Once the Subaru was sold and gone from my life, things began to turn around for me. I got a job waiting tables in a kind of urban country club called the East River Club. The place was located in the financial district and was housed inside several climate controlled warehouses which sprawled across a full city block. Inside the warehouses were multiple swimming pools, various gyms, two spas, four steam rooms, glassed-in squash courts, and not one but two restaurants. One restaurant was a fancy diner for members looking for protein shakes and club sandwiches to go. The second restaurant featured dim lighting and a leather-bound wine list and served cedar plank salmon. My largely fictionalized resume somehow qualified me for a job in the latter.

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.