In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (30 page)

Even if you got out early with mains, some guests would invariably gripe, “How come the other tables [in your station] always get served first?” Standing in our shoes, wearing our cummerbunds, we perceived the guests as always complaining. Picture the Passover seder recounted by a man of seventy:

We viewed the guests as “altecackers” (literally, old shits) who wanted to eat all they could (rates included all meals). We mocked their accents and ridiculed their habits. To them, we were adorable college kids whom they always wanted to engage about where we lived and went to school, our career choices and sweethearts. In response, waiters tried to fool the guests:

We did try to be pleasant, both because we were trained to be and because our tips depended on it. As one waiter recalled, “I would thrown in two Jewish phrases which made people feel comfortable.” But sometimes, people got so much on your nerves that you couldn’t hold in your emotions. One troublesome guest told me there was too much water in the teacup, no matter how much I titrated the amount. Unable to please her, I poured some out in my busbox, and she still complained, so I poured half of that right onto the floor in front of her. Another guest insisted on only a half cup of coffee, and whenever I brought it it was always too much. So I went to the cup bin and got a broken cup and poured a bit of coffee into the depression in the piece and gave it to her. An owner’s son recounted a story about a guest who disliked herring so much he demanded that the waiter who served it family style put it at the far end of the table, as distant as possible from him. So difficult was this guest that someone tied a herring to the pull-chain of the light in his room, which scared him enormously when he entered one dark night.

Strategically, the best thing to do was to “train” your guests. You didn’t want them to send you back and forth to the kitchen for little side dishes of sour cream, then bananas. So you told them that it would be “easier” to ask for everything at once. To preclude their choosing from too many possible selections, you brought out what you thought would be the preferred soup, and simply started dishing it out. If they wanted the other choice, you told them that it meant waiting until you could get back to the kitchen, after you served the rest of the table (who
were
behaving by accepting
your
choice). Similarly, it was common practice at breakfast to stockpile an assortment of plates of lox, pickled herring, steweed prunes, grapefruits. When a guest requested something, you retrieved it quickly, both saving a trip and impressing them with your speed. This approach to waiting was termed “speculating”; bosses and stewards (who ran the kitchen) hated it because food might get messed up from being piled up in your sidestand. Worse, if you didn’t get orders for the speculated food, you might conveniently ditch it in the busbox rather than returning it to the kitchen where you’d get yelled at for speculating.

Another big sin was “scarfing,” eating guest food, especially at your sidestand. Everyone did this, so it was mainly a matter of circumspection. At breakfast, while waiting for guests to amble in, you could move a chair beside your sidestand, hidden from the view of the maitre d’, and eat in peace, even if briefly. If time was short, you just stooped down and gobbled up a whole honeydew slice in a big gliding-mouthed swallow. Scarfing was also possible on the way from the kitchen to the dining room, when you passed through hallways and anterooms containing toasters, egg-boiling machines, breadboxes, and bathrooms. We scarfed because the staff food was so bad, though I’m sure we would have done it even if that were not the case. They served us leftovers of food that we’d have rejected even if fresh—like flanken, boiled short ribs of beef whose gray color made you think of putrefaction. In her memoir of waiting in the Mountains, Vivian Gornick writes, “The mountains were always one long siege of vitamin deprivation. No one ever wanted to feed the help; the agony on an owner’s face if his eye fell on a busboy drinking orange juice or eating a lamb chop was palpable.” In the memory of an ex-waiter:

At the Karmel, the owners grew tired of having the kitchen crowded with staff picking up their own meals one hour before the guest meal. You could understand that two dozen waiters and busboys, four bellhops, two lifeguards, the chauffeur, and assorted others hovering at the range could get messy. So the next season started with a staff waiter, Willie, serving us all in a tightly packed anteroom to the kitchen. Willie was a veteran waiter, old and hobbled, who could no longer make the fast pace of a main dining room, so he was stuck with this sad job. We felt bad for him, and meant no particular disrespect, but one day after a whole week of leftover chicken, dried-out potato pancakes, and other such food that we found truly inedible, we decided we wanted real meat. One waiter began spontaneously, and in a moment a chorus rose from the whole group: “Beef, Willie! Beef!” Our chant continued till the owners came running in from assorted locations, fearful that we would embarrass them to the guests. I think we got maybe one decent meal out of this the next day.

If you worked the “teenage station,” you could even get one kid at each table to take orders, and you could dish out food for everyone to pass around. Busboys could get a whole table’s dishes collected and stacked without lifting a finger until the pile reached the end of the table nearest your busbox. Teenagers mostly did not like soup and appetizers, so serving was quicker. They also enjoyed helping you set up tables after the meal. On the romance end, “working teenage” meant you usually got the first opportunity to meet new arrivals on Friday night, and make a date for afterward. This, plus the ease of noncomplaining guests, made it worth the lower tips you got from the teens’ parents.

Our tasks seemed always to expand. Besides cleaning and setting our tables after meals, we had to wash our own silverware. This was done in a fairly sloppy way. During the meal, silver was put in a slot in the sidestand, to fall into a galvanized bucket of soapy water. At the end of the meal, we took the bucket to the sinks off to the side of the kitchen, poured out that water, added new soap and hot water, twisted this heavy load about ten times, rinsed it twice, and returned with it to the dining room—often with some burned skin and a sweaty face from the ferociously hot steam that came on top of an already hot meal. There we dumped the steaming silver—with occasional food pieces—onto a tablecloth already too soiled to keep on the table, bundled four corners together, and rubbed the whole assemblage till it was dry. For $10 a week, at some hotels, you could get your busboy to take over this task. We also had to wash our own goblets, since the bosses feared the glasswasher would break them. They also feared the busboys’ carelessness, and yelled at us if we tried to unload that duty.

Everyone had a “side job” as well: refilling all the salt and pepper shakers weekly, wiping off ketchup bottles, delivering hundreds of dishes from the dish room to the chef or the baker, cutting bread in the industrial-size slicer before the meal, storing sliced bread under damp cloth napkins afterward, sorting the soiled linen for the laundry truck. There was so much laundry that several staff had this task. It was so boring that we often had spoon fights, throwing silverware across the room at each other—I still have a forehead scar from one of these episodes. About every three weeks we would have to spend an extra couple of hours between lunch and dinner burnishing the silverware. This miserable task involved waiting our turn to place our silver in a revolving round chamber filled with a viscous, gloppy soap and thousands of BBs that made a terrible sound as it removed egg stains, scratches, and tarnish, and shined the silverware. You lost your whole afternoon. I recently visited the Aladdin Hotel in Woodbourne, where an old burnishing machine without its brass top serves as a flower planter in front of the main entrance. A similar problem occurred with a periodic major task of buffing the floors with a heavy power buffer. This required putting all the chairs in the dining room up on the tabletops, hence being unable to set up for the next meal. By the time the buffing was done and the tables were set, little time remained for rest—another afternoon lost. At least this was very occasional—some hotels had busboys mopping and buffing floors every day.

Like many elements of Catskills life, dining room staff relations had something of a cutthroat attitude. Waiters would steal silverware from each other’s drawers, goblets from their trays, and even food from their sidestands. It was often necessary to make sure that either you or your busboy was always present at the station to protect the sidestand from marauders. Inexperienced waiters would find more seasoned ones cutting in front of them on the line in the kitchen. One of the worst offenses was stealing toast. We had to make our own toast in large revolving machines that held ten rows of four slices each. The best way to save time was to thrown toast in on the way from the dining room to the kitchen, pick up egg orders, and fetch the toast to add to the eggs on the way back. Lots of toast was stolen in that interim, and the excuse was always, “Hey, I put that in before. Someone else took yours.” The exact same thing held for boiled eggs, which we had to make ourselves. A large vat contained a number of egg machines hovering over the boiling water. You placed your eggs in the basket and pulled the chain down according to a marker indicating the number of minutes for that type of egg. When the time was up the chain returned the basket for you to extract your order. Eggs were stolen less frequently than toast, but only because many waiters couldn’t tell how well the eggs were done by merely shaking them.

We played around a lot in the dining room, before and after meals. We did animal imitations and performed impromptu skits satirizing the chef, maitre d’, and owners. We called make-believe harness races. We roughhoused with each other. A busboy recalled:

T
HE
S
TAFF AT
P
LAY

For the money, we worked long hours. We got up at 7 to serve breakfast. With luck you could be done by 10 or 10:15 if your guests finished trekking in early enough. Then back at 12 for lunch, and out again at 2 or 2:30. Free until 6 for supper. Time enough to go cruising other hotels or the streets of Liberty or Monticello in search of girls. Maybe just hang out poolside, play baskeetball, baseball, tennis. The advantage of smaller hotels was that you could use all the guest facilities; many larger ones segregated the staff. By hustling, it was possible to get out of the dining room by 8:30 at night. Almost everyone was after some fun. Sunday night was often poker, since we had just gotten the week’s tips. Once a week at Paul’s Hotel we hoarded food from the kitchen and rowed across the lake for late-night cookouts. But the best of times were at Monticello Raceway, local pubs, and rock shows at some of the larger medium-size hotels like the Eldorado in South Fallsburg, where you could hear groups like the Four Seasons. A waitress at the Homowack in Spring Glen recounted how the dining room staff would celebrate the end of the season by going glider flying in Wurtsboro.