My thoughts on the movie Waiting

I've been a waiter at a mid-priced Italian restaurant chain in St. Louis for more than five years now. Bill Clinton was still in office the day I showed up in a short-sleeved denim shirt and black pants and was issued a nametag and apron. Five years, an average of seven shifts a week, and every one of them is a different set of inconsequential but highly entertaining conversation with coworkers and customers. There are good days and bad days, but my tips pay my bills, and my job is too easy, too comfortable, and too much fun to walk away from.

My restaurant coworkers are my family - we're friends inside and outside of work, and we're the same type of people. Waiters in general are easygoing and personable, just a little hard to motivate. You can work in a restaurant for a few months over a summer or part-time while you're headed through college, or you can serve pastas, entrees and salads for your entire twenties. Think about it - you're young and unattached, living at home with Mom and Dad or squatting in an apartment, you work afternoons and evenings, and you leave with a pocketful of cash and at least one social invitation from a like-minded coworker. Work, party, sleep, repeat. You can live like this for years.

Aside from attracting fun, shiftless people, the food service culture is an untapped comic goldmine. I can think of dozens of gags and bits based on true exchanges with and observations of customers, cooks, high school-aged hostesses and borderline-retarded dishwashers. When we servers aren't out front taking orders, delivering food or just schmoozing in general, we're in the kitchen exchanging notes about the customers.

We're talking about the old lady at Table 72 who just had all her teeth pulled and can no longer chew and called ahead to have the manager put her small canneloni in the blender. Or the middle-aged gentleman at Table 43 who freaked out because a single pea somehow made its way into his side of broccoli, and he's deathly allergic to peas and is threatening to sue the pants off our incompetent-ass restaurant. Or the morbidly obese regular at Table 64 who comes in three times a week and orders a 16-inch triple-sausage pizza with extra cheese and then sends it back if he deems it "too greasy."

A good waiter laughs at the world - he or she has no other choice. So when I found out there was an R-rated shock comedy coming out called Waiting, I knew I had to see it. And take a group of fellow servers to the theater with me. In the end, I went with a friend/restaurant manager, and we each laughed a couple dozen times. Then we spent several hours talking about how much of the restaurant-humor big picture first-time writer/director Rob McKittrick missed. McKittrick's finished product actually reminds me of a customer's tip - at best, the individual scenes are 20 percent funny. Then there are 15 percent funny scenes, 10 percenters and scenes that stiff the viewer entirely.

Waiting takes place during a single business day at a fictional chain restaurant called Shenanigan's. Think Chili's or Friday's or Applebee's or Bennigan's - midlevel American bar and grill food served in a big wooden room loaded with mismatched road signs and pop-culture print art on the walls. It's a fairly big restaurant that apparently is staffed with only one hostess, one manager, four cooks, one dishwasher, one bartender, two busboys and six waiters. Implausible.

I read other reviews of Waiting that trashed the characters for being one-dimensional archetypes and stereotypes, and some are. But the restaurant world is full of stereotypes. In my half-decade tenure, I've worked with every one of these people in some form or another, and watching the movie, I identified with each of the three male server characters.

There's Monty (Ryan Reynolds, who apparently played a very similar character three years ago in National Lampoon's Van Wilder), the smarmy, wisecracking veteran server. He's pushing thirty and still waiting tables, still having wild parties at his apartment and still chasing after underage hostesses. Monty uses detached, cynical humor to cope with what, on paper, resembles a mighty pathetic life.

There's Dean (Justin Long), who's spent the past four years in the work/party/sleep/repeat holding pattern and, at 22, is feeling the need to grow up and get a real job. Dean's mother, a queen of condescension, informs him at movie's beginning that an old high school friend has just graduated college and gotten himself a nice career in electrical engineering. While Dean's been doing absolutely nothing productive with his life.

And there's Calvin (Robert Patrick Benedict), the guy who's neurotic and quiet and far too nice for his own good. He couldn't get a girl in the sack if his life depended on it, and he spends half his work time over-apologizing to his tables and asking if they're mad at him. I've been there. I haven't, however, been in the elementary-level subplot McKittrick provides for Calvin - that he has a phobia of and inability to pee in public thanks to a stranger he thinks was looking at his package from the next urinal over.

The female server characters are definitely bland archetypes, to be sure. There's Serena (a blonde Anna Faris), who is attractive and utterly unfulfilled. There's Amy (Kaitlin Doubleday), who is attractive and utterly unfulfilled and currently in a noncommitted relationship with Dean. And there's Naomi (Alana Ubach), who is attractive and utterly unfulfilled and a complete rageaholic bitch. Only the last of the three is the least bit funny, and I've known a couple Naomis at my restaurant - girls who cuss up a storm in the back and wish bodily harm on their customers and, immediately upon pushing open the "out" door and reentering the dining room, put phony smiles on their faces and act super-sweet for the sake of tip money.

Dan the manager (David Koechner, who did a one-year stint on SNL in the mid-'90s) is power-obsessed and completely unaware of how pathetic he is. Dan's the type who will scream at the busboys for no good reason one minute and ask the underage hostess where tonight's post-work party is being held the next. Poor Dan doesn't realize he'll never make a friend at his job because he treats his employees like automatons, and that he'll never have a truly fulfilling career because he's hit a ceiling of mediocrity.

The busboys are one-note stoner wiggers. Teenage MTV clown Andy Milonakis is kept surprisingly subdued, save a violent whippet fantasy brought by sucking the nitrous oxide out of canisters of whipped dessert topping. And the underage hostess, played by Vanessa Lengies... well, shit, every waiter has met this girl at least a half-dozen times. Hot, completely aware she's hot, and overly flirtatious with every older guy for the sake of validation and attention - all while acting like she has no idea of what she's doing and of the fact that she's making the male staff drool. Our restaurant currently has a 16-year-old Catholic school girl who fills this role like a champ and has the undivided attention of every guy who works there. Except for the gay host.

And the kitchen staff... boy, did they drop the ball here. A restaurant's kitchen is guaranteed to be loaded with lively misfits, minorities and foreigners. Basically, everyone who lacks the patience or people skills to deal with the public ends up in the kitchen. I could write a book about the cooks and dishwashers I've worked with. The best we have in Waiting is the always likeable Luis Guzman as the kitchen manager, Dane Cook as the psychotic Floyd ("Welcome to Thunderdome, bitch!") and Chi McBride as the dishwasher. McBride is the movie's towering but completely composed voice of wisdom, dispensing psychoanalytic advice to the rest of the staff while spraying dirty plates and racking up dirty glasses.

Now, allow me a digression here. Waiting is being marketed as a must-see comedy for anyone who's worked in a restaurant, but anyone can tell you dishwashers are the last people you want to cultivate your advice from. Sure, it's ironic that the movie's sage is the dishwasher - the lowest-paid grunt who's traditionally the least socially functional in the restaurant hierarchy - but let me quickly provide five real-life examples of funnier dishwashers I've met.

*A black Muslim fundamentalist named Aleem who would attempt lofty conversation about serious issues while claiming inside expert knowledge of our conspiracy-laden world. But then, when you'd engage Aleem in lofty conversation, he'd offer the same two responses: "That is something," or, "That is deep." He's also famous for pulling half-eaten food from dirty plates and chowing down when he thought no one was looking, but if you'd ever offer Aleem the other half of your sandwich, say, he'd get completely indignant. Then wait until you walked away and chow the fuck down.

*Allan, a white male in his early twenties who used to take off his pants at the end of every shift and run them through the dish machine. Allan was also fond of telling jokes I hadn't heard since elementary school.

*Derrick, a homeless black man in his forties who slept in a van and, due to a medical condition with his feet, would work his shifts while wearing tattered house slippers or plastic bags tied around his feet. Derrick has worked and been fired from just about every restaurant in the neighborhood, and the local police say he has a fondness for cocaine of the powder and rock variety.

*A mid-forties black Puerto Rican named Max who would regail me with retellings of dreams he had in which he engaged in sex with animals. ("I had this wild dream, yo! I was fuckin' a hippo! Every time I thrust in too deep, the hippo's head would come up out the water like [wide-eyed, gape-mouthed silent scream]!")

*A 53-year-old white male named Ralph who sported an open, cancerous lesion on his cheek, no hair on his head but plenty on his neck and arms, four to five teeth in his mouth and a mismatched glass eye in one socket. The glass eye was frequently pointing off to either direction and also oozed a yellow-green pus. He lost the eye, no joke, to an exploding chocolate shake machine when he worked at McDonald's. Ralph liked to make up outrageous, inconsistent stories about winning large amounts from lottery scratch-off tickets and had a beautiful wife who didn't exist.

There have been others, of course. A fun conversational game to pass the time is to nominate ex-employees for induction into the Dishwasher Hall of Shame. I'm guessing McKittrick didn't work in a restaurant for long and definitely didn't like it. These characters are more mean and bitter than fun, and they're cardboard in a way that most actual service industry people are not. The jokes in Waiting are more of the shock comedy variety - the movie's biggest running gag involves the Penis Game, in which male employees at the restaurant will pull out their genitals and, if any other male employee catches an eyeful, the penis flasher gets to kick the other employee in the ass and call him a fag. It's about as funny as it sounds.

And, of course, half the humor in a movie like this should involve the customers, who sometimes turn out to be more behaviorally challenged than the dishwashers. For a film that wants to pull no punches, there's all kinds of ethnic humor possibility here - different ethnicities, by and large, tip at different levels. Every waiter knows it, and every waiter talks about it. There are also patterns in the kind of food ordered by ethnicities. Why do black folks always order Chicken Fettucine and pink lemonade? Why do Asians always get the Linguine with White Clam Sauce? And how bad will a Hindu freak out when he realizes midway through consumption that his canneloni is stuffed with meat? This movie refuses to touch any of this ground. All we get is one unfunny gag about foreigners not knowing how to tip.

As for customers in general, most are nice and polite, tip 18 to 20 percent and have a sense of humor. But those ones aren't worth satirizing in a comedy. Give me the condescending couple who acts like they're in a five-star gourmet restaurant when they're in a casual three-star family restaurant. The people who ask for mugs of hot water so they can soak their silverware. The regulars who special-order every element of their meal, even down to the drink. The lonely old man who talks your ear off about his involvement in The Big War. The careless parents who let their small children rip up the table-tent ads and dump out the contents of the sugar caddy. The people who always try to find something wrong with their food so they can get it free. The people who get mad that they can't use their pasta coupons on a dinner entree or pizza. The self-appointed comedians. The requisite table with the screaming baby who spoils the mood of everyone in the dining room. The ladies who haven't seen each other in years and decide to take four hours to "catch up" during your dinner rush. The mannish lesbians who cause you morbid embarrassment when you first approach the table and ask, "How are you gentleman doing today?" The old lady who complains that her small Fettucine Alfredo, the blandest pasta you offer, is insanely overloaded with pepper. The hoosiers who spend big on appetizers and steaks and desserts and specialty drinks and then seem to have nothing left over for the tip. The old folks who insist on being as far away from the smoking section as possible. The smokers who take their babies into the smoking section with them. The bald guy who waits for you to leave the kitchen so he can press his 10 percent tip into your palm personally and tell you what a good job you did. The lady who brings a thermometer with her and checks to make sure the middle of her lasagna is exactly 180 degrees. The redheaded lady who pulls a long red hair from her pasta and is convinced it came from the head of the bald black pasta cook. The little fat girl who orders a cream pasta, cheese sticks and a Diet Coke, because her parents won't let her get regular. The big fat mama whose seat is shoved so far into the traffic aisle that you have to suck in your own gut every time you squeeze past her. The almost-teenage boy with the kid's menu in front of him who cries when you bring him the plastic kid's cup with the lid. The almost-teenage boy who spills his drink when you decide to give him the benefit of the doubt and bring him the big people's cup. The old lady who claims her steaming coffee is ice cold. The office secretary who tells you the iced tea is too strong. The mailman who tells you the iced tea is too weak. The ex-state senator pushing ninety who always wants to tell you about the time he met JFK. The families who come in with buy-one-get-one coupons and order two large pastas, four extra plates and six ice waters with plenty of lemon.

Waiting misses all of these. Instead, we get the lonely lady who's having man trouble and spends the movie's duration being hit on by the lesbian bartender. We get the mulleted hoosiers who are out celebrating a birthday and leave two bucks and change on a $63 check. We get a stereotypical pair of homosexuals. And we get a queen bitch character who sticks her finger in a steak, declares that it wasn't cooked medium-well, and sends it back. ("Really, how intelligent do you have to be to take an order and carry out food?") In probably the most talked-about sequence of the movie, the cooks and servers then add their own mix of saliva, snot, ass-crack filth, dandruff and pubic hair to the bitch's food before redelivering it.

I can't speak for every restaurant, since I've known friends of friends who used to urinate in pickle buckets at fast-food jobs, but I've never personally seen or heard of any of my coworkers sabotaging sent-back food with bodily fluids or scalp shavings or hairs. There are far subtler, funnier things that happen in restaurants - for instance, if people complain about their salads not tasting right and ask for it to be remade, you can turn around and bring them another salad from the exact same batch, and the customer will almost always say, "This one is much better, thank you."

There are some inspired moments that ring true, however. The movie is framed with identical montages of employees partying after work, showing us people who work together and play together and basically live out the same 24-hour cycle over and over. They hit on the archetype of the customer who eats the entire meal and then complains about how bad it was. And every waiter has had their share of customers like the hilarious, senile old man Monty gets - I've even said his line, "I don't care how bad a tip that guy leaves me. That is the coolest old man ever!" And the Penis Game subplot actually comes to a comical head, thanks to Tourette's-inflicted waitress Naomi.

There's also a sequence toward the end that every restaurant worker should identify with, when the cooks watch the clock inch ever closer to closing time. Not a single table comes in for 25 minutes straight, and then at three minutes to close, in walks a couple, and the kitchen erupts with a frustrated blend of curses and obscenities. This is something that happens nearly every night - you can turn off the sign out front and the neon "Open" sign in the window and even the parking lot lights, and people will still stream in five minutes to close.

I can remember a night about two years before I became a waiter, in which I strolled into a Chevy's Fresh Mex with a friend and a gift certificate good for two entrees, an appetizer, two alcoholic drinks and two desserts. Chevy's closed at ten that night, and we got there at 9:45. Ate a long, leisurely meal and drank three rounds in an empty restaurant while the closing waiters put all the chairs on the tops of the tables and got out their noisy vaccuum cleaners. When the waitress came back, check in hand, to ask if we wanted anything else, I said, "I thought this coupon came with two desserts." She informed me that the kitchen had been closed for a fucking hour and a half, and I asked if we could cash in the two desserts for two drinks instead. Steam practically erupted from the server's ears, but she accomodated my request. After sucking down that drink, we finally came to our senses, my friend and I, and settled our bill. By this point, the entire staff was in the doorway, watching us with evil eyes and willing us to leave. They stuck around an extra two hours for someone who got his entire meal free and left his server six bucks for her trouble. If I could travel back in time six years, I'd kick myself in the ass and call me a fag.

The owner of my restaurant, who also thought Waiting completely missed the point, has a theory. Every citizen of the United States, in his or her late teens, should be required to work in a restaurant for two years. As a hostess, busser, waiter, cook, dishwasher, whatever. It's an eye-opening experience, and it creates patience and understanding and changes the way you treat your waiters. And it sure as hell changes the way you tip. Rob McKittrick probably worked at a restaurant, yes, but I'm sure the owner of my mid-priced Italian chain will agree, he didn't work there for the full two years.