Bad waitress pt. 2

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The following is an excerpt from Bad Waitress by Becca Schuh, an essay that we published in full on June 5th.

When I moved to New York, everyone said that I would have a very hard time getting a waitressing job, because all of the jobs would want me to have ‘New York experience.’

I got a job on the first day I went out in the city to apply. And I didn’t take that job, because then I got two more jobs, and got to pick which job I wanted. I’m not saying this to brag—I think it could happen to anyone vaguely charming with decent experience. It was during the two star bubble of 2015—restaurants were opening every week, good ones, and employee turnover at restaurants was always high.

The job I ended up picking was an opening, bougie New American restaurant in the West Village. This is exactly what I wanted, though now I can’t remember why. I guess I thought that a nice restaurant confirmed something about me, my skills, my potential, myself as a person.

The job didn’t start for a few weeks, during which I walked around New York. How lucky I was! I don’t remember the specifics of many of the days—I went to MoMA, ran along the Columbia Street Waterfront, and bought a lot of wine to practice opening wine bottles. I’d drink the whole bottle by myself at night, in my sublet in Carroll Gardens. I lived with a middle-aged couple, married artists, in a pure white room next to the BQE. I had a mattress on the floor, and I’d sit next to it, drinking that wine and thinking about how I’d done it, I’d arrived, but having no idea what came next. I love this girl, and I know that she would love me, who I’ve met and become.

The woman who hired me at the bougie West Village restaurant was named Julie. She had deep sunken eyes and weatherbeaten skin and dark hair that curled slightly around her face. I thought she was beautiful. She, too, represented something to me: a woman I wanted to become, when I thought that becoming was about images and not about who you are to other people. I wanted her to love me, I wanted her to deem me worthy. I once had a dream about her. She was wearing high-waisted, old white underwear. It was both sexual and not sexual.

The job was terrible, but you could have guessed that, right?

I was their star. For a few months at least. I learned every detail of every sandwich and wine, what farm every cut of meat came from, spit it back out like it was information that mattered. And then it was critic season, and what does the best server do during critic season? She waits on the food critics. Even then, I couldn’t believe it. I’d been in New York for what felt like a day, and I’d been waiting tables for what felt like a few months. It wasn't even so much more than that—when I waited on Pete Wells, I’d been a waitress for less than two years.

I don’t know if this sounds like a big deal. Maybe it doesn’t. But it meant something to me, this small girl who came from a town in the Midwest and was being accepted to do something large and never thought that she’d have any sort of chance.

Julie, the manager who I admired and might have loved, was a bad person. She once shoved a broken wine glass in my face, she dragged one of my friends out of the restaurant and screamed at her on the street until she was in tears. She called another one of my friends an alcoholic and a slut. I had been tough enough to walk for eight hours at Hash House and build biceps from carrying potatoes, but I wasn’t tough enough to deal with this mental harassment. My anxiety spiked back up, I started running out in the middle of a shift and having panic attacks in the street. I was getting in trouble constantly, and crying as soon as I left the restaurant. I quit in a seven-paragraph email with 15 bullet points that people still text me about.

The next two restaurants were not as bad, but were in other ways the same. I still had to say what sous vide meant on command. I still had to taste wine and say that it smelled like mustard seed. I still had to sit in the restaurants when they were closed and take tests about what accompanied the duck like I was a student in high school. At one point, my boss was a literal Hapsburg prince. He hated me. We once got in a screaming fight about ketchup storage.

One night, I went out for drinks after work with a male server and we sat at the back of a beer bar and I realized that his penis was out of his pants. He was looking at me and laughing. I didn’t feel threatened at the time, I felt tired and disgusted—and yet, I can still remember the look on his face, his gap-toothed smile leering like everything was a joke: his penis, our job, my life.

It was on the last quizzing chef that I thought, no. My brain does not have room for this. It is an unrealistic expectation for anyone to memorize 12 ingredients in five different sauces on a weekly basis, but it is an untenable one for me personally. And then, when I least expected it, when I’d ceased to think it was possible, I landed at a sort of home.

You wouldn’t have guessed it from my tweets, or my bad attitude, but I loved my job at The Ginger Man. Logistically, it was the best thing that has happened to me in New York. Better than publishing my first interview in Bookforum, better than the two-year freelance copywriting gig that paid for a trip to France, better than any apartment. Emotionally, my mentor, my friends, my literary magazine, these things are, of course, superior. But I wouldn’t have had room to find these things without that job. I used to take entire weeks off in the summer when I wanted to party and go to the beach. I could pretend I was a normal person. I no longer had to miss weddings and graduations and family reunions. When I made a new friend, I could finally hang out with them when they asked me to drinks on a Friday instead of saying I had to work. This led to meeting the friends who are now the equivalent of my family, who keep me anchored. The last bar I worked at gave me the ability to have a life.

But of course, the other bars and restaurants did too. That’s what I realized during all of the quarantine months trapped inside. I never would have had the opportunity to do everything I’ve done if it weren’t for Aaron at IHOP, hiring me in my Hollister shirt. Waitressing funded my rent and bills and food and clothes so I could spend the time that was leftover figuring out how to be a writer. I look at all the waiters and waitresses I knew over the years, and you can replace writer with anything. Actor. Artist. Student. Activist. Parent. Person who just wants to experience living in New York City but doesn’t have the connections to do it with a white collar job.

I’m grateful, and I’ll always hold space for that gratitude. But I know that it was also a transaction: in exchange for that stability, your personality will always be policed—by bosses, customers, restaurant critics, and people online that have strong opinions about the nobility of the service industry despite never having worked in it. What is theoretically a near-private interaction, a messenger handing over a meal, has become an exercise in relitigation. Between the manager and the server, between the customer and the owner, between the armchair expert sitting at home pontificating about tipping culture and the very foundations of the industry.

People ask me all the time what’s the worst thing a customer said to me, or what’s the craziest story I have from work. I always say: I don’t remember. I used to store things like this, anecdotes to share on social media, but by the end, I went into work, I got through my shifts, and when I left, I wiped my brain like a chalkboard. When people ask me this, I get the sense that they’re looking for entertainment. What, I wanted to say, do you think I do this job for anecdotes? People will say that, too. Oh, it must make you a better writer, seeing all these people and the crazy things they say.

It has not made me a better writer. It’s made me lazy. It’s made me love money. It’s made me see that life is more than writing, it’s lessened my chokehold on dedication. I no longer identify as an ambitious person. I identify as a person who wants to make the life that they can scrape together as comfortable as possible.

I do think being a waitress has done one great thing with respect to writing: it has made me understand deeply and fundamentally how many writers are full of shit. It has altered my view of privilege and money and the ways that people complain that mask the fact that in their world, they would never have to do a job that equates to basic manual labor, because their intelligence is worth more than waiting on others. (Side note: Sweetbitter was an overrated waitressing book, Love Me Back is underrated.)

Maybe by accident, maybe on purpose, I fell in to a social group in New York City with many people who consider themselves to be intellectuals. I’ve been privy to countless conversations about how intellectual labor is labor, about how someone needs to do the sitting around and thinking and theorizing, with the thought underlying this being: and it certainly wouldn’t be the people who carry things for a living.

Why don’t websites hire service people to write about food? How do ‘restaurant journalists’ exist, when servers who are also artists are standing right here? A book critic once told me, “a website could never be staffed by service people, the quality of the writing would be too low,” and I wanted to laugh. I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter.