When I was a fourteen-year-old punky pube of a kid, I started working at Harvey’s fast-food restaurant on Great Northern Road in Sault Ste. Marie. My mother got me the gig so I could help out with my outrageous hairspray bills and it seemed like a pretty harmless idea at the time. So I dawned the brown polyester overalls and the oversized pin that read Extra Pickles With That?? and I hid my six-inch mohawk under the provided orange gingham cap and within two shifts, I was promoted from fryers to grill and then to cash. Who would have thought, WHO???, that twenty-five shitwhoring years later I would still be plowing away in the service industry, fetching extra ketchup and saying with that fake, snide smile, just like I learned at Harvey’s, “Enjoy your meal and have a great day!”? Not my poor mother, that’s for sure, the woman who took me travelling and bought me books and fed my mind with words like “international lawyer” and “romance language expert” so that I would never have to spend my life working in the Steel Plant like she did. She lived—the happiest day of her life was the day I got into McGill—and died for me to move beyond her. What would she have thought of her girl, her only girl, the one she pinned all her dreams and hopes to, the one that was supposed to “amount to something,” spending the next quarter of a century reading the day’s specials or getting another pitcher of beer or providing a new fork please—“there’s something wrong with this one!”—to an endless stream of rude and needy ingrates the world over?
Twenty-five years of “service,” despite the dreams, despite the education, despite all the other opportunities. Twenty-five years of servitude. I went from Harvey’s to the Omellette Factory to the Royal Hotel. Then I started to travel and worked the Press Klub in Prague and the Quiebra Canto in Cartagena, Las Hamacas in Coroico and all of the better restaurants on the north shore of Lake Atitlán. I did a stint at Porter’s Café in the French Quarter of New Orleans, rocked two funk-filled years at the world-famous Montreal Bistro jazz club, and I ended my career on a high note working three-to-four-and-a-half-star weddings at the fancy-pantsy Palais Royale Ballroom on the shores of Lake Ontario. Yes, I did end it, once and for all times, on August 22nd, 2010, the night I dropped my last plate, threw my serving cloths in the air and at thirty-nine years old, swore on my mother’s grave that I was not going to be a forty-year-old waitress.
This is what it means to NOT be forty-year-old waitress:
It means that I am no longer a well-paid, snidely underhanded half-cunt for eight to twelve hours a day, pretending that it’s my pleasure to fetch your fourth basket of complementary bread, or to bring you a tenth round of tequila shots even though you’ve just vomited under the table, or to send your pasta back to the kitchen and remove the basil from the pesto because you’re suddenly allergic to herbs.
It means that I no longer have to APO-LO-GIZE because you are an obnoxious, impossible-to-please, natural-born complainer who lives to complicate the lives of waitstaff the world over and all I really want from you is a decent tip.
It means that I no longer have to listen to the self-important natterings-on of angry, drug-addled, schizophrenic chefs who view servers as inferior beings and treat them worse than most customers do.
It means that I no longer have to work twice as hard running behind and picking up after the veritable army of authentically inferior servers who are only working until they finally get that breakthrough call-back and who don’t give two shits about the quality of their work or the actual service they provide.
It means that I no longer (never again!) have to defer to everyone else’s always being right—the customer, the chef, the manager, the owner. Everyone is the boss of the server. But not anymore! I am the only boss of me now.
I have to admit, though, it wasn’t all that easy at first not being a forty-year-old waitress. When high season hit here in San Marcos Sierras, with all the restaurants full and me completely broke, it would have been so natural, so simple, to fall back into the business, despite the sacred promise I made to myself and to my dead mother. I had to fight my urge to serve, like a newly clean junkie tries to steer clear of trigger situations and not return to her old destructive habits. All the local chefs, like mean-eyed dealers, would stare me down—they knew who I was and what I could do. They wanted me and it took all that I had to not give in and take “just one night a week,” just as a favour, just to help out. That twenty-five-year habit was still alive in me, just like the addict who, no matter how long she’s spent in rehab, still battles the overwhelming urge to jab the needle into her vein, at whatever cost. But then I’d see a waiter get reamed out by a chef or a waitress fend off the advances of a sleazy, obnoxious tourist and I knew, deep in my cunt, that I’d rather die than serve another plate again.
So I took to cleaning hotel rooms instead, picking up after the gross tourists where they shat and slept as opposed to where they ate, all for a whopping three dollars an hour. I also taught Spanish to a lonely, hard-headed, near-illiterate Yankee for five dollars a class. (He learned 32 words in four months.) And I started taking care of an old lady a few days a week, keeping her company and wiping her bum and making sure she and her walker didn’t tip over and break any joints. (This was slightly better paid.) I’d have done anything, ANYTHING, not to waitress again. I’d have given handjobs behind the bankmachine if that’s what it had come to. But fate was on my side and I stuck to my guns and luckily, everything worked out in the end. Now, I am no longer known as “Hey Get Me Another Glass Of Wine,” or as “I Sweep Up Pubes For Cash,” but as Miss Eva, the village’s new profesora de inglés. Teaching English, for most of my life, was the absolute last thing that I ever wanted to do. Now, it’s merely the second-to-last.
Very important note:
I am not ashamed IN ANY WAY of having been a waitress for all those years (though it does feel tremendously good to say “those years” and not “these”). Maybe my mother would have been disappointed in me, but I have no regrets about the way I earned a living from 1985 till 2010. I do not feel like I wasted any of my professional potential nor would I have traded in my waitressing career for any high-fallutin, over-stressed profession that my university edumacation may have provided me. As a server, I met more cool people, saw more amazing places and had loads more money and freedom and fun than most people could ever dream of. I do feel slightly bad though, I have to admit, for those poor customers in my final embittered years of waitressing who just came out for a good time and a nice meal and got sarcastically abused by a burned out, smart-mouthed, attitudinal half-cunt of a server. To all of you, with my fakest, most sarcastic smile, I do absolutely and most insincerely APO-LO-GIZE.
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