In 2003 a woman dining at a Sizzler Steakhouse asked her waiter if she could have vegetables instead of potatoes with her meal. There appears to have been a disagreement between the waiter and the Atkins dieter over this legitimate request. The waiter, hoping to get that coveted employee-of-the-month plaque, defended the restaurant’s no-substitution policy. I can understand where the waiter was coming from. Corporate restaurants are notoriously inflexible when it comes to making substitutions, and I have no doubt the waiter in question was sweating what his manager would say if he acceded to the woman’s request. In the end the woman prevailed and got her veggies. The waiter, however, lost his mind.
According to the police report, the waiter, with two accomplices, went to the woman’s house and daubed it with eggs, syrup, sugar, toilet paper, and instant mashed potato flakes. The authorities were summoned. Recognizing her attacker, the woman told the 911 operator, “Oh my God! It’s the waiter from Sizzler!”
Luckily no one was hurt. The waiter went away for a nice long rest. Let me go on record saying I don’t condone his behavior.
But I understand.
It’s a miracle more waiters don’t go postal. They’re surrounded every day by whiny, spoiled customers and supervised by power-mad control freaks. Toss in the workforce’s penchant for substance abuse and poor impulse control, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. When you look at workplace homicides, however, the number of waiters turning into deranged killers is low. There aren’t too many news reports about waiters shooting up the joint. Waiters must have an unknown safety mechanism that keeps them from going completely apeshit. I think it’s cursing like sailors.
People who abuse waiters are taking a big chance. We don’t need to drop phlegm into your entrée to exact vengeance. (But if you do, get the two-pack-a-day smoker to do it for you.) We can just subtly exercise our power and wreck your life.
When I was at Amici’s, we had a regular customer who was serially cheating on his wife. We nicknamed him Lothario. Silver-haired, imperious, and rude, Lothario would start screaming at the restaurant staff if he had to wait a single minute for a drink. Everyone, even Caesar, experienced the lash of his razor-sharp tongue. One day Lothario brought his much younger mistress to the restaurant. Blond, twenty-five, with high heels and long legs that disappeared up into a plaid miniskirt, she was a real piece of eye candy.
“I hope that’s his daughter,” groaned Rizzo, the headwaiter.
“Probably not,” sighed Scott, the resident drunk. “Oh shit, he’s sitting in my section.”
The moment Lothario’s ass hit the chair he started yelling for the waiter. Passive-aggressive Scott took his sweet time getting to the table. Lothario took it upon himself to conduct a customer-care in-service. After dictating his order, Lothario’s hand resumed its roaming underneath his date’s skirt.
“Man, he took his wedding ring off,” Scott whined. “I mean, what is he thinking? He comes here all the time.”
“The rich live in an alternate reality, my boy,” Rizzo observed.
“It’s amazing how competent people can be in some areas of their lives,” I remark, “and so incompetent in others. If you’re going to cheat, at least be discreet.”
We watch as the girl plays the coquette, laughing and tossing her hair, gazing at Lothario with unabashed admiration. She’s at that age when a girl transitions from ingenue to womanhood. I had a sinking feeling that Lothario was going to accelerate that process.
The meal went as expected. Lothario shouted for more water and wine, sent his entrées back twice, and doled out dirty looks and unkind words for everybody.
Scott, after a long life of suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous yuppie scorn, finally snapped. Dropping off the dessert menus, he inquired in his most obsequious voice, “Would your daughter like some ice cream?”
The girl tittered. Lothario’s face flushed bright red with anger, or maybe it was the Viagra.
“No ice cream?” Scott asked innocently.
“That’s not my daughter,” the man stuttered.
“Terribly sorry, sir.”
The man got upset but, in the end, he realized that making a scene was not in his best interest. He never should have taken his chippie to his wife’s favorite restaurant. One slip of the tongue by a disgruntled waiter, and he’d wind up in divorce court while his wife banged the cabana boy at some fancy resort on an exotic island.
On another occasion I had a corporate blowhard hosting a big business dinner. Before the guests arrived he pulled me aside and gave me a pep talk.
“This meeting’s very important to me,” the man says.
“Yes, sir.”
“If you screw this up, I’ll make sure you’re fired.”
“Yes, sir,” I reply. “Thank you, sir.”
“Are you being funny?”
“No, sir.”
The dinner went smoothly. All the diners were happy with their food and the service. I am a professional, after all.
When dessert plates have been cleared and the coffee finished, the man hands me his credit card.
“Ring it up,” the man says. (Please note the absence of the words “please” and “thank you.”)
I pretend to run the card. After a minute I return to the table and whisper in the man’s ear, “I’m sorry, sir, but this card seems to be experiencing some difficulty.”
The man turns as white as a sheet. “That’s impossible,” he hisses. “Try it again!”
“Problem, Bob?” asks one of the clients he was desperately trying to impress.
“There’s no problem,” Bob says smoothly.
“Do you have another card, sir?” I ask.
“No,” Bob says. “Try it again.”
“I’ll have to call the credit card company, sir,” I say. “It’ll be a few minutes.”
I go to the phone and pretend to call American Express. Actually, I check the messages on my answering machine and call up a few waiters to set up a cocktail run later that night. I enjoy watching Asshole Bob rub his stomach while his ulcer grows exponentially. I go back to the terminal, ring up the sale, add a twenty percent tip, and hand the receipt to the Bobster.
“Sorry for the delay, Bob,” I say.
Bob examines the receipt. “A twenty percent tip?” he exclaims, looking up quickly.
I say nothing and skewer the man with my thousand-yard waiter stare.
“Here’s a pen, sir.”
Bob signs the bill. As the party leaves I notice the client Bob was trying to impress regarding him a bit more cautiously. Did I screw up the business deal? Probably not, but maybe I gave that prospective client a moment of pause. Did Bob lose sleep that night? Who cares? At least I didn’t give the cops his license plate number and tell them he was driving drunk. I’ve done that.
Don’t ever think waiters and restaurant staffs are helpless victims. We’re not. There are Web sites popping up on the Internet where waiters can list bad tippers by name. Sure, some unimaginative servers will adulterate the food. Not me. I prefer something more elegant, something with panache. I prefer the emotional version of flambéing your brains. I engage in psychological warfare. I’ll subtly embarrass you in front of your girlfriend or client. Instead of putting hair in your pasta, I’ll slip into my arrogant waiter persona and make you uneasy. I’ll lose your reservation, make your steak medium instead of medium rare, put too much vermouth in your martini, and seat you next to the men’s room.
But sometimes I’ll employ a nifty chemical weapon that’s at every waiter’s disposal—flatulence.
Sure it’s lowbrow and crude, but it works. A waiter can zip in, drop a silent and deadly fart next to a problematic table, and then zip away. By the time the victims know they’re under attack, the waiter is long gone. Suspicion turns to the next table or each other. Most of the time people are too embarrassed to say anything, so they just eat through the stink. And if a waiter is pissed off at every customer in the restaurant, he can just fumigate the entire pla
ce with his love. I call this little maneuver “crop-dusting.” It’s one of the little things that help me get through life.
Yes, I can be bad. And I have a long memory. I might not exact vengeance right away. I can wait till your next visit, or the one after that, but don’t kid yourself, eventually vengeance will be mine. Like Dr. Lecter, I have infinite patience. I’ve never spat in a customer’s food, but I don’t claim I never will.
Be afraid.
Chapter 15
Snapshots
I sigh and stare out The Bistro’s front window. I didn’t get much sleep last night. For the past few months I’ve been spending every spare moment getting that book proposal together for my agent. Before and after every shift, I sit down at my desk and try coaxing words and sentences into doing my bidding. We’re supposed to start submitting to publishers this summer, but I’m suffering from a case of writer’s block. That’s not a good thing. I have a deadline. The pressure’s on. I stifle a yawn. I was up until two A.M.
On the other side of the plate glass it’s a bright Sunday afternoon. The restaurant’s doing a brisk business. Customers swilling wine and smoking cigarettes crowd the outside tables. Teenage girls with exposed midriffs cluster by the pizza joint across the street and pull shaggy-haired boys off their skateboards with the gravity of their adolescent abdomens. While the boys posture and playact being cool, I notice the girls swing their hips with an awkward tentativeness, like they’re carefully acclimating to their new bodies’ power. Claude, the neighborhood homeless guy, stands next to them, oblivious to their presence. Wearing an army field jacket despite the early June heat, he slowly chews a slice of pizza and stares off into space, quietly contemplating some distant part of his private universe.
I tell one of the bus girls that I’m running to Starbucks for a cup of coffee. When I step inside, my favorite barista, the redhead with the ponytail and ivory skin, pours me a small coffee without my asking. Another young girl, an obvious trainee, is standing next to her.
“How are you today?” the redhead asks, smiling broadly.
“Good,” I reply, pushing two singles across the counter. “How are you doing?”
“Same old stuff,” she shrugs, handing me my coffee. “Different day.”
“Tell me about it.”
I take a sip of coffee. The hot liquid feels good going down my throat.
“Coffee,” I sigh gratefully. “The lifeblood of tired men everywhere.”
“Why do you say that all the time?”
“I read it somewhere, and I liked how it sounds.”
“Oh…How are things across the street?” she asks.
“Not bad. How’s things here?”
“You work across the street?” the trainee interrupts.
“Yeah.”
“At The Bistro?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re the sad man in the window!” the trainee exclaims.
“Excuse me?”
“Whenever my mom drives past that restaurant, she calls you the sad man looking out the window.”
Flummoxed, I stare at the girl for a moment. Then I recover. “Nice to know I’m a local legend,” I say.
“Oh,” the trainee blurts, “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“It’s cool,” I say reassuringly. “Good luck.”
“Thanks, mister.”
I nod at the redhead and wink. “Take it easy on the newbie.”
“I will,” she replies. “Have a good night.”
The moment I walk back into The Bistro, Beth runs up to me. “Can you void something for me?” she asks.
“Whaddya screw up this time?” I reply, my mind elsewhere. Sad man in the window?
“I put all my new table’s appetizers on the wrong check.”
“Outstanding.”
“Please fix it for me.”
“If I had a dollar for every void I did for you guys, I’d be driving an Aston Martin.”
“Please…” Beth pleads.
What table?” I ask.
“Twelve.”
“I’ll get right on it,” I say, waving her away.
“Thanks.”
I walk over to the POS computer and open up the program to fix Beth’s mistake. I make just as many screwups ordering food as any other waiter in the place—but I have the manager codes, so they never notice.
As my fingers fly across the touch screen I watch Beth recite the specials to a table. Even though she’s only a few years older than the teenage girls outside, there’s nothing awkward about how she moves inside her own skin. Aware of her feminine power and careful how she wields it, Beth carries herself with a quiet dignity that seems to have escaped many of her peers in this era of Internet gonzo porn. This may stem from the fact that Beth almost wasn’t pretty. When she was a small girl, a dog mauled her face. It took several reconstructive surgeries to put her back together. Today the only evidence of Beth’s trauma is a tiny scar above her left cheekbone. Her plastic surgeon should get the Nobel Prize for Medicine. I think that incident taught Beth, on some level, a lesson about what truly constitutes beauty. When they’re young and beautiful, some girls get lost inside a self-centered world. I think Beth learned early that physical beauty is fleeting, and that, in an odd way, made her more beautiful.
“Can I get on the computer now?” Saroya says grumpily behind me. “I’ve got three tables to put in.”
“Sure,” I say, keying a few more commands into the system. “I’ll be done in a sec.”
Saroya lets out a long, controlled sigh. She does that whenever she’s impatient. With me, that’s often.
“Chill, baby,” I say. “I’m almost done.”
“Chill this,” Saroya says, digging her sharp nails into my biceps, “I need to get in there.”
“You know I love it when you grab me like that,” I say, my voice dropping to an Elvis Presley bass.
“Hurry up.”
“Why so grumpy?” I ask casually. “Trouble in paradise today?”
“What you mean?” Saroya replies.
“Problems between you and lover boy?”
“Ugh,” Saroya says, throwing up her hands. “He’s acting like an asshole.”
“I guess the honeymoon’s over then.”
Saroya just glares at me. Knowing I’ve said enough, I exit out of the computer and give her a wide berth.
Saroya’s been having a tough time. Eight months ago she and her daughter moved into Armando’s condo. Even though everything seems to be going well, I know there are some serious readjustments going on in that household. Armando’s become an instant daddy, the girl is sharing her mother with another man for the first time, and Saroya’s relationships with the most important people in her life are changing. Conflict is inevitable and normal.
Saroya and Armando, however, are very connected to each other. Besides the obvious physical attractions, I suspect there’s something deeper at work. Armando’s mother died when he was a baby. It’s a subject he never talks about. Saroya’s father was a policeman in Nicaragua. He was shot and killed when she was five years old. It doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to understand that these types of events have an effect on people. It’s not surprising that a little boy who lost his mother hooked up with a little girl who lost her father. That may sound a little pat, but I’ve found that many successful relationships have a bit of shared trauma at their center. They both have good heads on their shoulders. I think they’ll be fine in the long run.
Felipe, The Bistro’s dishwasher, hustles past me, carrying a bus tub of onions up from the dry goods area. Felipe’s a major pain in my ass, literally. Whenever my hands are full, he takes advantage of my defenselessness and tries sticking his finger up my butt. Since I’m wearing pants it’s not going to happen, but I swear to God, I think I’ve had my sphincter tickled more times than a two-dollar Bangkok whore. Now Felipe isn’t gay, mind you: this is just another example of the homophobic grab-ass games Spanish kitchen workers love to play. I do get my re
venge. Like a patient sniper waiting for the perfect shot, I wait until Felipe’s in a position of utter vulnerability—usually when he’s carrying dishes or standing on top of the stove cleaning the ventilation grates. When the opportunity presents itself, I grab a pair of tongs or a pepper mill and…well, you know. I smile inwardly. If the customers knew where that pepper mill had been, they would never bug me for fresh ground pepper. I’ll skip the obligatory salad-tossing analogy.
But Felipe’s got a story, too. Leaving his wife behind, he’s working in the United States so he can help pay for his son’s legal studies in Honduras. Sometimes he gets terribly lonely, and sadness gets the better of him. Once he got so depressed that he didn’t show up to work for a week. Sometimes Felipe goes over to the dance halls in Corona, Queens, to have a few cervezas, dance in the arms of a pretty girl, and try to forget that home is two thousand miles away. I always laugh when I hear radio commentators blab about how “easy the immigrants have it up here.” Work in a restaurant for a couple months. You’ll think differently.
As I return to the front I exchange greetings with a high-powered yuppie couple eating salmon and tuna at table 16. They’re good regular customers who’ve always been nice to me, but I’m worried about the woman. When I first met her three years ago, she was an adorable, sexy, and vibrant-looking blonde. Back then she was dating a distinguished-looking, if a tad arrogant, man a few years her senior. After they broke up, however, something inside this lady went off the rails. Even though she’s still pretty, she’s become one of those joyless, obsessive-compulsive health nuts who tracks every calorie in and out of her body and lashes herself to a StairMaster seven hours a day. Maybe adipose tissue is the vital ingredient missing from this woman’s life.
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