Fawning for Tips

Are we all professionals here?

“What qualifies you to write on your subject?” It is my turn to have Sarah Fay’s attention on my newsletter. I’m in a Zoom meeting learning how to be better at directing my Substack toward my goals.

At the exact moment she asks, I’m trying to find the right button to click so that I’m viewing her shared screen while she and the group critique my ‘about me’ page. The technical difficulty of the moment weakens my response. Something about the disembodied faces staring at me, expecting any kind of expertise, sends me into a mode. It’s not fight or flight—it’s flop mode.

“Nothing,” I say. “I’m not qualified. I’m not a teacher or a guru. I’m not an expert at anything. I’m just a waitress.”

I am disappointed in my answer because I’m trying to believe in myself. I’m blowing it—but also there was a moment in one of the meetings, where she said we shouldn’t put tip jars at the bottom of our posts because, “We are all professionals here.”

Should I be embarrassed for living almost entirely off of tips? Have I always been unprofessional? They don’t know what it’s like to get trapped in restaurants.

I’m haunted by this pile of bones we saw while hiking Gridley, pushed to the side, a pale brown pelt with white spots and big femurs that could have only come from the gangly legs of a baby deer. It is the evidence of a past violence—the gnashing teeth of a coyote or mountain lion. My stomach turns at the site of it. The sight of the corpse feels like a personal attack.

It’s not explicitly stated in the job description, but you become skilled at fawning in my line of work. Each day brings the fear that someone will be mean, and I will take the impact all the way down to my tendons and bones—shrink back into the earth.

Even the owners are caught in a trap—especially the owners.

After years of working the line at Sweeneys Cafe, Dad was given the opportunity to partner up with Mr. Sweeney and became a co-owner. There’s only one reason I would want to have my own restaurant, and it’s the exact reason why I never should. It’s to live moment that my dad had in defense of my older sister.

Jess was the first of the sisters to work at Sweeney’s. Her nickname there was “LP,” which was short for Little Princess. She was better at it than any of us—especially me. They served omelets and pancakes, BLTs and club sandwiches. Little clear plastic ramekins full of warm maple syrup sat on the line next to a tub of whipped butter. Despite being LP, Jessica is the sister least likely to put up with anyone’s crybaby shit.

She was around sixteen this one shift at Sweeney’s—maybe she was a little less tough back then. She came into the kitchen crying because a woman was being mean to her. My dad was on the line, flipping omelets. He fathered and managed through the frame of the pass-through window.

He came out of the kitchen and approached the table of the woman who had made my sister cry. The restaurant was in a city that seemed to be comprised almost entirely of retirees who go to restaurants and act cranky to servers. He asked the culprit of LP’s tears, “Is this how you treat people in their homes?”

The woman, likely startled to see this man giving her the what-for answered, “No.”

“Well, this is my home, and I expect you to treat my staff with respect.”

Subsequently, the woman did not stop coming to the restaurant. She kept coming in—Dad says after that, she was sweet as pie. She would make sure to smile and say, “Hi, Tom!” on the way to her table.

Maybe she needed to be reminded that the people who served her were humans. Whatever it was, my dad loves telling that story. The restaurant had always been his passion. Those little moments of success—that he was at the center and in charge made all the toil worth it for him. He cooked until the day his cardiologist ordered him to stop.

I’ve written so many words about what living in the fawn response can do to your body. It’s not good or healthy, but people are hungry. If they stop eating, they die. If they stop reading, the consequences are not so dire.

I almost quiet-quit my newsletter before I signed up for the coaching sessions. I was overwhelmed with the feeling of being perceived, but after this catering thing at some richie-rich property, I resolved to never, never ever give up.

I wear my most waiterly dress to the off-site. It is a button-up pinafore style mini, made of a black corduroy. The host has hired us for passed-apps during cocktail hour, another local restaurant to make pizza after we pack up and leave, a mobile bartender, a DJ, and a line-dance instructor. Her house has panoramic views of the mountains. I gawk at the sweeping vista outside her kitchen window- the one above the sink. I wash my hands and imagine what it would be like to wake up and make my morning coffee in that kitchen. The wall that separates the open living space from the bedroom is a built-in bookcase that extends to the exposed-beam ceiling. Bookshelves are my kink.

Jessie loads my tray up with fritters and says, “Sell, sell, sell.” We laugh at that because the fritters have already been sold. She is a singer and a master at strutting through these spaces like she belongs. My other app-passer is a dancer. The hospitality industry is overflowing with people like us—artists who sell time to industry, so we can keep chasing what we really want.

The job at hand is to find the people scattered throughout the property who are willing to eat a fritter from my tray. I am paid well for it. It affords me my home, a functioning vehicle, a plane ticket to a far-away place every now and then. While we sit at the bar after the event is over, Audrey the dancer tells me about the ambitious performance her dance company is putting on in a couple of months. It involves a string instrument that extends across an entire barn and storytelling through dance. We have both spent the afternoon doing the job that a table could do.

I realize as she tells me about her creative outlet that I’ve been missing my connection to the audience. I understand that the melancholy of feeling like a failed table when my tray of ceviche is rejected isn’t about the table or the ceviche. It’s about having something that’s mine.