Waiter Rant

by Steve Dublanica

  When it was time for Drunky Dave to go home, he could barely regulate his breathing, much less stand up straight. Once, when he was in a drunken stupor, he started throwing up. As he bolted for the door, vomit dripping from between his fingers while he attempted to keep his dinner from projectiling out his mouth, he clipped an old lady on her way to the bathroom. I caught the old lady before she broke a hip. The bus people cleaned off the table, and I called Dave a cab. When I was satisfied the contents of his stomach had been deposited onto the curb, I walked outside and presented him the check.

  “But I’m not finished!” Dave protested.

  “Yes, you are,” I replied. “Come back when you’re sober.”

  “Fuck you!” Drunky Dave screamed. “I eat here all the time. I drop a lot of money here.”

  “You’re drunk,” I said as the cab pulled up. “And the beauty of all this is that you’re not going to remember a thing when you wake up.”

  “You’re right,” Dave acknowledged, in a rare burst of self-awareness.

  “Good night, Dave,” I said, pushing his head down as he got inside the cab. I took his check inside and rang everything up. Of course I wrote in a 30 percent tip for myself.

  Drunky Dave never said a thing.

  Guys like Dave are just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve seen rich yuppie chicks pass out from overdosing on Special K; I’ve seen people snort heroin while waiting to get inside the restaurant; and I’ve caught sixty-year-olds smoking pot in the bathroom. I’ve had customers beg for napkins as they bled from deviated septums caused by cocaine abuse. From my vantage point, standing above the customers, I see track marks peeking out from under French cuffs. I notice the broken capillaries and the rheumy eyes. I see women rummaging through their purses looking for benzodiazepine candies. I notice the slightly jaundiced skin and detoxification tremors of men going mad as they try to space out their drinks in polite company. I know all the signs from having worked in a drug rehab. Sometimes I feel like I never left.

  In addition to taking your order and delivering food, servers are often forced to play liquor cop. In the state of New York it is against the law to serve alcohol to a visibly intoxicated person. If you come into my place already drunk, I’m not going to serve you. But what if you get drunk inside my place? What if you’re noticeably pregnant and drinking like a sailor? Do I fatten your check and my tip with high-priced booze or cut you off? Ah, the moral dilemma begins.

  Many of my customers are drunks. They shouldn’t be drinking. If they were members of my family, I’d give them AA literature, not booze. But they’re not family—they’re customers. They have a right to get fucked up if they want to. If I cut them off, they’ll likely just go drink themselves stupid at home. If I see customers who’ve had too much to drink, I’ll give them time and coffee until they sober up. If they’re not sober, I ask how they’re getting home and offer to call a cab. I’m sure some of my customers have gotten behind the wheel drunk. There’s no way for me to know what they’re going to do when they leave my restaurant.

  Sometimes they go to another bar to drink. Late at night, on my way home from work, I’ve seen people I served a few hours earlier fighting and arguing in the street like stew bums fighting over the last drop of Four Roses.

  “Did Crackhead Pete steal from you?” Arthur asks, breaking my train of thought.

  “No,” I reply. “He never took as much as a nickel. But he was always asking to borrow money.”

  “I think he owes everyone in town twenty bucks. He even hit me up once.”

  “You’ll never see it again.”

  “I’ll consider it charity.”

  “Talking about waiters and substance abuse,” I continue, “what’s the percentage of waiters who’ve gotten a DWI?”

  “Oh, man,” Arthur says, looking up at the ceiling like he’s figuring a large sum. “We’ve got at least two waiters here who fit that bill. I’d say thirty percent.”

  “That sounds about right,” I reply. “Ever notice a lot of waiters don’t drive?”

  “Their licenses have been revoked.”

  “Exactamundo.”

  A customer walks up to the bar and asks for a cosmopolitan. Arthur slips away to prepare the drink. Dawn and Beth, getting off shift from The Bistro, walk in the front door and grab the bar stools next to me.

  “Finally,” I say, looking at my watch. “You guys took your sweet time.”

  “My last customers were assholes,” Beth says.

  If you haven’t guessed it by now, “asshole” is a cherished customer descriptive.

  “What bad behaviors were on display this evening?” I ask.

  “The lady gave her date a hand job under the table,” Dawn says. “Can you believe that shit?”

  Dawn’s a petite twenty-one-year-old blonde with a cute body and green eyes. Arthur’s in lust with her.

  “I believe it,” I reply.

  “They took forever,” Beth groans.

  “The hand job took forever?” I ask.

  “It took them forty-five minutes to order,” Beth says, ignoring me. “The lady took forever to eat.”

  “Hard to eat with one hand,” I say. Dawn giggles.

  “I wish you were their waiter,” Beth says. “With that stare of yours, they’d’ve cut it out immediately.”

  “Yeah,” Dawn says. “Thanks for abandoning us.”

  “Hey,” I shoot back, “how often do I get to leave before one A.M.?”

  Arthur comes over, says hello, and gets the girls’ drink orders. They both order mojitos.

  “So,” I ask after Arthur walks away, “did the couple retire to the bathroom and, uh, finish the job?”

  “Yeah,” Beth says, “but they took an awfully long time.”

  “Probably doing drugs, too,” I say. “It’s amazing how many people need to have their consciousness altered before they have sex.”

  “Whatever,” Beth says, shrugging. “The night’s over.”

  I sip my drink. Beth and Dawn chug down their mojitos and order another round. I think all servers drink their first postshift drink quickly. A waiter’s first drink is medicinal, his second is relaxing, but his third is anesthesia.

  “So you got ’em?” Beth says to Dawn, her voice dropping to a whisper.

  Dawn fumbles in her purse and pulls out a medicine bottle.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Xanax,” Dawn says.

  “You’re not gonna take that now, are you?” I say.

  “What are you,” Dawn says, “my father?”

  “Xanax and mojitos don’t mix.”

  “I have a prescription.”

  Beth and Dawn take their pills and wash them down with a rum and mint chaser. In a few minutes the drugs will kick in and they’ll forget their own names. I’ve seen it happen before.

  I shake my head and look down at my martini. It’s still half full. I take another sip. The best advice I ever got about drinking was from my godfather. “Drink till you’re mellow,” he used to say. “After that it’s all downhill.” My father, never a big drinker, was another example. He’d have one beer every night, and that was it. I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I’ve seen my dad tipsy.

  Of course, I’ve skied booze’s downhill slope more than once. I’ve done the blackout thing. I’ve thrown up on the subway. I’ve felt cold porcelain on my cheek while prostrate on the floor of a filthy men’s room. I’ve acted just like some of my more difficult customers. Most of that shit happened before I turned thirty. Now I like to drink but hate being drunk. I try imbibing to the fine edge of happiness and then stop. Two drinks are my normal limit. If I go to a party, I ask for half-strength margaritas or light vodka and cranberries. At my brother’s wedding reception I sucked on watered-down scotch-and-sodas all night. I hate feeling dizzy. I hate throwing up. I’m afraid of getting cancer and throwing up from the chemo. I’ve seen cancer patients driven mad by nausea. I’d probably kill myself before throwing up for hours on end.
But I smoke cigarettes, so I’m just as full of shit as everyone else.

  I take another sip of my drink. Lately I’ve been drinking past my limit. That worries me. After years of watching good and bad people suffering from addictions, I came to the conclusion that everybody, and I mean everybody, narcotizes their pain somehow. I don’t care if you think the pain comes from insufficient parenting, frustrated dreams, the human condition, or the wages of Original Sin. Everyone tries to deaden it somehow.

  I hear a woman laugh. It’s a sexy, crystalline laugh that forces my head to turn. The laugh came out of a lithe woman wearing high heels and a leather miniskirt. She’s sitting on one of the tables against the wall. A young guy’s clumsily nibbling her neck. The woman’s in her late forties and still a knockout. I know her. She’s a bad drunk. She goes home with a different guy every other night of the week. Her conquests are usually younger men. She’s slept with half the waiters in town. She made a play for me once. I felt sorry for her and shined her on. She called me a fag. I look at her carefully. Her good looks won’t last forever. Eventually booze will ruin them. Men will stop being enchanted and start being repulsed. Soon she’ll have only liquor to numb her pain.

  I’ve seen people get addicted to crack and booze, religion and sex, money and power. People can get addicted to shopping and exercise, chocolate and soap operas, surfing the Internet, and even throwing up. When happiness and peace are scarce, people will turn to artificial means to shut off the jabbering in their brains. Waiters aren’t free from pain. They suffer from aching joints, bad backs, bruised egos, tattered nerves, and emotional angst.

  I look at my reflection in the mirror. A lonely-looking guy stares back at me. I never drank every day until I became a waiter. Doctors say one or two drinks a day are actually good for you. That may be true. Maybe I’m drinking more because I’m older. Maybe I’m drinking more because I’m a slacker waiter watching his life amount to nothing. I’m thirty-eight years old and waiting tables. This writing thing is a crapshoot. I’m still struggling with the proposal. If this doesn’t work out, I’ll have nothing going on, nothing to look forward to. That scares the shit out of me.

  Beth and Dawn order another round of mojitos. They’ve gone from sober to trashed in half an hour. They’re chattering away on their cell phones. They’ve forgotten I’m even there. That’s okay. They’re young girls. They like to party. They’ll get annihilated, sleep it off, and go back to work the next day. I’ve always said you can’t diagnose alcoholism in someone until he’s twenty-seven. Before then everyone’s a situational drunk. When you’re in your late thirties, however, like Crackhead Pete and me, things are very different.

  Crackhead Pete eventually met a pretty girl. They started a business, and he got most of his drinking and drugging under control. He’s not the same desperate character I met years ago. It’s a nice reminder that no one’s beyond redemption.

  I smile ruefully to myself. I gave Pete a lot of shit when I was his boss. I joined the chorus of people calling him a crackhead. Now he’s got some of the things I want but don’t have. What a kick in the ass that is.

  “Arthur,” I say a bit loudly, “another drink, please.”

  “You gonna go past your limit tonight?” Arthur asks.

  “Yep.”

  Arthur makes my drink and slides it toward me. I know I’m breaking my own rules. I want to join Beth and Dawn in obliviousness. I feel like there’s a dead zone in my brain keeping me disconnected from the human race. I want to get drunk like my customers. Behind me the sexy alcoholic laughs. Suddenly, I don’t feel sorry for her. I realize I want to fuck her, too. When people are desperate and lonely, they’ll try to connect with anything. I prop my head up on my elbow and start lapping my third drink. I’m in a bad place. The café transforms from a pair of comfortable jeans into a straitjacket. My head swims. The Iceman’s coming. I need anesthesia.

  I don’t want to think anymore.

  Chapter 18

  The Fourth of July

  Despite my hangover I show up early for my shift the next day. I have to. Fluvio is at Bistro Duetto getting ready for its grand opening. It’s lunch on a beautiful Fourth of July. The Bistro’s crowded. If it were up to me, I’d still be in bed. But since I never cut any other hungover waiters slack, I’ll never hear the end of it if I call in sick. Waiters are like arrogant teenagers, always sniffing the air for the slightest whiff of hypocrisy.

  Thick-tongued and feeling like someone stuck an ice pick into my occipital lobe, I try to ignore the clatter and bustle of a holiday lunchtime crowd. I try to imagine I’m cocooned inside a muffling force field that blots out the nerve-fraying shrieks of children and softens the pain banging inside my head. After a few minutes I realize my therapeutic visualization isn’t working. The acetaminophen I took earlier isn’t doing the trick, either. I’ve already exceeded the maximum adult dosage. If I take any more, my stressed liver’s going to slither out my navel.

  I look outside The Bistro’s plate glass window. Crowds of people throng the sidewalks soaking up the vitality of the summer season. A beautiful woman in short shorts and a diaphanous T-shirt strolls past. As I covertly watch the muscles under the tanned skin of her legs stretch and contract, a couple of high school boys spoil my view by pausing midstride to gawk at her, too. I’m slightly annoyed. I’ve been looking at women longer than these boys have been alive. They need to learn a little discretion like me. Who am I kidding? On some level, men are always fifteen.

  “Hey,” Beth says, walking in the front door. She looks terrible.

  “My, my,” I cluck. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

  “Gimme a break,” Beth grumbles. “You got hammered last night, too.”

  “Not like you, darling,” I say. “I wasn’t dancing on tables.”

  “Was I?”

  “The video I took will be all over the Internet tomorrow.”

  Beth flips me the bird. “You’re full of shit.”

  “At least you got home all right.”

  “I didn’t get home,” Beth groans. “I’m wearing the same clothes I had on last night.”

  “How delightfully skanky.”

  “I washed my shirt in a sink, so I’m not totally skanky.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” I reply. “I had no clean pants this morning, so I ironed the ones I’ve got on with Febreze.”

  “Ew.”

  “They’re so dirty I thought they’d get off the floor under their own power and commit suicide.”

  Beth laughs. I like it when Beth laughs. Her face lights up with a radiance that could dispel the darkness of human sin. Even hungover she’s still pretty.

  “How many on the books tonight?” she asks.

  “About one-fifty.”

  “Ouch,” Beth says, wincing, “Why can’t tonight be a slow night?”

  “It’s always busy when you’re hungover,” I say. “This business is like a merciless god.”

  “I don’t know how I’m going to make it,” Beth groans.

  “The wages of sin is death, young lady,” I say with mock seriousness. “Now hurry up and get ready. You just got a table.”

  “Already?”

  “Like ripping off a Band-Aid, honey. Dive in and get the pain over with fast.”

  “Ugh,” Beth says, shaking her head. “Can you believe it’s July Fourth already?”

  “I know,” I reply. “Valentine’s Day seems like last week.”

  “And I haven’t even been to the shore yet,” Beth says. “Where does the time go?”

  “Tempus fugit, kid.”

  “I guess.”

  Beth heads to the back to get ready. She’ll be all right. Beth has the best work ethic of any server at The Bistro.

  The front door chimes. A young woman of twenty-five walks in. She’s wearing a big smile on her face.

  “Remember me?” she asks.

  I flip through my mental Rolodex of faces. “Sophie?” I say carefully.

  “You remember me!” the gir
l yelps.

  I remember. Sophie. She was a bus girl when I started at The Bistro six years ago. She was nineteen back then, another college freshman hustling to make a few summer bucks. Much to my surprise, she had a schoolgirl crush on me. Fluvio used to tease me about it.

  “Of course I remember you, Sophie,” I say, coming around to give her a hug. “How’ve you been?”

  “I’m great,” Sophie says. “I’m starting my second year of law school.”

  “You’re going to be a lawyer?” I say. “Good. You can defend me when I blow this place up.”

  Sophie laughs. We give each other a hug. I catch a whiff of her perfume.

  “You look great, Sophie,” I say, as we pull apart. “Very grown up.”

  “Ugh!” Sophie says, putting her hand to her cheek. “Do you remember the hairdo I had when I worked here?”

  “Something with pink in it, I recall.”

  “Oh, you do remember.”

  “Hard to forget.”

  Sophie’s hair is now long and professionally styled. I notice her clothes fit very well. When she worked at The Bistro, she wore bulky clothes that obscured her figure. Now, baby fat long dissolved, she moves with the grace of a self-assured woman. I feel my pulse quickening. I realize I’m feeling desire. There’s a minor argument between my id and superego before the portcullis of my self-control comes crashing down. I try to remember that this girl’s fourteen years younger than me. I’m feeling what all men feel when they realize the little girls they’ve known are growing into women. It’s a feeling I’ll be experiencing until they plant me six feet under. I try and remember Lew Archer’s old adage. “When a man gets older, if he’s smart, he likes his women older, too.” That’s good advice, though I wonder how Ross Macdonald’s fictional detective would have fared working around nubile twenty-year-olds every day.

  “Are you still with Allie?” Sophie asks.

  “Oh,” I say, waving my hand, “we broke up two years ago.”