Waiter Rant (19 page)

William Hurt, the Academy Award–winning actor, is one of my regular customers. The day after I saw
A History of Violence
, he came to The Bistro to eat. As I served him I pondered the weirdness of seeing someone getting his brains blown out on the silver screen one day and then eating risotto in my section the next. So, as a goof, I started watching all the movies William’s ever starred in. As I made my way through the William Hurt filmography, I stumbled across a jewel of a film called
Smoke
.

Made in 1995, the movie revolves around a Brooklyn cigar
shop and its colorful proprietor, Auggie Wren, played by Harvey Keitel. This film has special resonance for me because I once worked in a cigar shop to earn some extra money. Auggie’s character, a raconteur and amateur photographer, has taken a picture of the same street corner outside his shop at the same time every day for fourteen years. Assembling all the pictures into a series of photo albums, Auggie can’t explain why he does it; he just knows he has to. When he shows the photos to William Hurt’s character, a blocked writer and grieving widower named Paul Benjamin, he notices the author flipping through the album a bit too quickly. “You’ll never get it if don’t slow down, my friend,” Auggie says. When Benjamin remarks that all the pictures look the same, Auggie points out the differences in the seasons, the expressions on people’s faces, how the light plays on the buildings. It’s then the viewer realizes what Auggie’s done. Put together, all those snapshots combine to create time-lapse photography on a massive scale. By slowing down and focusing on something as small and mundane as a street corner, Auggie has created something beautiful. By staying in one place, Auggie’s created a work of art. Auggie sums up his philosophy when he says, “People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you’re going to see just about all that you can handle.”

Until The Bistro, I never worked at anyplace longer than two years. After walking the restaurant’s floorboards for several years, however, I think I unconsciously realized I knew enough about something to start writing about it. Like Auggie’s street corner, the sameness and stability of The Bistro focused me so I could appreciate the little stories that waltzed into my restaurant every day. Staying put inspired me to write. Two years after starting my blog, when I flipped through the hundreds of the stories I had written, I realized I was doing what Auggie did. I was taking snapshots of The Bistro with words.

But, as the barista at Starbucks pointed out, people have also been taking snapshots of me. To many people, I’m a great waiter
and a friendly person. To others, however, I’m that slightly arrogant, reserved guy who corrects customers when they mispronounce their entrée. There are even a few customers who despise me—calling me the rudest waiter in the neighborhood. And to a lady who only catches a glimpse of me through the plate glass, I’m the sad man in the window.

Later, in my car heading home, the events of the day flicker under my eyes like the dashed white lines in the middle of the road. I think about Beth and how she almost lost her beauty. I think about Saroya’s struggle to build a family and Felipe’s efforts to do the right thing by his. I think of all the things I’ve seen and what people have confided in me—their hopes, their dreams, and their confessions of sin.

Within The Bistro I’ve seen people get married and divorced. I’ve seen babies being born and parents mourning the loss of children. I’ve waited on people celebrating birthdays and grieving at funeral repasts. I’ve helped people when they had heart attacks and seizures. I’ve witnessed customers being kind and cruel. I’ve met the rich and famous and the poor and common. I’ve spoken to nuns and priests, rapists and pornographers, criminals and cops. I shook hands with soldiers and politicians. I’ve looked upon the beautiful and the ugly. I’ve been felt up, fucked, smacked, assaulted, lied to, and abused. To borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan, I’ve seen people busy being born and people busy dying. Auggie was right: if you stay in one place long and keep your eyes open, you’ll see all you can handle. It was just like my English teachers told me—if you read stories, you get to see the entire world. And not just the stories you find in books and film, but the stories of strangers sitting next to you on the subway or in an ordinary restaurant. You can find the world in your own story, too—you just have to keep your eyes open.

I pull into my parking spot, fumble with my keys, and let myself into my apartment. My joint-custody dog Buster races around the house, thrilled that I’m home. I leash him up and take
him for a walk in the cooling evening air. I idly wonder where Claude and the other homeless are bunking down for the night. When Buster finishes with his business, we go back inside. I refill his water bowl, give him a treat, and fix myself a drink. I power up my computer, take a sip of my Johnny Walker Black, and once again try coaxing words into doing my bidding. I have a deadline. The pressure’s on.

T
he next Saturday The Bistro’s packed. A line of customers waiting for tables snakes out the door and into the street. As my first round of tables finish their desserts, the frustrated people milling around the front entrance glower at the lingering customers with impatient hatred. Sensing the negative energy being transmitted their way, my remaining patrons hurry up and slow down—taking their sweet time to sip the last dregs of their coffee. I love passive-aggressive shit like that.

“Can you tell these people to hurry up?” one of the waiting customers, a shrill woman with a baked-in tan, asks the hostess. “We’ve got reservations for seven o’clock. It’s seven-ten now.”

“I’m sorry, madam,” the hostess replies primly. “I can’t control how long people take to eat.”

The woman obnoxiously taps the thin, expensive watch strapped to her wrist. “I was guaranteed a table at seven,” she yelps. “I’m a friend of the owner!”

I sigh inwardly and shake my head. Fluvio wouldn’t recognize this lady if his life depended on it. The tanning-booth junkie’s behavior doesn’t surprise me, however.

“Madam,” the hostess replies, “when your table’s free, I’ll seat you right away.”

“Unacceptable,” the lady says icily. “I want to speak to the owner.”

“Fluvio’s not available,” the hostess replies automatically. “He’s on vacation.”

Sensing I’m going to be drawn into the fray, I decide to be pro-active and walk over to the hostess stand. Before I can get there I hear a woman scream.

“Help! Oh my God, help!”

My brain instantly triangulates the location of the scream. Customers sitting at the back tables are covering their eyes and jumping out of their chairs. Louis is running toward me with a terrified expression on his face. Something has gone horribly wrong.

“The lady on table eight!” Louis shrieks. “She just threw up and keeled over!”

“Call 911!” I tell the hostess automatically.

I cross the length of the restaurant in record time. At table 8 I find a slim, delicate-looking lady in her mid-sixties, one of The Bistro’s regulars, slumped against the shoulder of the man sitting next to her. White as a sheet, with vomit rolling off her chin, the lady lets out an agonal groan as her eyes roll toward the back of her head. She looks like she’s going to die right here.

The man supporting the stricken woman looks up at me. I know what he’s going to say before he says it.

“The ambulance is on its way, sir,” I say.

“We knew this might happen,” the man says softly, gently stroking the woman’s hair, looking confused. “It’s not totally unexpected.”

“Sir?”

“She’s at high risk for strokes.”

“Yes, sir.”

As my eyes take in the scene it looks like someone fired with a shotgun loaded with recently masticated risotto all over the table. A stroke would explain it. This lady didn’t just throw up; she projectile-vomited. The splatter effect is widespread. I’m not a doctor, but things look very bad. My emergency health care training automatically kicks in.
Maintain airway. Prevent aspiration.

“Sir,” I ask. “Is your wife breathing?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Is there anything in her mouth she can choke on? Any food?”

“I don’t…”

“We have to look, sir,” I say, pressing in.

Saving me the trouble, the husband sweeps his finger inside his wife’s mouth. Some vomit drips to the floor.

“Her mouth looks clear,” he murmurs.

“Good,” I say. “Make sure she keeps breathing.”

Entering restaurant-manager-crisis mode, I step away from the stricken lady and tell the hostess to update 911 that we have a female in her mid-sixties suffering from a possible stroke. I ask Beth to cover my section, and, knowing the paramedics will need room to work, Louis and I throw all the customers from the back section into some recently vacated tables on the aisle. Great, I think to myself, now the hostess’s seating plan has been blown to pieces.

Suddenly, the interior of the restaurant is bathed in strobing red and blue lights. The Bistro transforms from cozy restaurant to downtown emergency room in the twinkling of an eye. The Puccini playing on the overhead speakers is drowned out by blaring police radios squawking commands in the staccato language that only cops understand. As the paramedics trundle a large gurney down the length of the restaurant, I feel sorry for the customers. They all came here to have a good time, not to see this. But, when you serve over forty thousand people a year, statistically, one or two nights like this are bound to happen.

“Hey,” a bespectacled man waiting with three people by the door calls out to me, “are you in charge?”

“Yes, sir,” I reply. “I’m the manager.”

“We have a reservation at seven-thirty for a table in the back. Can we get seated?”

“I’m terribly sorry, sir,” I reply. “We’re experiencing a medical emergency. The back is unavailable right now.”

“What!” the man yelps. “I want to sit in the back!”

“I’m sorry, sir—”

“When I called, I specifically asked for a table in the back!”

“What’s the matter, George?” asks a woman standing behind the man.

“He won’t give us a back table,” the man says over his shoulder.

“Why not?”

“It’s not that I don’t want to give you the table,” I try explaining. “I can’t. The medics need room to work.”

Oblivious, the man squints at me from behind his thick glasses. “You’re gonna sit us in the back, right? You’re gonna sit us in the back like we want, right?”

“Don’t you see the paramedics working in the back?” I reply, aghast.

“Phyllis and I don’t want to sit anywhere else, George,” the woman, obviously George’s wife, warns ominously.

“Well, we want that table when it clears out,” the man huffs.

I point to an empty table near the door. “I have that table available,” I say.

“Unacceptable,” the man says.

I look toward the back. The paramedics are busy stabilizing the woman. The entire Bistro’s ground to a halt. I don’t have time for this shit.

“Listen, sir,” I say, putting steel in my voice. “You can either sit at what I have available or dine with us another night.”

The man looks flabbergasted. “B-but…” he stutters.

“I’m sorry, sir, but that’s the way it has to be.”

“I don’t want—”

“I need to keep this door clear,” I order. “You need to sit down
now
.”

The self-involved four argue among themselves but finally do sit down. After a few minutes the medics bundle the woman onto a stretcher and tear out the front door. The cops and I talk outside as the lady, looking like a wounded and frightened bird, is loaded into the rig. I feel for her husband. When he and his wife
were young and vibrant newlyweds, I doubt if he considered their end might come like this. No, probably not.

With a blast of sirens, the ambulance streaks off into the night. I head back inside, the bus people clean up the mess, the waiters resume serving the food, and I make my way around the restaurant, thanking the diners for their patience. George’s wife glares at me from her substandard table, but I don’t care. It’s all over.

I’m not surprised at this woman’s reaction, however. It seems customers are never happy with where they get seated in a restaurant. I constantly overhear customers asking others in their party if the table is “okay” or if they want to sit somewhere else. Every hostess has horror stories about patrons throwing temper tantrums if they can’t get the exact table they want. Why do people get all bent out of shape over a table? Simple—survival of the fittest.

The incessant jockeying for the best table is all about competition for resources. Once, in our primordial past, we’d bash in one another’s heads for scraps of mastodon meat, breeding partners, fur pelts, and a nice cave near a clean water supply. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to pass on your genetic material. That impetus to survive is hardwired into our brains. We see unscrupulous businesspeople exhibit this instinct all the time—when they character assassinate each other in the press, acquire and dispose trophy spouses with astonishing rapidity, buy fur pelts (still), and get into frenzied bidding wars over a nice cave, I mean condo, in a trendy neighborhood. Of course, this crap isn’t solely the province of rich customers. You should see me in a mall parking lot during the Christmas holidays. Talk about competition for resources! I become like one of those digitally six-pack-abed warriors from
The 300
. Cursing the cowardice of handicapped people and expectant mothers with their preferred parking slots, I want to cry out, “Wimps! Fight it out like everyone else! Now where’s my spear?”

It’s a tough world out there. We all want to have our little piece of the pie and our shot at happiness. Struggle is part of life. Sometimes you have to be aggressive to get what you want. Occa
sionally, we stiff-arm people with ambition or trample over them in pursuit of our goals. We don’t set out to hurt people; sometimes we just do. Of course, we get elbowed and ground into the dirt, too. Life can get rough. At some point we will all know what it feels like to lose. You have to learn to take it on the chin gracefully and figure out how to win the next time. That’s the great lesson of sports. Getting a good table in a restaurant, however, isn’t essential to one’s survival or happiness.

In order to achieve their goals, some people have internalized knocking people around psychologically, economically, and sometimes even physically to get what they think they deserve. They’re like people with a faulty adrenal system or an overabundance of testosterone—it’s always game time, it’s always time to be aggressive, it’s always time to battle for any little thing they think they deserve. When I tell these people they can’t have the primo table they want, they act like I’m threatening their very survival. I may not be withholding food or shelter, but I’m holding out of their grasp a valuable “psychological resource”—the illusory feeling that they’re somehow better than everyone else. That’s what a seating chart at any high-end restaurant is all about. Ask any reservation manager or maître d’. She’ll tell you it’s a sensitive social/economic pecking order, and no status-conscious customers want to be on the bottom of the pile—or near the men’s room. That would mean,
gasp
, they’re somehow inferior. And if they’re inferior, they won’t survive! That explains why those four people were willing to step over a woman having a stroke so they could get the table they wanted.

Of course, those four people will survive not sitting in the back—just like I’ll survive parking three miles from the mall entrance the day before Christmas. And don’t think I’ve got some prejudice against rich and successful people hustling to make it—far from it. Nonwealthy slackers aren’t immune from this craziness either. Middle-class America—secure in the knowledge that at least they’re better than
that
guy—loves watching people make complete idiots of themselves on national TV. Many of my
wealthier customers are the nicest people I’ve ever met. I’ve never bought into the fiction that the rich are evil and that poor people are romantic souls always struggling for justice and equality. Talk to any cop. There are poor assholes in this world, too.

But there’s got to be more to life than just survival. There’s got to be more to life than being better than everyone else. You have to survive for
something
. My godfather, a Catholic priest, once told me, “You may be the strongest and survive—only to win a life not fit for living.”

Late the next morning Beth and I are sitting by the front window drinking coffee and kibitzing. It’s early, and we’re not expecting customers for an hour. I take a sip of my coffee and sigh. Like Grand Central Station when it’s empty, The Bistro hums with potential, as if it knows that being empty is an unnatural state.

“So did you hear how that lady’s doing?” Beth asks me.

“The woman from last night?” I reply.

“Yeah.”

“I called the hospital, but they wouldn’t tell me.”

“What a shame. That poor lady.”

“Yeah,” I murmur. “It was terrible.”

“Well, the paramedics got here fast.”

“Thank God.”

“You know what, though?” Beth asks.

“What?”

“I’m still pissed at those assholes.”

“The four top who wanted to sit in the back?”

“Yeah. Can you believe how insensitive they were?”

“I believe it.”

“It’s almost criminal.”

“‘Hell is other people,’” I say, quoting Jean-Paul Sartre.

“You ain’t kidding,” Beth replies.

“I wish I was.”

Beth and I are quiet. We continue to sip our coffee and watch the world go by. Outside, people bustle along with faces set to grim purpose, running around like so many rats in a cage.
Gotta
hustle. Only the strong survive
. I think about that four top and how coldhearted people can be. And not for the first time I remember that indifference to the suffering of others is the ingenuity of evil. When that whole survival-of-the-fittest thing goes haywire, it can damage the part of our soul that makes us care about other people. When you don’t care, when you’re wrapped up in your own selfishness, man’s inhumanity to man becomes that much easier to ignore.

A few hours later the front door chimes. Two parents and their daughter walk in for an early dinner. My face brightens. I remember the father is a good tipper. After I seat them and bring their cocktails, they order expensive entrées and a $200 bottle of wine. It’s my lucky day.

They polish off their appetizers and tuck into dinner. In the middle of their entrées the little girl waves me over.

“Yes, miss?” I ask.

“Who’s that?” she says fearfully, pointing toward the window.

I look over. Claude, our local homeless guy, is outside looking in. I wave to him. He waves back.

“That’s just Claude,” I reply. “He’s harmless.”

“See, dear,” the mother says reassuringly. “I told you it was okay.”

“Why is he out there?” the girl asks.

“He’s always out there,” I reply.

“Is he a bum?”

“Claude is homeless, miss.”