An Ode to Cheaters

As a waitress I often get the sense that some people think they’re the smartest and sometimes only intelligent people in the room. It’s as if they think the rest of us are too stupid to notice the wedding ring around their finger, that the woman next to them is different than the one they brought in two days ago and that I should be honored (because the date that they’re on is not going well and while she’s in the bathroom it’s totally the perfect time to ask me over) that they want to take me home. Even though my hair smells like French fries; the gentleman in them is willing to overlook it. The words, “My wife is out of town,” have just never really done it for me.

Do some servers actually go home with customers? I guess it must happen or we wouldn’t get asked. Sure I’ve dated patrons, but I’ve never looked at someone who was completely blotto and thought I should follow them back to their residence; unless I thought they deserved to have their wallet lifted and would pass out before they could lay a hand on me.

In real life most married men are thoughtful enough to take off their wedding rings and flip over their cell phones so you can’t see the photo of their wife on the screen. However, when you’re the one serving them you don’t get these sorts of courtesies. There’s this phenomenon that I like to call “the last vagina in the bar.” All of the female patrons have since blacked out and been piled into cabs, the other waitress is holed up either doing her cash-out or doing blow off the paper towel dispenser or both (it will never cease to amaze me that a drug as expensive as blow will be done in as many filthy locales as the person holding the eight ball of it can think of), so it’s just you and a bunch of men that you’re regretting not cutting off.

I don’t pull my punches anymore, hit on me and I’ll tell you that I think you’d be too drunk to do anything about it if I came home with you. Leave your wedding ring on and I’ll be all too happy to tell you that it makes me want to hang myself. What are you going to do? Complain to my boss that I didn’t handle your sexual harassment in an upstanding manner? As the years go on I find that my patience gets thinner with this. I’m sick of the phenomenon that happens when you put a name-tag on someone and have them hand out beer and suddenly all sense of decorum goes out the window.

Frankly I enjoy it when people bring in women who clearly aren’t their wives to their local watering holes. Do you honestly think that bad tips and years of verbal abuse is going to make me keep my mouth shut the next time you bring the mother of your children in? I’m not above telling you how nice it was to see you in here with your daughter the other day and let your wife figure it out. I’ve often thought it would be a good racket to hawk the camera footage of men out on an afternoon of infidelity. “Well you see ma’am, I’ve got just the thing to help you win that court case.” I may be a lot of things, but I’m not stupid.

My favorite story perhaps is that of a man, that we shall call Frank, who used to come in often with another man’s wife. The couple would have a few rounds and then leave, and it was a pretty regular schedule for a while. Until the woman’s husband burnt Frank’s house down.  

It was then that I learned of Frank’s own wife and his three children. I was terribly curious to know where they spent the winter while Frank slept in an arctic sleeping bag and spent the winter fixing up the place. It had seemed like a strange sort of karma to me at the time, particularly because no one ever caught the arsonist. Frank kept coming in and telling me about his progress—he’d rejoiced when he’d been able to get the heat finally going in February—though suddenly his girlfriend was nowhere to be found.

He liked to hit on me too, telling me about a six month contract he had in Louisiana and that he wanted to bring me along. This was further complicated by the fact that we were not so distantly related. “What if I get pregnant or something and the kid ends up with a cleft palette?” I’d joked.

There had been a long pause afterward and he’d said, “Don’t you think I have money to fix things like that?” It was the first time I’d ever heard his voice border on hurt. I’d actually pictured it then, me swollen and pregnant in a Louisiana swamp somewhere, standing in the shallows and waiting to be eaten.

A number of months after that I saw Frank again, sporting a tan and sitting across from his girlfriend;  I wondered then what he had left to set on fire, if maybe the bar would go up in smoke one night or I’d see flames up the street, bursting from the windows of Frank’s elderly sports car.