Poem of the Week 2014/36

Here's one for Labor Day:

Busboy and Waitress: Cashing Out

I sip my free drink with Karen,
my uniform stained with slop
from scraped plates, a rancid buffet.
I close my eyes and try to sigh
deep enough. I hear her splash
change onto the counter,
rustle her bills.

My face is tired, she says.
Her own stains: a businessman's
crude remark, the visual undressing,
some old ladies who stayed forever
then stiffed her. I wait
for her to shove a little money my way,
nodding, listening – part
of what I'm paid for.

Jim Daniels

Often when I see dramas set in offices, I feel as if I'm seeing not an actual office but some strange fairy-tale land, in which the monsters are real and so is the camaraderie and the sense of importance and adventure. I cannot take those works seriously as depictions of actuality. Perhaps the working world is of its nature inimical to dramatic representation: how can an art form limited to a few hours and dependent on concentrated and significant action and dialogue and on human connection truly capture an experience which is fully revealed only after many grinding humdrum years of day-in, day-outness in an inhuman corporate machine, many years of emotional explosions and crises and emergencies that all end up meaning nothing, in which even friendly relations tend to evaporate when cubicles are moved apart. . . . it's not totally impossible, but rarely do I find the combination of Kafka and Beckett who can capture what it's like in Office-Land.

This poem is, of course, not about an office, but Daniels gives us a vivid, revealing, and truthful vignette of the working life. You feel that if you walked past this restaurant after closing time you might spot these two inside, bent over the counter under a single stark light, an Edward Hopper painting come to life. They are the sort of workers who generally get taken for granted: a waitress and the even more anonymous busboy (her name is given; his is not). There are the treasured little perks that really don't cost the bosses that much, like the free drink (it sounds as if they are allowed only one). There is also the literally dirty reality: even in offices, in which the stale air is usually overheated, you sweat, but the speaker here, a busboy, is doing physical labor, which stains the uniform he has to wear. (There's always a scene in a certain type of high school or college rom-com in which our hero, who is forced to wear some ridiculous get-up for his restaurant job, is shamed when he is spotted wearing same by the girl he adores and his rival, who is usually the school's top jock; these scenes go back to Buster Keaton in College. Aside from military personnel and athletes, we don't really prize jobs that require uniforms; back when suit-and-tie was required wear for men in offices, the wannabe rebels – the cubicle cowboys – would refer to these clothes contemptuously as their uniform.)

The restaurant isn't even particularly good: the buffet is "rancid," the food scraped off the plates is "slop." It's not expensive; it's frequented by generic office-workers (the sort of businessman who insults waitresses) and by old ladies who take up a table for hours and then don't even tip the waitress. When Karen empties her pockets, there is the rustle of bills, but also the clang as she digs out all the coins and drops them on the counter – clearly if there is enough small change for it to "splash" out like this, she's not making a whole lot of money off of tips (which are, of course, considered a major portion of a restaurant worker's wages, to make up for their low salaries). Even her face is tired. He cannot sigh deeply enough to plumb the depths of sighing needed by their day.

I love the concise depiction and the truth of the relationship between these two: we have a woman and a man alone together, day after day, and they have a sympathetic, perhaps even friendly, bond, but there's no teasing sense of romance, or even the possibility of romance, as there usually is in workplace dramas – you feel that the busboy, at least, will eventually move on, and maybe she will too (though who knows whether either one will end up in a place that's in any way better), and they'll mostly forget each other. She's letting out her frustrations to him, and he's listening and commiserating with her, but this isn't pure kindness: there's hierarchy even here, and he's aware that providing this outlet is part of his job; if she gets little money, he probably gets less – while listening and nodding, he's also "waiting for her to shove a little money" his way.

Jim Daniels is a contemporary American poet. I took this poem from the anthology For a Living: The Poetry of Work, edited by Nicholas Coles and Peter Oresick.