Waiting in Wisconsin

Today’s story is written by John Rambow.

After all this time, it’s hard to figure out what exactly my high-school-sophomore self hoped to get from trying to be a waiter at Chuck’s, a tavern in the town of Fontana, a few miles from the farm and small town where I grew up.

Maybe I thought this job would help my shyness, and maybe it would have. Maybe I applied because of my belief that some of the cooler, more presentable, more emotionally intelligent kids at Big Foot High School already worked there, and that whatever they had would rub off on me. (Some of them even got to work behind the bar, which seemed like a central, important job.) But maybe I just wanted a change from the often lonely and tedious job of bagging groceries.

With a population under 2,000, there wasn’t too much to Fontana, but it got a lot of tourism because of the spring-fed lake it was on. Lake Geneva provided lingering glamour from the days when Wrigleys, Maytags, Schwinns, Swifts, and other Chicago industrialist families had built up large estates around much of its shore. By the 1980s, most of those estates has been subdivided, the houses and outbuildings torn down to become country clubs or hotels, but its population rose higher than ever as the temperature rose, once the “city people” arrived for a weekend or maybe the whole summer.

Being right on the lake and close to Fontana’s public beach, Chuck’s was hard to miss, a sprawling two-story wooden building that looked like a stretched-out farmhouse. Downstairs was a bar done in Upper Midwest Lake Cabin: old pictures and maps, old oars, old pennants and flags, beer signs, and usually an old man or two drinking away.

Up a steep flight of stairs was the restaurant itself, which was a little cramped (it had to fit in its own bar and kitchen), but with big windows of the lake in compensation. It served a not overly ambitious, crowd-pleasing mix of bar food and comfort food. Lots of grilled stuff, fish on Friday, brats, egg dishes--the sort of things that good-natured but still relatively unskilled sophomores would be able to handle.

“So we’ll start you at brunch,” said “Nancy,” the manager who hired me. I don’t remember her that well -- she was a little birdlike, with very short dark hair and a fast-talking voice that in my small-town way I associated with Chicago and other big cities.

Thinking back on it, it’s not clear why brunch was so great for a newbie. Slightly less hectic and rowdy than dinner, sure, and a shorter menu, but it was still pretty busy. And although an experienced waitress was there to help me at first, she had her own tables. I sank pretty fast, falling behind with getting people their water, their silverware, their orders, and even their checks.

There wasn’t any particular monstrous thing I did wrong, other than being scared all the time. Fear about forgetting orders, about forgetting who got what, about forgetting the specials, but mostly about spilling drinks all over hapless diners. A tall brown plastic pint glass full of ice tea or beer never seems so tall as when you are carrying it on a large round plastic tray and are a little shaky yourself.

It was bad enough introducing myself to the vacationing hordes. They were greeted with a nervous stutter that did anything but imply that they were in good hands. I remember one big table of happy people all looking up at me. Their nervous laughter began soon after I started rattling off the specials. The odds such challenges presented were not surmounted.

“Let’s not drag this out any longer,” said Nancy, after calling me into the back office after my shift -- could it really have just been my second or third? It was a relief, though I remember wishing that I could have somehow turned this setback into a job in the kitchen, or gotten another chance of some sort.

But that’s not what happened. After biking the few miles home, I told me mom, who found this quick turnaround hard to believe. She wanted me to double check that I understood correctly to make sure that I had really been fired. I did not do that.

Chuck’s and my classmates there would go on to have an eventful few years. Crates of beer started mysteriously disappearing late at night from the back of the garage around that time, and for one acquaintance his easy access to the on-site booze turned into a serious problem.

Me, I got some help from a friend and got a new job and moved on. But part of me still wants to have been a waiter--it’s rare that I’m not at a bustling, busy, not-too-fancy restaurant that I don’t think for a moment or two about whether I could have ever become the waiter I thought I could be when I was young. There I’d be, holding three trays at once, remembering everyone’s orders, hardly ever looking at my pad, rattling off the specials (“Try the chorizo omelette”), joking and laughing, making it all seem so easy.