Listen to the body talk...

Body language. An amazing thing.

Two snapshots from the last few days:

#1 Where are you going? Where have you been?

A couple, a man and a woman in their mid-twenties, early-thirties come in. He is dressed in jeans and a shirt, both of which hang loosely. His shirt is a collared flannel shirt. It is tucked into his pants but pulls out in various places around his waist. His hair is short, but kind of shaggy, his beard untrimmed, his glasses cheap. The girl is dressed in a floral-patterned dress that looks better suited for a woman who is in her sixties. Her hair is poofy, but not bushy. It shows she has paid attention to her hair, but it hasn’t helped.




They sit in a booth and after the server takes their order I watch them from across the room. She sits with her hands on the table in front of her. Her back straight and stiff. She mostly remains quiet, but every so often her mouth moves and I assume she is talking. He sits slumped against the booth bench. His legs are stuck out straight and crossed at the ankles. After a minute or two he slides so he is wedged in the corner, still slouching, still legs extended and crossed. He looks anywhere but at the woman across from him.

I think he’d rather be anywhere else in the world than sitting at that booth.



#2 The down side of being right…

A group of six or seven women come in. About half are fifty plus in age, the other half twenty-five or less in age. They are all dressed for an evening out. Most in dresses or skirts. All in high heels. The younger girls totter and walk awkwardly on their heels, as do a couple of the older woman. A thin blond in her fifties is seated at the head of the table. Her shirt is very low cut and the tops of her breasts are pushed up and out. She has a tattoo of lightening or something similar on her right breast.

While waiting for the food, they are constantly up and about, leaning over each other and talking screechingly loud, taking a million pictures while blocking the door in front of the dish pit while they pose. The flashes are so incessant and unrelenting that it feels as if a posse of paparazzi have taken refuge in the dining room

It would seen these women are not used to dressing up and going out, nor are they familiar with the social conventions of going out to eat – and they sure tipped that way.


[+/-] Read the rest of this post

Dude, you are messing with my head...

I'm still trying to wrap my brain around this...customer wants creme brulee, I explain that we have only the coffee creme brulee, not the vanilla.
"So it has coffee in it?"
"Yes," I reply.
"I guess in that case, I'll pass. Instead I'd like a decaf coffee with cream."

What does this mean?

Why I did it...and still do.

Amazingly, just after I turned 38, I woke up and said to myself, “I want to spend my free time serving people food and drink." Actually, not really. But every once in a while coworkers at my day job ask me why I wait tables. I consider responding with answers such as, “Oh, I love working all day then working five or six more hours at night,” or “Who wouldn’t want to spend their free time running around bringing stuff to often inconsiderate and ill-mannered people” (this is also a response I consider when people ask me why I have three kids).

The obvious answer is of course money. After my divorce, I had no choice but to work another job, and although I had never waited tables, I figured I might do ok at it. I found the money could be much better than I had thought. If you work at a good restaurant, there are few jobs that can equal the money you can make in one night. Of course, nothing is for sure when you wait, so it is often a game of chance as to how much you make on any given night (since the hourly age is usually $2.35 or so, paychecks usually only cover taxes). Some nights the wait staff doesn’t make gas money. The lack of predictability isn’t a huge issue for me since it is a second job; my fellow servers who do it as a full-time job have a certain kind of personality that lets them deal with the varying amounts of money one makes. And they are mostly drug dealers (kidding).

To my surprise, once I got some experience waiting, I found I was pretty good at it. And I kind of enjoyed it. I still do. I think even if I didn’t need the money, I’d still wait tables some. Ok, not really, but since I do need the money, at least I’m doing a job that is kind of fun.

Fictitious Monday X

All Souls’ Day
By Tony


Her pantyhose are wet because of the rain. As she walked to the door of the nursing home, the huge drops exploded off the pavement and onto her legs. They are soaked. The nylons feel slimy and stick wetly to her. She stands in the foyer of the home, smoothes her skirt, takes off her jacket and shakes off the water.
The smell of the place -- the urine, the disinfectant -- fills her nose. Sometimes when she’s driving here, the thought of the smell makes her gag, makes her want to turn around. But she doesn’t, she hasn’t.
To get to her mother’s room in the Alzheimer’s unit, she has to punch in a three-digit code that opens the locked door. She knows, she really knows, that they are locked up for their own good. But she also knows that she feels like she’s on her way to visit an inmate.

She has punched the code and is now standing next to her mother’s bed. Mother, like everyone in this place, doesn’t really know where she is. A lot of times she doesn’t know who this woman is who visits her.
“How do you feel?” she asks Mother who fell last night. They called her this morning and told her that her mother fell, but that she was okay, that she was walking just fine. It’s now five-thirty in the evening, she rushed here after work, and Mother can’t even get out of bed, much less walk fine. She’s been here with her mother for about a half an hour.
She pulls the blanket down off of her mother, down to around her shins, then lifts her nightgown out of the way to look at her hip. Mother is so skinny -- her pelvic bone is outlined under her skin. It seems so close to the surface, like it might burst through, tear her parchment skin.
“Does this hurt?” she asks. She touches the side of her leg. Mother shakes her head no, so she touches a little higher, right around where the hip looks a little discolored. Her mother winces and sucks air through closed teeth.
“I’ll be right back, Mom. I’m going to get the nurse.”
Her mother doesn’t respond.
She leaves the room and walks to the nurse’s station. There is no one at it; all the nurses are busy. So she waits. She sees one nurse at the other side of the unit. The nurse is trying to calm this woman named Betty who is screaming. Is there ever a day when Betty doesn’t scream? And Betty always screams for people to stop touching her, even though no one ever is.
Another nurse is at the far end of the room helping an old man sit down. All the while this old man’s mouth is in constant motion, like he’s chewing something. Sometimes his tongue slithers out as if he’s trying to get the crumbs from his lips.
There should be two or three more nurses, but she can’t see them. She doesn’t know where they are. She has no choice but to stand there at the chest-high desk and wait.
All around her, the patients of the unit walk. They mostly wear pajamas or robes. It’s strange the way they wander. They remind her of wind-up toys. Some look absent, vacant. Others look thoughtful in a kind of off way. There’s this one lady who stops every couple of seconds, bends slightly, and looks at the floor. It is as if she knows what she’s doing.
It’s been about ten minutes, still no nurse. She’s worried about Mom. She wants her to see a doctor right away. The nurse in charge told her on the phone that they were calling the staff doctor, but he hasn’t come yet, he hasn’t even called. It’s been three hours now. She’s thinking about calling an ambulance to bring her mother to the hospital.
She leaves the desk and goes back to Mom’s room to check on her. She sits in the chair next to her mother’s bed. Her mother is lying in the same position, she hasn’t moved.
“Are you okay, Mom?”
She strokes her hair out of her mother’s face. The hair is greasy -- they haven’t washed it in a while, she can tell. But if she asked them, they would swear they did.
“You look great,” she says.
Mother closes her eyes, smiles, and scrunches her forehead. The loose, papery skin forms deep fissures. Mom opens her eyes and turns her head towards her. She’s always amazed that her eyes are still so blue, like she thought they would fade with age or something.
“I have to get the potatoes peeled,” her mother says.
Her voice is not a whisper, it is strong.
“What?”
“I have to get the potatoes peeled. Your father will be home soon, he’ll be hungry.”
“It’s okay Mom, we did all that. Everything is done.”
She closes her eyes again. It would be wonderful if Dad really were coming home. But he’s been gone a long time now. He left before Mom got like this, and that’s good. He couldn’t have taken it. Mom used to say that she hoped he died first because she worried what he’d do without her.
But look at how she’s done without him. She stares at Mom’s sunken face. Mom is getting pale and she’s starting to worry seriously about her. Usually her color is so good.
The door opens suddenly, and a man named Mr. Jenkins walks in. This happens all the time; people just walk in, they think it’s their room, or they are just confused in general. Every time she sees Mr. Jenkins she wants to cry. He’s only five years older than her.
“Hello Mr. Jenkins,” she says.
He smiles. His hands are constantly in motion, like he’s fumbling with something.
He says, “Oh, oh sure, you’ve got it. You’ve got it. Okay. That’s fine. That’s just fine.”
Poor Mr. Jenkins is always so confused. More so than Mom. At least Mom has days when she is somewhat clear.
Mr. Jenkins is still mumbling. He passes by her -- his smell, a smell of sweat and dirty clothes -- is strong. He walks over to Mom, rubs her hair with his hand. He is almost petting her. He bends over and kisses her on the forehead. He’s such a sweet man, so gentle. And so young, compared to everyone else in here. She hopes his family visits him, but she’s not sure they do.
Mr. Jenkins mumbles something, then smiles at her. He turns to leave, but he opens the wrong door and goes into the bathroom. It’s almost comical, but it makes her want to cry.
“This way, Mr. Jenkins,” she says. She takes him by the elbow and leads him out of the room.
As he walks out, another man walks in. His name is Flannery. He’s a round little man, and about the same age as Mom. Flannery walks around the room touching everything briefly, as if he’s hoping something will feel familiar. He is carrying a rolled up newspaper that he occasionally pops against his leg. He walks up to the foot of Mom’s bed and grabs her toe through the blanket.
“No, no,” she says. “Be careful, she’s not feeling well.”
He pops the newspaper against his leg, and ambles out of the room. She follows him out and goes back to the nurse’s station.
Again, there is no one at the desk. It’s almost understandable; this place is crazy tonight. It seems like everyone is wandering around, or yelling, or just causing trouble. There are two patients, a man and a woman, and they are arguing viciously. She is in a wheel chair. He keeps pushing her, and she keeps yelling at him to stop. She tries to slap him over her back. They both move so slowly. So slow. In the corner she sees Mr. Jenkins, sitting quietly. He has this smile on his lips that just breaks her heart.
Finally, a nurse comes to the desk. Her name is June. She is a huge black woman. Huge, but not fat, just broad-shouldered and imposing. Her hair is pulled back, and large earrings hang from her lobes. She wonders if the patients ever try to pull on them.
“Where’s the doctor?” she ask.
“We’re still trying to get a hold of him, Mrs. Carlyle.”
“You said that two hours ago. My mother is in a lot of pain. I want the doctor here now, or I am calling an ambulance to take her to the hospital.”
“We have to get the doctor’s approval before we can let her be taken to the hospital,” she says.
“But you can’t find the doctor,” she says.
“Let me try his pager number again.”
“I want to call an ambulance.”
“If I can’t get the doctor, I’ll call the director and get approval to call the rescue squad, okay? Why don’t you go sit with her while I try to get someone. Don’t worry about her Mrs. Carlyle, she’s just fine. I checked her just a little while ago.”
“She’s not fine. She’s in a lot of pain.”
“Mrs. Carlyle...”
As she speaks there is a loud crash from down the hallway.
“Oh hell,” the nurse says. “Let her go see what that was.”
June rushes down the hallway, while Mrs. Carlyle goes back to her mother’s room. She take her place in the chair.
“I’m thirsty,” Mom says.
She fills a styrofoam cup with water and puts a straw in it. She places the end of the straw between her mother’s lips. With effort, Mother draws the water into her mouth. Some dribbles down her chin.
“How’s that?”
She smiles slightly, and says, “I just want to sleep. I hurt so bad.”
Mother tries to make her voice strong, but it’s just a croaky whisper.
Mrs. Carlyle can’t help it, she bursts into tears. She puts her head against Mom’s unwashed neck, and cries. The tears flow down the folds in her mother’s old skin.
“I’m sorry Mom,” she says, while sobbing. “I’m sorry your here, I’m sorry I couldn’t take care of you Mommy. I’m so so sorry. You don’t deserve this.”
She sits up, tries to stop crying, dabs a tissue at her eyes. She’s sure she looks a mess. She is sure her mascara is all over her face.
“Do you want some more water?” she asks.
Her mother doesn’t answer. She decides to take another look at her mom’s hip. She pulls back the blanket again, this time uncovering her legs and feet. When she does, she notice the toes on her left foot are blue. They feel cold when she touches them.
“Oh, Mom,” she says. She puts both of her hands around the foot and tris to warm it up. She starts crying again and keeps trying to warm Mother’s foot. She see those blue toes sticking out from her hands and she feel helpless.
“Mom, move your foot for me,” she says while crying. Her mother doesn’t move her foot, nor does she respond.
“Mom, please wiggle your toes,” she begs.
Her mother stares at her, blinks, then says softly, “I don’t like to, it hurts.”
“Oh, Mom,” she says and gently brushes her mother’s cheek with the back of her hand.
Sobbing, she leaves the room, plowing over some wandering old man as she does. There are no nurses around.
“Help!” she scream. “Help, I think my Mom is really hurt.”
She screams as loud as she can, but there is so much noise she feels like it is drowning her out. She feels like she blends in.
“Help her,” she screams, and she pounds on the desk at the nurse’s station.
She sees a nurse trotting down the hall towards her. She sinks to her knees, crying, yelling, watching everything through a nose-dribbling haze.
The nurse comes up to her.
“Help,” she says.
And she knows, she blends right in.
THE END

[+/-] Read the rest of this post

Round Table Redux

After dropping out of the Carnival due partially to an existential dilemma and partially to other reasons, I'm back in the Service Blog Carnival...and as a welome back, I'm doing this week's carnival, albeit a bit late...

Over at Bitterwaitress, there's a great essay about turning forty that I can definitely empathize with (as you can see by my blog entry here.


At Red Lobster Blog, the smell of weed on patrons seems to be an issue. I find it annoying when the server smells of pot too....

The Insane Waiter noticed the Holy Grail for servers at Ron Paul's website. I can totally get down with this, problem is, I can't get down with Ron Paul's anti-gay, anti-black affiliations.


Restaurant Gal has been quite the temptress, getting invited to be whisked away by handsome millionaires. Next time, I just wish she would accept my proposal!



I'll never understand why coworkers can be as douche baggish as customers, but they can,just ask Ribeye.

Quote the truth wherever you find it. Bitchy Waitress over at At Least Call Me Miss certainly speaks the truth in this pithy post.


I love when Ali gives us descriptions of her nights at the bar...
this one really makes me feel what she is going through.


A Valentine's mmmmmysteryfor us at
Well Done Fillet.
Sounds manigficent.



I totally get too many of these types of tips...
...Dennis over at Don’t Tip the Waiter explains. .

Half Server, Half Amazing lost her cool...well we've all been there!


Feather or Foam is on board withquoting truth....


Upset Waitress isn't just funny, irreverent, and good smelling -- she's a babe, if the pictures are true. Check out…

Absinthe - out of the closet, into the cabinet

Absinthe. Immediately I think of a dusty Spanish bar, a bare bit of a breeze. Hemingway pouring me some of that sweet wormwood then relating to me what a wuss Scott Fitzgerald has become and how he will never go on another auto trip with him and that psycho Zelda.

Absinthe has a long and mystical past, and since I fancy myself a writer, I feel should have all the ruggedness of Hemingway and hence I should try absinthe. Hem seemed to love it, in fact contributed this recipe to a recipe collection made sometime in the thirties:
Death in the Afternoon "Pour one jigger absinthe into a Champagne glass. Add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Drink three to five of these slowly."

Ok, I also thought Absinthe might make me see pretty colors. That’s the mythology, but the mythology seems sadly to be untrue; while it reportedly gives you a different kind of buzz – an energetic feeling is reported (probably due to the fact it is usually made from three herbs - anise, fennel and wormwood, and this may account for the differentiated buzz) – most reports indicate no hallucinations. Boo hiss. But it has become a mystical and misunderstood substance that was therefore banned in most western countries by the 1920s.

Absinthe is back. Out of the closet. And dammit, I want to try some. Many websites have sprung up since the drink is no longer banned. I stumbled upon a website called Buy Absinthe(pretty straight forward naming scheme, don't you think?). Just for total disclosure purposes, the nice people at Buy Absinthe asked if I’d review them and said I’d be welcome to write anything -- positive or negative. Happily, I’ve nothing very negative to say, so it’s no big deal. The site itself is straightforward – thank goodness. No annoying, slow loading, useless graphics or the always maddening inscrutable navigation. I like that they explain each type of absinthe they sell and the level of alcohol in each. The site has a nice, but perhaps too little, faq section; you can find out much more at wikipedia, but the info they give is a decent start. They do have a blog ( Blog of Absinthe.) that greatly expands upon the faq and has some interesting entries, although I can’t tell if it’s a real blog or a blog that has advertising as it’s sole purpose. Overall, a pretty cool site – I’m looking forward to ordering some Absinthe to try out…when I do, I’ll let ya’ll know how the trip goes.

Before Cupid Takes Target Practice...

In the lead up to Valentines Day, it’s been quite quiet at the restaurant. The roof is going to blow off the place starting Thursday and continuing through the weekend – literally, the reservation book is full for dinner each day. Last night however, was dead, so dead that you could yell clear and shock the hell out of it and still not get a pulse.

I know any job is tedious when there is nothing to do, but I think this especially true of serving. So last night, without really thinking about, I just started observing.

I was across the restaurant, away from everyone, so I couldn’t hear any conversations, I could only see their interactions like a movie camera panning the crowd. There was the chef smiling and laughing with a line cook, then throwing a mushroom at him when he turned his back. The camera then panned off to his side where a server was talking to the food runner. She was very intent on whatever she was saying; her eyes were focused on the food runner, little lines creased the sides of her mouth and forehead. He leaned forward and said something, and she suddenly exploded into laughter, the lines gone, the intensity dissipated like an electrical charge. As the camera panned from them, it landed on the hostess as she sat alone at the bar, her back to me. She was rolling napkins. What an lonely little sight she was – the light flickering in her blond hair, her raising her head to look around, and seeing nothing of interest, returning her attention to the napkins. Then phone rang, and I could see her back heave as she sighed and got up. She leaned against the hostess stand as she flipped through the reservation book, phone pinned between her shoulder and ear, hand poised with a pencil. She moved the pencil across the paper in short little Morse-code dashes. After hanging up the phone she turned and saw me looking, shrugged her shoulders and smiled.

I smiled back, turned and walked toward the server station. Gentle fade to black…

To sleep, perchance to dream...

Recently I was on a bus with a female friend of mine. Although I never dated her, she is attractive, and in the distant past I had thought about asking her out. I never did, I think because I never felt that chemistry, and perhaps because I had a torturous unrequited love for another. But it wasn’t until I rode on a bus with her not long ago that I realized I could not have in the past and would not in the future have a romantic relationship with her.

Why you ask? Wherefore this epiphany? Did she have massive gas attacks? Terrible conversation skills? Racist ideology? No hips and a flat butt? No, something much simpler. It came to me when she fell asleep next to me.

It was a long bus ride, and as the bus boringly made it’s way through what seemed like the same piece of highway over and over again, my friend began to fall asleep. She tried to keep her eyes open, but they closed eventually, of course. I looked over at her sleeping face and the thought in whole formed in my mind: I could never be with this woman romantically. There was nothing wrong with her, per se. But when I looked at the sleeping face, the slightly opened lips, the relaxed cheeks, the hair tousled a little – I didn’t feel the things you feel when you see someone you love who is asleep.

Like my children. If you have children, you know what I mean. Is there anything more beautiful than their faces when they sleep? The innocence that returns, the baby inside that suddenly appears again in their features. You, like me, have probably had this similar feeling when looking at an adult you are attracted to when he or she is asleep. There is a certain beauty that comes out in a lover's sleeping pose, a certain protective feeling that is stirred inside your body. A certain need to feel their sleeping breath against your neck.

And as I looked at this pretty girl next to me, I felt none of these things. No inner beauty spoke to me. No protective passions stirred inside me.

So I drew a marker mustache on her and went to sleep too.

One more decision...

After consulting with some people in business whose opinions I trust, I am un-password protecting the first six or so chapters of my novel, Entropy. In order to preserve "first rights" I'm not making the whole thing widely available, but if you want to keep reading after you finish what's online, shoot me an email.

Decisions, and the process thereof...

As seen below, I've been contemplating my blogging career. I have had numerous death threats for the rebellious writings I have posted - just kidding, that was for Upset Waitress who wanted a dramatic reason behind my hiatus. Here's what it boils down to:
I started blogging in order to impose on myself the discipline I did not possess - I wanted to force myself to write. That effort worked. But in looking at what I've written, I think 80%, perhaps more, is crap. Drivel. Stupidity. You say, "Ah, but that's what blogs are for." I had another vision, that I wouldn't write vapid prose that said little or nothing, that I wouldn't chronicle stupidity. And seeing other blogs that were able to do avoid this trap made me, well pissed. And envious.

So, what then? I think I will continue to blog, but only when I've written something I think has meaning, something that is more than just masturbation (although, there's a lot to be said for masturbation, just not in this context).

Bottom line, look for future posts, maybe less frequent, but hopefully better written. Thanks for indulging me....

Tony

p.s., daisyfae, can you add me back to your blog roll? i felt so lost not seeing my link *sniff sniff*