrench.

  I extricated it.

  “You realize,” the wrench went on after a moment; “there’s such a thing as a talking dishwasher. With talking components. As it is, I got nobody to check anything out with down there.”

  “I’d be afraid a talking dishwasher would sing,” I said. “‘Swish, swash, wushy wishes, / Swish, swash, do the dishes.’ I don’t want that.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, that’s up to you. All I know is, we are going the right way.”

  “Hey, that’s a big help,” I said. “Shall we try it again?”

  And we did.

  “Nnnnng,” I went. “Nnnnn-ng.”

  “Nnnnn-nn-nnnnn-nng,” went the wrench, and then the dishwasher, for all that it was nonspeaking, said:

  “Flllllpppplplpl … pllp.”

  And all the viscid water ran out.

  “Fwew,” said the wrench.

  “Hey,” I exclaimed. “That went
fine. Yes sir. Now I can feel around and clear out whatever was the obstruction. Fish head or something.”

  What I found was two pieces of glass, a swatch of peach skin, half a raw green bean, and something I couldn’t identify at first.

  “Oh. You know what I think this is?” I said. “A chicken tendon.”

  “You get ready to tighten back up,” the wrench said, “let me know.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s do it.” And we did.

  “Well!” I said. “Listen, I’ve enjoyed working with you. You, uh, want to take a break?”

  No response.

  So I sat there on the kitchen floor with the wrench.

  And then I just came on out with it:

  “I’ve … always had problems with machines.”

  “Uh-huh,” said the wrench after a moment.

  “And, uh, with … tools.”

  “Uh-huh,” said the wrench.

  “With any kind of—I don’t know what the collective term would be. I don’t want to say ‘gadget.’ Some people would say … ‘gizmo,’ quote-unquote.”

  If the wrench took offense, it gave no sign.

  “But I’m not out to pigeonhole. Is there any insight you could offer me?”

  “I don’t get into that,” said the wrench.

  “Oh. Uh-huh. But I was just thinking. Let me tell you a story. I used to work on a newspaper with a guy named Dick Link. And he used to write these great short editorials. We called them Linklets.”

  Wrench didn’t say anything.

  “Give you an example. In the first paragraph, Link takes note that a special state commission on education has just weighed in with a report. The commission declares that it has pinpointed a major problem: there are too many teachers in the state who aren’t up to par. Right? Here is Link’s second and final paragraph: