waiting
It was the middle of an intense, pre-theatre rush at the restaurant. My busser Daniel was so ‘on,’ that if I even glanced his way from across the room, he immediately turned his head to meet my eyes and interpret my nod or my lifting of an eye-brow. Without hesitation he’d be offering more bread, giving hot towels, replacing a fallen knife. I loved this feeling of being in the middle of complete insanity, with runners careening through the dining room, unconcerned diners clogging the service bar or aisle, one table ready for cheese and Banyuls, another hoping to do three courses in a hour to make the shuttle to the Mark Taper Forum; while the crew moved smoothly, seamlessly like a ten-headed, undulating organism, creating pathways in the crossfire, counterpoint in the conversation and improvising over the primitive rhythm of humans feeding.
But why did I like this? Hmm... I was a child in a good liberal California household in the 70’s. Picture women with long, stringy blonde hair at mellow social gatherings in low-lit carpeted apartment living rooms with beaded curtains and brown tones prevailing. Silkscreens by Sister Mary Corita Kent, lithographs of Picasso and Peter Max cover the walls and thin, mild-mannered men are diggin’ the scene in hip-huggers while kids mill around unmonitored, just watching – watching and being seduced by the slowness of it all, the incense haze and the adults talking about politics and civil rights. I have carried a certain love of this fly-on-the-wall activity into the realm of working in restaurants, where you have the most amazing intimate view of people revealing themselves through the simple act of eating. I also figured out at an early age that you can make more in tips than most companies will pay you, at least for the kind of work that leaves you with enough time and energy to follow your burning desire to create art out of thin air.
For me, waiting tables was really about observing people, and it turns out that watching people eat - whether with family, friends, business associates or by themselves - is a rather intimate look. And a rich opportunity for interaction wonderful and otherwise. From the
The whole thing was the perfect hyperactive meditation for me and my poised but angst-ridden self. I found most people to be wonderful and I could find interesting the suffering bastards who acted like assholes. I would look into the pores of there skin, zooming in on the creases in their brow, hitting the mute button as they began to rant, getting all the information I needed - the real low-down - by simply watching them shake their pain thing, their insecurity, their thinly veiled self-hatred, disguised as disdain and dissatisfaction with others.
What kind of freak would actually get more benefit than pain out of waiting on these people and dealing with this crap? You can draw your own conclusion. I can’t say for certain, and I’m sure it’s not entirely healthy. But to be able to watch people reveal themselves this way is some kind of crazy gift, even if the occasional verbal shrapnel did manage to burrow itself down through my skin and hit a nerve. So what if I lay sleepless in bed at 1AM once in a while obsessing over the guy who told me I was brain-dead because he doesn’t know the meaning of medium-rare... A small price to pay for such a vibrant carnival of storytelling and songwriting fodder. Coworkers expressed admiration at my ability to handle humanity and remain non-violent. I’m sure they were simultaneously nauseated at what must have seemed like a Pollyanna before them. Well, I just couldn’t help it, though I was nauseated too sometimes. This job left me mentally spent but strangely inspired and most importantly, with a flexible enough schedule to do music, music, music.
As real as the inspiration was, it was accompanied by the sinking feeling that the longer I took advantage of this job that gave me quick cash in less time than a manager can say, ‘spoiled fucking waiters!’, the harder it might be to ever make a change. I thrived on this job that would exhaust me to the point of actually being able to get a good night’s sleep if I didn’t drink too much after work at the Biltmore bar or in the alley behind the kitchen, laying on 50-pound sacks of salt, sharing a bottle of something too good for salt sacks, venting about the evening's injustices or pondering the litost of our half born dreams, trying to figure out how to get the rest of the body out. But the longer I did this, the harder it would be to believe that I could actually make a change if I could even think of something else I could tolerate as a means of paying my rent.
The natural progression would seem to be a transition to "Management." It might indeed be natural but it sounded as absurd to me as going from a barker to a banker or from a baker to a pie. Just one step away, but one step into a very tidy, very small box. I tried it and proved it to be so. So on I went in my pressed shirt and jacket, with my Rockports supporting the whole endeavor from the bottom up.
Funny thing is how those managers would whine and complain about how easy we had it, we being so spoiled and all that. I finally took up the point one night down in the dungeon beneath the restaurant where the offices were. There was really no air down there; literally no circulation, no fresh air, no ventilation in the underground office in this downtown L.A. restaurant. Maybe that’s why the managers' skin looked so sallow, their gaze so glazed at the end of the night. Or maybe it was just us waiters bringing them to the brink on a nightly basis as we pulled out our wads of pre-tax cash and pondered which bar to hit to unwind. But I took up the point with dear Byron one night (a recent waitron-to-manager convert), deciding he needed a dose of my reality and that I needed to spew it.
I laid into him, questioning him that if it’s so freakin’ easy to wait tables, and if we’re all a bunch of prima donnas, then why aren’t all the managers jumping at the opportunity to rip off their suit jackets and don the company-issue white waiter jackets that scream ‘minimum waaaage?!' Why weren't they so quick to sport the look that says, ‘I’m going to be a successful artist someday, but until then please allow me to describe the cheese selection.’ Why don’t these managers opt for the easy money and malleable schedule - which I do admit is wonderful in many ways - and forget that they ever had to worry about labor costs and what 'Corporate' thinks about their performance?? Why don’t they just get on the train to freedom, make the cash, drink at the bar after work, maybe take a customer or co-worker home once in a while, take time off whenever they can get their shifts covered... Why not just join (or rejoin) the good life? Huh? Why? Can you answer that?
Well, I can! It’s because they couldn’t do stomach it any longer! It’s because of the way it fucks with your mind to turn thirty and continue putting on the white jacket every day, knowing that you can trace every single god-damned cent you earn back to the greeting, the selling, the carrying, the slicing, the saucing, the listening, the clearing, the crumbing, the well-wishing of every person you care for throughout a shift, whether they’re your guest or that of the neighboring waiter. In other words, the lack of a sense of any leverage at all. The awareness that the wheel spins exactly as fast as you pedal and there’s no point at which you can ease up and coast, no gear you can switch to, to make the tire spin faster in relation to the movement of your feet. The knowledge that there is no paid vacation; no sense, real or imagined, of a ladder you may be climbing that will lead you to perhaps a more boring, but less physically exhausting position and allow you to move gracefully in a position suitable to someone of your advancing age.
They just couldn't withstand the pungent reality that everything you earn can be traced back through the smell of your fingers at the end of any given night. This is the reason. It takes a certain something - blind ambition, egomania, desire for greatness, humility, aimlessness or perhaps some amount of wisdom that knows this is the best balance for your artistic work - to continue on, knowing that if you ever decide to change tracks you’ll have to start over at the bottom no matter what you choose to do.
This is the reason that managers become managers. And that’s it. We all know that the waiters are having a better time so there’s no denying we enjoy a more pleasure-filled here-and-now than the managers. So it’s not about how easy the job is, it’s what lurks around the corner for every waiter, threatening to consume them, what tests their attachment to status at every moment. That’s what it is. And since restaurant types in general tend to be odd misfits, you can assume that the managers who ‘evolve’ out of this pool have probably not negotiated themselves the most stellar rate of pay. Add this to the long, crappy hours and working holidays and you get some resentful motherfuckers: amnesiacs who quickly forget the relief that they felt when they first graduated to the suit, gave in to the status quo and became a card-carrying member of the population of salaried employees.
Unless my life takes a horrifying turn for the worse, I’ll never need to spew this tirade again, but let it be said for once and for all that this is the real story. This is what I told Byron, as he sat there silent, so new to the job, with his matching cuff links and watch; his perfectly pressed shirt and slacks, his pink cheeks and pinker brain.
And don’t ever talk to me about spoiled waiters again ever. Ever. Yes, they are people who in a puny sort of way, have the upper hand in the whole dismal picture of unskilled labor; people who, as the first in the line of fire in the pursuit of the perfectly executed dining experience, have the opportunity to bitch on a nightly basis about needing more spoons or what's unfair about the tip-out process. Filled with longing and self-hatred? …Maybe. Ready to lose a screw at any moment due to the head-on collision with uncertainty that they’ve chosen as a lifestyle? ...Definitely. But spoiled? No.
Spoiled are the people who have never had to 'serve' the human race night after night in a place where you are only be allowed to eat the evening's exotic offerings once they are declassified as trash at the end of the shift, left out in the dishwasher’s station for you and your kind to share; for the rodents or whomever can make it there first to slam a bite or two. Those who never had to know what it feels like to be so grateful, so hungry, so filled with longing and hope and sadness that you can taste it.
Comments