Waiter Psychosis

We anticipated a few bits of gravel showing up in one, or maybe two customers' salads. But when we start finding bits of glass it probably should be a wake up call. It isn't.

Let's take a step backwards here, you and I, from the grim, hangman's tone of the last few posts. It's now before my dead friend Pam and I begin our dance in the dark, before I decide to leave New York, before I am told by the creepy astrologer that without love I am nothing.

I am nineteen, a year out of the American Academy of Dramatic Art, two years from moving to Los Angeles. Waiting tables is what I do while pretending to have a career as an actor. The thing is, I'm actually really good at it. I have the multitasking capabilities of a soccer mom, which is what a good waitron-unit must have if any level of competence is to be mastered. It's like throwing several small dinner parties at once, where everything has to come out at the right time if the courses are going to work out, and where every guest has an allergy he or she failed to phone you about beforehand.

While living in New York I work in a number of places, most of them fairly respectable, but all of them managed and/or owned by specimens from a vile, hostile, cruel-just-for-fun, mistrustful, abusive subspecies of the human race. By and large, restaurant owners and managers are just not nice. They fire waitresses for not giving them blowjobs. They think racial and sexual slurs are funny. They deal drugs on the premises and never share.

The kitchen staffs are difficult in a different way, and unlike with the owners and managers, if you prove yourself to the cooks and prep guys (always guys) then an atmosphere of mutual if distant respect can prevail. Every kitchen staff is composed of the same ethnic group, be it Korean, Caribbean, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Chinese, or Indian, and they are all invariably hostile to waitpeople, at least initially, probably because in the places I wait tables most of the waitpeople were white and working with no expectation of making it a career. The kitchen staff think of us as dilettantes, guilty until proven innocent. It is physically very hard work, especially in New York, where storage basements are usually reached by going outside, wrestling open two huge metal doors in the sidewalk, and descending down perilous steps to dark, dank, moldy, rat-infested caverns. Eat and enjoy.

I never knowingly put gravel or glass in a customer's salad. It just happens THIS ONE TIME at a place owned by a notorious cokehead who constantly shows his penis to all of us, whether we want to see it or not. (It isn't even particularly large or interesting - not unless white pubic hair gives you a big thrill.) Anyway, there is an enormous refrigerated salad bin in the kitchen that has to be replenished by the waitpeople, who are required to haul gigantic trash cans full of pre-prepared, cancerous, phosphate-preserved salad up the basement steps, through the metal doors, across a long length of sidewalk, and into the kitchen.

Doing this in the snow is its own little holiday on ice. If we stuff enough salad in the trash cans however - smashing the greens down, packing them as tightly as possible, we can often manage to make only one trip in an evening's shift rather than having to do the whole thing twice.

So we load the salad bins and jump on top of them, mashing the salad down with our feet until the bin's capacity reaches its limit.

The gravel and glass must come from our shoes. I suppose we could put something between our shoes and the salad itself, some plastic wrap or whatever, but why would we?

At this particular restaurant they like to promote you to senior staff as soon as they can. I am senior staff at nineteen even though I'm not even technically allowed to sell alcohol yet. We serve the full menu until 4:30 in the morning, every night of the week. The senior staff member selected to work the late-late part of the night arrives two hours into the dinner shift at 6:30. By 9:30 or 10:00 some of the other waitpeople are allowed to leave, as the dinner crowd dwindles. More depart by 11:30 or midnight, then at 1:00 in the morning comes magic time:

One waitperson, one busboy, and one bartender. That's it. Not even a manager.

Sometimes the 1:00 to 4:30 hours are uneventful, but other times you find yourself with twenty tables. A triage situation. A strange mania I call Waiter Psychosis takes control as I juggle the food and drink orders. Any extraneous movement or conversation that interrupts my flow puts the entire mission in jeopardy.

One time I throw sour cream in a woman's face.

Here's how it is: I'm there, it's 2:00, and she is giving me such a hard time, sending things back over and over, three times, four times, and I have so many other customers. She tops off her obnoxiousness by telling me she thinks I 'm not very nice. Me? Not nice? I am niceness itself to my customers, genuinely warm, listening with unfeigned interest to their stories, even the boring ones, the very tedium of them fascinating me. If she wants to tell me I'm not nice, I tell her I'll just show her how not nice I can really be. At least the sour cream is in a paper container. It doesn't bruise her or anything as I fling it at her, its gluey whiteness splattering all over her face. I call her a Miserable Fucking Bitch and tell her to get out and not to come back. Or I'll kill her. (I'm really not kidding. I did this. Which is why I call the syndrome Waiter Psychosis. Not to be cute. But because it is insanity itself that takes over when nerves are stretched too far beyond the breaking point.)

After I chase out the woman who is now as sour on the outside as she is within, I leave a message for the next day's manager telling him of having to throw a drunken lady customer out because she was scaring the other customers by flinging sour cream around and screaming at me when I refused to give her more to drink.

This is in case the sour lady calls to complain. The manager won't think I'm the crazy one. He'll think she is.

Sometimes at the end of one of these really long shifts, after finishing my side work (which is refilling salt and pepper shakers, ketchup bottles, and the like) I blow off steam by hurling entire dishwasher racks full of glasses at the brick walls, leaving a spiky river of shards, taking an almost sexual pleasure from it. I know the Korean kitchen porters arrive in the morning before anyone else and their first task is to sweep the dining room, so not one of the managers or owners will find out.

Whether the sweepers regard all that glass as out of the ordinary never enters my mind. There's always broken glass everywhere at the restaurant anyway. Even in the salads.

Breakfast with a Tiffany Lamp

Maybe it isn't stealing since the will leaves everything to me... Or is it?

In Philadelphia for Pam's funeral I wonder if people think it's my fault. I am nice to her father and her evil step-mother, betraying Pam by cozying up to the two people she hates, because I want them to reassure me that they don't blame me. I am somebody else with them. The urge to play and pretend makes a comeback. It is all acting, the flight, the funeral, all of it. My old heroin addict acting teacher from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts would be proud.

The whole performance is a break-through in emotional realism, even as I try to firmly distance myself from the reality of what I feel after her death. After she kills herself. After I find her.

Pam's father assures me he will honor Pam’s suicide note and will, though her is also quick to point out that it probably isn't legally enforceable. He wants me to have whatever is left after probate, but tells me not to expect too much. Flying her body out from Los Angeles has been very expensive, and it is only fair, in his words, to pay for it out of her own money. Then he starts asking me what I know about various pieces of furniture and art Pam got after her mother's death, if he might have them back, since they were stolen from him by his wife.

I say I think Pam has sold a lot of stuff, that I'm not sure. I am scheduled to leave on a flight the morning after the funeral. I stay only twenty minutes at the post-funeral buffet, pleading exhaustion. They tell me Pam was lucky to have a friend like me, and that they hope I will stay in touch. I am such a good person.

From their place I take a cab to the train station and immediately go to Pam's apartment in New York. I take everything; the art, the small pieces of furniture, the jewelry, all of it.

Her father calls me a week later to say he is surprised at how little is left in Pam's apartment of the stuff his wife took from him. Did Pam sell everything? I say I guess she must have. I cling to what I have taken. I want it all. Including an original Tiffany table lamp I will sell for a lot of money years later.

I am not honest. I don't tell her father that these things are mine by rights. That they were Pam's mother's, left to her, then left to me. For him to get any of it back is unthinkable; a betrayal of what killed Pam, even of what killed her mother.

When I get back to Los Angeles my mother calls from Texas and asks if I want her to come out and stay with me for a while. Stupidly I tell her no, rejecting the idea, not wanting to be weak or needy. No one can know how dark it is in my head, least of all my idealized mother, who can only stay idealized at a distance.

Pam and I come from the same place and have the same weaknesses, keeping everything good at arm's length while we luxuriate in pain. She is now in the past tense. I am overwhelmed by her death, by the absence of her, but one true thing emerges: The astrologer in New York, the one who says I must have love or die , is right about me. Accept it or die. Just like Pam, like Pam, Pam --

Six weeks later probate closes. Her father sends me a check for $2,000.

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Stealing From the Dead

It's the night my best friend hangs herself at the Howard Johnson's. I'm a shepherd boy singing a love song to Mary Magdalene. Really.

My friend Pam is in Los Angeles, still alive for only a few more hours, though I don't know this yet. I'm acting in a terrible musical in a small dumpy dinner theater, where I play a shepherd boy who falls in love with a non-reciprocating Mary Magdalene, performed by an actress whose main claim to fame is her decade-old Miss West Virginia title.

The wig the actor playing Jesus is forced to wear makes him look like Marlo Thomas in "That Girl." Often when he turns his head too quickly, the wig goes a bit askew. Keeping a straight face while he sings at me is hard work - the kind of thing they never prepare you to do when you're in acting school. It's my first job in La La Land. Hooray for Hollywood.

When I get back to Pam's hotel after the show there is no answer at the door. Pam is supposed to be having dinner with a mutual friend and I figure they are out at a bar or something, which pisses me off, since Pam knows I'm coming back to the hotel after my show.

The thing is, I'm stuck. A crazy older lady cousin of mine has rented a room to me near Toluca Lake. I've already told her I'll be staying with Pam tonight. The cousin is nutty and prone to fits of rage. If I go back there it means waking her up, since she will have put the chain on the door. Waking her up is a bad idea. Plus I'm embarrassed. I don't want to admit that Pam has forgotten me.

It's cold. I wait in the car. My shepherd boy costume has this cavernous cloak/cape thing, so I use it as a blanket, and I fall asleep, waiting in the parking lot. Even as I sleep I grow angrier with Pam. How could she do this to me? I'm ashamed; ashamed that I'm stupid, unloved, and disposable. After I've taken such care, shown such concern for Pam, how can she forget me like this? I grow furious.

After a fitful night I knock on her hotel room door again. Still no answer. I make the maid let me in the room. My anger with Pam evaporates as I'm filled with a surreal sense of absolute disconnectedness. Time stops. The bathroom door is ajar. I peek though and see Pam's fingers, ruddy and dirty looking at the fingertips, hanging over the side of the bathtub.

After the maid screams in Spanish and her supervisor pronounces Pam dead, over and over, her southern accent searing itself in my brain, we find a hand-written will leaving most everything to me. The suicide note says nothing really; just that she's sorry; that everything hurts too much; that this is the only way.

Before the police arrive I grab Pam's purse and hide it in my backpack. The cops get there and tell me to go wait in the hotel restaurant. I call a friend who calls my cousins - the nice ones, not the crazy lady I live with, and they come and stay with me. I go into the men's room and look through Pam's purse. She has five hundred dollars in cash. I put it in my pocket.

The police seem to suspect me for a while. The handwritten will can be construed as suspicious. Maybe I'm her killer. I sit in the restaurant drinking scotch on the rocks, waiting to be questioned. I'm the star of this episode of "Law and Order." When they finally get to me, several hours later, I can see it in their eyes, that just a few questions is all it takes for whatever interest they have in me to disappear. I am skinny, effeminate, and bewildered. Not a killer's profile, I guess.

The cops are patient and nice. They tell me how she hangs herself on the shower rod, how the weight of her body pulls it down after a while, which is why I find her crumpled and broken looking in the tub. Her fingertips are discolored, they say, because that happens with dead bodies. I let them know I have her purse; that it isn't missing or anything. I explain that I was afraid someone might steal it, so I picked it up almost instinctively. They search it and find no money, but they don't accuse me of taking it.

I have five hundred dollars in my pocket, stolen from a dead woman, but I am innocent.

I insist on acting with Mary Magdalene that night, ridiculously proud of how I know the show must go on. I don't know what I feel yet, and the rest of the cast are very careful with me. I want to play to their sympathies. I want to try on the role of tragic widow. Very "Valley of the Dolls." But something brittle inside me snaps. Her death feels real, and I don't like it.

She had to know I would be the one to find her. That goes around my head. She had to know. I sing my shepherd boy song and go home.

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Hanging Around Howard Johnson's

You know the show you're in sucks when you have to be drunk to get through the performance. Running away to La La Land solves nothing. Not when the Reaper tags along.

After my six-hour session with the astrologer, I'm completely convinced I've got to change my whole life. I must find love or I will never be famous. My friend Pam wants to change her life too, so we set out trying to do it together. But before we can really implement our makeover, Pam's mom gets really sick with leukemia. This puts a crimp in our plans to love and be loved.

Everything happens to me.

While Pam goes to Philadelphia to be with her mother, I go on tour with the ghastliest musical revue in the history of musical revues. In a red velvet jacket, singing in Italian, Polish, Yiddish, and even ocassionally, English, in places like the Jerry Lewis Room at the Brown's Hotel. Our boss is a bombastically mean, fat, smelly man who has been staging the same show since 1950 or something. We are all ill-prepared, unrehearsed, and miserable about it. During the day the elderly Jewish clientele at the "resorts" where we play buy us endless drinks. We usually perform bombed out of our minds. It makes the time go by quicker.

I stage a labor walkout. Half of us quit the show over our treatment and unpaid wages, and we catch a bus in the early hours before anyone can stop us. Like we're escaping from prison, which we are.

Pam calls when I get back to New York. Things in Philadelphia are bad. Her mom is dying. My worst, most secret fear in my own life is that my mother will die, and I'm willingly drawn into Pam's drama, heart and soul. I go to Philly.

Her mom's apartment is like a warehouse. Through ugly divorce proceedings with Pam's father, still ongoing, the mother manages to filch as much art and furniture as she can get her hands on, all of it forming a maze in her apartment you have to stumble through to get anywhere. Pam and I sit down to eat. Over the dining room table is an enormous oil painting of a cemetery, with agonized wraiths rising from the graves, their mouths contorted by screaming. I make Pam cover it with a blanket.

Pam's mom dies a couple of weeks later and I am there for Pam as best as I can. There are endless issues to resolve with the estate and ongoing fights between Pam and her father. She is sometimes irrational; as if he is touching her again, like when she was a kid, loving her in all the wrong ways. Depression hits fast and hard. I glom on to her depression, letting it give substance and ballast to my own misery, fear, and lack of direction. I still don't know how to love or be loved and my career doesn't exist.

I decide to move to Los Angeles. I need a change. I need to be someone else. Pam doesn't want me to leave. I go anyway. I love L.A., spending the first month going to the beach every day and eating the same lunch at the same restaurant, charging it to my American Express card. I charge a month of car rental to it too. And new clothes. I have no job or income. Meanwhile, Pam's spirits are dropping. She decides to see a shrink who prescribes Nardil, the first time I learn the name of an actual antidepressant. I'll know all the names later.

Palm trees vs. the onset of winter in New York; I persuade Pam to come out to L.A., just to visit, maybe she will like it here, maybe she can move too, and she says yes. I am ashamed to admit that I make her suffer through a ridiculous charade when I introduce her to my cousins who live in the Valley. I say we are engaged. That Pam and I will soon be married. Though I am totally out to friends, acquaintances, and the people I have sex with, I still haven't gotten around to having that conversation yet with family. I don't know why not. But saying we're engaged embarrasses the hell out of Pam - not because she minds people thinking we love one another, since we do, but because I am twenty and she is thirty, and she has been married once briefly before. She thinks my cousins will think her a cradle robber. Probably they do not; too busy laughing at the idea that I will marry a woman to worry over the age difference.

Pam and I have no real plans and she keeps extending her visit, staying on at a hotel where I often spend the night with her. We still tell each other our worst childhood stories ever. We eat in coffee shops. We pretend one day we will have everything we want, everything we think we need. She is still depressed. So am I. She hangs herself at the Beverly Garland Howard Johnson's in Studio City, which is now a Holiday Inn. The shower rod is broken. Pam is crumpled in the bathtub. The maid screams in Spanish and her supervisor comes in. "That girl's dead," the supervisor says over and over. "She's just dead."
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