Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress Read Online Free

tenants had been coming up for years, effec tively transporting their own neighborhoods upstate. While these makeshift communities enjoyed their peak in the 1950s and ’60s, there were still hundreds throughout the Catskills in the late ’70s.
    Looking for a change of pace and wanting eventually to open their own restaurant, my parents had decided to rent the lun cheonette for the summer. It wasn’t quite a “real” job, I reck oned, since I’d be working for my parents, but it was close enough. The promise of adventure loomed large.
    My father was very creative when it came to the menu. He devised daily $1.99 lunch specials for the kids who attended day camp in the community. One day it was a burger, fries, and a soda, another day it was grilled cheese sandwiches and pick les. After a few weeks, he tried new twists on old themes. After breakfast one morning, he instructed me to make a sign saying, “Today’s Special: Las Vegas Hot Dogs.” What would those be? we all wanted to know. As my father dumped the dogs into the deep fryer instead of cooking them on the flat grill, he pro claimed, “There you go, Las Vegas Hot Dogs. Come and get ’em.”
    The luncheonette had a beautiful old soda fountain that reminded my father of his childhood days in Brooklyn diners, so he taught me and my sister to make lime rickeys and egg creams (which contain neither eggs nor cream). We had an ancient milk-shake machine in which my father made malteds. We served cof fee and brewed Sanka. After a couple of weeks of trial and error, our basic menu was complete.
    It took very little time to become acquainted with the denizens, most of whom were quite friendly and liked the idea of a family running the luncheonette. For me, the local color was made con siderably brighter by the addition of a large group of teens around my own age. The girls were primarily a catty bunch, concerned mostly with their hair and their tans (with the possible exception of fifteen-year-old Lori Zucker, who gave impromptu seminars on the art of fellatio from one of the luncheonette’s corner booths. “You should really learn how to do it,” she would say, “you won’t believe how much the boy likes it”).
    The boys, however, were a different story. To me, they all seemed like incredibly cool guys from the city who knew much more about life than I did. (My main source of information regarding love and romance at that point was The Thorn Birds, a book I’d read so many times it fell apart at the spine.) The first few weeks of summer saw old romances reignite and new ones form. I was a totally fresh face in the crowd and was, to my plea sure, immediately sized up as a potential girlfriend.
    My burgeoning popularity with the lads at Maxman’s didn’t mean that their parents were any less demanding when it came to their meals. As one of the luncheonette’s two waitresses (my sister Maya, thirteen at the time, was the other), I was the canary in the coal mine. My father preferred to remain behind the counter or in the kitchen. Nobody, he reckoned, was going to beat up on an innocent little sixteen-year-old. He was mistaken. For me, the luncheonette was a radical introduction into the vagaries of human nature as it pertained to service. Everybody who ate at the lun cheonette was a regular. Everybody liked their meals just so and none were afraid to voice their opinions.
    There was Mr. Grubman, for example, who loudly informed the community at large that he had a bypassed intestine. Mr. Grubman ate as if trying to find a spot in the Guinness Book of Records, yet the hefty Mr. Grubman could eat only certain items. Whole meat platters disappeared down his gullet, followed by whole cheese platters. “I need my protein,” Mr. Grubman said. “You got any more of this?” My father was rarely able to keep up with Mr. Grubman’s appetite.
    Then there was little Ricky Scalini. Most mornings, Ricky hoisted himself atop a counter stool and, with the worldliness and