Box Girl (13 page)

It was our first Valentine's Day together, and with a craziness that only a twenty-something in a brand new relationship can possess, I thought this meant something. But of course, like a twenty-something in a brand new relationship, I didn't tell him this. I expected him to read my mind, to just
know
.

I don't know why I cared, really. I've never had a good relationship with the holiday, ever since Valentine's Day my freshman year in high school. I had my very first boyfriend and, because of that, it was my first Valentine's Day that mattered. School was cancelled because it was a snow day, so my boyfriend invited me over to his house. Before I had even taken off my coat, he handed me two pink carnations and a candle that looked like a mushroom. Then, before I could even say thank you, he dumped me.

The next day, I couldn't go to school, couldn't get out of bed. I learned why they call it heartache. Your actual heart—not the round-edged red one in the Hallmark window, but the one inside your chest with aortas and ventricles, that one—physically aches.

Pretend I didn't tell you that, either.

The boyfriend that I was crying about in the box recovered, slightly, when an orchid the size of an adolescent showed up outside my apartment. I read the card while standing outside,
still in my pajamas. It told me not to worry, that we had a lifetime of Valentine's Days to spend together.

Pretend I didn't—no, never mind. You can remember that one. His name is Peter.

Waitress

There are a few words or phrases in the “industry”—meaning
“restaurant industry”—that make me cringe. “Industry” being one of them. Even more unpalatable is “Industry Night,” a mixer typically held on a Monday, so employees from local establishments can get together and enjoy three-dollar shots. It also never sat well with me when a restaurant employee, who had just arrived at work at 5:00 pm, said, “Good morning!” Worse still was when they'd refer to their days off as the “weekend” when it was nowhere near a weekend. “Have a great weekend!” the bartender would shout over his shoulder when finishing a shift on Monday, knowing he wouldn't be back to work until Thursday.

Most cringe-inducing, however, was when the staff would refer to one another as “family.” At the end of my first week at the restaurant, the manager hooked his arm around my shoulder and proclaimed, “Well, you're part of the family now.” He rattled me into the crook of his arm, like something an uncle would do to a shy teenager. I thought he might give me a noogie. I lifted my head and looked around at these
Southern California strangers, three thousand miles away from my real home. Family? I was far from convinced.

This was not my first restaurant job. In college, I worked for a hot minute as a hostess at a Cuban-themed jerk-chicken- and-mojito joint. But that was for fun. To meet people. To have extra money for clothes and beer. The people I worked with were also students, just making some extra cash. They were like me. They were
normal
. At the restaurant in Los Angeles, several of the employees were well over forty. Some of them were career servers and had worked there for ten, fifteen, twenty years. These people were not like me.
They must have had rough lives
, I thought.
Something must have gone horribly wrong
. And the ones my age, well, they had to be actresses, or from the wrong side of the tracks, right? These people worked there because they had to. But wait, so did I.

The place I begrudgingly called “home” three to four days a week was Chaya, an upscale Asian-fusion restaurant in Venice. After twenty-five years, it was still consistently busy, a go-to spot on the Westside where agents took clients, businessmen schmoozed investors, and celebrities who lived in the neighborhood drank sake, safe from the paparazzi that preyed on the city's more interior restaurants. It was also a restaurant where Chelsea Handler had worked to support herself while doing stand-up, until (legend goes) she was eventually fired for chasing a customer into the parking lot when he failed to leave a tip. Another legend says that she was actually fired because she was always drunk. This I find more believable. I worked in the same section she had, the cocktail lounge, which attracted every walk of life: the Ladies Who Cosmo (even though the Cosmo fad was long gone), the yoga-mat-wielding green tea–drinkers, the surfers, the Venice hipsters, the young and successful, the couples with strollers, the repellent old men.

The old men were the worst. “Has anyone ever told you, you look like you ride horses?” one of them said, while cracking
an imaginary whip in the air. He then let out a “Yee-haw!” and spanked his thigh. Another time, a man in sweatpants and a red bandana, fresh from Gold's Gym, asked, “Now on this entrée—could you ask the chef if I could get a female chicken?”

Huh?

Women asked the most ridiculous questions, too.

“Can I get you started with something to drink?” I asked a woman who took a seat in my section.

“Oh, there will be two of us,” she said, panicked, when I only put down one cocktail napkin. I have decided there are two types of people in this world: people who are comfortable eating by themselves, and people who are decidedly not.

“I'm waiting on someone,” she reiterated, terrified I might have thought for a second she was all by herself. A moment later, she asked, “Now this wine, the Cabernet Sauvignon, it's caffeine-free right?”

I looked up from my notepad. “Yes,” I said. “All of our wine is caffeine-free.”

If I learned anything from working at a restaurant, it's that, generally speaking, people are insane.

At the end of a shift during my first week, while separating ones from twenties—excited about this stack of cash but terrified that I had to calculate how much I was supposed to tip out—one of the servers saw me mashing the calculator's clear button like a chimpanzee. She asked if I needed some help. When we finished my checkout, she invited me to join some of the girls for a late-night meal down the street. “Sure,” I said, because I was hungry, not because I was in the mood to make new friends. (I love friends but I don't like making them. It's just so much work. I hate the beginning of anything—a job, a class, the get-to-know-you games, caring what you look like, making a good impression. I wish I could just skip to already knowing each other, liking each other, and not caring what each other thinks.)

We sat in a large leather booth at Swingers, a '60s-style diner on Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica, all wearing our server uniforms: some of us in the all-black ensemble of the cocktail waitresses, others in the shirt-and-tie combo required for the dining room. I ordered a grilled cheese and tomato soup and barely said a word. Which was very strange for me. But I was in such a weird place. I had just broken up with a boyfriend and had just quit my real job. Now I was paying for a grilled cheese sandwich at one in the morning with a wad of ones pulled from an apron that was still tied around my waist.
What the hell is going on
, I thought.
I'm a waitress
.

Because I spent so much time at that place, you'd think I'd be rolling in money. The problem was, for my first year at the restaurant, I had to work at the sushi bar before I could move into the much more lucrative cocktail section. This meant I left each night with maybe sixty bucks. Heather and I lived together at this point; we'd graduated from sharing a bedroom to sharing a two-bedroom apartment. (Craving weather patterns and closed-toed shoes, Melissa and Rachel had both fled to foggier pastures in San Francisco.) During that period, Heather was my sugar mama on more occasions than I'd like to admit. She often hooked me with, “I'll buy you dinner if you clean the house.” Said from her real office where she made real money. More months than not, I'd pay my rent part-check, part-cash-from-tips, part-IOU. At one point, my running tab with her flirted dangerously close to four digits.

On days when I worked at both
Flaunt
and Chaya, I'd leave the magazine in Hollywood at four o'clock and race west on the 10. I'd slam into a spot, change into my server uniform behind the tinted windows of my backseat, and barrel up the parking garage ramp, passing under a sign that said
NOT A WALKWAY
while stuffing my feet into my shoes. I'd zoom through the employee entrance, saying “Hola!” to the Hispanic cooks in the kitchen, “Konichiwa!” to the Japanese chefs at the sushi bar, and “Sorry” to the manager for being late.

By all accounts, I was one of the worst cocktail waitresses of all time. There are some pretty significant reasons I should have never been a server: I am clumsy, I am forgetful, and I am very bad at pretending to be in a good mood when I'm not. The best adjective to describe my serving skills was “clunky.” I'd try to channel my inner geisha, their delicate hands gingerly pouring tea, their faces in a perfect, painted pout, all while wearing a beehive and little wooden blocks for shoes. I possessed none of that grace.

Coordination has never been my thing. I have always been terrible at sports with teams and/or balls, though I have played them all. One time, in third grade, my grandparents flew up to stay with me while my parents were out of town, and they came to my soccer game. The coach never put me in. Not once. Throughout the entire game, two other unskilled players and I were skipping along the sidelines, involved in our own intense competition of who could catch the most falling leaves. After the whistle blew, one of them realized she hadn't gotten to play, and she started crying. The coach, feeling sorry, said he'd start us all in the next game. This was doubly punishing for me. I had let down my grandparents, who had traveled so far, and now I had to
start
in the next game? I spent the whole next week praying the ball wouldn't come anywhere near me. When it did, I panicked and kicked it out of bounds. Soon after, thankfully, I was taken out of the game and able to continue leaf catching, an activity at which I was much more adept.

The coordination that evaded me on the field was missing from my server arsenal as well. I once spilled five beers on one person. I was carrying six different bottles for six different men—a little army of Stellas, Heinekens, and Amstels,
all balancing perilously on my unsteady tray. I placed the Stella in front of the guy who ordered it (or one can hope), and then something went horribly wrong. I'm not sure how. Maybe I lost my balance. Maybe I hit the tray with my own hand. Maybe I had a seizure. But all five beer bottles dove off the tray—
BANG, BANG, BOOM, SHATTER, SPLASH
—right into this poor guy's lap. Fortunately, he was a good sport about the whole thing. “At least I told my wife I was going to the bar tonight,” he said, sniffing his soaked shirt as I fumbled to fork over a stack of napkins.

My coworkers would often ask why I didn't work in the dining room. “You could make so much more money,” they'd say. Honestly, the more casual ambiance of the cocktail lounge was treacherous enough. In the dining room, I would have probably lit someone's hair on fire.

The managers liked to joke that what I lacked in skill I made up for in charm, because rarely were my tips below twenty percent, and the five-beers-one-lap scenario was only one of many such debacles. Charm, maybe, if I was in a good mood. More like charm and humor—and honesty.

When customers asked how certain things tasted, I told them exactly what I thought. About the vanilla ginger gimlet, I'd reply, “It tastes like Pine-Sol, or air freshener. It tastes like something you're supposed to smell but not eat.” About other items, say the New Zealand grass-fed lamb chop, I'd tell customers, “I have no idea. I've never had it.” They'd look at me, confused, and after I'd give them the ol' “honest-to-goodness” shrug, they'd laugh and thank me. On many nights my tables would really stump me with, “What are the specials?” See, here's the thing. I worked in the cocktail lounge. Sure, customers could order off the dining room menu, but most people ordered from the bar menu, which I knew inside and out, if for no other reason than I selected my dinner from it nightly. When asked this very standard question, I'd reply,
“You know,” pointing my pen at them, “that is a great question.” I'd pause for effect. “That I do not know the answer to. But if you wait one minute, I'll race into the back and find out. You want to time me?”