Free Waiter Rant by Steve Dublanica Page B

the silence, I go into the kitchen and wash down two prophylactic aspirins with a bottle of water. The Bistro’s open on New Year’s Day, and I haveto be at work in eight hours. The last thing I need is waking up dehydrated and hungover.
    As I drink my water I look out my kitchen window. The sun is already coloring the gray edges of the cold eastern sky. I wonder if I’ll be waiting tables this time next year. The thought troubles me. Waiting tables was supposed to be a temporary solution until I figured out what I wanted to do with my life. Now I’m entering my seventh year in the restaurant industry. I guess I’m still struggling to figure out what I’m going to be when I grow up.
    I finish my water and go into my bedroom. I peel off my garlic-and grease-permeated clothes and toss them into a corner. I should take a shower, but I’m too tired. Smelling slightly like truffle oil, I slip under the covers and lay my head on the pillow. Just before my conscious mind crosses over into oblivion, I remember I forgot to bring the lady at table 26 her third cosmopolitan.
    No wonder she stopped smiling at me.

Chapter 5
Paupery
    I t’s an early afternoon two weeks later. The lunch crowd, what there was of it, has come and gone. I’m sitting at a back table reading the newspaper when I notice Beth, the lunch waitress, staring glumly into her $3 double caramel mocha latte.
    “What’s the matter?” I ask her. “Lunch tips that bad?”
    “I’ve got a lot on my mind,” Beth replies sullenly.
    “Anything serious?”
    “Bills,” she says.
    “Oh.”
    “It’s almost the end of the month, and I’m broke as usual.”
    I nod sympathetically. Been there, done that.
    “I’m so pissed at myself,” Beth mutters angrily. “I’m always short because I spend my money on stupid shit.”
    For a brief second I think about telling Beth how I blew $500 at a strip club in under fifty minutes. I wisely reconsider. What happens in Atlantic City stays in Atlantic City.
    “We’ve all done stupid things with our money,” I say instead.
    “Yeah?” Beth says. “How’s this for stupid? I bought a three-hundred-dollar bottle of Grey Goose at Butter last night.”
    “Three hundred for a bottle of vodka?” I say. “You can buy Goose for forty bucks in a liquor store.”
    “My friends wanted to sit at a table,” Beth says. “And if you want a table at Butter, you have to buy a bottle. You just can’t order drinks.”
    “That’s insane.”
    “That’s New York City,” Beth says. “And now I don’t have enough money to pay my cell phone bill.”
    I look at the cell phone holstered on Beth’s hip. It’s a sophisticated slab of plastic sporting a 2.0 megapixel camera, pullout keyboard, Internet access, MP3 player, and an oversize color screen. The gizmo even lets you download TV shows off the Web. It’s a very cool and very expensive toy. I used to have a cell phone, but I got rid of it after paying one too many usurious wireless bills. My friends, dismayed they actually have to talk to me instead of communicating by text message, snipe that I’m some kind of Luddite al-Qaeda yearning for a return to the letter-writing days of the nineteenth century. I used to dismiss them as technology junkies until I realized that proclaiming you don’t have a cell phone is like saying you watch only public television. While I’m smugly proud of my disconnection from the modern communications grid, I don’t want to sound like some Birkenstock-shod intellectual telling everyone how “evolved” he is. Now I just keep my mouth shut and save money. $2.50 for a ringtone? You’re smoking crack.
    “Can’t you just use your regular telephone?” I ask. “I haven’t had a cell phone for years, and I’ve survived.”
    “I only have this phone,” Beth says, running her fingers over it protectively. “I’ve never had a landline.”
    “Oh.”
    “God,” Beth sighs. “I hate being broke all the time.”
    Even though Beth’s in a bad