Debra Ginsberg - Waiting : The True Confessions of a Waitress

On a particularly hot and sticky night in August 1998, I stood in front of the display kitchen in the restaurant where I worked and waited for my food to appear. The cooks, sweating, frantic, and bad-tempered, shot me dirty looks.

Table Five? I questioned, smiling. A lasagna and a spaghetti? Coming soon? I shot a backward glance at Table Five. They were craning their necks as other waiters walked past their table with steaming plates. They were hungry, their water glasses were empty, and they were starting to get very foul looks on their faces. In the twenty minutes since Id made their acquaintance, Id learned that this particular couple were hashing out a divorce settlement and, for all intents and purposes, hated each other. I knew that if I didnt get them their food within five minutes, I was doomed. My tip would disappear. Theyd ask to see the manager. There would be an ugly scene. Through no fault of my own, I would become another casualty of their divorce.

The cook muttered something bitter in Spanish. Although I didnt understand the exact meaning of the words, I hardly needed a translation to figure their intent. A recently hired coworker noticed my despair and shook his head.

Its bad tonight, he said.

Like every Saturday, I replied.

Yeah? he said. How long have you been doing this?

It took me a stunned moment to answer him. I took another look at Table Five. The soon-to-be-ex-husband made eye contact with me and raised his hands expectantly. I smiled and pointed to the kitchen. Turning back to my coworker, I said, Twenty years. Ive been doing this for exactly twenty years.

I watched his mouth drop open and wasnt sure which one of us was more horrified. My coworker, I realized, had not even been born by the summer of 1978 when I had my first job waiting on tables in a luncheonette.

How old are you? he asked, baffled.

Does it matter? I said, casting another desperate glance at the kitchen. Its been twenty years and Im still waiting.

The restaurant business has been part of my life since childhood. When I was a kid, both of my parents worked in the restaurants of several Catskill Mountain hotels in upstate New York, my father in the dining room and my mother in the bar. My mothers stint as a server didnt last very long at all. By all accounts, including her own, she was the worst cocktail waitress in the history of time. No matter who her customers were, my mother was never comfortable serving other people. Every time she approached a new table, she felt she should be sitting at it instead of waiting on it. Her service reached its nadir one night when a guest ordered a bottle of Pouilly-Fuiss. My mother placed the bottle and corkscrew on the table, asked the guest, Can you open this? and fled from the table. This was basically the end of her career as a waitress of any kind. My father, on the other hand, lasted considerably longer as a waiter.

Every night, hed come home with stories of the various acts that still played the circuit of Browns, The Concord, and Grossingers. While most of these showpeople couldnt really be considered headliners any longer, Id hear names I recognized and be moderately entertained.

Ever mindful of the sweet teeth in his family, my father also brought home treats. On Saturday nights, hed arrive with a variety of confections wrapped in thick white napkins. We regularly sampled and fought over petits fours, chocolates, and gateaus, learning, in the process, how to tell apart the styles of different pastry chefs.

Far more intriguing than the sweets, however, were the stories my father told of the customers and the restaurant staff. After his shifts, he would sit at our big dining room table with my mother, drink coffee until late into the night, and discuss the denizens of this world while I listened avidly. There was Jerry, his demented busboy, who shouted, Coffee? Coffee? Who wants coffee? Raise your hands. There was the chef who regularly threw ladles of mashed potatoes at upstart waiters. And there were a succession of elderly couples who shared every detail of their lives with my father. The most fascinating character was Carmen, a cocktail waitress gifted in the art of hair and makeup, who was casually drifting into the more lucrative business of prostitution.

My fathers tales began to form a colorful quilt in my mind, each story its own square to be called up and viewed at will. Although I never visited any of the dining rooms my father worked in, I envisioned them and the minidramas that happened within them in great detail. My fathers job was certainly a unique one in my peer group. My classmates all had fathers who disappeared into offices and performed nameless, faceless tasks. Not a single one of my friends had a parent who waited on tables for a living. None had heard any stories even remotely similar to the ones my father brought home.

Of course, there was also the money. My father came home with his pockets full of fives, tens, and twenties, which my mother would smooth out and pack away. Sometimes guests staying at the hotel for a week or longer would tip my father at the end of their stay. In those cases, he would bring home a stash of tiny manila envelopes and scatter them on our kitchen counter. Bulging with cash, these envelopes all had his first name carefully inscribed on the front, testimony to the level of familiarity between him and his customers. My father did quite well indeed. By 1978, he was supporting a family of five children quite comfortably on tips alone. This in itself was something I found quite impressive.

All in all, I viewed the whole concept of waiting tables as exciting, glamorous, and somewhat mysterious. It was a vision that would persist long into my own adulthood. And, although my fathers stint as a waiter didnt last longer than a few years, he always maintained that it was honest work. And, hey, you couldnt beat the money for the hours you put in. Ultimately, every one of his four daughters would share this view. While my brother has always held table service in the same regard as my mother, my three sisters and I have all supported ourselves waiting tables for varying lengths of time (although I still hold the family record for duration).

When my parents rented a luncheonette the summer I turned sixteen, providing me with my first experience waiting tables, I was instantly hooked on the excitement, the hustle, and the money. The rest of the packageexhausted feet, customers bent on denigrating their waitress, sexist boneheaded managers, and occasional misanthropywould come much later to form a love/hate relationship with what would ultimately become my living.

Perhaps if my father had been a fireman, car salesman, or lawyer, I would never have considered waiting on tables as a source of income, but I suspect I would have been drawn to it regardless. I have been a writer longer than Ive been a waitress and, as such, a perpetual student of the human experience. My fathers stories only confirmed what Id already guessed: that I could only write what I knew and that I would know nothing without experiencing it directly. I wanted my own stories and saw no better way to collect them. This was a belief that has remained true for me even though the novelty of waiting has worn very thin. In fact, this notion is doubtless responsible for the fact that Ive come back to waiting time and again for two decades.

Over those two decades, I have walked countless miles back and forth and have worn through enough shoes to stuff a land-fill. I have met literally thousands of people, heard as many tales, and witnessed scenes of high drama and wild comedy. I have made many dear friends, men and women I couldnt have met at any other place but the table. I have even taken several nonwaitressing jobs offered by people I waited on. Through waiting, I met my sons father. It was again waiting that enabled me to support and raise my son as a single mother. In all these years of waiting, I have developed self-reliance, resilience, and the ability to manage high levels of stress, all of which have become invaluable life skills. Truly, there has never been a dull moment at the table. And the stories I have gathered there are colorful, passionate, absurd, and intimately human.