Why I'm Like This (5 page)

What little was left of the session after these interruptions was devoted to me, but still, I had to think up things to say. I found R and her mess so distracting that I just didn't feel that much like talking to her. She had become the friend you no longer like enough to confide in so you feed them little drips and drops of your life. Just enough so you don't have to go through the bother of actually ending the friendship. Also, she was so obviously worse off than I that it would have been like telling a starving child you've got a hankering for a cup-cake. I always felt relieved when I had an excuse to skip a session, like a trip or an audition or if I was sick (a migraine, hooray!). All spring I kept trying to figure out how and when to end it.

I finally got the break I was looking for when I was invited
to be in an intensive and time-consuming workshop at a New York theater. I paid one last
visite à l'hotel
and at the end of the hour I told R that I was feeling strong and happy, that I wouldn't have time to see her for a while, and perhaps this would be a good opportunity to take a hiatus. She did not rejoice in my wellness. In fact she was pretty nasty about it. I told her I'd call her when the workshop ended, but I left secretly hoping never to see her again.

I didn't. Which leads me to Part Two.

 

Part Two

 

Three months and a few extra weeks of procrastination later, I telephoned R, only to find her number had been disconnected with no forwarding information available. I was mostly relieved but vaguely alarmed, although not enough to pursue it, or rather, her. I was curious, though, and a few friends slash fellow patients confirmed that while R had fallen off the radar, she had not disappeared entirely. Evidently, she had so insinuated herself in the lives of several of her patients that not only did they continue to see her, but they allowed themselves to become entangled in her own disastrous affairs.

Here's what I know. Actually, for legal reasons, let me revise that. Here's what I heard: R borrowed a total of approximately eighteen thousand dollars from three of her
patients. One would have to surmise she borrowed more than that from patients I did not know, presuming there were any. She had neither an apartment nor an office and moved from hotel to hotel, including, at one point, the Helmsley Palace. Sometimes she had her husband call patients to ask for money or groceries. One night they asked a patient, a friend I'll call Howard, to pay their hotel bill so they would not be evicted. Another night R asked a young woman who had already lent her thousands of dollars to bring food to a hotel, claiming that she and her son had nothing to eat. When the woman asked R—through the closed door of the hotel room, as R would not open it—about being paid back, R threatened to call the police if the woman did not stop harassing her. Another patient I knew who was particularly dependent on and devoted to R, let's call him Mark, not only loaned her money but became actively involved in an effort to keep her and her family afloat. She preyed on his vulnerability, on his good-heartedness, entreating him to not let her “fall through the cracks” as so many do when they become homeless. On the face of it, this is not an unreasonable request. People get into trouble sometimes, their lives succumb to some sort of fatal disarray and they need help. Well, this wasn't that. Had it been, from all accounts the aid she received from her patients should have buoyed her for some time. Rather, the money was obviously disappearing as fast as it was coming in. When Mark was tapped out both financially and emotion
ally and had finally cut himself loose from R, he brought her up on malpractice charges with the appropriate body politic, the Office of Professional Discipline. In the course of this process, he actually discovered that R was not, at present, properly registered as a social worker. She had her credentials, she was licensed, but she had not kept up with her registration fees for years. Unfortunately, the Office of Professional Discipline so bungled the case that it is still unresolved. Something, Mark tells me, about their process server not dating a summons properly.

I wanted more information than seemed fair torturing Mark for, so I called the Office of Professional Discipline. I identified myself as a journalist (why shouldn't I?) but after giving them R's name was told they could not confirm there was any action pending against her. “But you are not denying it?” I asked. The woman understood what I wanted. (
If I sneeze twice and you don't say gesundheit…
) She went to talk to her supervisor and then came back and repeated that she could not
confirm
it. That was good enough for me. Besides, even though I didn't learn anything, it was fun to say I was a journalist.

I called Howard. He was still being treated by R through a good bit of this, and he confronted her several times regarding the money she had borrowed from him and from fellow patients. She told him variously that the money was not a loan but a gift and that she was not expected to give it back, that the money was an advance on future sessions, and that it
was owed her because for years she had undercharged her patients. Howard's own therapy finally ended when the check R gave him to repay him for paying the hotel bill bounced. He never saw her again after that but he kept up with her by e-mail for quite some time. He was worried about her and although he was annoyed to hear from her that she had bought a PowerBook with money borrowed from her patients, he continued to try to help her. In response to his queries about her well-being he received lengthy rants detailing her precarious circumstances. Sometimes R wrote messages all in caps that would trail off into non sequiturs or end abruptly, midword, as if she had just passed out at the keyboard.

What can we take away from all of this, I wonder? I spoke to Howard again recently and he told me a hair-raising saga about how R once encouraged, if not abetted, a romance between himself and another patient, only to destroy it when it blossomed by revealing each patient's confidences to the other. I find that the years have not mellowed his anger and confusion. John and Sarah, the couple who had originally recommended R to me, will always wonder how much she may or may not have manipulated the ups and downs of their marriage to suit her own purposes. And there must be countless others whose stories I do not know. My boyfriend heard a strange but not unlikely tale from his own therapist about a patient of R's who may have, as it turns out, unwisely, loaned R her credit card.

God only knows what has happened to her young son.

 

As for myself, well, I am philosophical. I liked R quite a bit in those early years. She commiserated, which is something I needed, still need, perhaps more than therapy. Justification as Cure, that's me. You will remember that I didn't much like the idea of being in therapy in the first place. Considering R was not properly registered, I think it stands to reason that if all I did was pay a crazy lady seventy-five bucks a week to chat with me about myself, it may have been stupid, but it wasn't therapy. Hey, look at that, Justification as Cure really works.

Who was R? A lost soul or a manipulative user? Or both? A dedicated healer or a quacksalver? (Means
charlatan
—I found it in the computer thesaurus.) Perhaps all those phone calls she made and took, which I'd presumed from R's discreet one-or two-word responses to be patient emergencies, were actually drug communiqués. It is impossible to know. Whatever the case, I am sad and sorry about her dissolution. She helped me through some tough times by laughing with me at my oppressors, which gave me validation and built my confidence. I am a stronger, though not necessarily a nicer person for it, but I am working on that last part. Sometimes, now, when I am low, when I feel misunderstood or ill used, I think of what R might have said to me, had I arrived for a session thus. We would have had a little therapy, talked about the new Alice Munro collection, and then maybe together we
would have subtly put down a colleague or friend of mine, just enough to lift me out of my slump. And, of course, she would have suggested I put on a pair of dangly earrings. When R was good, she was very good. And when she was bad, well, she was sort of good, too.

E
VEN
if you are a waiter for a very short time, you are doomed to have waiter nightmares for the rest of your life. You go into work and your uniform is missing or you can't figure out how the tables are numbered or you've suddenly developed a limp. Your dead aunt Rose, who was always impossible to please, pops up at one table or someone you made fun of at camp or an ax murderer is demanding their appetizer. You miss your wedding because no one will cover for you.

I was a waitress for almost four years in a restaurant in Soho I will call Mariella. Mariella was owned by a despot named George, who, when he was through screaming at us at staff meetings for our various and sundry infractions—spot
ted aprons and askew table settings and snide attitudes and tardiness and wastefulness and our overall failure as viable human beings—would then make the startling pronouncement that the greatest achievement of our lives was that we were working for him. There was some truth to this statement. Without a doubt, George was the most loathsome person I had ever met, and if somehow one could manage to avoid his wrath and last more than two weeks on the wait staff at Mariella, that was, indeed, an accomplishment.

There was actually a “Mariella,” for whom the restaurant was named. She was a tall, thin, very attractive Jamaican woman known mostly for wearing tiny sparkly dresses, spike heels, and outrageous wigs. Mariella could be both funny and brutal—to call her capricious would be too flattering—and you remained in her good graces, or not, depending on whether you were a) keeping her amused and b) keeping people's wineglasses full and dishes cleared. If they were going to drink, they could stay; if they weren't going to drink, they had to leave, because the restaurant made most of its money on liquor. Or if they were having no appetizers, or appetizers as main courses, or splitting main courses, they had to leave. Or rather,
you
had to get them to leave by continually asking them if there was anything else they needed and then clearing their table until there was literally nothing left on it but the tablecloth. You couldn't just put down the check, because that would have been rude. Mariella was also a relentless publicity hound, and you could count on a reasonably pleas
ant lunch shift if she had appeared that morning in a chef 's hat and stilettos to make fried chicken during the food segment of some morning show, or if her name had turned up on Page Six of the
Post.

It is not as if there is a writ or edict, something on file at City Hall declaring that all struggling actors take jobs as waiters with no regard for the fact that perhaps their backgrounds or educations recommend them, in the opinion of their parents, to a more lofty purpose. Mainly, I needed a job that would have some flexibility so I could go to auditions and rehearsals. I also needed a job that would not require that I wear stockings, which I hate. Waitressing at a salad bar, as I had done in college, and which I believe is an oxymoron, unfortunately did not qualify as restaurant experience. However, as a testimonial to my acting school, at my interview I acted the part of a waiter and was hired.

Mariella was, at the time, a very popular restaurant and therefore a very desirable place to work. It offered expensive Jamaican-ish food and was famous for its two deceptively strong frozen rum-and-fruit drinks, a red one called a Mariella and a blue one called a Montego. I would come to know these drinks well. I would serve several of them to a person and perhaps by the end of the meal the person would serve them back to me in a slightly altered form, most likely in the company of some half-digested onion rings or curried chicken or pecan pumpkin pie.

The restaurant was also renowned for its raucous Gospel
Sunday Brunch—perhaps the most dreaded wait shift in all of Manhattan. We would arrive at nine-thirty in the morning, cut a thousand bagels, and move all the tables and chairs around in order to fit 233 people, the exact number permitted according to the fire department's Maximum Allowance sign. By eleven o'clock, the first clamoring horde—you'd think they hadn't seen a bagel since the Carter Administration—was stuffing its collective face with challah French toast and Montegos while singing eighty-three verses of “This Little Light of Mine” along with an overmiked gospel group. Actually, the cacophony was produced by two main elements: the sizable black contingent giving it up for Christ and the equally sizable Jewish contingent screaming for their food. And, as always, Mariella would be following us around with the full ashtrays she'd picked up off of our tables, shrieking, “What is this? What is this?” Just when it seemed like All God's Chillun had been fed and/or saved, the bagel cutting began again in preparation for the second seating. Sometimes while I was cutting bagels I would think about how once my grandmother told me that as a young woman she was courted by one of the Lender brothers. If she'd married him we'd all be rich now and I wouldn't be here, cutting bagels, and even if I were here, Lender's bagels are pre-cut.

The brunch shift would finally end around six o'clock, just as the waning sunlight signaled the official demise of the weekend.

 

I adapted well at Mariella under the tutelage of ten or so actor/waiter/homosexuals, who taught me how to open a bottle of wine with a pocket corkscrew, stack plates up my arms, and make cappuccinos. They also, in accordance with the laws of their people, taught me the original choreography from every Broadway show of the past fifty years, including
Broadway Babies of 1925.
In college, none of the people I knew to be gay were “out.” If they were not completely assimilated into the mainstream they were relegated to the small though vocal Lesbians and Gays at Penn, or LGAP, pronounced
el-gap
. I didn't know anyone in LGAP. I'd had no gay friends in high school either; people in suburban Connecticut in the seventies weren't allowed to raise gay children. But at Mariella, it was as if a dozen Rosalind Russells were starring in a never-ending Jacqueline Susann movie. The banter was smart and snappy, but it was all about sex and drugs and show business. And management. The general consensus was that the former were good and the latter was bad.

Unfortunately, I didn't do drugs and there was only one straight waiter at Mariella, Pete, and he had a girlfriend. Although that did not stop us from smashing ourselves together one night on the street outside an after-hours bar where we and eight or so of our homosexual brethren had adjourned for a post-shift sousing. That night Pete and I were drawn together in that age-old, time-tested fashion called the Process of Elimination.

Sometime during my first summer at Mariella an English guy named Matt showed up and promptly became the object of one of my three or four life's great obsessions. An attractive man with an English accent is wonderful thing. Even the Boys wanted a piece of the action. Matt and I liked each other a lot very quickly and almost had something going and then everyone started teasing us and we became very self-conscious and nothing happened, which, of course, ensured him a place in my psyche until the twelfth of never. At the end of the summer Matt returned to London. I actually hunted the guy down in his sister's Shepherd's Bush restaurant a year later, while pretending I had come to London to visit a friend. He took me driving around on a motorcycle and we made out like fiends and then he left on holiday with his mates. A year after that, I was working the bar tables at Mariella and looked out the double glass doors and he was standing there holding a bicycle. I went outside and he pushed me against the building wall and we kissed like we were dying and then he pedaled away to go on holiday with his mates. I guess we weren't going to get married.

Over the years waiters, managers, and chefs came and went with startling frequency, a reflection of the whims of the owners, of the AIDS epidemic, and of show business. When the national tour of
Beauty and the Beast on Ice
calls, you go. But despite the ever-revolving door, there was an almost instant camaraderie among us. We were quick to accept new staff, providing they were competent, knew the
lyrics to at least five Sondheim songs, and could survive a mandatory hazing period which consisted of being sent into the basement of the restaurant swathed in garbage bags to clean the pestilent onion-ring-batter machine, even though such a machine did not exist. “Keep looking,” we would call down. It also helped if you could speak with a foreign accent. Doing Meryl Streep speaking with a foreign accent was particularly impressive.

Every night we put on our waiter costumes and our efficient-waiter smiles and we went out there and tried to make people happy enough to tip us 20 percent. And between taking orders, delivering food, and avoiding Mariella, who nightly could be found teetering about the restaurant alternatingly sucking up to celebrities and venting her spleen, we convened in the waiters' pantry and made fun of everyone and everything in sight. There was a highly entertaining, though short-lived, staff newsletter called
Eat the Press,
chronicling the exploits of various waiters and managers and customers. It was a saucy publication and after two volumes was quashed by our humorless employers. Being a waiter at Mariella was as close as I have ever come to fulfilling the obligations of my vaguely socialist heritage. Isn't that what young socialists did? Take orders from the bourgeoisie and then gather in tetchy clumps to make coffee and compose propaganda? At Mariella, I was among the proletariat, a worker bee. Insurgent. Or maybe just insolent.

 

Here is how to be a good waiter, which means getting large tips: always give an opinion when asked. The curry is better than the lamb chops. The snapper is so-so but the halibut is delicious. People love when you tell them not to have something. It inspires trust. Shake your head conspiratorially when they ask about the osso buco. That's it. The rest is common sense. Be nice but not intrusive, be relaxed but let them know you're in control. Get them stinking drunk.

One of the many pitfalls of working in a restaurant is that eventually you will wait on your peers. Or people who had been your peers before they became successful bankers and you became a waiter. First, there will be the requisite “Hi!” “Hi!” “How are you!?” “What are you doing?!” (What am I
doing
? I think it's pretty clear: Good evening, my parents spent fifty thousand dollars on my education, would you like some more bread?) After the initial pleasantries are dispensed with, you will embarrass everyone with “Let me tell you about our specials.” Hopefully the food runner will deliver the food so you save yourself the agony of “Enjoy your meal.” You must, however, check up on them, refill their water glasses, and, noticing their empty wineglasses, ask, “Another bottle?,” to which they will sheepishly shake their heads no, sorry not to be spending more money at your table. The episode will deteriorate at a fairly even pace, through dessert and the proffering of the check, until, finally,
during the good-byes, someone enthusiastically pronounces you
Neat!
for being stalwart enough to wait tables while pursuing your pathetic dream.

Another pitfall is waiting on celebrities, which is inevitable if you work in a “happening” New York restaurant. It is very hard to strike the right note between
I know who you are
and
I don't care who you are.
And they, in turn, are either apologetic for being celebrities and fall over themselves proving they are not jerks, or they
are
jerks.

Most often, though, you will wait on people who expect you to contribute to their overall happiness and well-being, or make them forget about their crappy day, or their stinky marriage, or the fact that their mothers didn't love them enough, and who will behave badly if you disappoint them or will behave badly because that is all they know how to do. At Mariella, in the eighties, most of the customers were either hyped-up Wall Streeters flailing money, or neighborhood book publishers on long lunches because enemies of Salman Rushdie were threatening to blow up their offices, or dissatisfied women with recent face-lifts. I could always tell when a woman had had a face-lift because when I came to the table to take her order she'd look surprised to see me, as if even though I was obviously her waitress she didn't think I'd show up. She'd look surprised when I brought her a drink, as if she'd forgotten she'd ordered it. She'd look surprised when the meal came. Is that for me? What did I order? Surprise, you ordered the tuna.

But the money was addictive. I came home most nights with a pile of cash, which, being me, I dutifully put in the bank. The job saw me through my last year of acting school and several low-paying theatrical productions, one with the very unfortunate title
The Little Planet of the Heart Is Vast
. It's not.

I worked Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, Easter Sunday. I worked Valentine's Day, where people would propose to one another over corn and crab fritters, or get drunk and make out at the table or in the bathroom downstairs or sometimes just sit in sulky silence, waiting for me to bring their food and give them something to talk about. But I did not mind working the big holidays. It was extremely convenient having an excuse for why I couldn't go to holiday parties where you were supposed to wear all-white clothing, or why I didn't have a date for Valentine's Day. And there was comfort in knowing that at midnight on New Year's Eve I would not be standing half drunk and headachy in a crowd of people who were obviously
best best
friends with everyone there but me, wishing I was home in bed.

The tough shift to work was Sunday brunch. That was the day ordinary people, happy people, rolled out of bed and read the paper over breakfasts of tea and croissants and jam and played co-ed touch football in the park with their friends and friends of friends, and if they did not already have a boyfriend, they found one on Sundays. Or they were away for the entire weekend cavorting at the beach or admiring the
autumn leaves or wedeling (if anyone still does that) down the slopes until the sun slipped behind the tree line and then they would drink and dance in their ski boots to a guy playing “American Pie” on a guitar, and then,
then,
they would get into a giant outdoor hot tub and tell hilarious anecdotes about the day's adventures and touch one another beneath the black bubbles.
This
was the life of a non-waiter.
This
was the life that was going on every Sunday, the life anyone who wasn't cutting bagels for the teeming multitude could have. It was on Sundays that I was stung by the loss, regretful, feeling that my real life hadn't yet begun, and wondering when it would.