Hospitality was a pitstop – some sore money while I figured out exactly what I supposed to do with the rest of my life – I will have a definite answer to this, any time now: it will come in a dream or a glass of house red, and everything will make sense again.
But obviously, hospitality isn’t a pitstop – not for writers and artists or any other with an excess of ambitions and a lack of motivation.
More a deep ruby ravine that you fall into screaming in a tone you cannot distinguish between pleasure and terror.
I am a waitress. I am your waitress. I bring you your fish.
I have taken my WSET exam, a wine exam and, though the results do not come for another month (a ridiculous duration considering it was multiple choice pencil elected for computer convenience) i understand that wine, like art, is beautifully complex and disappointingly simple. Coffee is the same. Food, too. And life, life is the same.
Yes, it is in the build up, the idea, the concept, but most, if not all, is in you – in how you allow the illusion to take you. After all, we are just apes on a spinning rock, you don’t need to like Cab Sav – it matters nothing to magma if you don’t.
Sometimes, I wonder, when I am bobble tight and taking orders with a weird laugh that isn’t mine, that belongs to the girl I become when I take orders, how the illusion remains. How you and I can pretend so.
It took me a long time to bring myself to pour customers their water, nevermind their wine. Even still, I can only manage it at the beginning, when they are first sat and I can ask of allergy or occassion without feeling too much like an interloper. It is that I know and you know, that there is no need for me to pour your water. You have hands, you have done it before. That I do it, and do it slowly, so I don’t spill upon the table, is a charade, a sort of dance that neither of us enjoy.
Does it make you uncomfortable, that I stand above you and pour – you pause your conversation, like I haven’t heard it before. Is it that you think I might tell? Richard from work, whose voice you find grating or Georgia, who is lovely in every way but her lunch manner which drives you to your office for yours? Do you think I would tell? Who do you think I am?
Sometimes, I wonder why I don’t strip off my apron, and my clothes while i’m at it. Strip down and run mad through the table aisle shouting: look at me! Look at me like the caged animal I am, kick me or comb out my nits, whichever takes your fancy. But look at me as person and forgive me that I cannot pour your wine as well as your water.
Of course, I don’t because i ‘d like to keep my job. Of course, I don’t because I keep my nudity for the shower and morning after and nothing else.
Of course because on the train, in the supermarket, meeting an old friend to whom I used to be naked and stupid, I am polite and quiet and speak when spoken to.
But in being a waitress, in being paid for the show, I wonder how it goes on. I wonder why it is harder to perform it when it is lived so easily. I wonder what disaster it would take to force us to look at each other in the eyes, I wonder at which lesser disaster we would still fail to.
If a gunman came in the restaurant, and you and I were sharing the table cover – could I hold your hand, or would that be inappropriate.
If you took mine, I wouldn’t mind – in fact, I’d be glad to be of such service.