Unfortunately, I didn’t do drugs and there was only one straight waiter at Mariella, Pete, and he had a girlfriend. Although that did not stop us from smashing ourselves together one night on the street outside an after-hours bar where we and eight or so of our homosexual brethren had adjourned for a post-shift sousing. That night Pete and I were drawn together in that age-old, time-tested fashion called the Process of Elimination.
Sometime during my first summer at Mariella an English guy named Matt showed up and promptly became the object of one of my three or four life’s great obsessions. An attractive man with an English accent is wonderful thing. Even the Boys wanted a piece of the action. Matt and I liked each other a lot very quickly and almost had something going and then everyone started teasing us and we became very self-conscious and nothing happened, which, of course, ensured him a place in my psyche until the twelfth of never. At the end of the summer Matt returned to London. I actually hunted the guy down in his sister’s Shepherd’s Bush restaurant a year later, while pretending I had come to London to visit a friend. He took me driving around on a motorcycle and we made out like fiends and then he left on holiday with his mates. A year after that, I was working the bar tables at Mariella and looked out the double glass doors and he was standing there holding a bicycle. I went outside and he pushed me against the building wall and we kissed like we were dying and then he pedaled away to go on holiday with his mates. I guess we weren’t going to get married.
Over the years waiters, managers, and chefs came and went with startling frequency, a reflection of the whims of the owners, of the AIDS epidemic, and of show business. When the national tour of Beauty and the Beast on Ice calls, you go. But despite the ever-revolving door, there was an almost instant camaraderie among us. We were quick to accept new staff, providing they were competent, knew the lyrics to at least five Sondheim songs, and could survive a mandatory hazing period which consisted of being sent into the basement of the restaurant swathed in garbage bags to clean the pestilent onion-ring-batter machine, even though such a machine did not exist. “Keep looking,” we would call down. It also helped if you could speak with a foreign accent. Doing Meryl Streep speaking with a foreign accent was particularly impressive.
Every night we put on our waiter costumes and our efficient-waiter smiles and we went out there and tried to make people happy enough to tip us 20 percent. And between taking orders, delivering food, and avoiding Mariella, who nightly could be found teetering about the restaurant alternatingly sucking up to celebrities and venting her spleen, we convened in the waiters’ pantry and made fun of everyone and everything in sight. There was a highly entertaining, though short-lived, staff newsletter called Eat the Press, chronicling the exploits of various waiters and managers and customers. It was a saucy publication and after two volumes was quashed by our humorless employers. Being a waiter at Mariella was as close as I have ever come to fulfilling the obligations of my vaguely socialist heritage. Isn’t that what young socialists did? Take orders from the bourgeoisie and then gather in tetchy clumps to make coffee and compose propaganda? At Mariella, I was among the proletariat, a worker bee. Insurgent. Or maybe just insolent.
Here is how to be a good waiter, which means getting large tips: always give an opinion when asked. The curry is better than the lamb chops. The snapper is so-so but the halibut is delicious. People love when you tell them not to have something. It inspires trust. Shake your head conspiratorially when they ask about the osso buco. That’s it. The rest is common sense. Be nice but not intrusive, be relaxed but let them know you’re in control. Get them stinking drunk.
One of the many pitfalls of working in a restaurant is that eventually you will wait on your peers. Or people who had been your peers before they became successful bankers and you became a waiter. First, there will be the requisite “Hi!” “Hi!” “How are you!?” “What are you doing?!” (What am I doing? I think it’s pretty clear: Good evening, my parents spent fifty thousand dollars on my education, would you like some more bread?) After the initial pleasantries are dispensed with, you will embarrass everyone with “Let me tell you about our specials.” Hopefully the food runner will deliver the food so you save yourself the agony of “Enjoy your meal.” You must, however, check up on them, refill their water glasses, and, noticing their empty wineglasses, ask, “Another bottle?,” to which they will sheepishly shake their heads no, sorry not to be spending more money at your table. The episode will deteriorate at a fairly even pace, through dessert and the proffering of the check, until, finally, during the good-byes, someone enthusiastically pronounces you Neat! for being stalwart enough to wait tables while pursuing your pathetic dream.
Another pitfall is waiting on celebrities, which is inevitable if you work in a “happening” New York restaurant. It is very hard to strike the right note between I know who you are and I don’t care who you are. And they, in turn, are either apologetic for being celebrities and fall over themselves proving they are not jerks, or they are jerks.
Most often, though, you will wait on people who expect you to contribute to their overall happiness and well-being, or make them forget about their crappy day, or their stinky marriage, or the fact that their mothers didn’t love them enough, and who will behave badly if you disappoint them or will behave badly because that is all they know how to do. At Mariella, in the eighties, most of the customers were either hyped-up Wall Streeters flailing money, or neighborhood book publishers on long lunches because enemies of Salman Rushdie were threatening to blow up their offices, or dissatisfied women with recent face-lifts. I could always tell when a woman had had a face-lift because when I came to the table to take her order she’d look surprised to see me, as if even though I was obviously her waitress she didn’t think I’d show up. She’d look surprised when I brought her a drink, as if she’d forgotten she’d ordered it. She’d look surprised when the meal came. Is that for me? What did I order? Surprise, you ordered the tuna.
But the money was addictive. I came home most nights with a pile of cash, which, being me, I dutifully put in the bank. The job saw me through my last year of acting school and several low-paying theatrical productions, one with the very unfortunate title The Little Planet of the Heart Is Vast. It’s not.
I worked Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, Easter Sunday. I worked Valentine’s Day, where people would propose to one another over corn and crab fritters, or get drunk and make out at the table or in the bathroom downstairs or sometimes just sit in sulky silence, waiting for me to bring their food and give them something to talk about. But I did not mind working the big holidays. It was extremely convenient having an excuse for why I couldn’t go to holiday parties where you were supposed to wear all-white clothing, or why I didn’t have a date for Valentine’s Day. And there was comfort in knowing that at midnight on New Year’s Eve I would not be standing half drunk and headachy in a crowd of people who were obviously best best friends with everyone there but me, wishing I was home in bed.
The tough shift to work was Sunday brunch. That was the day ordinary people, happy people, rolled out of bed and read the paper over breakfasts of tea and croissants and jam and played co-ed touch football in the park with their friends and friends of friends, and if they did not already have a boyfriend, they found one on Sundays. Or they were away for the entire weekend cavorting at the beach or admiring the autumn leaves or wedeling (if anyone still does that) down the slopes until the sun slipped behind the tree line and then they would drink and dance in their ski boots to a guy playing “American Pie” on a guitar, and then, then, they would get into a giant outdoor hot tub and tell hilarious anecdotes about the day’s adventures and touch one another beneath the black bubbles. This was the life of a non-waiter. This was the life that was going on every Sunday, the life anyone who wasn’t cutting bagels for the teeming multitude could have. It was on Sundays that I was stung by the loss, regretful, feeling that my real life hadn’t yet begun, and wondering when it would.
On the
night I turned thirty, about ten of my friends met me at Carmine’s for dinner. I sat at the center of the long table under the misguided impression that it would make me the center of attention, only to discover that I was unable to be part of the conversations that had sprung up on either end. The man whom I was vaguely dating stood me up, and I was forced to add another layer of false jollity on top of what was already a mille-feuille of pretense. I drank too much red wine in the hope that it might inspire one honest emotion. It did: relief. I could have been waiting on my table rather than eating at it.
world peace
LAST night I slept for forty-five minutes. I fell asleep at 3:34 A.M. and distinctly remember looking at the clock as I awoke at 4:19 A.M. An investigation this morning conducted by myself and my cousin, Erica, who is staying with me in my apartment, revealed the cause of my insomnia to be an unintentional overdose of the nonprescription medication Maximum Strength Multi-Symptom Midol.
It all began when I was invited to an ice-hockey game by a man who on our first date had, without provocation, explained that discussions of menstruation, or the P-word, as he called it, did not particularly interest him. Why this tiny nugget of information did not register a warning in some appropriate quadrant of my brain, I cannot say. All I know is that I was sufficiently impressed with the fit of his Levi’s to put a handful of Maximum Strength Multi-Symptom Midol into my pocket before I met him at Madison Square Garden. When I got there I went to a water fountain and took two, as a preventive measure.
Happily, my little friend, as someone’s mother, thank God not mine, once called it, failed to appear. As luck would have it, however, I was afflicted instead with a migraine headache, another source of mind-altering agony sure to enhance the enjoyment of any date, particularly one taking place in a sports arena. A man always remembers you when he has to take you home at the top of the third period, no pun intended, of a game where his favorite team, the one whose insignia is emblazoned on the front of the dorky hat he insisted you wear, is tied with the dread rival team. When the blurry vision that usually accompanies my migraine coincided exactly with the twenty-minute laser light show at the end of the second period, I did what any self-respecting person would do in my position. I took eight more Maximum Strength Multi-Symptom Midol and kept my mouth shut.
I arrived home at approximately 11:00 P.M. I tiptoed about, ate a Reese’s Piece, and proceeded to bed. I turned on 1010 WINS news radio because two minutes of it and I am usually out like a light.
So there I am, waiting to drop off, when suddenly I realize I’ve heard the traffic and weather twelve times, the news eight times, and the sports twice, and although I am lying stock-still, it is with all the serenity of a stunned deer on I-95. I begin to sing silently to myself in the hope that a gentle, regular rhythm will lull me, but find that I am only able to produce rousing renditions of “Those Were the Days,” “Hava Nagila,” and “Onward Christian Soldiers,” the singing of which convinces me that they are, in fact, all the same song.
Just when you’d think I should give up all hope of ever falling asleep, lo and behold at 3:34 A.M. I do. And in what seems like no time, because it was no time, I open my eyes and it is 4:19.
At approximately 4:53 A.M. I cry, this lasting only a few seconds due to the fact that Midol relieves bloating and I imagine myself bordering on the dangerously dehydrated. Five-fifteen finds me lying crosswise on the bed gasping dramatically for air and flailing my arms and legs, an unpleasant reminder of how my single status makes just that sort of self-indulgent behavior possible. Five-forty-seven and I am searching wistfully out the window for signs of life. There is, in fact, a lone light shining from across the alley, and I momentarily hallucinate I am in college pulling an all-nighter, which makes me even more agitated because I can’t get the paper done in time and every day it is late I lose a grade.
At 6:02 I yawn. My first yawn of the night slash morning. You can imagine my disappointment when I recognize that this is not a promise-of-slumbers-to-come yawn but rather an I’m-bored-out-of-my-skull yawn. The kind of yawn that says: Fuck the warning on the package, I could definitely operate a forklift.
At 6:34 A.M. I turn on the light and reread Our Bodies, Ourselves.
At 7:00 Erica’s alarm goes off. I open the door of my bedroom just in time to see her slap the sleep button and roll over.
At 7:08 her alarm goes off again and again she goes for the sleep button, but because I have moved it out of her reach she knocks over the lamp. At this point she gets up. I brief her on my previous night’s activities and I eat a couple of bowls of Captain Crunch in order to compound my exhaustion with a sugar headache. We determine an investigation is in order and no sooner do we set our minds upon the task than we conclude the fiendish culprit is none other than Maximum Strength Multi-Symptom Midol. Ten caplets, to be precise. Close examination of the package reveals that in addition to the nonaspirin painkiller acetaminophen, each Midol caplet contains sixty milligrams of caffeine. With little or no pharmacological training we further deduce that the six hundred milligrams of caffeine I had ingested within a two hour period was perhaps enough to rouse a dead horse.
Why had I done it, I asked myself. What had I been thinking, besides the obvious things like how’s my breath and did I shave my legs this morning just in case? In my mind’s eye I retrace the fatal moments which had brought me irrevocably to this moment, this day. This day I thought I might never see. This day which was separated by forty-five minutes from the day before it.
I did it for a guy.
Phew, what a glaring, harsh moment of self-awareness this is. I wonder if there is any way I can tell this story and have it seem like I did it in the name of those dolphins that get caught in tuna nets. Or World Peace. Stop the fighting now, or I overmedicate!
At least I got the last laugh: the Rangers lost.
from the ashes like the phoenix
I’M not sure why it is that by this time in my life I am not either a VJ on MTV or living in the Mexican rain forest with my artist husband and young son and doing some kind of socioenvironmental study or something. Where is my drive? For God’s sake, why don’t I go get my Ph.D.? When did I fail to take the bull by the horns and become a successful human being? I really mean it when I say that I’m not going to get through the rest of this day if someone doesn’t call who is more of a complete failure than me to tell me how lucky I am that I’m me and not them.
Really, I just heard that someone I was friends with in high school is living with her husband and baby in the Mexican rain forest. What the hell are they doing down there? Who even knew Mexico had a rain forest? The last I heard they were just obscure, meandering artists. She was a dancer and I don’t remember if he was a drummer or painter, but either way, when did they become sociologists? It’s like me all of a sudden saying I’m a brain surgeon. It gives me the same sinking feeling I got when I was in college and there was a boy I liked and my roommate would accost him at a party and, in the name of friendship, extol my virtues in a manner that would make her breasts appear larger. How she managed this I’ll never know.
My mother insists there is no such thing as success or failure; all there really is, is just living your life. I completely disagree. And even if it’s true, no one in their right mind ever feels that way, so what’s the point? No one I know is really happy, at least I hope they’re not, so why pretend things are otherwise? Go ahead, try to walk around happy. Try to accept things as they are, enjoy your day, be thankful for your blessings. Go ahead, you’ll just be riddled with guilt because you don’t deserve it or you gave up on your real dream or because people are homeless.
And even if it turns out that this old high school friend of mine and her husband and her child just sort of wound up in Mexico, aimless, broke, by default, maybe it’s a bad scene, whatever; still, I know they will return to civilization in due course and she will choreograph The Scourge of the Rain Forest and will win a Bessie and a Pulitzer and his paintings of her and their son, L
eaf, or Rain, or Monkey Boy, naked, dancing in the Mexican wilds will become collectors’ items. Their exile will have fed their art, and they will ultimately write, and it will also be written about them, that had it not been for those dark years, well, you know the rest.
It drives me crazy that you can’t count on anyone to stay down so you can feel up.
And just to put a capper on the whole thing, tonight I have to go to a party. I’ve got to get in the shower and dry my hair and put on makeup and pick an outfit. And then for three or four excruciating hours I have to skirt the edge of my bitter homebody character and try not to get so smashed that I say something truly revealing. Because nobody wants to hear it.
I am currently a freelance recruiter for a well-known retail company. I do this between auditions and acting jobs because it pays really well, much better than waitressing, and I don’t have to work at night or on weekends. Also, it uses a portion of my brain that I did not heretofore know existed and which I plan to shut down for good as soon as is fiscally possible. I know nothing about retail—I don’t even like shopping—and yet it is my job to ingratiate myself with secretaries and assistants at rival companies until I have learned the names and titles and telephone extensions of all of their executives—information which is often considered proprietary. I have several nom de phones, and sometimes I say I am from the Association of Retailers/Retailers of America/American Association of Retailers and am sending reports/invitations/holiday cards. Or if someone sounds coldy, I say, “You need those Kleenex with the lotion.” And “Go home, for God’s sake.” We laugh, and I get the names I need. I then call the executives and we discuss opportunities with my company. I work anywhere from ten to thirty hours a week, depending on my workload and on my acting commitments and on my mood. There’s only so much of it a person can take. This person can take. I know there are people, reasonable people, people with whom I work, who devote their lives to this. Crikey.
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