I worked as a waiter for a period of time in Middle Villiage, Queens. It's a black-hole of a neighborhood, just beyond the reach of the M train. Far enough away from the commercial center of the city that the inhabitants turn their backs on Manhattan and say things like "I'm from Middle Villiage". A bastion of incestuous ignorance fiercely guarded by the Italian-American populous and perhaps doomed for eternity due to its lack of a subway stop.
To be fair, I loved where I worked and the manager loved me back. I still think about the people that I used to work with once in a while. The waiter who trained me was an Italian guy named Simone. He was really Italian, though, not one of the Tony Soprano-wanna-be locals that frequented our quiet little restaurant. Simone was tall, skinny, and prone to giving advice. Simone never went to college and had been working in restaurants his whole life, so his advice wasn't like the advice that I was used to getting. It wasn't goal-oriented advice. It just vaguely related to his own meandering experience.
One day I was sitting outside during a slow lunch-shift, watching the cars go by on Metropolitan Avenue, and a guy in a shitty little gray car slammed in to a line of cars stopped at a light. It was a fender-bender, so no one was more than a little shaken-up. I can remember the guilty guy's sad, slow movements as he sat in his car realizing what the fuck just happened. I followed his eyes as he watched the man in the injured car jump out with his glasses hanging off his face and hurry to check on his small daughter in the back seat. It took about a second for his day to make a 180-degree turn for the toilet.
I was excited to tell Simone all about it when he showed up for the dinner-shift that night. I explained the scenario in vivid detail while he cleaned some wine glasses at the bar. He was surprisingly un-phased by my dramatic rendition of the afternoon's incident, although I've never been much of a story-teller. His response was pretty simple, "Billy, you remember the things I tell you right? Well... I used to think about pussy all the time, man. See what happens when you think too much about pussy?"
One day I was sitting outside during a slow lunch-shift, watching the cars go by on Metropolitan Avenue, and a guy in a shitty little gray car slammed in to a line of cars stopped at a light. It was a fender-bender, so no one was more than a little shaken-up. I can remember the guilty guy's sad, slow movements as he sat in his car realizing what the fuck just happened. I followed his eyes as he watched the man in the injured car jump out with his glasses hanging off his face and hurry to check on his small daughter in the back seat. It took about a second for his day to make a 180-degree turn for the toilet.
I was excited to tell Simone all about it when he showed up for the dinner-shift that night. I explained the scenario in vivid detail while he cleaned some wine glasses at the bar. He was surprisingly un-phased by my dramatic rendition of the afternoon's incident, although I've never been much of a story-teller. His response was pretty simple, "Billy, you remember the things I tell you right? Well... I used to think about pussy all the time, man. See what happens when you think too much about pussy?"