Ready to Serve: "They Looked After Me" [by Mari L'Esperance]

(Ed. note: This is the third post in our Ready to Serve series. Find previous posts here. sdh)

For nearly three years in the ‘80s I waited tables at a waterfront steak-and-seafood restaurant in Southern California. It was popular with the boat crowd for serving up large portions of red meat and copious amounts of liquor. The job taught me worlds about human behavior. There was the customer who had his seven year-old son smell the wine cork before sending the bottle back. The drunk who bit into his wine glass. The couple who sat through their entire dinner listening to music on their headphones. I earned enough in wages and tips so I didn’t need loans to attend the nearby public university. I always had loads of cash. And I’ll admit the untouched food that customers left behind kept me well fed on many a day. My social life revolved around the restaurant, as I spent nearly every weekend night there. I knew it wasn’t work I’d do forever, just a way to get by until the next better thing, but looking back I realize it was more than a job. It was where I began to make my adult self.

I started in the usual way: as a hostess, shepherding hungry people through the dining room as the sun sank behind the boats docked in the marina—the din of alcohol-tinged conversation and laughter rising as the evening deepened. Hostessing was dull and didn’t pay, so several months in I decided to try my hand at cocktail waitressing. It looked easy and fun. I lasted one night. Having not grown up around booze, I couldn’t keep track of who had ordered which amber-hued drink (Was it bourbon? scotch? whiskey?). The servers’ complex code of colored swizzle sticks and dog-eared cocktail napkins baffled me. And I didn’t care at all for the skimpy uniforms they were required to wear. So I switched to food service.

After the required initiatory weeks of bussing tables, I was taken under the wing of the paternal and ever-meticulous Arvin, a Filipino-American headwaiter who took his work very seriously. Arvin was the first person ever to teach me that if you want to master something in life, there are no shortcuts—words I’ve not forgotten, but have at times struggled to live by. To watch him open and pour a bottle of wine tableside or to tend to his customers—all with seamlessness and grace—was to observe a consummate professional in his element.

Once on my own, I discovered I was no Arvin. Waiting tables was unglamorous work; lugging heavy platters laden with steaks, lobster, and slabs of prime rib, up and down a narrow flight of stairs several times a night, was a workout. I’d be sweating an hour into my shift. It was a male-dominated environment and my sister servers and I suffered our share of "honey" and "sweetie" and uninvited advances from customers who'd had one too many bourbons. Diners were alternately demanding, indifferent, and occasionally appreciative. A few snuck out without paying their tab. Summer weekend dinner shifts were the most intense: a cacophony of voices, dishes and silverware clattering in the kitchen, the broilermen yelling out orders over the sizzle and smoke of grilling meat, bodies milling and colliding. Somehow in this charged mayhem hundreds of meals were prepared and served, leftovers were doggie-bagged, plates were scraped and washed and dried and stacked, until it all wound down to clearing last tables, balancing cash drawers, scrubbing grills, and hosing down floor mats. Then we’d unwind for an hour in the bar before hauling our exhausted selves home.

I don't miss the work, but I do sometimes wonder about my co-workers: Arvin, who I imagined would be there forever—or Bob, who taught high school English and had an ill wife and a coke problem. Jim, an aging surfer who had been there forever, and was kind to me. Single mom Cathy, who supported me after a particularly stressful shift. And Gary, who teased me mercilessly and called me Shtanky, but with love. I was young and just beginning and they looked after me.

**All names have been changed for privacy reasons.

Born in Kobe, Japan to a Japanese mother and a French Canadian-New Englander father, Mari L’Esperance is the author of The Darkened Temple (awarded a Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and published in September 2008 by the University of Nebraska Press) and an earlier collection Begin Here (awarded a Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize). Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, co-edited with Tomás Q. Morín, was published by Prairie Lights Books in May 2013. The recipient of awards from the New York Times, New York University, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, L’Esperance lives and works in the Los Angeles area. You can visit her website here. 

Comments

[Millicent Borges Accardi]

I think we worked at the same place! So many memories, the regulars who came in every night and ordered bloody marys, the early bird diners who read the newspaper over a plate of red snapper, the folks who lived on their boats and brought goldfish crackers to eat with their Tom Collins. There were times I changed uniforms in my car between shfts. My first apartment was gladly "furnished" with cast off cocktail forks, bent knives, chipped plates and stained coffee mugs. The "lifers" were always completely kind to me: the head waitress who used to be a reporter, the lunch waiter who raised twin daughters on his tips, the brutal broil cook missing a finger, who used to be in prison, the manager who graduated from an Ivy League school and earned less than his floor staff, even on a bad night.

[Mari]

Some overlap, Millicent... only there were definitely *no* head waitresses where I worked -- only men.

[Tony Davis]

Oh the stories we all have about working in restaurants! I like how you describe it as the perfect place to view a variety of human behaviors. Any customer based job is exactly that, and much more!

[Mari]

Yes, Tony. And somehow food seems to bring out the best and worst in us. Thanks for reading.