I Hate Everyone, Except You

by Clinton Kelly

  “Ass rape, no mayo,” I say.

  “Louder, boy!”

  “ASS RAPE, NO MAYO, SIR!”

  Then the chef—he has become Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds—paces back and forth in front of the steam table where they keep the soups: Manhattan Clam, New England Clam, and whatever the soup du jour is. I probably should know it, but I forgot to memorize the specials. “Did ya hear that, fellas? This fine sonofabitch wants nonconsensual sodomy! With a categorical lack of lubricant!”

  All of a sudden I’m confused because I don’t know how my customer is going to get his sandwich. “No,” I say. “That’s not what I want at all. Nobody wants that. Can somebody please make me a turkey club?” The next thing I know, I’m running and running. I’m the only waiter for the entire restaurant. All the water glasses need to be refilled, ashtrays are overflowing, my name tag says Charlene.

  “Noooooooo!” I sit up in bed.

  “Are you OK?” Damon asks.

  “Just another restaurant dream,” I say and try to go back to sleep.

  If I ever become president of the United States, which I won’t because I want that job about as much as I want bacterial meningitis, I vow to institute a draft. Not for military service, but for mandatory restaurant work, which will result in a more kindhearted society overall.

  Hear me out.

  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.

  * * *

  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.

  * * *

  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.

  On this Saturday night, during leather weekend, two men in their late thirties arrived at Cornelia’s for dinner. One wore tight black leather pants and a black leather jacket unzipped halfway to reveal a tanned chest covered in coarse dark hair. A vintage-looking motorcycle cap with an eagle medallion and a chain across the brim sat atop his head. His mustache was shaped like a horseshoe. Let’s call him L.D. for Leather Daddy. His companion I’ll call S.B. for Slave Boy. He was dressed similarly, though his leather pants were not as revealing in the crotch. He was shirtless under his jacket too, save for a studded black leather har
ness worn across the chest. His head was shaved, maybe four days earlier judging by the length of the stubble, and he wore a choker collar, about two inches wide, with a chain attached to it, the other end of which L.D. was holding in his right hand.

  When the manager sat L.D. and S.B. by the window in my station, I said to him, “Wouldn’t it be better if Thomas took that table?” Thomas, who pronounced his name tow-MAS, was a fellow waiter whose hair had a tendency to flop into his eyes when he was busy. His retro black-framed glasses made him look like a 1950s chemistry grad student, but he was actually working toward his doctorate in English. He had mentioned to me at the start of the shift that he had a date after work with some guy in town for the convention.

  “You want me to ask them to move?” the manager asked.

  “No, not move,” I said. “Thomas could take them, and I’ll take his next table.”

  “Are you scared of them or something?”

  “No I’m not scared of them,” I said. It was sort of a lie. “I just don’t think they’ll like me.” In fact, I’m pretty sure the manager didn’t like me very much ever since I corrected his pronunciation of pollo. There was a dish on the menu called pollo alla pesto, which was one of the more popular menu items at the restaurant and for good reason. It was farfalle pasta with chunks of chicken in a basil pesto sauce that contained golden raisins. Two decades later, I still make it, usually in the summer with fresh basil and grilled chicken. My version is delicious. Anyway, he was calling it POY-o alla pesto, and I said I was pretty sure it was PO-lo alla pesto, because the dish was Italian-inspired, not Spanish.

  “Why are you in Chicago again?” he asked me.

  “I’m getting my master’s in journalism at Northwestern,” I said.

  “You’re not studying restaurant management?”

  “No.”

  “Then shut up.”

  He was kind of a dick.

  He told me I couldn’t trade tables with Thomas, out of spite, I was sure. I grabbed a water pitcher from the service station and approached my new deuce. “Hi, guys, my name is Clinton, I’ll be your waiter tonight. Can I get—”

  “Vodka and cranberry,” said L.D. without looking up at me.

  “—you something from the bar.” I can’t stand being interrupted. “One vodka and cranberry, and how about for you, sir?” I tried to make eye contact with S.B., who had that faraway look that models sometimes have, the kind that simultaneously conveys hunger, fatigue, and a general disgust of anything with a pulse.

  “He’ll have nothing,” said L.D. “Take his water glass away.”

  “Okey doke.” I grabbed the water glass and removed it from the table.

  I went to the bar to order the vodka and cranberry from the bartender, an older, portly guy in his late fifties who had taken a liking to me from the start because I was from New York. He had spent some time there in the seventies and eighties, he said, sleeping around and doing a shit-ton of drugs. He didn’t age too well because of it. He made it clear that Chicago had not been his first choice, but he had settled down with a nice guy and they had two small lap dogs.

  “Can I get a Cape Codder for table ten, Robert?”

  “Of course, my dear,” he said. He had a deep, raspy voice but feminine mannerisms, which resulted in him seeming both fatherly and motherly. I found the juxtaposition soothing. “What’s the daddy having?” I was confused and I must have looked it. He asked again: “I assume the sissy drink is for the bitch on the leash. What’s daddy drinking?”

  “The one on the leash isn’t having anything. The vodka cranberry is for the . . . master?”

  A look of sheer repulsion came over his face. I was glad he had his back to them. “In my day,” he said, “a leather daddy top wouldn’t be caught dead drinking punch.” He made the drink and pushed it across the service area to me. “Goddamn poseurs,” he said. I put a lime wheel on the rim of the glass and added a swizzle stick because that’s the way I had been taught to garnish a Cape Codder.

  When I arrived back at the table, S.B. was looking out the window at nothing in particular and L.D. was examining his own fingernails.

  “Here we go, one vodka and cran—”

  “I didn’t ask for lime.” He removed the lime wheel and tossed it like a miniature Frisbee at S.B., who didn’t even flinch. It hit his chest below the harness and landed in his lap.

  “—berry. Okaayyyy.” I worried that the acidic lime juice would stain S.B.’s leather pants. “Do you want me to take that from you?” I held out my palm to take the lime.

  S.B. didn’t answer. I was starting to get the feeling someone had taken a few too many downers before dinner.

  “Angel hair with shrimp,” L.D. said, handing me both menus.

  “You got it,” I replied. I assumed S.B. needed to eat too. He looked so hungry. “Can I get you anything?”

  “Don’t talk to him,” snapped L.D. At this point, I was starting to get a little pissed off. I mean, I can talk to whomever the hell I want, especially if he’s a full-grown man sitting in my station and it’s my freakin’ job to bring him food. Plus, I really don’t like being told what to do, but I needed the job and didn’t want to make a scene.

  * * *

  As I mentioned, leather really isn’t my thing. And dominance and submission stuff has never really resonated with me either. It goes against what is probably my most fervent core value: fairness. Damon and I say things to each other like, “I’ll choose the restaurant, you choose the movie,” “I’ll cut the sandwich in two, you choose which half you want,” “I’ll go down to the hotel lobby and get coffee while you poop if you’ll do the same for me.”

  That’s not to say people into dominance and submission, or D&S, lack a sense of fairness. Fairness has nothing to do with it, I know. It’s a power exchange. Each person is getting something they want, either by assuming power or relinquishing it. My very close friend Ellen taught me all about it.

  Ellen’s a very pretty Colombian woman in her forties who takes her kids to hockey practice and dancing lessons like millions of other American moms. She’s maybe five foot three and a hundred pounds. If you saw her on the street you might assume she sold clothes in a high-end boutique or ran a small art gallery. She’s had a little fascination with dominance since she was a teenager, she told me. When she was single, she enjoyed seeing how far she could push men before they broke. For example, she’d call a guy in the middle of the night and ask him to bring her a pint of ice cream. Or she’d say she needed a ride to the airport at 6 a.m., and when the guy showed up, she would tell him the trip was canceled. Because she was very beautiful, men pretty much did what she asked them to do.

  She eventually married a man who got so fed up with her “games” that he snapped and moved to Europe. Needing cash, she discovered on the Internet that she could make thousands of dollars doing what she had been doing for free. I told her I was concerned for her safety, but she assured me she wasn’t working in some dungeon basement. Basically, she would go on very public dates—no sex—and treat her customers like crap.

  I had made plans with her one stiflingly hot early August night in New York City. I hadn’t seen her in about six months so she came in from Long Island and we decided to have a few cocktails and dinner downtown at an outdoor café. She wore a skintight black sheath and seven-inch black platform stilettos. If her hair and makeup hadn’t been flawless, she would have looked like a total skank. In the middle of dinner, her phone rang and she answered it. With her hand over the microphone, she asked if I would mind if one of her clients met us for drinks. I didn’t mind. I was curious to see who was on the other end of the line.

  “Wear a sweater, a thick one,” she said before hanging up the phone.

  “Sweater?” I said. “It’s gotta be ninety degrees out with no breeze and one hundred percent humidity.”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” she said.

  About a half hour later a not-at-all-bad-looking guy showed up at our table in a suit and tie—wit
h a wool sweater under his jacket. Ellen introduced us (he said his name was John, which to this day I don’t know was true or not) and he sat down. I became very uncomfortable almost immediately. I was in the middle of a business transaction with no idea what to expect or say. Was I supposed to treat him like crap too, or just Ellen? I regretted not asking her before he arrived.

  Finally, I said, “Would you like a cold drink? You must be hot in that sweater.”

  “Thanks, I’ll have a beer when the waitress comes around.” He smiled a big smile full of perfectly straight bright white teeth. He reminded me of the guy who played Elaine’s boyfriend in the final season of Seinfeld.

  “How long have you known Ellen?”

  “This is our,” he looked at her before answering, “third?” She nodded. “Our third date.”

  “And what do you do for a living?” I was scared to death of letting the conversation lull out of fear that, given the opportunity, Ellen might punch him in the head or something and make a scene.

  John told me he worked in banking. The waitress came by, and we ordered another round of drinks and while we drank them we talked about everything from politics to the TV shows we were watching. To any other table in the place, we probably looked like three friends catching up and sharing a few laughs, except one of us had a steady stream of perspiration running from his hairline past his ears and down his neck. The guy appeared to be crying from the top of his skull. It was actually getting painful to watch. And to make it worse, every time he would reflexively use his hand to brush a rivulet away from his eyes, Ellen would calmly stop him with a firm “No.”

  While we were discussing a recent episode of The X-Files, a drop of sweat rolled slowly down John’s forehead into his left eyebrow, which at this point must have reached complete saturation because it went from his brow directly into his eye. It must have stung because he blinked his eyes really hard and pressed the knuckle of his left forefinger into his tear duct.