Grendel

Getting ready to go to work, which is to say I am sitting on the sofa after standing outside for not one but two cigarettes in the grey, dreary morning. I have twenty or so minutes before I need to shower and dress and catch the bus downtown where, even though I have told myself I don’t need one, I will smoke another cigarette in order to calm my nerves before walking  through those double doors to the darkened restaurant, where the owner will be sitting, waiting to pounce. No doubt he will have found something to piss him off, something about which to be suspicious, and the calm I have spent this morning cultivating will be replaced with anger and frustration that if I stick up for myself and tell this tiny Albanian immigrant what he really needs to be told, I will be fired. Even worse is the possibility of being kept on, and treated with even more suspicion and hostility.

Money is a bitch. And I think I’m working for her son.

This is why your server hates you

Friday night my last table just before cuts went up was a four top – an old white dude, his wife, their daughter, and the daughter’s teenage son who wanted nothing but water and biscuits (hooray, please let me refill this glass for you seven times while I run back and forth fetching you free bread and jellies. No, really. Nothing would make me happier). After being informed that junior would not be paying for a meal, I proceeded to take orders for the rest of the table, starting with junior’s mama.

She ordered breakfast, and when I asked her how she would like her eggs cooked, she thought about it for a minute and finally settled on scrambled. I smiled and turned my attention to her mother in the next seat, but before giving me her order, the older woman told her daughter, in a very snotty tone, “Do you want cheese on them? Because if you don’t want cheese on them, you have to tell them, or they’ll just put cheese on your eggs!”

Her daughter looked up at me, non verbally checking the accuracy of her mother’s outburst. I simply shook my head and said, “No.”

Right then and there my tip went down by ten percent.

“Well, they always put cheese on your father’s eggs and he doesn’t want it,” the older woman said to her daughter, as if exposing a global conspiracy between restaurants and the dairy industry.

“We will definitely not put cheese in the eggs,” I said, then, “What can I get for you today?”

She ordered, without looking up from her menu, obviously steaming about oeufs avec cheese, and when she was finished, she pushed her menu toward me, letting it hover in the air in front of her husband’s face. I very slowly finished writing down her order before taking it from her.

When the husband finally ordered his breakfast, I figured out why the old dude is always getting cheese in his scrambled eggs. “I’d like the pancake breakfast with bacon,” he mumbled, “and I’d like the eggs scrambled without cheese.”

So there it is, I thought, the reason dude is always getting what he thinks he didn’t ask for. If my old dude’s wife hadn’t raised such a stink about it, I probably would have served him and charged him for the dreaded cheese in his eggs, just as psychic bitch predicted.

Why? Because guests don’t know how to fucking order and because they don’t speak up. At full capacity, our restaurant seats over 200 people. Add to that the crowd of non-seated, waiting for a table people. And add to that ten to fifteen servers, two hostesses, maybe a couple of busboys, five grill cooks, two managers, two backup cooks, one prep cook, and whoever manages to show up in dish – all engaged in conversation. Add to that the clank of dishes being set on tables, thrown into bus tubs, and dropped on the floor. Add to that the phone ringing and cash registers slamming shut. And add to that three children running and giggling through the restaurant and one screaming baby. Always one screaming baby.

And I, the server, am standing at the end of your table, focusing intently on your every word as you stare into your menu and whisper your order to me as if we’re in hiding and raising your voice too much would let the serial killer outside the door know we’re in here. Even when I ask guests to speak up, using the pretense that I’m just deaf, most only raise their volume a fraction of a decibel.

So when you say to me, in your tiny voice, “Bring me a Coke with no lemon,” all I catch is “Coke” and “lemon.” And because a Coke is not served with lemon, has not ever been served with lemon, and is not listed on the printed menu you are holding in front of your mouth as you try to communicate with me as including a lemon, it can be assumed that the only reason you would mention a lemon is because you want a fucking lemon. Difficult concept to grasp, I know.

Mommy, why do the Communists hate me?

As a senior in high school, I was forced to take a course in government. I already had enough credits as a junior that I could have graduated early except for two required courses – economics and government. That was the title of the semester long course. Government. In just eighteen short weeks, we would learn everything we needed to know about government.

Our instructor was a portly (yes, I said portly), old white dude who stood at the windows between classes and shouted insults at the smokers on the non-school-property sidewalk outside. This particular OWD was a Republican, which I know because he declared so in class on a daily basis. I was most definitely not a Republican, but he had a PhD and I figured I could learn something from him despite his misguided ideology.

There were also in our class, two exchange students from Germany. One from West Germany. The other from still-behind-the-iron-curtain East Germany. It made for interesting discussions in the classroom, especially with our OWD teacher mockingly accusing the East German student of being in our class so he could go back home and pass on secrets to his countrymen. What national secrets were being divulged in a twelfth grade government class in the Midwest, I’m not sure. I’m also not sure our OWD was entirely joking.

Most of the semester, we had spent talking about communism. And how it stacked up against democracy. We didn’t actually discuss the ideological bases of democracy vs. communism, or how fascist governments could be the product of any political system. Instead, we talked about the communist USSR and how it stacked up against the democratic US of A. And most of what we learned was reinforcement of what we had already learned through television and the media, the gist of which was that communism was bad, democracy good.

So the eighteen weeks of government was little more than a course in flag-waving, the capstone on eighteen years of Cold-War-Era learned paranoia. The Communists were out to get us. Because they hated freedom.

We were offered examples of how freedom-hating the communists really were.

- In Russia, the KGB suppresses political dissidence. In the US, you’re free to say whatever you want about the government and nobody cares.

- In Russia, there are all these secrert prisons and the government can hold you there for no reason whatsoever. Like if you disagree with them or something. Not like in the United States where you have right to due process.

- In Russia, the police can just barge right into your house any time. Not like in the US where they have to have a search warrant.

- In Russia, the secret police torture people to get information from them. We don’t torture in the US.

- In Russia, the government controls the media. They decide what goes in the papers and on the air, not like in the US where we have freedom of the press.

- Communist elections are fixed. Leaders aren’t chosen by the people. Cronyism is rampant in communist countries, unlike in the US where our leaders are democratically elected.

- In communist countries, the government listens to your phone calls and reads your mail. Not like in the US where we have a guaranteed right to privacy.

- In Russia, the whole country is run by the same people. The government is all-powerful. Not like in the US where we have a set of checks and balances that protect the people.

You get where I’m going. At least I hope you do.

I had the good fortune of going on to college, of actually reading Marx (and Hume and Hobbes and others on whose theories our Enlightenment following founders based our particular brand of government), and of learning the difference between a government and an ideology. And the things that had bothered me as a child and young adult (how can we say all communists are bad when their government won’t let them be any other way?) started to make more sense. And also less.

That semester I took government was in the fall of 1989. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall came down. I remember that our OWD pushed a tv set into the room and we watched coverage on CNN (it might have been a tape of the previous nights’ broadcast, I can’t remember). In the desk in front of me sat the West German student and a few chairs over, the East German. We asked them both lots of questions. What did this mean to them? What was it like to see all those people pouring into West Berlin? Are you sad you aren’t there to witness it for yourself?

I honestly don’t remember their answers. I don’t even remember if they did answer or if they just sat there, staring at the television, and the crumbling of a wall.