The VICE Guide to NYC Waitstaff

THE MAN WITH A PAST These are the waiters found in dark Italian restaurants owned and operated by Lebanese families. They generally work alone, handling the whole restaurant with the aid of a small boy who buses tables and has the mien of a monkey. These men, the men with histories, are generally in their mid-50s. They are slim, move elegantly, and have skin that appears to have spent decades veiled in cigarette smoke. Their manners are scrupulous. They go out of their way to charm obese sets of women in stained pastel cotton-jersey sweater sets. They bring free shots of apple liqueur to the table at the end of a meal and coo over the young toddler who did not like her pesto. They insist on bringing out something she will like, anything—perhaps meatballs. You might, looking from afar, imagine that they will, in back, piss into the kid's food, but they aren't like that. What you can't see—what you can only feel—is the mysterious darkness of their past. Who knows? Maybe they put a steak knife through somebody's hand, and this is the only place that will hire them. Maybe they owe the restaurant's owner $10,000 for his service in the murder of the prick-of-a-swine uncle who raped their daughter. Maybe he just gave blowjobs. It's impossible to know why, at night's end, your waiter pulls down the roll-down gate and makes a pallet on the diningroom floor (true story). Just be aware: These characters are as sinister as hairdressers and smile just as sweetly, and the best you can do is look them in the eye and try to get with them, vibewise. Because if you're not connecting with ominous waiters, why are you in New York to begin with?

THE HYSTERICAL BOOTLICK Oh God. This guy, we're sorry, is generally a gay man. He descends from a fading New York archetype, actually. Like Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy, he has come to New York because he has a dream. Voight's dream was to sell his body to rich ladies, but today, the dream has become even more degraded. His dream is to live like television.

Really.

It's weird. But these guys, whatever darkness they're running from, it's so hideous and small and awful that they have come here to live a fantasy life in which they are a waiter. These boys are under 30. They are attractive, as a rule, but flawed—with snaggleteeth or a drooping, black-whiskered mouth. They wear lotion that gleams on the surface of their skin, have whitened teeth, tanned skin, a bit of muscle tone, and—this is the giveaway—they speak like that character on Will and Grace, if he were at the tail end of a coke freak-out. They tremble, and they do everything imaginable to try to seem at ease, and basically therefore end up in this weird spiral where they operate as though, at any moment, it's all going to explode. Like: "Here's your calamari salad," he says, and his eyes roll back, and skulls and skeletons, demons and corpse rapists and insects with the face of his mother come flying out of his eyes, ears, mouth, and anus in an explosion of time and space. Resulting in his being fired and having to return, tail between legs, to Gramma Lee Anne, who tells him he needs to get that AC installed pronto and sends him to the grocery store for shaved turkey.

In short, if these guys come to your table, there's nothing you can do. Your meal is fucked.

THE HUMAN BEING And then one day, you sit down at a restaurant in a neighborhood you've never been to before. The tablecloths are white. The waiter is wearing a simple, clean uniform. At the table across from you is an old lady in a yellow dress. She orders a lunch in three courses, and when the waiter brings her first course to her left side, she looks at him slightly askance. You order a salad and he asks you if you want wine, and you think, "Yeah, I do want that." He brings you half a carafe of rosé, which you'd never order, and when your salad comes, you thank him a lot, craning to get his eyes, but he just nods and goes off, and you just let the whole plate kind of sit there, and you drink, and you try to catch his eye, and maybe he sees you once or twice, and the old lady takes a bite or two of her food, and she yells at him and he nods, and an hour or an hour and a half pass, and it's time to go, and back out in the world of wraiths leaning on phone booths sucking down paper plates of hot grilled street meat, you can take refuge in the warm feeling left by your lunch, for a minute or two.

"TOUGH BITCHES" You will be seeing a lot of them. You know what it is you are seeing: utter and abject confusion taking the shape of a TV character.

It's true.

Basically, yes, there is a "New York rude." It is played by people who grew up in New York. When you see it, you'll know it's authentic, because it will be given to you by an old lady who is four feet tall and wearing an orthopedic boot. You will know her by the scratch ticket in her right hand. If she is not bearing a scratch ticket, you will know she is the genuine article because despite the fact that she is insulting your physical appearance, you will find yourself smiling at her. That is New York rude. You are smiling because, yes, calling you a bald faggot is her way of saying, "Hello, sonny boy."

This other thing, this imitation of New York that you get from people who aren't from New York, it's basically just the way people act when they first get here and everything is overwhelming them, i.e., people who have been here two years or less.

Example. Once, a bartender who was about 24 and almost model-pretty refused to serve me a drink. She said that she didn't serve the part of the bar where we were standing, and she pointed to a blond woman on the other end of the bar and said, "She serves you."

In response, I did that game where you make someone repeat something ridiculous. I made her repeat herself three times. I am good at doing that while seeming innocent. I don't do it like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, I do it like a decent person who really didn't hear. Anyway, kind of heartbreakingly, her facade broke, and she served me abashedly, and I felt abashed too.

In short: Don't be mean to the tough bitches. They're just playing parts in some private insane fantasy that is their brain. If you are rude, you are reinforcing the Sex and the City prism through which they are seeing the world. And the more credence that little fantasy gets, the more it grows in the minds of New Yorkers hailing cabs, trying on shirts, buying low-fat frozen yogurt—God—you know?

So when the "Mean Bitches" give you lip, visualize them at home in the SoHo bedsit they share with twelve Chinese men who eat with their hands, and act in a way that reminds them they are not TV characters in the city, but ladies. Young ladies. Who are nice.

THE 1,000-YARD STARE

This is a funny sort, a dreamer just on the other side of his dream. He's in his late 30s to early 40s and came to New York with notions of celebrity. Now that he's pretty much put those notions aside, he's taken sort of a benign, resigned attitude to the everyday. He's got some tattoos on his arms. He smiles wearily at the Pretty Young Things who catwalk between his tables. He doesn't try to take their fantasy down, nor does he let it piss him off. These guys are probably a tiny event—a callback, or a random call from an agent—away from sliding back into the fantasy that leads a grown man to catwalk in sunglasses through McDonald's, but for now, they're awakened, and they're your angels, because they're close enough to home to remember why you just ashed in your pie plate, genius.