Call Him Waiter: A Review of Call Me Waiter by Joseph Torra
For twenty-five years Joseph Torra “lived a life of a writer and a servant by night.” In his autobiographical novel, Call Me Waiter, Torra recounts his time in the restaurant industry, where he started to pay for school and which culminated in a collection of skills, experiences, and friendships earned through his hard work in various Boston-area restaurants. Yet, even as Torra looks back on a career that sustained him and his family, the reader is never subjected to a rose-tinted point of view. Torra’s honesty of memory is nothing like the waiter who might suggest to a guest that everything on the menu is recommended, that all the food served is delicious. The money kept Torra in the business, but it didn’t stop him from trying to leave. His first departure led to a position “as a substitute teacher . . . breaking up fights for forty-five dollars a day”; next, he worked digging and filling holes in “sheer drudgery” as a contract laborer. When he last took time off to spend with his family, it was the money that drew him again back into the apron. So when the reader questions whether Torra will go through with his departure plan this time—the book opening on the very day he puts his notice in—and quit for good, their reluctance in believing him is understandable. Torra certainly seems well-prepared for their doubt, recalling his times at restaurants filled with unassuming, eccentric, and sometimes dishonest people with the sort of clarity that is earned the hard way: the sort of clarity that might make staying in the restaurant business easier to handle. Blended into his narrative with a level of flawlessness is Torra’s writing history, from his discovery of Ginsberg and Kerouac to the publication of his several novels and books of poetry. Yet, at any point along his forked career a customer could be relied upon to exhibit the same banal response: asking how his writing’s going, when they’ll get to read the next great American novel, trying “to lend support, assure [him he’ll] write that bestseller yet and make it to the big time.” Yet perhaps no location could offer such sensationalist material for the imagination as a restaurant with its sex- and drug-induced bonding, and array of personalities set against the rigid social hierarchy. Torra’s time in the Umbagog Restaurant, Bonanza, The Greenhouse, The Public Library, The Seafood Emporium, Boylston Bistro, Tapas, Tulips, and other restaurants he didn’t work at long enough to remember certainly may have provided the proverbial fuel, but nothing was capable of extinguishing his creative fire like the customers. Their dissatisfaction with the food served (the dish almost always not what they’d expected), those looking to book a banquet and wanting a deal, their expectation to create their own menus, their insulting tips, and general expectation of being catered to by waiters in every plausible way, be they writers or not, the customers became a drain on Torra’s passion in both spheres: job, and writing. Yet, as evidenced by Torra’s literary success, something about the environment must have been favorable. So when the reader ponders whether or not he will withdraw his notice before the month at Tulips is up, the apprehension is shared: Torra’s belief that “something is out there for [him],” yet he has “no idea where he is headed, what the future holds,” is communal. We’ve been with Torra on that quiet road once “the flow [of traffic] goes by.” We know how it feels to tear our eyes from the familiarity, the safety, caught in our rearview mirrors and fix them on that something in the distance which may very well never materialize, but is nonetheless worth the drive. Visit Pressed Wafer on the web.
Born in Scotland and raised in South Africa, Erin McKnight now lives in Dallas. In 2006 she joined The Rose & Thorn Literary Journal as an assistant editor in fiction and nonfiction, and is a writing instructor for the Long Story Short School of Writing. Her writing has appeared in: Siren: A Literary & Art Journal, Ginosko Literary Journal, DiddleDog, The Bergen Street Review, The Flask Review, Flashquake, PRECIPICe, Why Vandalism?, and The Houston Literary Review, among others.
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