“I said, NO LEMON!” he growled at me, shoving the glass of iced tea back across the counter. I flinched at his rudeness and brittle tone. His lazy eye leered at me from behind his thick glasses. Muttering to myself, I turned around to fetch him a brand new glass of iced tea, without the offensiveness of a lemon wedge perched on the rim.
In my two year stint as a diner counter waitress, my clientele consisted of one major demographic - crotchety, aging bachelors. These men, without the comfort of a wife at home to cook them dinner, and apparently without the abilities to fix their own, visited the diner often five or more days out of the week and subjected me to all of their fussy demands. I became increasingly understanding of why these men remained single. Unfortunately, not only was I expected to cater to these men’s every whim and desire when it came to their dinner, I was also supposed to stand there like a mindless post and listen to stories about their excruciatingly dull lives. Forget I had other customers to wait on - it was more pertinent that I give my undivided attention to a man who apparently gets none anywhere else.
John, the lemon detester, was the pickiest eater and biggest rambler of them all. He would fill up a seat at my counter with his very generous frame for hours upon hours - nowhere else to go and nothing else to do but talk my ear off about the fascinating field of accounting. If by chance I had other things to do at my place of employment rather than stand there and suck up his insipid conversation, he’d complain that I was rude. If I made the slightest mistake while serving him his usual five-course meal, such as leaving a lemon on his iced tea when I apparently should have learned by now that he takes his tea without lemon - he’d give me a healthy portion of his irrational attitude. He’d switch from snapping at me rudely and chastising my service to flirting with me and staring at my breasts rather than my face while he driveled on about his house in LBI.
“You should come visit,” he once said. “I invite a lot of waitresses to stay with me there.”
One day, I had just about enough. I had been bending over backwards to appease his insatiable demands. He requested an appetizer, scallops wrapped in bacon, that we did not have on our menu. I begged the indignant chef to make an exception and prepare the dish for my difficult customer. He obliged. I brought the plate out to John.
He wrinkled his nose at me and gestured toward a cabbage leaf garnishing the edge of the plate in disdain. “They always have to screw something up,” he retorted unhappily.
A much more pleasant regular of mine sitting beside him appeared confused. “John, you don’t have to eat that part.”
I was livid. I brought out John’s second appetizer. He wasn’t satisfied with that, either. Next I brought him his main course - pork chops. By this time I was resigning my position as humble servant to his whininess and unreasonable nature. I walked past him several times, and noticed he had barely touched his pork chops. Without asking him the problem, I waited until the busboy had cleared his plate and asked him if he wanted dessert.
“The pork chops weren’t cooked enough,” he mumbled like a spoiled child, not even making eye contact. A legitimate complaint of course, but I couldn’t care less at this point.
“You should have told me,” I chastised him.
“You never came over,” he argued.
“I walked past you several times,” I sneered, and began to pour him a cup of coffee. Distracted by his tense energy, I had accidentally grabbed the pot of decaf. He began to wail in protest.
“Regular, regular, REGULAR!!”
I froze mid-pour and gawked at him in awe. “You don’t have to be so nasty,” I shot at him, furiously pouring him a cup of regular coffee.
He argued I was the one being nasty. I told him I certainly am not nasty, I’m at work and my job does not permit me to behave in the way I truly see fit. I slammed his cup of coffee onto the counter and did not return to him again for the remainder of the night. He had to obtain his check from the cashier. He left me his usual ten dollar tip, but promised the check out girl he would not be sitting with me again. “That’s ten dollars less that she’ll be getting from now on,” he remarked nastily.
When I began to think about it, I usually waited on John two nights a week at ten bucks a pop. He contributed to twenty dollars of my earnings every week. It was a significant amount, and I had been finding myself biting my tongue against his orneriness and suffering silently through his sexist attempts to turn me into some sort of geisha there to coddle his needs. I realized this man had held way too much power over me with his wallet and was beyond relieved my connection with him had been severed. I wasn’t paid company, I was a waitress - what he needed was an escort.
Of course, I still had a colorful array of other characters lining my counter - an incredibly wealthy yet cheap and frumpy old man Dominic, whom expected to receive everything for free, left me a two-dollar tip consistently and often told me I “should know better” if I made any error in satisfying his appetite; an always drunken man old enough to be my grandfather who would gape at me over his cup of coffee and tell me what he’d do to me if he were only 50 years younger; or a young bespectacled oddball often caught taking photographs of the waitresses with his phone that once chased me around the restaurant insisting he give me a chocolate bar.
He came in often, always ordered a Pepsi, took one sip only, and then asked for his check. His real reason for being there was to harass and frighten the female servers until we were all hiding in the kitchen. He already had restraining orders filed against him for following waitresses to their cars and was banned from several other diners in the area. After I refused to take candy from this definite “stranger”, he ate it himself then approached me to throw out the wrapper. I refused.
“I’ll do it,” my fellow server offered.
“No!” the customer shrieked. He snatched the wrapper back. “I asked her to do it!”
Needless to say, he was soon banned from our diner as well. A server also walked me to my car that night.
