I know, I know. This post is late. I got sidetracked, kids, with life and whatnot. But I swear I will finish this little series in the next week or so......also, did you know you can subscribe to this blog now? No more pesky checking in to see if I've posted! In the right hand column on the main page at the top, just enter your email address and you'll get notification when I post. Amazing.
Ok, so where were we? 1999, I believe. I'd just survived my 4th (and last) corporate job experience and was back in familiar territory, waiting tables. I went to work at a sister restaurant of Cutter's in Seattle, The Palamino. Yes, it's a chain, yes, it's faux Italian food. Yes, we nicknamed it The Pony. Yes, we had no less than 17 pasta dishes on the menu at the height of the Atkins craze in LA. And I don't say "craze" lightly. Those bitches had us making cappuccinos with cream instead of milk because that meant less freakin' carbs. Our most popular dish, however, was a crab dip, made essentially of mayonnaise, some crab and some cheese, and nothing delighted me and my fellow waiters more than when some skinny "actress" would come in and say, "Well, I'm not very hungry. I'll just have the crab dip." And 3,000 calories.
I'm not going to lie, it was a long couple of years waiting on the people of Los Angeles. They tended towards just what you'd imagine - demanding, rude, often unable to make eye contact, incredibly fucking fond of creating their own unique dishes that did not appear anywhere on our menu. We were situated in Westwood, near UCLA, Brentwood and Beverly Hills adjacent, which equals a shitload of older, rich people in St. John sweater outfits. When I first got there, an insane man named James ran the front desk. James felt that The Pony was akin to Spago, and treated it as such. He knew all the names of these horrible people, researched the latest seasons of St. John's, Prada, Escada so as to compliment their outfits upon entry, commented on their "refreshed" faces and made no secret of his own cheek implants and propensity towards MAC powder. He kissed ass, gave away a Dim-Sum's brunch worth of crab dip on a Saturday night, was slipped more $20 bills than I'd ever seen and drove us waiters insane. He had no ability to say something simply or handle the seating of someone without 100% drama. Once, I heard a man ask him if we were closed, and he said this: "Why yes, sir, I do believe we have terminated service for the evening." Eventually, however, the pressures of The Pony's front desk became too much for poor James. His career ended one late night when he took off a shoe and hurled it at the head of the manager in charge. Rumors floated around that drugs and sexual favors were involved, but we will never know for sure.
Oh, and the celebs. Tyra Banks used to come in for lunch all the time, when she was a little chubby and had not yet lost her mind. She was very sweet. Warren Beatty nice, Lisa Bonet was picky and weird. John Cusack was also nice and although I didn't wait on him, I contemplated attaching myself to his ankles as he left the building. And then, one quiet night, I waited on Monica Lewinsky. And her dad. Both were polite and quiet, and my heart sort of broke for her. It was only a year or so after the scandal, and she was about my age. All I could think was all the mistakes I'd made with men along the way, men far less famous and charismatic than Clinton, and all the baggage that entailed - yet it was nothing compared to hers. She could never go on a first date without the images of cigars and soiled dresses dancing through her dates' heads. Never meet a potential mother-in-law who wouldn't assume she was a slut, which is sort of what I assumed, until she was a flesh and blood girl in front of me, young, insecure and wanting to be loved. I did my best to smile at her as much as I could and pretended she was just another customer. I like to imagine she was grateful and relieved.
In the meantime, I did my best to adjust to my new life. I, once again, had no idea what I was really doing, I just knew I was elated to no longer be trapped behind a desk. I took my first fiction class at UCLA, then continued on with Lisa's private workshops. I learned that waiting until the day before a story was due to write it didn't really work, and that overall, writing was very, very hard. But I loved it. It was unlike anything I'd tried to do before, this spinning of words into a story out of thin air. Most of my first stories were thinly veiled autobiographical pieces, mainly focused around all the crazy men I had dated. When I discovered I had a lot more material than just that, something in me knew I could do this for real, and I started researching MFA programs. I had been writing a year and thought I should wait another year before I applied, but Lisa said no, do it now, why wait? And so I did, and was accepted to UC Irvine. My future was back on track, and I was headed to a mecca of artistic ingrity and, I assumed, unadorned appreciation for my writing. (I blame Lisa for this naivete, as she would simply write "Brilliant" on the top of nearly everything I wrote.) I would get a stipend there to teach unwitting undergrads, so after 2 1/2 years at The Pony, I was all like, "See you later, bitches, I'm done with all this and off to write a brilliant bestseller!"
As with all the best laid plans, this theory quickly unraveled. I, like an asshole, volunteered to be up first for workshop, and in that excruciating 45 minutes, I knew several things: 1. I was a piece of shit writer. 2. Graduate school was a terrible idea. 3. No one here was ever going to say that my work was brilliant. 4. I had to smile while my guts were ripped out of my body and spread out on the table. 5. I had approximately 2 more years to go of this bullshit.
That first year, I nearly came undone. We were also expected to teach the youth of America with exactly one week of training, and on top of writing piles of shit, I wasn't doing that all that well either. The workshop is a bizarre place, full of egos and insecurities and projections and judgements and hatred and jealousy, and sometimes, love and respect. It's a long story, but aside from a few people there, I felt universally misunderstood in those rooms and entirely lost. My usual charisma failed, my charms thwarted or ignored. By my second year, I had more free time and was longing to go back to something I had some footing in, something I knew I was good at, a place where people appreciated who I was and what I had to offer. Also, I thought it might be a good idea to not have a ton of debt for something that amounted to pure torture. So? I went back to The Pony. Just three days a week, but I went back. Cocktailing instead of working in the dining room, but baby, I was back.
And ironically, I felt a lot better. I had this other world to escape into from graduate school all these people who didn't care about how much interiority my characters' had, if my characters' were really just whiny, self-pitying women underneath all that interiority or if I'd ever read T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland." I had not, and I still have not. There was a guy in my class who could quote that fucking poem on demand, most likely tell you what page the line he was quoting was on. It was nauseating.
It was a horrifically long two years. I stayed for an extra year teaching to finish my thesis, a collection of (surprise!) thinly veiled autobiographical short stories. And suddenly, it was 2004. I had a master's degree and. . . I was waiting tables. I was also very, very tired of Los Angeles, and I missed my family. By then, I had been away from them for 15 years. I mentioned to Ma that I wanted to come home. Of course, she said. Take a sabbatical! she said. A sabbatical at 32. Only my mother would have championed this. And so I did. I packed my shit and left, with no clue as to what was going to come next. I would teach, I figured, write my novel. I knew, of course, that whatever happened, I was done waiting tables.
I moved home in July. Two months later, my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer at 28. In an instant, my life was no longer my own, and whatever plans I had were erased: firmly and completely.
0 comments:
Post a Comment