“Please do not hang up the phone. This is an important call regarding your business-” I hung up that phone faster than a Latina woman finds a seat in a busy subway, because there is no reason for an automated agent to be calling into a busy restaurant with an “important” phone call. More importantly, anything that is important would not have to state that it was important because it would be apparent that it was important. Anyone who has worked a day in customer service near a phone knows the tone of a scam call. I, however, enjoy them… sometimes. In my previous jobs as a cashier in retail stores, it wouldn’t be as busy, so I would try to make conversation with them. If the call made it up to a few minutes, I would pump with an “I love you, please marry me.” I cannot do that now, not just because they are all automated voice recordings, but also because I have two groups of four waiting for a table.
It seems like in New York, all local stores are owned or managed by an immigrant to some degree. Either that or I just naturally always end up being drawn to one that is. For the restaurant I started working at, it is a Chinese woman in her early 40s. Her name is Faye. She is as thin as a leaf and loud as a truck. I would assume her philosophy on clothes is that they are an extension of one’s skin, because every time I see her, her pants have been as tight as her skin. Yet, she does not look bad overall; she just looks tense as she walks over to me and asks me to let the phone go to voicemail whenever it is busy, and take care of the floor, especially if my coworker is not present in the front. Dine-in first. That is a cardinal code for food service. So is a ding. You hear a bell ding from the kitchen, you run after it as soon as possible, so the food is served hot, especially if it is a thing like pho, which is our thing.
kitchen dings. I walk towards the bell ding.
Simply put, as a job, serving is quite simple. You ask people what they want, and you give them that. You are also pressured into getting them to buy as many things as possible in the name of upselling. I feel somewhat guilty doing that, so I kind of don’t, but that is about it. The devil is in the details, and the hidden ques. It is the fact that you have to stand there and smile through your teeth to say, ”No, I’m sorry we cannot stir fry the noodles in your pho,” or. “We cannot make you a whole other bowl of broth without garlic or onion or sugar or msg or salt.” Anyway, I am about to take these two full bowls of pho to a table of 4 people, for whom the kitchen just dinged. Pretty simple. When I went over earlier to the table to clear out the plates for the incoming entrees, they insisted on holding onto the little appetiser plates. So as I stand here wrists mildly shaking with two bowls teeming with boiling broth and meat, I look at them and say, “Two classic beefs.” No one moves. Like a third grader left stunned after mistakenly opening an SAT questionnaire, they freeze when I repeat back what they had just asked me verbatim. This happens often, sometimes even to me when I go out, and honestly, it is fine as long as you act fast and nicely, which they start doing. One of them pretends to move the plate and make way for the food, and asks for extra jalapenos. Then, I run back to bring the other pair of bowls and some jalapenos. Faye spots me taking away more than one slice of jalapeno and mutters in a muted yet aggressive tone, “Every slice counts. You give them too much, and they just throw it away. Am I make sense?” She has terrible grammar, but also, we all know she does not care about the environment of food going to waste. As I put everything down, I find the table to be a nice group of two couples in their late 20s. That age group is mostly always nice. 20-year-olds to zillenials: they smile back, are polite, and tip well, as long as you don’t spit into their food after putting it down. It is the boomers that occasionally treat you as if you asked for their daughter’s hand in marriage while being a 30-year-old unemployed man surviving on a GoFundMe you created by claiming to have some brain tumour after being kicked out of your living room sublet situation because you made the entire apartment reek of b.o. and were months behind on rent. Actually, my roommate did that. Ex-roommate. I used to stalk his Facebook page, but I haven’t seen anything from him after the tumour post. Wonder why.
Also, if you have 10 tables, you have to mentally queue ten things in a priority order, which is constantly cycling. By the time I got back from putting the four pho down, I had to check out table 9, and then promptly bust it down to get one of the waiting parties seated. Faye butted in every few minutes, asking me to do the things I was just about to. I remember when she hired me for the job, she said, and I quote, “Don’t worry about me. I will work with you, but I am not a micromanager.” My tolerance is not that high, but my need for money is, so I simply internally say fuck you to her sometimes to calm myself down. Also, as someone who works here, I would never eat here. Why is an egg roll $12? But I won’t complain too much because it helps my tips. I check the table out – my favourite activity – and everything is all routine and rehearsed: they put the card down; it goes through; you ask them if everything was okay; you subtly mention that the next thing that shows up is the tip; probably crack a joke or make a two dialogue of conversation; they sign it off; say your thank you’s, and leave. The most that will happen is that they either won’t tip, or the card won’t go through, or they’ll want the bill or the food to go. I asked this table if they wanted anything to go, and they said yes. So I asked them what they would like to go. With a blank stare and a Toyota car smile, they say everything. Time and place, people. You see one person running, serving, bussing, and packing takeout, and your response is… “everything.” I Toyota smiled back and asked for a moment while taking their food away to be packed. Ideally, I would now place them at no. 10 in my to-do list, but I need that table asap so I box them up quickly.
The people waiting by the door call for me to inquire about their wait time, to which I say soon, as the table I just checked out is about to leave. She grins and opens her mouth to ask me a question, to which I had a bad feeling about before she even asked, she says, “I think we might have one more person. Is that okay?” Rarely is that okay. Three to four, fine. Five to six, sure. Seven to eight, fine, because most tables either fit two or four people. But four to five? That is a crime. I can’t just add a chair and hope for enough space. So I candidly explained this to them, and surprisingly, they were willing to squeeze in. The food may not fit, but who cares. Be my guest, literally. She also asked another dumb question; she said, “What would the wait time be if we had a reservation?”
“Do you have a reservation?”
“No. But if we did, how much would the wait time be?”
I don’t know, girl. If I had a finger up my ass, how many times would I come? Like this is not your playground of imagination or hypotheticals, so I just walked away.
By the time I returned, two more tables needed me for something, I had forgotten that another table had asked me for a check before I put one down on table 9, some girl wanted more lime (which I had to go down to the fridge for), and an elderly man wanted to know if the mushrooms we had were wood mushrooms. Faye was helping me as much as she could spare to help between her cigarettes and drinks. She is a raging alcoholic. My first day here, I told her that, she went, “I drink this everyday and still show up to work. Does that look like a alcoholics to you?” Well, yes…That is what an alcoholic looks like. Why do alcoholics never admit that they are alcoholics? I just then remembered that I had been holding my piss for so long that I forgot about it, and no longer felt the urge to piss. This will perhaps come back to me in the form of kidney damage in 20 years, but right now, I cleared out the plates and took them back to dump out the leftovers. Sometimes these activities feel so repetitive, I feel like I am having deja vu. Was I not just doing this for this very table? Did I not just dump out their food? I never have the time to think about the answer, however. I just run. The only thing I love about being very busy is that I have the upper hand in customer interactions. I do not have to blurt out a multiple-choice dialogue in hopes of upselling them. They either get it or someone will.
By the time the table left, and I sat down the four-turned-five group, I was at least two tables behind on running food, and five delivery drivers were constantly saying, “Not ready?” What do you think, Mamaduke? Is it ready? The queuing of the UberEats-Grubhub-HungryPanda drivers is unavoidable. They are always loudly on the phone with someone, and if you ask them anything, they just shove their phones into your face without saying a word. So, they’re last in the priority list. Dine-in first. So I, for a moment, turned to the table of four-turned-five and greeted them because two of them were an elderly gay couple. I know I am not supposed to have prejudices while serving customers, but I love tables of the elderly, especially queer couples. As I said, some boomers can be rough, but most old people are super amicable if you are even slightly cheerful. They will also laugh at anything. Everything is funny to them, and they eat slowly, so you have more time to care for others. I try to signal with a feminine gesture that I am one amongst them, but even if not, they are always nice, and tip well. You do not even have to bother cracking jokes at them. They know you’re doing it for a job. One of them goes, “We live upstairs.” “Oh, we share the same plumbing. So we both fell victim to the water being down last week.” They laughed hysterically. I don’t know why.
As I continue to run the food, Sufjan comes up. He is the other server: a Moroccan who was downstairs breaking his fast for Ramadan. A New York City kitchen will always be more diverse than a college pamphlet. Yesterday, he broke his fast by 7, had a meal by 7:30, vaped up to the high clouds by 8, and by 9, he had gone to the bathroom and done a line of coke. Do not let that deter you from the fact that he is a sweet, compassionate man. “Habibi, don’t worry. We got this, I’m here,” he said as he lightly hugged me on his way up the stairs. And we had got this. I started packing the order, and he went over to the front to buss down a table. Faye, who can always catch me at the wrong moment, says, “Soul, can you please listen to me. Dine-in first. Why are you not at the front?” She seemed annoyed, but at this point, the kitchen was behind us, they were overwhelmed too, and there was nothing we could have done. Also, if I were in the front, she would ask me why two people were doing the same job instead of doing something else like packaging. So I stay invested in packing and withhold a response, and am thrown a, “We are going to have a serious talk later.” This just meant that she would sit me down and condescendingly repeat the same thing over and over again.
I see two people standing by the door. My prescription on my glasses was outdated, so I couldn’t really tell who it was. They both step closer, and I can tell that one of them is Faye’s “friend.” He comes over now and then and helps her whenever she needs to drill or fix (she prefers not to hire people for things she needs and just asks favours, to which he seems to comply, especially with washing the dishes when she abruptly fires dishwashers). However, as per what Sufjan told me yesterday, the friend and Faye were together because she cheated on her fiancé, who financed this restaurant for her with him. Tea, but we will get back to that later.
The friend comes up to me and introduces himself as her friend with his name, which I had forgotten by the time he said it. He says that he is just here to say hi to Faye, and wanted to also talk to Sufjan about something. I nod and simply proceed to lap the floor a few times, catering to a few needs. When I caught wind of Sufjan, I told him that the “friend” wanted to say hi to him. Sufjan waves at him and goes to him, standing by the door and asks him to meet him later when it is not busy. The friend, however, insists that it is urgent. The next thing I see is the two men walking outside together.
Alone, I have to constantly loop the floor like the tongue of a broke man licking the bottom of the Lays wrapper that he bought with his last cent, because it is always when it is busy that some woman wants to know if our garlic chicken tastes very garlic-y, and if they could do it without the garlic. It can be thrilling if you have the mind for it, but restaurants, otherwise, can be like watching a seal walk. Honestly, it would be faster if I spoon-fed these people. So this industry is filled with people who work here because they have to. Perhaps in high-end restaurants, the chef will have come from some school, and waiters will have climbed their way through lower-ranking restaurants to be there. But here, the kitchen is there because they had kids at a young age and now need to send money back to Mexico. Actually, even Sufjan is a divorced father of a one-year-old who is absent because the mother didn’t want him there. He still has to pay about $500 a month in child support, hence his presence here. The only person who dreamed of being here is Faye, whose restaurant it is. But no one dreamt of working with her, I can assure you.
Before I could go and ask the other man who had shown up there with the “friend” what he was there for, a lady asked me if we had glasses that were made from clay or ceramic to drink hot water from. The request irked me, but we had a set of ceramic cups that had reportedly been bought a while ago but had been unused, so I complied. I find the set, and at the same time, turn to learn the demands of the man who had been standing for a while. “How can I help you?” I asked.
He reached in to show me his ID as I opened the box of cups, and there it was: A ROACH. It slowly started crawling out of the box and landed right by my foot, as I stepped on it.
I hear the words, “I’m here from the Department of Health.”
There are perhaps only two things modern restaurant owners fear: bad reviews and the Health Department. A “B” in New York, especially in the Upper East Side, was a “Thank you, and goodbye” sign. I knew this. So, I said fuck dine-in first. I’ll deal with this man, who hopefully did not just see me step on a roach. So I put the box of cups down to greet him properly. I could not move because of the roach under my shoe, so I asked him to feel at ease to inspect whatever. As he stepped back, a dark horse rose in the opposite direction from the same set of cups: another roach. Not as big, but not small enough to go unnoticed, as it jumped out of the box and raced through the street between the tall benches, tables and people. It vanished into some table. I stood there as still as Japan’s economy after the 90’s with the roach under my feet. For a moment, I grasped some silence, not a shriek or a scream. Just absolute stillness in the vibration of the air within the room. And then it all exploded into a frenzy. Now, was what just happened bad? Yes. But be real, this isn’t the first roach you have seen in NYC. I can assure you that all stores here have some sort of rat or roach problem. But people just randomly started getting up from their seats and leaving. Faye was so tensely caught up with the officer from the Health Department that she almost teared up at the sight of this crumbling, but she did not dare to move an inch away from that man’s side. She can be a heartless person when it comes to others, but not when it comes to her restaurant. She needed that A even more now. Against the stampede of people flooding out the door, Sufjan walked in reddish, hungry for something. In a second, he was on his way out again. Only then did I realise his face was not reddish but blooied. The next thing I know, I see two men running across the street, one chasing the other with a knife in his hands. I’m pretty sure one of them was Sufjan.
Faye was nowhere to be found, even after the officer left. Once Sufjan came in, he simply went to the bathroom before I could even whisper to him. I heard him say, “He fucking did it during Ramadan of all days.” I continued cleaning the tables, and eventually it all wrapped up into the silence of the loudspeakers that bumped music only I listened to amongst the staff there. They hated my music taste because I put on music “that puts people to sleep.” But putting on Joni Mitchell gives me topics to talk about with customers. After a while, Sufjan stepped out of the bathroom with a busted lip. “Are you okay? Oh my god?” I exclaimed. “That motherfucker, he punched me. And I came back and chased him with a knife,” he said. I was stunned. Soon after, Faye stepped outside with a bleak face, “He gave us a B.” I went in closer to hug her. The only thing Faye cared about was crumbling. So this was the only moment she would ever feel loss. She still did not let us close early because nothing came between a Chinese businesswoman and her money. “We will probably go to court over this, but if we close it will look like we gave up.” Sufjan stepped out, taped up, and we somehow got through the night.
By the time we closed, I was basically dragging my body across the place. Faye went out and brought back her dog, a pug. I hate pugs for the way they are bred solely to serve our standard of cuteness while being unable to function as a being. Ah, I was too tired to blurt all of this out into words. She reached into her pocket and brought out three joints. I asked the back of the house if they wanted any, but they agreed to finish faster to get to their shift early tomorrow. I had not cared to notice, but today was 4/20. I reached in to take a picture, but I could not find my phone in my pocket. Still, the three of us cheered our joints. I was surrounded by this weird sense of belonging. Perhaps nothing will be the same tomorrow with our lives, our jobs, and our time spent together. I feel like the joint was just a pause in the chapter for the next things to unfold, but right now I understand what makes restaurants houses. Sufjan pauses to look at the dog and gazes back at Faye.
“Do you eat dogs in China?” he says, letting out a laugh (which is just him uttering the words “he he he” through his tongue).
On an impulse, I pat his shoulders and say, “You cannot say that!” Faye laughs it off; perhaps she is already high.
“Okay, if you were stuck on an island with him with nothing else, what would you do with him?” he rephrases.
“I would eat this motherfucker in a heartbeat,” she says without hesitation. I pray these people never make a tweet in their lives.
“It was fucked up what you did. You lied about being broken up with him,” he said.
“He’s bugging out, I don’t know what’s going on,” she said. I knew she would never take responsibility, or, worse, apologize. She’s Asian after all. I mean, my mother never once apologized to me in her life.
Momentarily, going back to this place being a house, a community. These overworked employees find refuge in the most fundamental thing they can provide to the people: food. We have all fled some horror in some faraway land, and hope to make the best of our circumstances for ourselves and the people we have left behind. We are not bound by passion, but necessity. Every other joy we find is a lucky stone we kick around along our climb. We are here because we need the money, and we are willing to suffer through things and have shitty life circumstances because we need the money. It is a sad, sad thing that we are at the end of the day being exploited for our work, and all we have is this bubble we create around our work, and the ones with whom we live in it.
“I’m leaving this place. Tomorrow,” said Sufjan calmly. I could see his resentment. But I could also see the release he felt in saying that. At least she could have apologized to him. Her actions caused him bruises. There was also the chasing down someone with a knife during Ramadan being bad, but he also did coke. He only regretted one of those things. Religion is complicated.
I wanted to confirm the whereabouts of my phone, and asked Faye if she had seen it as I was leaving. She was busy on her phone, looping the CCTV footage of the freakshow of the roach strutting down the runway. Then, she pulled me over, pointed to her point and said, “Isn’t that your phone?” Someone, during the eruption, managed to pickpocket my phone. Honestly, it broke me.
I shouted to Sufjan to wait up for me. On my way home, I felt helpless enough to break down into tears while walking. My phone is my actual child. It has a name. It also has all my pictures from back home up until New York, none of which is backed up. It is the last piece of my life I left behind. I overworked some penny-paying job back home, and summed up the money to buy it, and my parents added a bit as a gift. I am attached to that phone as if it were an organ. It was unfortunately also always dying, and could not be tracked down. Sufjan hugged me and said, “Doesn’t matter about the pictures. You have so many more pictures to take.” When at the station, I looked up at him and said, “You need to stop doing coke.” “I will, habibi, now,” he said as he put out the remaining joint and put it in between my palms. What, I gestured.
“This will be your friend on your way back home.”
Many forms of grief and loss I witnessed that day, but the worst of all was that I would have to put up with this day all over again tomorrow, and countless days to come.