I will require every citizen over the age of twenty-one to wait tables full-time for a minimum of two years. You might get drafted on your twenty-first birthday. Maybe on your forty-seventh. Perhaps when you’re eighty-two. Nobody knows, because it’s random. When you receive via certified mail the notice that you have been drafted, you will report immediately to the Bureau of Food and Beverage Service where you will be given an apron and some soft-soled shoes with decent arch support. Then you will be randomly assigned to a restaurant within a fifteen-mile radius of your home, to make fulfilling your service requirement as convenient as possible.
A wealthy, frozen-faced housewife might find herself slinging bowls of pho during the lunch rush at Saigon Sally’s on Route 6. The newest cocktail server at the Bellagio hotel and casino: a balding insurance salesman named Herb. Can’t find grandma? That’s because for the third time this week she picked up an extra shift at Hooters.
Just to be clear, the point of my program is not to level the economic playing field. This country is too far gone to fix that mess. I just think it’s important each of us experience the utter assholery of which our fellow American is capable while he’s eating a pork chop. If we’re all concerned that tomorrow we may be the one treated like the lowly pissant, smiling like a lunatic for a 15 percent tip, we will all behave more civilly today.
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While in graduate school, I took a job in a relatively small restaurant in Chicago’s Lakeview East neighborhood, which is also known as Boystown because of the high percentage of gay men living there. And though the restaurant wasn’t a gay one per se, a lot, maybe half, of the clientele preferred members of the same sex. Inside, eighteen tables, all deuces and four-tops, were arranged in an L shape around an old wooden bar. The food was American, with an Italian spin, insomuch as there was roasted garlic on the appetizer menu and olive oil on every table. If the weather was nice, the manager would have the waiters, never more than three (plus a bartender), uncover from beneath a tarpaulin six more tables outside on the sidewalk. The place could have used a busboy, but for whatever reason none was employed, which meant that the waiters had to do all the clearing, scraping, resetting, dropping bread, and refilling water in addition to taking food and drink orders and delivering them. I didn’t mind the work, and no bussers meant more cash in my pocket. But when it was busy, an extra set of hands would have been helpful, especially with all the tables in my station full at once.
Waiting on gay guys can be a fun—or horrible—experience if you are one. Sometimes the manager would seat a table of men past their prime in my station because they were obviously more excited about flirting with their twenty-three-year-old waiter than they were about the food. “Does that steak come with a side of tall, skinny white boy?” they’d say. Or once: “I’ll have a martini, and you make sure it’s dirty. Dirty as that little mind of yours. Oh, that’s right, I can see into your filthy soul, you wicked twink slut.” It was adorable.
I’ll tell you one thing, though: When a perverted old dude tells you his table is wobbly, don’t get on your hands and knees to check the screws on the bottom of the table legs. Because when you spot those two enormous hairy balls hanging out of an open fly, you will hit your head on the underside of the table. Every. Time.
The worst kind of gay table is a four-top of perfectly manicured, well-dressed homosexuals in their late twenties. The worst. They’re so predictable because they always follow this formula: one alpha, two betas, and a gamma. The alpha is the gorgeous one. He’s got a head full of perfect hair, neon-white teeth, and a jawline so sharp you could use it to slice most semisoft cheeses. He’s also got broad gym-puffed shoulders and a waist that looks tiny—even when he’s sitting down. Then, there’s the gamma, who through no fault of his own just wasn’t genetically blessed. Maybe the gamma’s eyes are a little too bulgy or he has a weak chin, you know, the kind of stuff you can’t fix without really expensive surgery and even if you do, you end up looking worse. Those two are easy to deal with.
The alpha’s self-possessed because he spends his life with people gawking at him. It’s like waiting on the Queen of England. “I’ll have the fish.” Across the table, the gamma knows he’ll never be the object of anyone’s lustful attention, at least not in this crowd, so he resigns himself to being the affable one. Someone has to do it because the two betas surely won’t. They’re handsome too, but unlike the alpha, they’re not traffic-stopping beauties. One beta might have really thin lips, the other a too-upturned nose. Well aware of their (some would say minor) flaws, they secretly despise the alpha for being so exquisite. And all this bitterness has to be released somewhere, so the gay waiter is the perfect receptacle.
And it’s not that they’re obnoxious; overt rudeness would tip off the others, including the server, to a simmering resentment. It’s a look up and down the waiter’s uniform. A questioning of the waiter’s aural faculties. (“I said sauce on the side. You heard that, right?”) A blank stare when asked if the food was cooked to their liking. Oh, the gays. Having been both a beta and a gamma, depending on the company, I can tell you, we’ve got so many issues. On the whole, the gays are good tippers though. Even when they’ve brought their date to the table on a leash.
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Every spring the International Mr. Leather conference is held in Chicago and attended by thousands of gay men with leather fetishes, some of whom—I’m not sure of the percentage—are into BDSM. I’ll just state for the record that at the time I knew nothing about the leather subculture, which is only slightly less than I know about it now. And I don’t judge. I do not care one iota about what turns you or anyone else on sexually, as long as everyone involved is a consenting adult. And no animals at all. I mean, if you stick a gerbil up someone’s ass or screw a horse, I hate you and you should go to jail. As far as I can tell, most leather men like to wear chaps and jeans or a leather codpiece, maybe a leather cuff or two and dance shirtless. Who cares. Knock yourself out. I’ll be at home watching Rear Window for the umpteenth time. I just can’t get enough of that Grace Kelly.