Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (42 page)

So I find it particularly ironic that I am now in the unique position of skipping beyond the covers of
Waiting
and writing my
own
ending. Although there’s a curious sense of finality in the act of writing this epilogue, it also seems quite fitting.
Waiting
cer
tainly marked the end of a long life phase for me while linking it to the beginning of another. But before I investigate what looms over the next horizon, let me back up for a moment and go to the beginning of this particular end: what happened after
Waiting
.

When I began writing
Waiting
, I had several very different jobs. I was working as an instructional aide in a preschool pro
gram for severely handicapped children during the day and I was waiting on tables a couple of nights a week. My freelance editing business was operating in fits and starts as well. I’d have a month or two with no work and then be deluged with deadlines. And of course there was my son, Blaze, a full-time job in himself, but a rewarding one. As usual, my waitressing job proved to be the most lucrative, even with an abbreviated schedule at the restau
rant.

I got some characteristically amusing reactions when I informed my restaurant coworkers that I was writing a book about the job and that it was going to be published. The chef, for example, responded this way:

“What do you mean, book? You are writing a book about what?”

“About this,” I said, making a sweeping gesture across the restaurant. “About this job. About my life as a waitress.”

“What?” the chef asked again. “Are you serious?” He smiled and wiped the edge of a splattered plate with a kitchen rag. “You are kidding, right?”

“No, I’m not kidding,” I told him and took my order from the line. The chef paused for a beat or two and scratched his head.

“What are you going to say about
me
?” he asked and smiled again.

After expressing a similar sense of disbelief, my fellow waiter Franco said, “I want my cut, eh?”

“What cut?” I asked him. “Why should you get a cut of any
thing?”

“You write about me, no? I want my cut.”

“Please,” I said, shoving him aside so that I could put an order into the computer, “why would I want to write about
you
?”

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“Eh? Come on, look at me.” He grinned broadly, revealing a mouth full of nicotine-stained teeth, and straightened his raggedy tie in a mock gesture of vanity.

“My point, exactly,” I said.

My managers were somewhat nonplussed with the idea that I was writing a book. They wavered between mild paranoia about what I might say and befuddled amusement that anyone would be interested enough about restaurant life to publish a book about it. (Of course, none of my managers actually
read
books so this wasn’t an entirely surprising reaction. In fact, several of them were barely literate in both Italian and English, which explained the inadvertently hilarious items on the “nightly specials” sheet. We often had “pork lion,” for example, and “veal lever.” My per
sonal favorites, however, were the “stripped sea bass” and “ravioli staffed with salmon.”)

I realized that my status as resident restaurant writer wasn’t exactly an elevated one when I signed my cashout one night and told my manager jokingly, “You might want to save that signa
ture, you know, it might be worth something soon.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll have plenty more of these before that happens.”

My fellow servers were rather more excited about the book and began offering me all kinds of information about their past experiences on an almost hourly basis. There were some doozies in these tales. One server once had a manager who’d set himself on fire in the middle of the dining room. Another had waited on a party whose host hurled curses at the server for twenty minutes until another member of the group politely pointed out that the host had Tourette’s syndrome. Still another server had waited on an elderly, querulous Beverly Hills matron who had passed out at the table. Since she was out cold when the paramedics loaded her onto a stretcher, they asked the server if he knew about how old the woman was. “In her seventies,” I think, the server said, at
which point the woman shot up from the stretcher and shouted, “Excuse me! I am sixty-five and don’t you forget it!”

Although I loved all of these stories, I knew I would never be able to write about them. I knew that I was not an objective expert on restaurants, servers, or waiting, but after twenty years in the business, I was certainly an expert on my own experiences with all of the above. And it was only my
own
experiences that I could write about with any kind of authenticity. Somewhere in there, I hoped, I would strike a common chord.

Shortly thereafter, I started becoming overwhelmed with memories of the previous two decades every time I went to work at the restaurant. Since I couldn’t really think about waitressing while I worked at the school or while I edited manuscripts, my waiting shifts became, in a sense, writing shifts. I found myself jotting down notes when I should have been folding napkins and drifting into reveries about my first experiences at the table when I was actually
at
the table of a patron who wanted service now and not twenty years ago. I was preoccupied and for good reason. There weren’t actually enough hours in my day to keep all my jobs, spend time with my son,
and
complete the book I’d been waiting so long to write.

So, once again, I decided to leave the restaurant. This time, however, I did so assuming that, sooner or later, I’d be back. I looked at it more as a sabbatical this time and less as an escape from a trap I’d gotten myself entangled in. I had no illusions that I was going off to become some kind of literary star. In fact, my time floating in and around the book business had shown me that authors who became rich and famous from their writing were rare birds indeed. The concept of making a living from my writing alone was one I still couldn’t wrap my mind around.

My last shift was lacking in any kind of fanfare. It was such a nonevent that I had to remind my manager to prepare my separa
tion papers at the end of the shift so that I could receive my last

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paycheck. Nobody was particularly sad to see me go, although some were extremely envious. (There is always that whiff of parole in the air when a fellow server “gets out.”) Perhaps they thought I’d be back soon. Had they given voice to that thought, I wouldn’t have disagreed with them. The rate of recidivism in servers is pretty high, after all.

What actually struck me about that last shift, though, was not leaving at the end of it but arriving for work some five hours ear
lier. I had come up in the service elevator like I usually did and tar
ried behind the restaurant in the few minutes before my shift began. Back there with me were a couple of cooks sitting on over
turned milk cartons, smoking and inspecting their splattered aprons. There was a busboy eating the staff meal with his hands (all the forks were still dirty because the dishwashers were on a break) and the bartender, also smoking, stocking liquor for the night ahead from the outside storage unit. I buttoned my shirt col
lar and straightened my tie. These were the same motions I’d been going through for twenty years and I did them without thinking. After I donned the jacket I worked in, I checked my pockets for the night’s essentials: lipstick, wine opener, order pad, pen, mints, and a dollar’s worth of loose change. I was joined by another waiter who, after an hour on shift, was already taking a cigarette break.

“What’s it like in there?” I asked him.

“Slow,” he said, shrugging. “Nothing yet. The book looks good, though. Should be a busy night.”

“It’s my last night,” I told him.

“Oh yeah?” he answered. “Cool.”

“I’m working with you tonight,
chapparita
,” the busboy said through mouthfuls of chicken and gestured toward me with a greasy finger. “We’re making good money.”

“Okay,” I told him. “Fine with me.” I applied the night’s first coat of lipstick using the blade on my wine opener as a mirror and checked my watch. The waiter stamped out his cigarette on
the ground, exhaled the last of the smoke in his lungs, and fol
lowed me into the kitchen.

I punched my time card and all five of my senses sharpened to the immediate assault. Behind the rumbling sound of the dish
washer I could hear knives hitting meat and marble. A radio was tuned to the Allman Brothers’ “Whipping Post” and the sous
chef was singing along loudly and off-key. There was water run
ning and waiters screaming for silverware. The air crackled with curses in four different languages. I smelled coffee, steaming veg
etables, and garlic. A busboy rushed past me with an armful of fresh bread and dusted me with a fine layer of flour. As I was brushing the white crumbs from my black pants, a sweating wait
ress came into view. It was only five o’clock, I noted, and already she had splotches of coffee and red wine on her jacket. Not a good sign.

“Oh, good, you’re here,” she said, slightly out of breath. “Can you take table forty-two? They were seated a while ago but I haven’t been able to get to them because I’ve been slammed, but they’re in your station anyway. They need bread. And they look like they’re ready to order. And they’re probably a little pissed because nobody’s been there yet but it’s not my fault.” She disap
peared in a whirl of bread, butter, and olive oil.

I sliced bread for table forty-two and felt a familiar surge of adrenaline through my body. In moments, I’d be out onstage again, performing my own show. Although I had a clue about how I’d be greeted by table forty-two, I had no idea what the rest of the night would bring. After twenty years, the anticipation of going out to that uncertain audience still caused a butterfly flit. There wasn’t anything in the world quite like that moment of expectation, I realized. Every night, at least for one moment, I got to be sixteen again, with everything fresh and the promise of excitement just outside the swinging doors. As I prepared the bread basket for my first table, I knew I would miss that moment

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for as long as I was off the floor. It was a little epiphany but an important one, nonetheless. One can’t really ask for more at the beginning of a dinner shift with a station already full and at least one table in a bad mood.

I finished work on
Waiting
shortly after that last shift, but the book wasn’t published for a year after that. In the interim, I had plenty of time to work myself into a full-scale panic over the kind of reception it would receive. After all, there’s nothing like antici
pation to fuel paranoia. Once again, it was authenticity that I wor
ried about. I didn’t expect that any reader would have had the exact same experiences as I since
Waiting
is essentially a memoir, but I hoped that those experiences would echo those of the reader. In addition, I really wanted other servers to be able to relate to what I had written about restaurants and a life spent waiting.

As soon as it was published,
Waiting
proved to be an entirely entertaining experience with a dash of the absurd thrown in for good measure. Just before the book was released, I taped a seg
ment for the game show
To Tell the Truth
. For those not in the know, this is a game where a celebrity panel questions three peo
ple, one who is telling the truth about her/himself and two impostors who are lying as effectively as possible. As my two impostors attempted to absorb my personality during the course of the day, we watched a parade come and go in sets of three. As well as we three waitresses who had written a book, there were three women who lived with a horse and three naked cowboys who sang country music. There were three plus-size models in lingerie, three female boxers, and three policemen who played in a rock band. In the spirit of the game, nobody would admit to who was real and who was an impostor. As Debra #1, Debra #3, and I were riding the elevator down to the studio, we were accosted by three medieval knights in full regalia.