Everyone laughed at Dave’s story, even Reynaldo, who I expected more from. I seethed. I hated Dave, not because he was ignorant, which he was, but because he was not East River Club material. Not in my opinion he wasn’t. I’d earned my position at the Club. I’d survived those first weeks through a combination of aplomb and moxie, and I was proud for having done so. With Dave and his stupid face on staff—I used the words “stupid face” to describe him in a journal entry later that night—everything I’d accomplished was diminished. If Dave could be a member of this selective community, then how selective was it? Listening to Dave crow over all the corners he’d cut in his life, and about all the partying he was planning to do in Chicago, I had to stave off the urge to snatch the newly minted name-tag off his chest—if there was a dumber name than “DAVE,” I couldn’t think of what it was—and throw it into the lobby fountain.

On Dave’s first night on the floor, he tripped on the step by the piano and dropped a glass ramekin of butter. The ramekin didn’t break. It bounced once then began rolling along the hardwood of the restaurant. It made a racket. Dave loped after it. Diners put down their forks and craned their necks. I’d been praying for Dave’s humbling, praying for him to reveal himself as the complete joke he was. I didn’t expect his humbling to arrive so quickly. Mr. Galanti, from his perch at the maitre’d station, saw the whole thing. I thought, Reap what you have sown, Galanti.

Once Dave retrieved the ramekin, he did something strange: he turned and, facing the restaurant, took a deep bow, like a conductor at the end of a performance. The restaurant’s patrons didn’t seem to know what to make of this. No matter. Dave kept bowing in silence. Then someone began clapping. Soon, the entire restaurant erupted in warm applause.

I envied Dave in this moment, much more than I wanted to. If the same thing had happened to me, if I’d chased down a runaway ramekin, I knew myself well enough to know that I would have cowered in the kitchen for the rest of my shift.

On his second day at the restaurant, Dave began handing out nicknames. Reynaldo was “Ese.” Pete, the sous chef, was “Cookie.” I was “Cadbury,” because Dave observed that I was uptight and trying to be perfect, like a butler. I didn’t want to be known as Cadbury; I would have done anything to unshackle myself from that abhorrent name. But it was too late—Dave had spoken. I was Cadbury until further notice.

On his third day at the restaurant, Dave called in sick. No waiter ever called in sick at the East River Club, not unless it was a matter of life and death. Doing so meant that the on-call waiter, who was no doubt at home, slippers up on the coffee table, watching “The Price Is Right” and praying with every cell in his or her being that the phone would not ring, would get a phone call—the worst call imaginable—informing him that he had to come to the restaurant immediately. I suggested to Mr. Galanti that there was a very strong possibility that Dave wasn’t sick at all, that he was simply too hungover to come in. Mr. Galanti thanked me for my scrupulous detective work and told me to mind my own business.

The on-call person that day was Reynaldo. He arrived about an hour later. His forehead was damp. His name-tag was on crooked. He vowed to do bodily harm to Dave the next time he saw him. Reynaldo wound up pulling a large table of Italian business men, a table that would become known as his “8-Top To Glory.” The men left him a $200 tip on a $400 check, and one of the men, a man with a lion’s mane of black hair and a gold wedding band on his hand, wrote his name and phone number on the back of the check. A few days later, Reynaldo would begin an affair with the man that would go on for several years.

After lunch, as we re-set the tables for dinner, I attempted to remind Reynaldo of the bodily harm he’d promised to inflict on Dave. It was no use. Whatever malice he’d previously had was utterly vaporized by the $200 and the phone number. On my next shift, I wandered into the banquet room at the back of the restaurant and, to my surprise, stumbled upon Reynaldo and Dave together. Reynaldo was delivering one of his trademark back-crackings to Dave, who was belly-first on the floor.

“Cadbury, you have to try this. Ese’s hands are pure magic,” Dave said, half into the carpet.

Reynaldo’s back-crackings always made me uncomfortable; I rarely took him up on his offers. Yet, I had foolishly assumed those offers were exclusive to me. Now it seemed that Reynaldo was cracking every back in town, including Dave’s. I felt a pang of jealousy, then felt angry at myself for feeling it. I mumbled something about the restaurant opening soon. Then I headed back out onto the floor.

I took pride in being a quick study. I learned how to prepare a latte without permanently scarring my forearms with boiling milk. I learned that most entrees required 8 to 12 minutes of prep time, but that the lamb chop required 18 to 22 minutes. When someone ordered it, I needed to punch it into the Micros terminal right away (Micros was the restaurant’s convoluted computer system for sending orders to the bar and kitchen), even before I inputted in the person’s drink or appetizer order. And I was pretty much the only person who worked there who could reliably locate the “SPICY” input on the Micros confusing sets of menus and sub-menus (hit SPECL, then EXTRA, then MISC, then SPCY).

Reynaldo put a hand on my shoulder after an especially trying dinner shift one night and said, “Congratulations, you’re a semi-competent waiter now. We’re all so proud.” He said that a special ceremony was being held in my honor at a club called Field Day where I would be awarded a medal. Reynaldo and the other gay waiters were forever inviting me out to their gay dance clubs, even though I thought I had made it clear to them, on several occasions, that I was straight, that I liked girls very much, and that I had no interest in joining them. The gays I knew were far more open and persistent in their pursuit of me than I’d ever been in pursuit of any girl. In the three months since I’d arrived in Chicago, I’d barely been able to bring myself to make eye contact with girls.

That had to change.

Through trial and error, I also learned that I could work a double shift—a lunch and a dinner—after consuming 12 beers the night before, but that I could only work a single shift if I drank more than that. I’d done some drinking in college, but the drinking I was doing in Chicago was a whole new kind of drinking for me—a kind that was always done alone, in my claustrophobic apartment, and always while playing video games.

Some nights I would drink so much (more than 12 beers) that I would actually forget where I was in the game and I’d have to start the thing all over again the next night.

Aside from my family’s annual trip into the ruins of Utica for school shoes when I was a kid, I realized that I had no city experience whatsoever prior to moving to Chicago. Still, I was convinced for some inexplicable reason that city life was for me. I was exposed to the whims of crazy homeless people who followed me down the street, and rampant minefields of dog shit on sidewalks, and the police sirens always wailing in the distance. I drank beer, most likely, to numb myself from the shock of it all. And I drank because, for the first time in my life, I was truly lonely. I’d been in Chicago for a couple of months and I still didn’t really know anyone. I had to make friends and meet girls, two things that I’d really only ever done within the structured confines of a school system of some kind.

There was a woman who occupied the apartment in the courtyard across the way from me. She had long, dark hair. She never turned on any lights. I could see her, night after night, sitting in the X-ray glow of her television set, always wearing her ghost-like nightgown. I couldn’t see her face well enough to deduce her age or tell if she was attractive. But I knew this: she was lonely, and I was becoming an expert on that brand of loneliness.

I had designs of rescuing this strange woman, not unlike the way that Mario has designs of rescuing Peach in every Mario Bros. video game. I realized that the woman must see me, too; she must me sitting here, in the X-ray glow of my television, night after night, chipping away at 12-packs. I wondered if we were soul mates, she and I. I wondered if there was some way that I could meet her. I began to take note of her comings and goings. She’d arrive each night at 7 p.m. sharp, set her purse on the kitchen counter, drink a glass of water in her tiny kitchen, then disappear into the back and reappear wearing the nightgown. Then she’d pour herself a glass of wine and switch on the television. My plan was to wait outside of her building, which was one block north of mine, at 6:55 p.m. I would say hello, I would introduce myself, then I would ask her out for coffee. I was confident that she’d say yes, because having a cup of coffee with me had to be better than the nightgown and the TV and the wine.

It took time for me to work up the nerve to pull this off—a few days, a week at the most—because I’d never done anything like this before. It was bold. It was exciting. It was the kind of thing that people did in movies. And while I was in the process of gathering my nerve, and still running through all the possible scenarios for how this thing could play out, one night I came home and saw that her apartment had been stripped clean. The couch, the television—everything was gone. Two painters were there. They had all the lights switched on in the place. They had the windows open. They blasted salsa music from a tiny radio. They painted until midnight. Then they sat on a pair of overturned buckets and drank beer together. Then they gathered their supplies and switched off the lights. I could smell the paint fumes drifting across the courtyard from the apartment’s open windows.

Though I obviously did not know this woman at all, I felt like I’d been abandoned somehow. I was coming for her. I had a plan. All she needed to do was wait a few more days, to hold on for just a few more days. Goddamn it all, why couldn’t you have waited? I thought. Why couldn’t you hold on?

The apartment sat empty for a week. Then a bald man and his books and his cat moved in.

The next day I went to a newsstand and purchased a porno magazine for $3.99. My heart pounded as I paid the newsstand attendant, an Indian man with yellowed fingernails. I kept telling myself that it was my right, goddamn it, that I was a grown man, that I was 18 years old, that I was entitled to buy a porno magazine if I goddamned wanted a porno magazine. Despite my pep talk to myself, my face still went hot with shame. The Indian man slipped the magazine into a paper sack, an act for which, during my three-block walk home, I was most grateful.

I did not purchase this magazine for its award-winning journalism, or its candid interviews with stars and politicians, or the literary fiction it occasionally published. After a few days with the porno magazine, I wondered why on earth I hadn’t purchased one sooner. What a revelation this thing was. What an absolute miracle. It’s not an overstatement to say that I adored the magazine and the women who, to my mind, lived within its pages. I found myself actually looking forward to seeing the magazine when I got home from my shifts at the restaurant. When Mr. Galanti began making plans for a five-day cruise to Bermuda for himself and his collie, he left a trail of vacation brochures around the restaurant. During lulls in my shifts, I’d sometimes unfold the brochures and study the photographs. The never-ending seafood buffets featuring a lobster wearing a top hat and standing upright in a bed of ice; the comfortable-looking deck chairs with complimentary margaritas; the Broadway-caliber shows at night in the ship’s theater—these ships, as advertised, were floating paradises.

Sometimes, during idle moments, I’d imagine the magazine and I, packing our bags and being able to get away from it all.

Just the two of us. Together.

Reynaldo tailed me to the bar and asked me how it was going. I felt like a boxer receiving a between-rounds pep talk. “I have them right where I want them,” I said. He said that he’d waited on these two mummies before and that they had a reputation for being fussy. “They once sent back a piece of mahi mahi four times,” he said. He told me to stay on top of them, to “overservice” them—I nodded as if I understood, but it was a term I wasn’t familiar with—and that if I got into “the weeds”—another term I wasn’t familiar with—he’d be there for me.

Jeeta the bartender placed the two drinks for the ladies on the bar. A grumpy little bottle of Perrier stood in the shadow of the tallest wineglass I’d ever seen. I wondered if someone was having a laugh, using a huge, joke wineglass as a way to pick on the new guy. Jeeta, who never smiled and who was likely born with a furrowed brow, assured me that in The Club’s decade-long history the wineglasses had always been regulation-size.

I placed the Perrier bottle on one section of my circular tray and the joke wine glass on the opposite side, trying to counterbalance the weight of one drink against the other. When I picked up the tray with the drinks on it, everything began to wobble. I immediately set the tray back down, then picked it up a second time. Using both hands to carry it, I began to shuffle my way across the restaurant towards my first table, and towards my great undoing.

Carrying trays with drinks on them was something I’d seen waiters do in restaurants for years, never having any idea that tray-carrying was a bona fide skill. I’d seen waiters carry trays crammed with drinks and plates, with the entire thing balanced on the very tips of their fingers. How they pulled off such a feat was a complete mystery to me. Even my smallest movements, the slightest tilt, sent a seismic jolt through the tray causing the blood-red cabernet to roil like Homer’s wine-dark sea inside the glass, first careening from one side then back to the other. I felt like I was trying to balance an overfilled fishbowl on top of a chopstick. I marveled at how utterly impractical this vessel was, how poorly designed the wineglass was for its intended purpose. I understood now why people were always hurling them into fireplaces in movies.

My journey across the restaurant—and it truly was a journey, involving multiple close calls followed by near-miraculous recoveries—seemed to span several hours, though it probably only lasted a matter of minutes. By the time I reached the Oprah Doppleganger and her companion, I was sweating openly. Sweat streamed down the sides of my face and gathered at my chin. “Well, hello again, ladies,” I said, winking and hoping they wouldn’t notice the sweat, or the panicked expression on my face. “Did you miss me?” I asked. As soon as I lifted the Perrier bottle from one side of the tray, the tallest glass of wine in the world went over.

The roiling cabernet, nearly every drop of it, splashed down the front of the Oprah doppleganger’s pristine sweater-cloak. She stood up so quickly that her chair tipped over.  The restaurant went quiet. Everyone, still chewing like cows and holding their utensils, turned in their seats to see what the commotion was. The woman looked down at her ruined sweater-cloak, her eyes welling up with pain and anger, her chest rising and falling. Her mouth hung open. She looked like she’d butchered a gazelle with a chainsaw and she knew it.

“How dare you!” she said, pointing at me. She said it a few more times. “How dare you! How dare you!” Each time she said those words—”How dare you!”—felt like a hammer-blow to the back of my neck.

My farce at the East River Club was over. Whatever wool-pulling I presumed I was getting away with was obviously finished now. No seasoned waiter would ever make such a gaffe. I could hear Mr. Galanti’s dress shoes striding with great purpose across the restaurant’s parquet flooring. He put a hand on my shoulder, leaned towards me and said under his breath, “Get the fuck off the floor now.”

I retreated to the employee locker room, which felt like the safest place in the building to me. I sat on one of the benches in a stunned state and tried to figure out what I was supposed to do next. It had been obvious to me from the start that I didn’t belong here, that I didn’t have the sand for city life. I wasn’t even sure why I thought coming here was such a hot idea in the first place. I’d launched myself into the unknown, mostly because I had no grand plan, no better idea for what to do with my life.

I suppose that I also wanted to see if I could do it, if I could pull it off. There was a morbid curiosity underlying this enterprise, not unlike watching a daredevil attempt to jump over a fire pit. For three months I’d hurled myself into the gears of the city, and what did I have to show for it? I had an apartment the size of a prison cell that I couldn’t afford. I had no car, no real friends, and no love. I had a laundry schedule that involved me getting up in the middle of the night. The closest thing I had to friends were a pair of street-roaming cross-dressers wearing Tina Turner wigs. It was time for me to go. Time to concede, to accept my fate as a small towner, and return to where I belonged: my small town. I kept hearing that woman’s voice like a mantra in my head: how dare you, how dare you. She was exactly right—how dare I? Who did I think I was, trying to fool these street-smart city people? I changed my clothes and stuffed my uniform into a plastic shopping bag.

After the dinner shift, I found Mr. Galanti in his office doing paperwork and eating a sandwich. He told me to close the door and then motioned for me to take a seat. The fluorescent lights in his office were painfully bright. He looked at me across his desk. “Well?” he said.

Like the church-going Catholic boy I once was, I confessed everything. I apologized for lying to him, for attempting to pass myself off as an experienced waiter when I clearly was not. I told him that I appreciated the opportunity he’d given me, one that I didn’t deserve. The unburdening was making me feel better. This was a moment of personal reckoning, a moment when lies and posturing—two things which I was certain city life would require of me—had no value. This was the first time in months that I felt like I could relax into being my old, flawed self again.

Mr. Galanti wiped his mouth. He planted his elbows on his desk. I once again noticed the framed photo of him and his collie, both wearing bright orange life jackets, both looking pure and happy, the sun on their faces. It was a silly photo to have on your desk, but it was an honest photo. Mr. Galanti clearly loved that collie enough to put a life jacket around its neck, then have his photo taken with it. “I’ve been in this business for 20 years,” he said. “I know a green waiter when I see one. I knew you were green as they come. Despite your shit credentials, I made the decision to put you out there anyway. Normally, I would never do such a thing. But you seemed like a decent kid. And, right now, I need decent kids more than I need waiters with experience. So this is what I want you to do. I want you to hang onto your uniform for now. Show up tomorrow for your lunch shift. Practice carrying things on trays. And, if you’re still spilling wine on my customers a month from now, then we can talk about you leaving.”

The Oprah doppleganger, he said, had demanded that I be fired. “I talked her down,” he said. “I comped her check. She’ll bill us for the sweater that you ruined. In my opinion, you did her a favor. That thing was awful. Also, Nancy gave her some passes for a show, so it’s all taken care of. Oh, and this belongs to you.” He produced a garbage bag from underneath his desk and tossed it to me. Inside was the woman’s cabernet-soaked garment. “She left it here,” Mr. Galanti said. “She kept saying the words, ‘You bought it; it’s yours now.’”

I told him that he would not be disappointed, even though I would eventually disappoint him, in countless ways. Once our meeting was over, I headed for the series of secret hallways that led to the discreet employee exit. I burst through the doors, feeling the damp Chicago River air on my face—the first real air I’d felt in hours. I’d square-danced with doom yet again, and somehow I’d survived. Somehow I was still standing. Two women passed in the shadows and I froze. I was paranoid that one of them was the woman I’d embarrassed, that she was out here lying in wait for me by the employee exit, prepared to hurt me the way that I’d hurt her.

When I realized it was simply two random city dwellers, I ran down the street at top speed, running until my thighs burned, screaming at the top of my lungs. I was letting Chicago know that I wasn’t done, not yet, not by a longshot. I was still here to do damage, to kick ass, to take names. A few blocks from The Club, I slam-dunked the trash bag with the sweater inside into one of the corner garbage cans, the same way Michael Jordan was forever slam-dunking basketballs on every TV screen in Chicago. I raised my arms in victory, ran in a circle a couple times.

I started to walk away, but then went back to the trash. I pulled the sweater out, digging into the garbage bag. I yanked the iridescent coaster-size button off of it, claiming it as a trophy. I stuffed the button into my back pocket, then headed for my busstop.

As soon as we were outside of the table’s earshot Reynaldo began cursing them out under his breath. “These mummies are already dead inside and they don’t even know it,” he said. Anyone who was over the age of 40, or anyone wearing a sportcoat, or a dress with a floral print qualified as a “mummy.” While we waited for the bartender to fill our order, Reynaldo gave me some advice. “Two things I want you to notice,” he said. “One, always pick out the person at the table who you think is most likely to pick up the check. Pay that person a compliment right away. It’s usually a man. If there are two or more men at the table, pick the alpha. The alpha is always the fattest one, or the loudest one. Tell him that you like his tie or his sweater or his stupid sportcoat, or ask him if he’s been on vacation recently because he is looking especially well-rested. Be bold and flirt with him a little.”

I told Reynaldo that I couldn’t do that. If it was a woman, sure, oh yes, I would flirt up one side of her and down the other. But a man? I wouldn’t flirt with a man. I couldn’t.

“Because he’s straight? And you’re straight? Let me tell you something. Even if he’s straight, flirt with him. You straight men have the most fragile egos in the world. You’ll take flirting from anyone or anything. Number two, use the word cilantro when describing the specials. Cilantro has buzz around it right now in the restaurant scene. Cilantro is hot. Everyone expects everything to have cilantro in it, even when it doesn’t.”

My goal that night was to make myself invisible, to literally stay in Reynaldo’s shadow for the duration of my shift. But I was tall, and my new shoes were pinching me, so I tripped over my own feet a couple of times. Each time I did Reynaldo would put his arm around my neck and pull me close and ask me to kindly practice my ballet moves after my shift. Which surprised me, because he’d been mostly warm and supportive up until this point.

Mr. Galanti positioned himself behind a small lectern at the front of the restaurant, standing in a carefully angled cone of light that made it appear as if he’d just beamed into the restaurant from space. He welcomed diners as they walked in, referring to the regulars by name. Then he led them to what he promised was a table that he’d personally selected for them. “Those two mummies are in here every other night,” Reynaldo whispered as Mr. Galanti filed past us with a couple—man in a sportcoat, woman in a floral-print dress—in tow. “If he seats them in our section, I swear I’ll snatch that toupee off Galanti’s head and throw it up into that tree.”

I looked up at the tree rising high into the glass atrium. It was some sort of olive tree or ficus, with wide leaves that were constantly clogging the filter in the burbling fountain below. I imagined Mr. Galanti’s toupee suspended up there in the branches and I started laughing out loud. Reynaldo looked pleased with himself. “I swear I’ll do it one of these days,” he said. “My last night here. You’ll see.”

As the tables filled up—four more two-tops, two more four-tops, one six-top scheduled for an 8 o’clock arrival—and as the diners’ needs evolved from drinks to appetizers to main courses and finally to desserts, more parts of the restaurant came to life to contribute in some small way. A short, mannish Indian woman named Jeeta efficiently pumped out a steady stream of martinis and glasses of wine at the bar. When one of our tables ordered tiramisu, Reynaldo asked me to go find our in-house pastry chef, Bobby, a surly man with an acne-scarred forehead who, I discovered in the employee locker room after my shift, always made his tall paper chef’s hat the very, very last article of clothing he removed before taking his after-work shower.

The restaurant had a distinctive rhythm to it, and watching it all come together, watching the disparate parts line up to ensure that these people were fed and content and were sent on their way was thrilling to see. It was also agonizing, because I was painfully out of step with the entire operation. When Reynaldo asked me to fix a cappuccino for table 16, I stood in the kitchen blowing scalding hot foam everywhere with the cappuccino machine until Reynaldo told me to let him handle it before I permanently disfigured myself. He watched me clear away the dishes from table 4, which I did by first stacking the dirty dishes at the center of the table, then grabbing the stack and hauling it away. There were many moments where I didn’t know where to go, or what to do, so I simply ducked into one of the many dark corners of the restaurant—the dramatic track lighting meant that the place was filled with shadows—hoping no one would find me. The less I did, I reasoned, the fewer opportunities I had to make mistakes.

An hour into my first dinner shift, Reynaldo pulled me aside and asked me if I’d ever waited tables before. I knew right then that he knew the truth about me. He’d seen me for the fraud I was. The jig was up.

“Don’t be silly,” I said, still thinking that there might be some way I could turn this night around. I’d made it this far, I figured. Might as well keep going. “I simply haven’t had the chance to show you and Mr. Galanti what I can do yet.”

Reynaldo glanced over my shoulder. “I believe your chance just arrived,” he said. I turned to see Mr. Galanti seating two people at the Oprah Table. It was two women. One of the women was tall and slender. The other was shorter, and rounder, and when she removed her sunglasses, she bore a striking resemblance to Oprah Winfrey.

A murmur traveled through the restaurant. Everyone turned in their chairs to look, to glimpse Chicago’s most celebrated celebrity—second only to Michael Jordan—in their midst. My knees went weak. Before, I had the  chance to take off my apron and run screaming from the restaurant, Reynaldo whispered to me the only nine words in the English language that could have possibly calmed me down at that moment. He said: “Has everyone gone blind? Because that’s obviously not Oprah.”

The murmur was already dying down, as club members realized that, as Reynaldo had observed, this was not Oprah at all, but simply one of the many thousands of affluent women in Chicago in the early ’90′s who affected Oprah’s style and mannerisms. “Try to remember what I’ve taught you,” Reynaldo said, as he ushered me towards my very first table. “If you need anything, I’m here, right behind you.” And I could see in his eyes that despite the fact that he knew what I was, that he knew full well that I was out of my depth, he wasn’t going to abandon me.

“Few people know this, but she actually came into The Restaurant once,” he said, lowering his voice in a way that made it sound as if he was about to tell me a campfire ghost story. “It was in the late afternoon on a Thursday, about an hour before the dinner shift. Nancy, that unholy witch who I swear I will kill one day, made us open up early for what Nancy referred to as ‘the Club’s number one V.I.P.’ Who should walk through those doors but Oprah, wearing a terrycloth head band and tiny round sunglasses.”

Reynaldo led me to a two-top in the corner. He crouched and lifted the table cloth, peering under the table. “This is it,” he said. I crouched next to him. On the underside of the table someone had drawn a large “O” with a marker. “Go ahead, take a seat,” he said.

I sat down and looked out across The Restaurant. I was looking at the same things that Oprah had once looked at. I wondered if the chair had retained any of Oprah’s magical aura, and whether or not I might be able to absorb some of it. Even the smallest bit of Oprah’s aura, if it got on me, would do a world of good.

“She ordered a piece of cod, dry, and a cup of black tea, then she left a $3 tip on a $22 check,” Reynaldo said. Reynaldo pretended to be a paparazzo and held an invisible camera to his face. He pointed his “camera” at me. “Ms. Winfrey, is that you?” he said. “What’s your relationship status with Stedman? Is it true that you lost a hundred pounds and gained a hundred pounds in six months? Ms. Winfrey, how rich are you? Ms, Winfrey, why don’t you tip the service industry standard of 20 percent? Ms. Winfrey, can we take your photograph?” He made picture-taking sounds—chh-chick, chh-chick.

I pretended to shield my eyes from the invisible flashes and mimed eating motions. “I said no pictures!” I snapped. “Now let me enjoy my dry cod in peace, damn it!” Reynaldo dropped his invisible camera and began to silently applaud. He complimented me on the rawness and intensity of my Oprah impression.

The Oprah Table, he said, was my table for the night. “It’ll bring you luck.” He told me that he’d be working the rest of the section, motioning to about nine other tables, which seemed like a tremendous amount of tables to me. I remembered that I’d sold myself as waiter with years of fine dining experience. So I did what an experienced waiter would probably do when given the news that he’d be waiting on one table: I told Reynaldo that a single two-top was an absolute insult to a world-class fine dining expert like myself and I demanded that he give me more tables. Then I prayed that he would ignore me.

“Everybody starts out with one table,” he explained. “Even I started out with one table. It’s one of Mr. Galanti’s rules. He calls it ‘the art of the perfect service.’ ” The art of the perfect service, he said, involved being prompt, attentive, but never overbearing. “A waiter should appear at the precise moment he’s needed, and vanish again long before the customer has a chance to think, ‘Boy, I’d sure like this guy to go away and leave me to my gazpacho.’ ” Reynaldo paused for a moment and apologized for having to walk me through these painfully obvious aspects of table service. “I’m sure you already know all of this,” he said.

I assured him that, yes, I knew all of these things, but that even the best waiters in the world could stand to hear these golden tenets again once in awhile. Reynaldo continued to tell me more about Mr. Galanti’s art of the perfect service as he began walking towards the back of the restaurant. “Follow me, we have one more thing to do before we open,” he said.

We travelled along a short hallway that eventually opened up onto one of The Club’s cavernous banquet halls. The place was the size of a football field and dark. Chandeliers hung in the rafters. Tables and chairs were stacked in the corners. The only bit of light in the room was coming from the windows along a far wall where the drapes were parted to reveal a slice of the gray-green Chicago River. I briefly wondered if I was dreaming. “Lie down on the floor, belly to the carpet, please,” Reynaldo said. He pointed to a spot on the oriental rug under our feet and began rolling up his sleeves.

I asked him what laying down on the floor with my belly to the carpet had to do with the art of the perfect service and took a step back towards the hallway.

“It has nothing at all to do with the art of the perfect service,” he said. “I’m training to be a massage therapist. I graduate from my program next week. You’re tense—anybody can see that. Look at the hunched way you’re walking.” He did a quick imitation of me that wasn’t flattering at all. “I’ll do an adjustment, you’ll feel better, and some of that tension will be gone. In fact, it’s my duty, as a trained professional, to help you right now.” Then he added the words, “Trust me. I do this for all the waiters. Now please let me do my duty.”

Reynaldo wasn’t wrong; I was tense. I’d had a knot as hard as a stone in my left shoulder for months, ever since the snowstorm in Ohio. The idea of finally getting some relief sounded terrific to me, even if it was at the hands of a man who I’d just met, and who was probably gay (double earrings), and who was probably coming onto me, and who had received his training from a massage therapy school which was probably called, for all I knew, Fred’s School Of Massage Therapy.

But here he was, standing before me, offering relief. “Oh, all right,” I said. “Let’s get this over with.” I got down on the floor. I placed the side of my face against the banquet hall’s carpeting, which, up close, smelled like french fries and bleach. Reynaldo knelt next to me, planting his knees against my ribs. He told me to exhale. “Breathe all that tension out. Keep going. More, more, more.” When all the air was gone from me, he placed one hand on top of the other in the center of my back. He leaned forward and, using his body weight, he drove his palm downward. A rippling sensation, like a string of carefully arranged dominoes toppling over, traveled the length of my tailbone all the way up to my the base of my neck. A muted popping sound rang out.

I felt calm and peaceful for the first time in months. My eyelids were suddenly heavy. I wanted to fall asleep right there on the floor of the banquet hall. I couldn’t do that, of course, because Reynaldo probably would have tried to molest me. Maybe that had been his plan all along—to get me relaxed, then have his way with me. I hadn’t spent much time around gay people, and didn’t trust them at all. I was afraid of them and their gay ways. The only gays I’d ever seen before were the outspoken gays in college. They were always protesting something outside of the student center, lobbying the school for more recognition, for more gay rights. They were boisterous. They were strange. The men sometimes wore floppy wide-brimmed sun hats. There was a rumor on campus that the gays held mysterious gays-only parties where everyone—men and women alike—took all of their clothes off at the door then danced together in pitch black dorm rooms.

I climbed back to my feet. My shirttail had come out in the back. I quickly worked to get it tucked back in. I thanked Reynaldo in a formal way. I told him that I felt better, as he’d promised I would.

“Glad to help,” he said. Then the two of us walked in silence back out onto the floor together. My fine dining debut at the East River Club was about to begin.

The East River Club, unlike a regular table-waiting or bartending job, offered full benefits, including health insurance and a 401K program. Those benefits would kick in only if I survived the initial “courtship” stage, as the restaurant’s manger, Mr. Galanti, called it. “After 90 days, once our little courtship is over, we decide if we like you, you decide if you like us, and if everyone is happy then we go ahead and fill out the paperwork and make this more permanent,” he said. A framed photo on his desk showed Mr. Galanti with his arm around a regal-looking collie on a boat. Both Mr. Galanti and the collie wore bright orange life jackets around their necks.

After months of living close to the bone, the idea of having health insurance and a 401K sounded like sweet victory to me. I felt like Mr. Galanti was inviting me in from the storm of poverty and rejection that I’d been enduring since I’d arrived in Chicago. I wouldn’t let him down.

He gave me a menu to take home after my interview, to familiarize myself with the restaurant’s offerings. I stayed up half the night memorizing it, making notes in the margins, compensating for my lack of experience in the only way I knew how. The next day I rattled off the desserts for Mr. Galanti, including the Bananas Foster, which featured real Canadian maple syrup, and which was only available on Friday and Saturday nights. I knew which entrees were appropriate for diabetics, which ones were prepared with butter, and which ones came with sauces on the side. Mr. Galanti was impressed. “I’ve had waiters working here for years who don’t know half the things you already know,” he said. I could tell that Mr. Galanti was quietly rooting for me.

Mr. Galanti partnered me with Reynaldo, one of the restaurant’s more experienced waiters, for my very first dinner shift on the floor. Reynaldo had a goatee and a ponytail and a gold hoop in each ear. Once Mr. Galanti was gone, Reynaldo showed me how to fold napkins into little hat shapes. “When people sit down at the tables, they like to see a napkin in a little hat shape,” he said. The hat shape was the idea of Nancy, the Club’s Director Of Operations. “That bitter, old harridan has to control everything in this place,” Reynaldo whispered across our napkin folding table. “Oh, how she loves her fucking little hat-shaped napkins.”

I made a mental note to one, keep an eye out for Nancy, and two, to be sure to quietly disparage her often in front of the other waiters. Disparaging Nancy, I learned, was one of the waitstaff’s favorite pastimes.

My first few attempts at hat shapes failed miserably. My hat shapes all flopped to the side. Reynaldo gave them scores, pretending that hat-shaped napkin folding was an Olympic event. “The Puerto Rican judge gives that one a 4.0,” he said. I kept trying, kept folding, until I finally got a 7.0. “OK, that’s enough napkin-folding,” Reynaldo said.

These anecdotes were designed to be shared with other people. He’d spring them on unsuspecting waiters, barbers, cashiers, and aunts and uncles, and he’d intentionally do so always in our presence. “You wouldn’t believe what this one did yesterday,” he’d say, pointing out one of us before launching into his story. These anecdotes were designed to embarrass us—and that included our mother—into never doing anything stupid again. Dad’s audience—those barbers and waiters—could be counted on to chuckle uncomfortably, then either change the subject or sidle away. But before they could get away, Dad would always end his stories with the same gesture: he’d shrug his shoulders in a theatrical way, hands above his head, as if to say, Can you believe it’s my lot in life to be cast in with this bunch?

True story: when I was in the fourth grade my father asked me to check the oil on the family car. He was forever checking the oil on the family car. He checked it in the morning and he checked it again at night. There was nothing more important in the entire world than the oil level in the car. Should the car ever run out of oil, as he had informed us many times—which could only happen if we did not gauge the oil level with vigilance—the world, as we knew it, would come to an end. The car’s engine would seize up—and he would ball up one of his fists to demonstrate this great engine-seizing, world-ending moment, then shake the fist in our faces—and the engine would be rendered as useless, to use another of his preferred expressions, as tits on a bull.

The oil-gauging dipstick was located in the front of the car, underneath the hood. I knew this. Yet on that particular Sunday afternoon, for some inexplicable and possibly self-destructive reason that will haunt me until the end of my days, I made the mistake of opening the car’s trunk to search for the dipstick, and in doing so, I doomed myself to top-billing in a chestnut that my father would recount for decades to come.

As I stood on the quiet Chicago side street hoping that Terry—the stranger who I’d willingly handed over the keys to my car to and watched drive away in a self-guided test drive—would come back, what I thought about was this: If Terry did not return, if Terry turned out to be the type of person who was capable of taking another man’s car, my father would have his magnum opus. This story—about the one time in Chicago when I let a stranger drive off in my car—would be his Citizen Kane. Dad could retire on this one.

I listened for the familiar high whine of the Subaru’s Japanese-made engine and did my best to defend the parking space. Cars continually pulled up then attempted to reverse into the space where the Subaru had been parked—my space. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I’d say, waving my arms wildly. “This spot is taken! It’s taken!” Drivers would stop and glare at me through their back windows, trying to figure out if the spot was worth the trouble of confronting me or not. Then they’d face forward, put their cars into gear, then squawk their tires as they sped off.

A few minutes later, a yellow Toyota buzzed up like an angry bee and began reversing into the spot at an aggressive rate of speed. I thumped the car’s trunk and gave the driver a few “Whoas.” He rolled down his window and poked out his head. He was a fat man with mirrored aviators squeezed around his head. “What do you mean ‘not available’? It looks available to me,” he said.

I told him that he’d better keep driving. He glared at me. I glared back at him. After a tense moment, all the air seemed to go out of him. He faced forward and shouted into the windshield. “If one more fucking thing goes wrong today, just one more thing, I swear I will fucking lose it!” he screamed. “I don’t need this shit!” He pounded the dash a few times. He drove off.

I realized that I needed something that would clearly indicate to passing drivers that the spot was blocked off, something official-looking, like traffic cones. I spotted a trash can nearby and figured that might do the trick. I hustled over to grab it, and as I was returning to the spot, another car—a Crown Victoria that was the color of a black olive—was backing into it. I gave the car my usual “whoas” and a thump, then set the trash can directly in the path of the reversing car. The brake lights came on.

The driver did something that none of the previous drivers had done: he put the car into park, opened his door, and got out. He was tall—a head taller than I was. He wore a leather jacket that hung to his knees. “What kind of shit are you trying to pull here?” he asked.

At that moment the passenger side door opened. A second man got out. He was taller than the first man. “Get out the way, man,” he said. “Get out of the way before you get hurt.”

I felt sick and small and a long way from home. I grabbed the trash can’s handles and hustled it up onto the curb. The driver got back into the car and finished wedging the car into the spot while the other man stood on the curb with his hands on his hips, staring at me. Once the driver was satisfied, he shut off the car and got out. The men were surprisingly calm. They were not afraid of me. They stood there, and looked at me like they wanted to extract something more from me.

I told them that this was my spot, that they couldn’t go around taking spots from people like that. I tried to act tough, but these were the type of men who would get into fights over nothing, and they’d be happy to do so.

“What are you going to do about it?” the passenger asked. “Are you feeling strong this morning?” They asked me if I’d had my Wheaties that morning.

The spot was gone. The Subaru was gone, too. I didn’t need a beating on top of everything else. When it was obvious that I didn’t have anymore lip in me, the men turned and walked off.

Goddamned assholes.

At that moment I heard the familiar whine of the Subaru’s engine coming up the block. Like a mirage, there was Terry sitting behind the wheel, along with his well-trimmed beard and his tiny gold earring. He turned down the window.

“What happened to the spot?” he asked.

“I couldn’t hold it,” I said.

“I figured you might not be able to,” he said.

“It was a bad plan,” I said.

“Better or worse plan than letting a total stranger drive off in your car?”

He told me that he liked the Subaru a lot and that he wanted to buy it. He asked me if I’d take a thousand dollars for it. I told him that we had a deal. It was the first significant deal I’d made in my life. My confidence was starting to return. Terry double parked and put on the Subaru’s hazard lights. I signed the title over to him on my kitchen counter. He counted out the thousand for me. When we walked back downstairs, we found a parking ticket on the Subaru’s windshield. Since the car was still technically in my name until the DMV processed the paperwork, the ticket was my responsibility. But Terry, nice guy that he was, offered to pay for it. He took out his wallet again, and pulled out $75, and handed it over to me. When he opened his wallet, I could plainly see that he’d brought much more than the thousand he’d paid for the car. I cursed myself for not haggling with him, for not squeezing him for more. He had obviously anticipated some haggling.

Terry honked once as he sped away. I stood and watched him go, waving and then feeling stupid for waving. The Subaru was gone, and when it left, I felt a great weight lift from my shoulders. I hadn’t realized how much worry and concern I was devoting to that car. Now it was someone else’s problem. I also had a cool thousand dollars in my pocket, which, if I was very frugal, meant I’d be able to stay in Chicago for at least two more months. But best of all, the waiters, barbers, cashiers, and aunts and uncles in my father’s life would be spared from having to endure a new story from my father.

My apologies to the handful of you who come to the site on a daily basis in search of an update. The reason I haven’t posted anything in weeks is simply this: I’ve been going through some personal b.s. lately, and that b.s. has made it extremely challenging for me to write. I know, I know—if I’m going to call myself a writer I should be writing, no matter what the emotional weather is, etc. etc. Well, for whatever reason, I can’t seem to get myself together enough to get a damn post out the door.

On the bright side, as I type this, my desk is covered in stray Post-It notes. That’s usually a sign that the writing is about ready to happen. Expect something soon. And thanks again for your time and your patience. And thanks for hanging in there.

Best, Scott

One night after an especially trying day, I went to the local supermarket to pick up my spaghetti-making materials. During checkout, I opened my wallet and discovered that I was a few dollars short. I panicked and handed the cashier my credit card, instructing her to go ahead and run it, though I knew it wouldn’t take. The cashier was in her late 40′s, with kind, gray eyes. She reminded me of my mother. When my card was declined, I said, “You remind me of my mother.”

She told me that was a sweet thing for me to say. I suppose I was hoping that she’d do something motherly, and save me somehow. But she went ahead and paged the store manager anyway. He arrived a few minutes later with a huge ring of keys that looked like something the Town Jailer in a cowboy movie might carry. He inserted one of the keys into the register, and by doing so removed the bread loaf and the quart of milk from my bill. I must have been looking especially low after this transaction, because as I was leaving the cashier shouted after me, “I hope things turn around for you!” Then she frowned and corrected herself. “What I meant to say was, everything is going to be fine.”

I thanked her, then exited through the pneumatic doors.

The spaghetti that night wasn’t great. All I could think about was the missing bread and the milk. The meal wasn’t the same without those two ingredients. The self-pity I felt that night was overwhelming. Halfway through the meal, it dawned on me that I’d subconsciously positioned my chair so that I was facing directly into one of the corners of the apartment. It was as if I was punishing myself for something. All I needed was the pointy dunce cap on my head.

I put down my fork and wiped my mouth. I turned around in my chair. All I could see in the tiny apartment were all the goddamned foolish purchases I’d made since arriving in Chicago. There was the Contra III: The Alien Wars cartridge for the Super Nintendo ($69.99). Over there was my copy of The New Joy of Sex ($24.99). And there was the iconic torchier lamp ($39.99) which looked like something that Zeus himself would have been glad to have as a decoration in his apartment on Mount Olympus. Because of its top-heavy design and white-hot 300-watt halogen bulb, the torchier would soon become famous for starting fires in dorm rooms and small apartments everywhere.

Yet the biggest albatross of all, far bigger than a video-game or a sex manual, was the Subaru. It was out there at that very moment, parked on a side street in the dark and—last I’d checked—completely covered in bird shit. It was the Subaru that was slowing eating away at my bank account. I’d considered the car my last resort. If everything went wrong, and I ran out of money, I could always throw everything into the backseat and drive the car back East. Knowing that the car was out there, ready to go, 24 hours a day, that all of this could be over with the simple turn of the starter key, made me feel less claustrophobic here.

But the Subaru obviously wasn’t doing me any favors. In fact, if anything, it was the Subaru that was holding me back. I understood what had to be done. I dumped my spaghetti dish into the kitchen sink, put on my shoes and jacket, and grabbed a garbage bag. I went down to the street and cleaned all of the trash out of the car. Then I came back upstairs and phoned the Chicago Reader, the city’s free newspaper, which I read religiously each week, mostly because it featured Lynda Barry’s terrific comic strips. I placed an ad for an ’89 Subaru for sale—$1,200 or B.O.

The first guy to come look at it was named Dan. He had slicked back hair and wore a puffy black parka. He kept his lefthand buried in one of the parka’s side pockets, which made me worry that he had a gun. Dan popped the hood with one hand and looked things over. I knew almost nothing about cars, but I didn’t want Dan to take me for a simp, so I leaned over the engine with him and affected a concerned look. Then Dan closed the hood and said, “Let’s take her out for a test drive. You do the driving.”

I got behind the wheel, and as I pulled out of the parking spot, which was one of the five-star parking spots in the neighborhood, I said a prayer in the name of the spot still being there when we returned. “Take her out onto Lakeshore Drive,” Dan said. “I want to see what this baby can do.”

I didn’t like Dan. I didn’t like the way he referred to my car as “baby.” As I stepped on the gas and pulled into traffic, I reminded myself that this was just a piece of business, that this was only a car, that sentiment shouldn’t come into play here. But there was sentiment. That car and I had been through a lot together. We’d driven through some of the worst Midwestern blizzards on record, and we’d come out OK on the other side. Dan opened the glove box and worked the windows. He checked the cigarette lighter to make sure it was functional. I think he was about to make me an offer when the car’s hood, which hadn’t been re-latched properly after we’d peered at the engine, caught the wind. In bumper to bumper afternoon traffic, the hood flew open, obscuring the front windshield.

Dan and I both screamed. It’s embarrassing to admit this, but of the two of us, Dan was the one to collect himself first. He told me to calm down, and to slow down, and to just keep driving straight. He told me to put on the car’s hazard lights. “Everything is going to be fine,” he kept saying over and over. Eventually we were able to blindly make our way to the side of the road. Dan got out of the car and closed the hood, making a big show of latching it properly this time.

We drove back to the parking spot. Naturally, it was gone. Dan had gone white. He finally pulled his left hand from his parka, revealing not a gun but a pack of cigarettes. His hands shook as he put one into his mouth, and with the Subaru’s functioning cigarette lighter, he lit it up. “I’m going to have to take a pass on the car, dude,” Dan said. Then he got out and walked off down the street on unsteady legs, sucking down the cigarette. Once he was gone, I drove around for an hour, looking for another parking space, while dreaming about the vast quantities of spaghetti I’d eat when I got back to my place.

The second person to come look at the car was a guy named Terry. He had well-groomed beard and a tiny gold pirate earring in his ear. Terry and I peered under the hood for a few minutes. Then Terry requested a test-drive. I didn’t want to lose my parking spot again, so I did something that, looking back, is one of the most foolish things I’ve ever done. I gave Terry the keys and told him to take the car out by himself.

It took a few moments for me to realize what I’d done here. Once the Subaru’s taillights vanished around the corner at the end of the street, I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. The street went quiet. A plastic bag caught in the branches of a nearby tree hissed in the wind.

I tried not to think about the fact that I’d gladly just given my car keys to a complete stranger and allowed him to drive off in my car. I imagined the chortles I’d get from the policemen when I told them the story. “So, let’s go over this again,” they’d say, “starting with the part where you gave the guy the keys.” My father would never be able to forgive me for this.

I stood there, alone as I’ve ever been in my life, peering at my watch, counting the minutes, hoping that Terry would bring my car back to me.

Carolyn Forche was the lone exception to Berryman’s rule. She was the most beautiful poet I had ever seen, and I was certain that one day I would meet her and she would recognize and appreciate the delicate poet’s soul that lived within my hulking, lumbering frame.

I was feeling lonelier by the day in Chicago. I knew that I couldn’t sit in my apartment and stare at the tiny photo of Carolyn Forche for the rest of my life. One of the reasons why I’d moved here, perhaps even the main reason why I’d moved here, was a reason that I hadn’t yet put into words: I was there to meet girls, damn it all.

I didn’t really know any women—Sam hadn’t returned my calls in more than a week—but I had to be prepared, in case one should come along. Which explains why I nervously walked into Barbara’s one day and spent money that I didn’t really have on a book titled The Joy Of Sex: A Gourmet Guide To Lovemaking. The book was textbook-heavy, and had a serious air about it. The author was a medical doctor with the curious name of Alex Comfort. I blushed like a schoolboy as the cashier rang up my purchase.

I figured that if the book taught me nothing, at the very least what I was purchasing was a piece of top-shelf pornography. Once I returned home, to my great disappointment, instead of the explicit photographs which I had anticipated, what I found on the pages within was a series of pen and ink drawings, showing two people—a man who was hirsute enough to be a distant relation of Chewbacca, and a woman with hairy armpits and a bush the size of Howard Cosell’s toupee—who seemed more interested in staring into one another’s eyes than doing anything that could be perceived as exciting or illicit. There were numerous drawings of the two of them resting their heads on each other’s butts, implying that the key to becoming a good lover was finding someone who was willing to let you use his or her butt as a makeshift pillow.

That was my ultimate goal: to turn myself into a quality lover. Pornography, I figured, would only get me so far. If I wanted to make a woman truly happy, if I wanted a woman to make the same face that Sharon Stone makes on the box cover of the movie Sliver (a movie I’d rented from my neighborhood video store based solely on the box cover), then I needed to educate myself. I needed to study up.

And study up I did. I read chapters titled “Tenderness,” “Nakedness,” and “Hormones.” I learned new terms like “mons venus,” “cassolette,” “soixante-neuf,” and “flanquette.” There were kneeling positions, sitting positions, and something called “the X position.” There was both blowing and biting to consider. And there was something terrifying involving a person’s big toe to consider. I memorized illustrations of The Wheelbarrow, and Birdsong At Morning, and The Viennese Oyster. I learned about aphrodisiacs, and ben-wa balls, trigger points, and feathers. Without a doubt there was not a lonelier, more knowledgeable unpracticed lover in the greater Chicago area at that time. I was nothing but potential.

Now, all I needed now was a woman upon whom I could unleash my new-found pleasuring skills. If only Carolyn Forche happened to be passing through town—boy, would I give her a time. I had no doubt that I could take her straight to the moon and back again.