I Hate Everyone, Except You(50)
“Sure,” said Alex.
(And the details of which—oh, you get the idea.)
* * *
* All names have been changed, including my own.
I’M WAITING
I haven’t waited a table since March 1993, but I still wake up in a cold sweat a couple of times a year because I forgot to bring a third whiskey sour to the naked old lady dining with Idi Amin. Or because the management has changed the computer system without telling me, so every time I type the code for a menu item it gets all garbled by the time it reaches the printer in the kitchen.
“Is this some kind of joke, you little prick?” The expediting chef screams at me as soon as I enter through the swinging doors.
I’m confused. “Is what a joke?” I ask.
“What did you order?” He looks like he wants to rip my head off.
“A turkey club, hold the mayonnaise.”
“Look at this!” He thrusts the ticket toward me. It’s got my name on the top, so it must be my order except, for the life of me, I don’t know why it doesn’t say TURK CLB, NO MAYO. “Read it out loud,” he says, “so these fine chefs don’t miss a single word.” A half-dozen surly types in white coats glare at me.
“Ass rape, no mayo,” I say.
“Louder, boy!”
“ASS RAPE, NO MAYO, SIR!”
Then the chef—he has become Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds—paces back and forth in front of the steam table where they keep the soups: Manhattan Clam, New England Clam, and whatever the soup du jour is. I probably should know it, but I forgot to memorize the specials. “Did ya hear that, fellas? This fine sonofabitch wants nonconsensual sodomy! With a categorical lack of lubricant!”
All of a sudden I’m confused because I don’t know how my customer is going to get his sandwich. “No,” I say. “That’s not what I want at all. Nobody wants that. Can somebody please make me a turkey club?” The next thing I know, I’m running and running. I’m the only waiter for the entire restaurant. All the water glasses need to be refilled, ashtrays are overflowing, my name tag says Charlene.
“Noooooooo!” I sit up in bed.
“Are you OK?” Damon asks.
“Just another restaurant dream,” I say and try to go back to sleep.
If I ever become president of the United States, which I won’t because I want that job about as much as I want bacterial meningitis, I vow to institute a draft. Not for military service, but for mandatory restaurant work, which will result in a more kindhearted society overall.
Hear me out.
I will require every citizen over the age of twenty-one to wait tables full-time for a minimum of two years. You might get drafted on your twenty-first birthday. Maybe on your forty-seventh. Perhaps when you’re eighty-two. Nobody knows, because it’s random. When you receive via certified mail the notice that you have been drafted, you will report immediately to the Bureau of Food and Beverage Service where you will be given an apron and some soft-soled shoes with decent arch support. Then you will be randomly assigned to a restaurant within a fifteen-mile radius of your home, to make fulfilling your service requirement as convenient as possible.
A wealthy, frozen-faced housewife might find herself slinging bowls of pho during the lunch rush at Saigon Sally’s on Route 6. The newest cocktail server at the Bellagio hotel and casino: a balding insurance salesman named Herb. Can’t find grandma? That’s because for the third time this week she picked up an extra shift at Hooters.
Just to be clear, the point of my program is not to level the economic playing field. This country is too far gone to fix that mess. I just think it’s important each of us experience the utter assholery of which our fellow American is capable while he’s eating a pork chop. If we’re all concerned that tomorrow we may be the one treated like the lowly pissant, smiling like a lunatic for a 15 percent tip, we will all behave more civilly today.
*
While in graduate school, I took a job in a relatively small restaurant in Chicago’s Lakeview East neighborhood, which is also known as Boystown because of the high percentage of gay men living there. And though the restaurant wasn’t a gay one per se, a lot, maybe half, of the clientele preferred members of the same sex. Inside, eighteen tables, all deuces and four-tops, were arranged in an L shape around an old wooden bar. The food was American, with an Italian spin, insomuch as there was roasted garlic on the appetizer menu and olive oil on every table. If the weather was nice, the manager would have the waiters, never more than three (plus a bartender), uncover from beneath a tarpaulin six more tables outside on the sidewalk. The place could have used a busboy, but for whatever reason none was employed, which meant that the waiters had to do all the clearing, scraping, resetting, dropping bread, and refilling water in addition to taking food and drink orders and delivering them. I didn’t mind the work, and no bussers meant more cash in my pocket. But when it was busy, an extra set of hands would have been helpful, especially with all the tables in my station full at once.
Waiting on gay guys can be a fun—or horrible—experience if you are one. Sometimes the manager would seat a table of men past their prime in my station because they were obviously more excited about flirting with their twenty-three-year-old waiter than they were about the food. “Does that steak come with a side of tall, skinny white boy?” they’d say. Or once: “I’ll have a martini, and you make sure it’s dirty. Dirty as that little mind of yours. Oh, that’s right, I can see into your filthy soul, you wicked twink slut.” It was adorable.