Eventually she hooked up with another distinguished-looking, if a tad arrogant, man a few years older than her. No surprise there. But the blonde’s old boyfriend still eats at The Bistro. Whenever he comes now, it’s with his wife and kids. His children are preteens, so the old boyfriend must have left or cheated on his wife and family to be with the blond woman, and now he’s returned to them. But what’s really interesting is that this man’s wife looks like an older version of what his ex-girlfriend is now becoming—an intense-looking, scarily thin, über-fit blonde. I wonder if that occurred because type attracts type or because there’s something about the old boyfriend that induces this reaction in women. I can’t help but wonder, What’s the story there?
I might never find out. Since I get to watch people only during the time it takes them to eat a meal, all I get to see are snapshots of their lives. Sure, I observe people’s expressions, listen to their conversations, maybe even glimpse a bit of their past, but I’ll never know the fullness of who they are. I see scores of people every day, and most of what makes them who they are remains a mystery. And I love a good mystery. Like Philip Marlowe, I love figuring out people’s stories.
I guess that’s why I’ve been a big reader since I was a kid. My father and mother certainly encouraged me. My dad, a high school teacher, was always thrusting books into my hands. Somewhere in the family photo albums there’s a picture of two-year-old me sitting in my father’s lap as he’s reading aloud from the New York Times. Of course, I couldn’t understand anything Dad was telling me about Richard Nixon, but I understood early that there was something magical in the power of words. To me, words were like incantations that could conjure fantastic worlds in the mind and take me to places I had never been. I devoured books, hunted words in dictionaries, and was a library junkie by the time I was eight. I read Star Wars before I saw it in the movies and devoured all of Ian Fleming’s books by the time I was thirteen. I picked up most of what I know about grammar and usage by osmosis. I also had two great English teachers in high school. They taught me that reading literature could teach you about the “universal human experience.” Maybe you’ll never hunt another man through the jungle, my teachers told me. Maybe you won’t climb Mount Kilimanjaro or watch a bullfight in the afternoon—you don’t have to. The world’s a big place. You can’t do or be everything, nor should you. Life is bigger than any one man. But when you read about other people’s lives, when you read their stories, you catch a glimpse of a world bigger than your own. You may never travel a hundred miles from where you were born, but if you read stories, you’ll get to see the entire world. You’ll enter into the Great Mystery.
Inspired by their lessons I toyed with the idea of becoming a writer when I was in college. In my naïveté, I thought I could tell some stories myself. I penned several chapters of the Great American Detective Novel in my dorm room and showed it to a person whose opinion I valued highly. He told me my writing wasn’t very good. Crushed, I never tried writing anything more complicated than a term paper or business report.
Then life did what life did, and I became a waiter. At first it didn’t occur to me to write down the stories that came through The Bistro’s doors every day. Sure, I had read Kitchen Confidential and Debra Ginsberg’s Waiting, but those people were writers. My college critic’s words still burned in my ears. This isn’t very good. Who was I kidding?
Then I discovered the Internet.
I didn’t go online until long after everyone else had jumped on the digital bandwagon. In 2004 I discovered a new phenomenon called blogs, online diaries containing mostly mundane but occasionally fascinating tidbits about people’s lives. Loving stories, I couldn’t get enough of them. Then an idea began germinating in my head. I have a million stories from the restaurant. Maybe I should start telling them. So I opened an online account, and Waiter Rant was born. For the first time since college I began to write.
My initial foray was less than successful. Like most bloggers toiling unappreciated in the needle-in-haystack vastness of the Internet, I became frustrated that no one was reading my stuff. I think three or four people came to my site a week. My comment counter was firmly set at zero. I figured that my college critic was right. I must suck as a writer. I gave up.
Then, five months later, for some unknown reason, I started writing again. Blogging, with its diarist orientation, turned out to be ideally suited to recording those little snapshots of life that flash past me inside The Bistro. Within a month my writing got noticed. I was linked on a popular Web site, and, before I knew it, my Web site was getting hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of hits a day. I was interviewed by the BBC and the New York Times. I had a real audience. People were also telling me something I never heard before—“You’re a good writer.” It was nice finally to get some encouragement, and from thousands of people. By the time I wrote my three hundredth story I began to figure out why I had resumed writing.
William Hurt, the Academy Award–winning actor, is one of my regular customers. The day after I saw A History of Violence, he came to The Bistro to eat. As I served him I pondered the weirdness of seeing someone getting his brains blown out on the silver screen one day and then eating risotto in my section the next. So, as a goof, I started watching all the movies William’s ever starred in. As I made my way through the William Hurt filmography, I stumbled across a jewel of a film called Smoke.
Made in 1995, the movie revolves around a Brooklyn cigar shop and its colorful proprietor, Auggie Wren, played by Harvey Keitel. This film has special resonance for me because I once worked in a cigar shop to earn some extra money. Auggie’s character, a raconteur and amateur photographer, has taken a picture of the same street corner outside his shop at the same time every day for fourteen years. Assembling all the pictures into a series of photo albums, Auggie can’t explain why he does it; he just knows he has to. When he shows the photos to William Hurt’s character, a blocked writer and grieving widower named Paul Benjamin, he notices the author flipping through the album a bit too quickly. “You’ll never get it if don’t slow down, my friend,” Auggie says. When Benjamin remarks that all the pictures look the same, Auggie points out the differences in the seasons, the expressions on people’s faces, how the light plays on the buildings. It’s then the viewer realizes what Auggie’s done. Put together, all those snapshots combine to create time-lapse photography on a massive scale. By slowing down and focusing on something as small and mundane as a street corner, Auggie has created something beautiful. By staying in one place, Auggie’s created a work of art. Auggie sums up his philosophy when he says, “People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you’re going to see just about all that you can handle.”
Until The Bistro, I never worked at anyplace longer than two years. After walking the restaurant’s floorboards for several years, however, I think I unconsciously realized I knew enough about something to start writing about it. Like Auggie’s street corner, the sameness and stability of The Bistro focused me so I could appreciate the little stories that waltzed into my restaurant every day. Staying put inspired me to write. Two years after starting my blog, when I flipped through the hundreds of the stories I had written, I realized I was doing what Auggie did. I was taking snapshots of The Bistro with words.
But, as the barista at Starbucks pointed out, people have also been taking snapshots of me. To many people, I’m a great waiter and a friendly person. To others, however, I’m that slightly arrogant, reserved guy who corrects customers when they mispronounce their entrée. There are even a few customers who despise me—calling me the rudest waiter in the neighborhood. And to a lady who only catches a glimpse of me through the plate glass, I’m the sad man in the window.
Later, in my car heading home, the events of the day flicker under my eyes like the dashed white lines in the middle of the road. I think about Beth and how she almost lost her beauty. I think about Saroya’s struggl
e to build a family and Felipe’s efforts to do the right thing by his. I think of all the things I’ve seen and what people have confided in me—their hopes, their dreams, and their confessions of sin.
Within The Bistro I’ve seen people get married and divorced. I’ve seen babies being born and parents mourning the loss of children. I’ve waited on people celebrating birthdays and grieving at funeral repasts. I’ve helped people when they had heart attacks and seizures. I’ve witnessed customers being kind and cruel. I’ve met the rich and famous and the poor and common. I’ve spoken to nuns and priests, rapists and pornographers, criminals and cops. I shook hands with soldiers and politicians. I’ve looked upon the beautiful and the ugly. I’ve been felt up, fucked, smacked, assaulted, lied to, and abused. To borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan, I’ve seen people busy being born and people busy dying. Auggie was right: if you stay in one place long and keep your eyes open, you’ll see all you can handle. It was just like my English teachers told me—if you read stories, you get to see the entire world. And not just the stories you find in books and film, but the stories of strangers sitting next to you on the subway or in an ordinary restaurant. You can find the world in your own story, too—you just have to keep your eyes open.
I pull into my parking spot, fumble with my keys, and let myself into my apartment. My joint-custody dog Buster races around the house, thrilled that I’m home. I leash him up and take him for a walk in the cooling evening air. I idly wonder where Claude and the other homeless are bunking down for the night. When Buster finishes with his business, we go back inside. I refill his water bowl, give him a treat, and fix myself a drink. I power up my computer, take a sip of my Johnny Walker Black, and once again try coaxing words into doing my bidding. I have a deadline. The pressure’s on.
Chapter 16
Heaven and Hell
The next Saturday The Bistro’s packed. A line of customers waiting for tables snakes out the door and into the street. As my first round of tables finish their desserts, the frustrated people milling around the front entrance glower at the lingering customers with impatient hatred. Sensing the negative energy being transmitted their way, my remaining patrons hurry up and slow down—taking their sweet time to sip the last dregs of their coffee. I love passive-aggressive shit like that.
“Can you tell these people to hurry up?” one of the waiting customers, a shrill woman with a baked-in tan, asks the hostess. “We’ve got reservations for seven o’clock. It’s seven-ten now.”
“I’m sorry, madam,” the hostess replies primly. “I can’t control how long people take to eat.”
The woman obnoxiously taps the thin, expensive watch strapped to her wrist. “I was guaranteed a table at seven,” she yelps. “I’m a friend of the owner!”
I sigh inwardly and shake my head. Fluvio wouldn’t recognize this lady if his life depended on it. The tanning-booth junkie’s behavior doesn’t surprise me, however.
“Madam,” the hostess replies, “when your table’s free, I’ll seat you right away.”
“Unacceptable,” the lady says icily. “I want to speak to the owner.”
“Fluvio’s not available,” the hostess replies automatically. “He’s on vacation.”
Sensing I’m going to be drawn into the fray, I decide to be pro-active and walk over to the hostess stand. Before I can get there I hear a woman scream.
“Help! Oh my God, help!”
My brain instantly triangulates the location of the scream. Customers sitting at the back tables are covering their eyes and jumping out of their chairs. Louis is running toward me with a terrified expression on his face. Something has gone horribly wrong.
“The lady on table eight!” Louis shrieks. “She just threw up and keeled over!”
“Call 911!” I tell the hostess automatically.
I cross the length of the restaurant in record time. At table 8 I find a slim, delicate-looking lady in her mid-sixties, one of The Bistro’s regulars, slumped against the shoulder of the man sitting next to her. White as a sheet, with vomit rolling off her chin, the lady lets out an agonal groan as her eyes roll toward the back of her head. She looks like she’s going to die right here.
The man supporting the stricken woman looks up at me. I know what he’s going to say before he says it.
“The ambulance is on its way, sir,” I say.
“We knew this might happen,” the man says softly, gently stroking the woman’s hair, looking confused. “It’s not totally unexpected.”
“Sir?”
“She’s at high risk for strokes.”
“Yes, sir.”
As my eyes take in the scene it looks like someone fired with a shotgun loaded with recently masticated risotto all over the table. A stroke would explain it. This lady didn’t just throw up; she projectile-vomited. The splatter effect is widespread. I’m not a doctor, but things look very bad. My emergency health care training automatically kicks in. Maintain airway. Prevent aspiration.
“Sir,” I ask. “Is your wife breathing?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Is there anything in her mouth she can choke on? Any food?”
“I don’t…”
“We have to look, sir,” I say, pressing in.
Saving me the trouble, the husband sweeps his finger inside his wife’s mouth. Some vomit drips to the floor.
“Her mouth looks clear,” he murmurs.
“Good,” I say. “Make sure she keeps breathing.”
Entering restaurant-manager-crisis mode, I step away from the stricken lady and tell the hostess to update 911 that we have a female in her mid-sixties suffering from a possible stroke. I ask Beth to cover my section, and, knowing the paramedics will need room to work, Louis and I throw all the customers from the back section into some recently vacated tables on the aisle. Great, I think to myself, now the hostess’s seating plan has been blown to pieces.
Suddenly, the interior of the restaurant is bathed in strobing red and blue lights. The Bistro transforms from cozy restaurant to downtown emergency room in the twinkling of an eye. The Puccini playing on the overhead speakers is drowned out by blaring police radios squawking commands in the staccato language that only cops understand. As the paramedics trundle a large gurney down the length of the restaurant, I feel sorry for the customers. They all came here to have a good time, not to see this. But, when you serve over forty thousand people a year, statistically, one or two nights like this are bound to happen.
“Hey,” a bespectacled man waiting with three people by the door calls out to me, “are you in charge?”
“Yes, sir,” I reply. “I’m the manager.”
“We have a reservation at seven-thirty for a table in the back. Can we get seated?”
“I’m terribly sorry, sir,” I reply. “We’re experiencing a medical emergency. The back is unavailable right now.”
“What!” the man yelps. “I want to sit in the back!”
“I’m sorry, sir—”
“When I called, I specifically asked for a table in the back!”
“What’s the matter, George?” asks a woman standing behind the man.
“He won’t give us a back table,” the man says over his shoulder.
“Why not?”
“It’s not that I don’t want to give you the table,” I try explaining. “I can’t. The medics need room to work.”
Oblivious, the man squints at me from behind his thick glasses. “You’re gonna sit us in the back, right? You’re gonna sit us in the back like we want, right?”
“Don’t you see the paramedics working in the back?” I reply, aghast.
“Phyllis and I don’t want to sit anywhere else, George,” the woman, obviously George’s wife, warns ominously.
“Well, we want that table when it clears out,” the man huffs.
I point to an empty table near the door. “I have that table available,” I say.
“Unacceptable,” the man says.
I look toward the back. The param
edics are busy stabilizing the woman. The entire Bistro’s ground to a halt. I don’t have time for this shit.
“Listen, sir,” I say, putting steel in my voice. “You can either sit at what I have available or dine with us another night.”
The man looks flabbergasted. “B-but…” he stutters.
“I’m sorry, sir, but that’s the way it has to be.”
“I don’t want—”
“I need to keep this door clear,” I order. “You need to sit down now.”
The self-involved four argue among themselves but finally do sit down. After a few minutes the medics bundle the woman onto a stretcher and tear out the front door. The cops and I talk outside as the lady, looking like a wounded and frightened bird, is loaded into the rig. I feel for her husband. When he and his wife were young and vibrant newlyweds, I doubt if he considered their end might come like this. No, probably not.
With a blast of sirens, the ambulance streaks off into the night. I head back inside, the bus people clean up the mess, the waiters resume serving the food, and I make my way around the restaurant, thanking the diners for their patience. George’s wife glares at me from her substandard table, but I don’t care. It’s all over.
I’m not surprised at this woman’s reaction, however. It seems customers are never happy with where they get seated in a restaurant. I constantly overhear customers asking others in their party if the table is “okay” or if they want to sit somewhere else. Every hostess has horror stories about patrons throwing temper tantrums if they can’t get the exact table they want. Why do people get all bent out of shape over a table? Simple—survival of the fittest.
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