I think I may have said this before, but it never ceases to amaze me at the high threshold of pain tolerance that the average Mexican worker has for injustice, either real, or perceived. It’s downright stratospheric! You see, the typical upscale waiter in Los Angeles is a college educated Caucasian. Sure you have the usual smattering of asians, blacks, and latinos, but for the most part, it’s Whiteyville. The dilemma that the educated servants have is as follows: How do I reconcile my vocational aspirations, to be a famous actor, musician, or model, all of which have stalled or failed to come to fruition, with my actual occupation as waiter? There it is, staring us in the face: the apron. We must accept the apron, and if we accept the apron, then surely it will allow us the opportunity to be happy. Yes? Christ no!
The intelligentsia of the service industry can’t stand that they have to wait on people, especially famous actors, musicians, and writers, all of whom have broken through, and make a comfortable living that their degrees from NYU and UCLA promised them.
I used to think the busboys at the Poison Ivy were stupid for putting up with all the bullshit. Why didn’t they stand up for themselves when told to do something that was plainly illegal? For instance, Blanche told us once that we had to be fully dressed upon entering the front of the restaurant. We weren’t allowed in the back lest we steal something, but she had no problem having all of us enter and exit through the same front door that celebrities used as well as the general public. Everyday there was a stinky parade of kitchen staff, with their soiled pants and stained Ivy t-shirts exiting the garden. Right passed the paparazzi. Absurd. Anyway, Blanche wanted us dressed upon stepping foot on the premises. Therefore most of would tuck in our shirts around the corner. This worked until the dress shop owner got tired of us using his windows as mirrors to stuff our pink shirts into our tight white jeans, so Blanche put up a memo ordering us to be dressed from our cars until we got to the restaurant. We weren’t paid “walking time” like assembly plant workers are paid. Looking back I see the Mexicans were wise and us gringos were jackasses. “It’s no big deal,” they would say, but us “edumacated” waiters would march upstairs and tell the GM, “This policy is illegal!” And we would savor the victory, no matter how brief, as they would take down the memo the next day, and put up another one rescinding the order. I’ve got a lot of respect for these guys who kept silent. It’s hard. Mark Twain said it best:
Better to be silent, and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove any doubt...
And I think it was Ernest Hemingway who said to a waiter,
Where’s my fucking cocktail?
Seriously, how many hours did I waste pontificating about labor laws and staring at the California Employment Code posters that spell out our rights. I have to laugh when they passed the whistle blower laws and put that 1-800 number on the wall. We would debate whether making us enter dressed was illegal, and should we call the number and lodge a complaint. I can only imagine the operator chuckling as she writes up our complaint, and then files it next to the one detailing the the illegal dumping of hazardous waste from a rocket fuel plant, into the LA river. What a bunch of jagoffs.
