Most cringe-inducing, however, was when the staff would refer to one another as “family.” At the end of my first week at the restaurant, the manager hooked his arm around my shoulder and proclaimed, “Well, you’re part of the family now.” He rattled me into the crook of his arm, like something an uncle would do to a shy teenager. I thought he might give me a noogie. I lifted my head and looked around at these Southern California strangers, three thousand miles away from my real home. Family? I was far from convinced.
This was not my first restaurant job. In college, I worked for a hot minute as a hostess at a Cuban-themed jerk-chicken- and-mojito joint. But that was for fun. To meet people. To have extra money for clothes and beer. The people I worked with were also students, just making some extra cash. They were like me. They were normal. At the restaurant in Los Angeles, several of the employees were well over forty. Some of them were career servers and had worked there for ten, fifteen, twenty years. These people were not like me. They must have had rough lives, I thought. Something must have gone horribly wrong. And the ones my age, well, they had to be actresses, or from the wrong side of the tracks, right? These people worked there because they had to. But wait, so did I.
The place I begrudgingly called “home” three to four days a week was Chaya, an upscale Asian-fusion restaurant in Venice. After twenty-five years, it was still consistently busy, a go-to spot on the Westside where agents took clients, businessmen schmoozed investors, and celebrities who lived in the neighborhood drank sake, safe from the paparazzi that preyed on the city’s more interior restaurants. It was also a restaurant where Chelsea Handler had worked to support herself while doing stand-up, until (legend goes) she was eventually fired for chasing a customer into the parking lot when he failed to leave a tip. Another legend says that she was actually fired because she was always drunk. This I find more believable. I worked in the same section she had, the cocktail lounge, which attracted every walk of life: the Ladies Who Cosmo (even though the Cosmo fad was long gone), the yoga-mat-wielding green tea–drinkers, the surfers, the Venice hipsters, the young and successful, the couples with strollers, the repellent old men.
The old men were the worst. “Has anyone ever told you, you look like you ride horses?” one of them said, while cracking an imaginary whip in the air. He then let out a “Yee-haw!” and spanked his thigh. Another time, a man in sweatpants and a red bandana, fresh from Gold’s Gym, asked, “Now on this entrée—could you ask the chef if I could get a female chicken?”
Huh?
Women asked the most ridiculous questions, too.
“Can I get you started with something to drink?” I asked a woman who took a seat in my section.
“Oh, there will be two of us,” she said, panicked, when I only put down one cocktail napkin. I have decided there are two types of people in this world: people who are comfortable eating by themselves, and people who are decidedly not.
“I’m waiting on someone,” she reiterated, terrified I might have thought for a second she was all by herself. A moment later, she asked, “Now this wine, the Cabernet Sauvignon, it’s caffeine-free right?”
I looked up from my notepad. “Yes,” I said. “All of our wine is caffeine-free.”
If I learned anything from working at a restaurant, it’s that, generally speaking, people are insane.
At the end of a shift during my first week, while separating ones from twenties—excited about this stack of cash but terrified that I had to calculate how much I was supposed to tip out—one of the servers saw me mashing the calculator’s clear button like a chimpanzee. She asked if I needed some help. When we finished my checkout, she invited me to join some of the girls for a late-night meal down the street. “Sure,” I said, because I was hungry, not because I was in the mood to make new friends. (I love friends but I don’t like making them. It’s just so much work. I hate the beginning of anything—a job, a class, the get-to-know-you games, caring what you look like, making a good impression. I wish I could just skip to already knowing each other, liking each other, and not caring what each other thinks.)
We sat in a large leather booth at Swingers, a ’60s-style diner on Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica, all wearing our server uniforms: some of us in the all-black ensemble of the cocktail waitresses, others in the shirt-and-tie combo required for the dining room. I ordered a grilled cheese and tomato soup and barely said a word. Which was very strange for me. But I was in such a weird place. I had just broken up with a boyfriend and had just quit my real job. Now I was paying for a grilled cheese sandwich at one in the morning with a wad of ones pulled from an apron that was still tied around my waist. What the hell is going on, I thought. I’m a waitress.
Because I spent so much time at that place, you’d think I’d be rolling in money. The problem was, for my first year at the restaurant, I had to work at the sushi bar before I could move into the much more lucrative cocktail section. This meant I left each night with maybe sixty bucks. Heather and I lived together at this point; we’d graduated from sharing a bedroom to sharing a two-bedroom apartment. (Craving weather patterns and closed-toed shoes, Melissa and Rachel had both fled to foggier pastures in San Francisco.) During that period, Heather was my sugar mama on more occasions than I’d like to admit. She often hooked me with, “I’ll buy you dinner if you clean the house.” Said from her real office where she made real money. More months than not, I’d pay my rent part-check, part-cash-from-tips, part-IOU. At one point, my running tab with her flirted dangerously close to four digits.
On days when I worked at both Flaunt and Chaya, I’d leave the magazine in Hollywood at four o’clock and race west on the 10. I’d slam into a spot, change into my server uniform behind the tinted windows of my backseat, and barrel up the parking garage ramp, passing under a sign that said NOT A WALKWAY while stuffing my feet into my shoes. I’d zoom through the employee entrance, saying “Hola!” to the Hispanic cooks in the kitchen, “Konichiwa!” to the Japanese chefs at the sushi bar, and “Sorry” to the manager for being late.
By all accounts, I was one of the worst cocktail waitresses of all time. There are some pretty significant reasons I should have never been a server: I am clumsy, I am forgetful, and I am very bad at pretending to be in a good mood when I’m not. The best adjective to describe my serving skills was “clunky.” I’d try to channel my inner geisha, their delicate hands gingerly pouring tea, their faces in a perfect, painted pout, all while wearing a beehive and little wooden blocks for shoes. I possessed none of that grace.
Coordination has never been my thing. I have always been terrible at sports with teams and/or balls, though I have played them all. One time, in third grade, my grandparents flew up to stay with me while my parents were out of town, and they came to my soccer game. The coach never put me in. Not once. Throughout the entire game, two other unskilled players and I were skipping along the sidelines, involved in our own intense competition of who could catch the most falling leaves. After the whistle blew, one of them realized she hadn’t gotten to play, and she started crying. The coach, feeling sorry, said he’d start us all in the next game. This was doubly punishing for me. I had let down my grandparents, who had traveled so far, and now I had to start in the next game? I spent the whole next week praying the ball wouldn’t come anywhere near me. When it did, I panicked and kicked it out of bounds. Soon after, thankfully, I was taken out of the game and able to continue leaf catching, an activity at which I was much more adept.
The coordination that evaded me on the field was missing from my server arsenal as well. I once spilled five beers on one person. I was carrying six different bottles for six different men—a little army of Stellas, Heinekens, and Amstels, all balancing perilously on my unsteady tray. I placed the Stella in front of the guy who ordered it (or one can hope), and then something went horribly wrong. I’m not sure how. Maybe I lost my balance. Maybe I hit the tray with my own hand. Maybe I had a seizure. But all five beer bottles dove off the tray—BANG, BANG, BOOM, SHAT
TER, SPLASH—right into this poor guy’s lap. Fortunately, he was a good sport about the whole thing. “At least I told my wife I was going to the bar tonight,” he said, sniffing his soaked shirt as I fumbled to fork over a stack of napkins.
My coworkers would often ask why I didn’t work in the dining room. “You could make so much more money,” they’d say. Honestly, the more casual ambiance of the cocktail lounge was treacherous enough. In the dining room, I would have probably lit someone’s hair on fire.
The managers liked to joke that what I lacked in skill I made up for in charm, because rarely were my tips below twenty percent, and the five-beers-one-lap scenario was only one of many such debacles. Charm, maybe, if I was in a good mood. More like charm and humor—and honesty.
When customers asked how certain things tasted, I told them exactly what I thought. About the vanilla ginger gimlet, I’d reply, “It tastes like Pine-Sol, or air freshener. It tastes like something you’re supposed to smell but not eat.” About other items, say the New Zealand grass-fed lamb chop, I’d tell customers, “I have no idea. I’ve never had it.” They’d look at me, confused, and after I’d give them the ol’ “honest-to-goodness” shrug, they’d laugh and thank me. On many nights my tables would really stump me with, “What are the specials?” See, here’s the thing. I worked in the cocktail lounge. Sure, customers could order off the dining room menu, but most people ordered from the bar menu, which I knew inside and out, if for no other reason than I selected my dinner from it nightly. When asked this very standard question, I’d reply, “You know,” pointing my pen at them, “that is a great question.” I’d pause for effect. “That I do not know the answer to. But if you wait one minute, I’ll race into the back and find out. You want to time me?”
A good cocktail waitress (I am using the antiquated word “waitress” because we were all girls), would have always known the specials and would have always let her tables know that they could also order off the much more expensive dining room menu, in addition to the relatively cheap bar food menu. But that was another area of my server brain that just didn’t fire: I absolutely hated selling.
I have always lacked that inherent salesperson get-up-and-go. I never up-sold a thing. If a customer asked for water, I never even let them know that we also had six-dollar bottles of Pellegrino and Evian. I don’t think I once asked a table if they’d like “coffee, tea, espresso, desserts?” The words echoed throughout the night from other servers, but the only time I’d suggest a table have dessert is if they were my friends and I wanted to eat some of it.
Not only did I lack salesmanship, but half the time, I’d talk people out of stuff. “Oh god, no, you don’t want that,” I’d say, about the fresh mint tea. “It tastes like hot toothpaste.”
Behavioral studies say that servers can increase their tips by one, or a combination, of the following: touching a person lightly on the shoulder, writing “thank you” on the check, introducing themselves by name. I never did any of those things. My name alone was a disaster. “Lila-what?” it typically began. It never ended quickly. “How do you spell it?” “Where does that come from?” “Where are you from?” “What are you doing out here?”
When the managers started posting customers’ Yelp reviews on the employee bulletin board in the back, I dreaded the name thing even more. From then on, if my tables asked my name and I thought my service hadn’t been so hot, I’d say, “Jennifer.” If I was fairly confident it had been good, I’d say, “Lilibet. L-I-L-I-B-E-T.”
After only a few months, my cheap black work pants acquired a giant hole in the crotch, similar to a pair of chaps, and could only be worn under an apron. I told myself I wasn’t going to spend money on new ones because I was going to quit. I told myself this for almost five years.
What I didn’t know that first night at the diner, staring out the window onto an empty Lincoln Boulevard, was that those girls, who so kindly invited me along and who I so quickly dismissed, would become my sisters. My best friends. The backbone of my new life in Los Angeles. I would quickly learn every horrible presumption I made about them—and everyone else at the restaurant, for that matter—was totally unfounded. Almost none of the girls were actresses, and the ones who were worked hard at it. Not to mention I myself would eventually become “one of those girls” who, from time to time, went on auditions. Two of the girls were in nursing school, and a couple others were getting master’s degrees. Almost all of them were transplants like me, from the East Coast, the South, the Midwest. They were smart, interesting, independent women. And sure, one of those master’s candidates was a former Hooters waitress, but who doesn’t want a former Hooters waitress as a friend?
There were the sisters from Tennessee, Kathy and Victoria, who had moved to California to get away from Memphis, too nightmarish after both their parents had died. There was Madison, whose dad arrested O.J. Simpson—she can remember when the police helicopter landed in her cul-de-sac in Calabasas to scoop him up in his SWAT gear. I need no other reasons to be friends with someone. There was Jill from Oklahoma, one of those actresses who was really dedicated, and was also one of the funniest people I had ever met. One of the first nights we worked together, she told me a story about her pet dog eating her pet bird, and somehow she made it seem absolutely hilarious. I was sold. There was Noelle, one of the nursing students, who possessed the sort of calming presence and Gandhi-like advice that kept us all sane. In the chaos that is a restaurant job, Noelle was our human Xanax.
And then there was Junko (Joon-koh) who was from Japan. Junko was everyone’s favorite employee. She was like a life-size My Little Pony. Her eyes were giant, almond-shaped, sparkly. Like a real pony, she was less than five feet tall. Though she had lived in LA for almost ten years and was completely fluent in English, she still sometimes had a tough time. The L’s and the R’s were, of course, a problem. There was an employee named Hillary that caused her all sorts of trouble. When Junko heard I was from Connecticut, she said, “Oh I love Connecticut! There are so many Bambis!” (She thought Bambi was the word for deer.) One time, she told us about a Japanese tradition in which everyone stays up all night on New Years Eve, and when the sun rises on the first day of the New Year, they all go outside and start crapping. (She meant clapping.) The language barrier sometimes caused problems while waiting tables as well. One night, Junko was waiting on an Italian man with a heavy accent. He ordered a Chivas (Regal, the Scotch whiskey), and twenty-five minutes later, Junko returned to the man’s table with a sea bass.
The governess for all these girls was a gray-haired gay man named Jeffrey. He had worked at the restaurant for almost twenty years, and on his off days, he worked at a perfume shop. Nightly, he would bring us chocolates and perfumes and give us advice about men. He was like our very own Golden Girl.
Like Sophia, Jeffrey was never short on snark. I once asked if he and his husband ever went out to Rage or any of the other gay bars I was always passing on Santa Monica Boulevard.
“Oh, no, we don’t go out dancing anymore,” he said. “Now we just lie around and complain.”
One night, Jeffrey answered the phone at the front desk because the hostesses couldn’t get to it in time. A guest asked if she could get a reservation.
“MmmHmm,” he said, never parting his lips.
“At eight o’clock?”
“MmmHmm.”
“For two?”
“MmmHmm.”
“Do you have valet parking?”
“MmmHmm.”
“Thank you.”
“MmmHmm.” He never spoke a word. Later that night, the manager went up to him and said, “I just seated the ‘MmmHmm’ party.”
We did these things to keep ourselves sane, especially during the recession. We leaned on each other during the recession because, as the economy went south, so did our business, and with that, our morale. A new memo from corporate appeared daily, one in English and one in Spanish—a MEMORANDUM, or the much more fun-sounding MEMORANDO.
“Em
ployees are no longer allowed to consume espresso drinks during their shift, or beverages that require tea bags, milk, or chocolate sauce. If you would like to have an espresso-based drink during your shift, you may purchase it through the bartender at your forty percent employee discount.”
A week later: “Due to tough financial times, the employee discount has now been reduced from forty percent to twenty-five percent.” On that memo, an anonymous employee drew a graph with the “employee discount” running along the X axis and “morale” running along the Y, our collective mood dropping incrementally with the decreasing discount.
These memos went on for months:
“Employees are no longer allowed to use chopsticks, those are for guests only.”
“Employees are no longer allowed to use the linen napkins in the bathroom. Paper towels will be provided for you in the back, which you can bring into the bathroom for your personal use.”
At least, from a writer’s perspective, each night at the restaurant was an adventure in idiocies uttered from the mouths of unsuspecting strangers. Where else could I hear things like, “So when I was in AA,” from a man drinking a Kettle martini, up, with two olives, said with no sense of irony at all? Like my very own Easter egg hunt, I never knew when I’d wait on golden eggs like this particular mother-daughter pair: They both had heavy Japanese accents, and the mom barely spoke English, so her daughter ordered for them. She said, “I’ll have a Diet Cock, and she’ll have a regular Cock.” About twenty minutes later the daughter signaled for me, motioned toward her mom, and said, “Could she have some more Cock please?” I had to walk away.
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