Restaurant Diaries #1
Your body is quick to learn new rules.
One of the central ironies of the restaurant industry is how much time the employee spends hungry. Employees are not to be seen eating during service. I bend behind the stand to take bites from a protein bar or chew on dried mango slices. To see the employee eating ruins the illusion of service, that the employee is attendant to any of the regular needs of the body. So, I become acclimated to the waft of oil and meat, and eventually, my stomach ceases to cramp because it knows I am in the business of feeding and not being fed.
There are tricks to outwit the hunger. My first week at the restaurant, I have a cold and bring a sleeve of cough drops to the stand. Menthol, I later read, dulls the appetite. My manager calls these cough drops mints; he pops them in his mouth after smoke breaks. The server, whose heady cologne doesn’t quite mask the cigarette smell that lingers on his skin, reaches for my cough drops and Altoids. I become used to this rhythm, too. “Thanks, sweetheart.”
Family meal is at four. Whatever the kitchen has on hand. Rice and steak, steak sandwiches—since this is a steakhouse, steak is always on hand. The steak is fragrant and delicious; the cheapest steak on the menu sells for sixty dollars. The trick, I discover, is to train my body to want lunch at 4 pm and dinner whenever I get out. This is but one manifestation of the pact I’ve taken to live in the shadow hours. While my friends dance in the Lower East Side, I spin records on the vinyl system from which the restaurant takes its name. The records are to be handled with care. I hold them by their edges and wipe the dust from the needles with a brush that is not to make contact with the ameliorative oils of my skin. The needle costs two hundred dollars. Now, when I look at food, I see money.
At the restaurant, they ask what brought you to New York. They nod when I tell them I’m a writer. Most of the servers are actors and the runner’s a dancer. If you’re an artist, working in a restaurant almost forces you to prioritize the art. Before work, on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays, I have a chunk of time that begs to be filled with writing. And on my days off—Wednesdays and Thursdays—all my friends are at work. How else to keep myself company but by writing?
The servers are disarmingly attractive. The boys unbutton their shirts to the midline of their chests, but it’s the women that catch my eye. Dark makeup and taut stomachs, they walk with practiced litheness. Almost all of them are very thin. One night, a server—dark-haired, pretty—remarks off-handedly about her anorexia. Defensively, she says she’s gained fifty pounds. Looking at this girl who doesn’t have fifty pounds to lose, an old hunger returns.
When I was seventeen, I took it upon myself to investigate a cluster of eating disorders on my high school crew team. The story was nominally an assignment for my Narrative Journalism elective, but I had wanted to tell for years, one of those private school open secrets that get passed down from upperclassmen like a ghost story. Quickly, the story consumed me. I focused on three girls in particular. The aim of the project was narrative journalism, so my interviews were long as I pressed for the details required to build a scene. What car were you driving when your friend joked hair was your diet? What insulating cream did you rub on your body to try and sweat the weight off? Most of my high school writing embarrasses me, but when I went back and read those scenes, I was shocked by how rich the writing was, crisp and strong. I was writing straight from the bone.
At the same time, I was experimenting with my relationship to food. Those were the months before I heard back from my early decision school, and I alternated between acute anxiety and a stomach-churning sadness over my breakup with my high school boyfriend. So, I restricted. A cup of non-fat yogurt for lunch, nothing for breakfast. Victories were measured in the popular calorie tracking app, My Fitness Pal, the same app the girls used to cut weight. At their heart, eating disorders are monsters of control. I had grown up among young women who were, on the whole, more competent than their male peers. They could write dizzying lines of code or spin an argument with astonishing skill, yet they were still tormented by the ruthless desire to be thin. I still remember one of the girls telling me how her friends would talk about the neurons they lost by starving themselves. Dully, they observed those neurons were gone forever.
That fall, I understood I was playing with something dangerous, that I had a choice between throwing myself over a precipice or walking away. It’s a choice I’ve had to make again and again as my body changes: to let go of the fruitless pursuit of perfection. Because you can’t write when you’re hungry, or, at least, you can’t write well. It was alright when I was a senior in high school just trying to ace a paper on Dubliners or a Calc quiz, but when it comes to rigorous writing, an unfed brain produces starved writing. To say writing rescued me would be an incomplete representation of a complex chemical and sociological pathology. However, writing was the purpose I clung to, one of the few things stronger and more compelling than personal vanity. Writing is now the organizing principle in my life. It’s how I chose where to live and what to do for work, why I say no to a walk in the park with a friend, and why I take a car home at eleven when the staff stays out until five. I know a lot of people who consider themselves writers. Fewer are willing to sacrifice the traditional career trajectory that an elite institution prepares them for. When I leave the restaurant, sometimes, I’m wired, sometimes, my body aches with the need for sleep, and oftentimes, there’s the brush of loneliness, but as I look at the white flowering trees stark against the night, I know the loneliness is worth it.
The school squashed the story.
They had already removed the coach responsible for the disordered eating culture, though he still teaches there. When I think about high school, the process of interviewing, writing, and failing to publish the story in our school papers strikes me as the most consequential event of my high school career. More important than my first boyfriend, then losing my virginity, then Mock Trial championships, a 3.99, and even more important than COVID-19.
(Years later, I told this story to a boy and confessed that I was afraid it was the bravest thing I’ve ever do. It won’t be, he said with such sureness that I fell for him right there.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about high school recently. Maybe it’s because my high school reunion is coming up or because I’ve realized that it was high school, where I picked up the conviction in my writing that strikes me now as a rare gift. Those three months were the first time I seriously committed myself, and then I lost. Ironically, my defeat fed the story by turning it from a high schooler’s sixteen single-spaced pages into something that germinated inside of me for years, waiting.
“I’m bad at letting things go,” I explained to a girl at the restaurant. “That’s why I’m a writer.”