Afterthought: New York
By ALAN BRIEN
MY dossier on New York waiters, probably the surliest and stroppiest in the Western world, con- tinues to swell towards bursting. But I think they are better images of their city than that journalistic favourite—the taxi-driver. The majority of them give the impression of being men who have been drafted into the job by a Labour Board during a period of martial law and are only waiting for the end of the emergency to get back to a really con- genial occupation such as slum demolition or debt-collecting. The transport strike, which has cut down the custom of most restaurants to a quarter of normal, has simply arranged that the diner is now ignored by half a dozen waiters instead of the usual one. They approach your table like a posse of male nurses in a mental hospital about to make the bed around and about and above the somnolent body of a patient under heavy sedation. If you speak to them while in the process of this ritual, they will often stop and stare everywhere but at you, as if they were trying to reassure themselves that they are not being addressed by a pillow or mattress. It is usually ten minutes before they return with a menu, when they now adopt the stance and expression of busy, overworked specialists who are about to listen to a hypochondriac whining for sympathy.
Most New Yorkers have so adjusted to this treatment that they no longer notice that their relationship with the waiter is that of a smuggler to a customs officer—as if the laws of the land were being grudgingly bent in their favour as a special concession to allow them to import a helping of food. The British visitor, who asks
only for a momentary illusion of equality be- tween seller and buyer, appears to be insisting on some feudal privilege only slightly less outrageous than the droll de seigneur.
I find myself continually cast in the role of a grammar-school Randolph Churchill, a blustery champion of socialist free enterprise in a city of capitalist bureaucracy. Sometimes the waiters' tactics, in small chic places, take on the elaborate, ironic edge of an undergraduate joke. At the next table to me the other day, a BOAC pilot ordered a bottle of beer with his French dish and we all watched as it was served to him in a tall, silvery, pedestal bucket of ice. Throughout the meal, a waiter constantly hovered over that beer, pouring it in tiny portions and fluffing up the ice to keep it well chilled to the last drop. It was not that the management felt the tone of the place was lowered by serving any drink but wine, but that it felt cheated by serving any cheap drink instead of wine. At my table, we were slugging a red Burgundy. But at all the others, without exception, the customers were sticking to cocktails, American fashion, as a prophylactic against tasting the food, without in- curring the reproach of being barbarians.
It would be tedious to instance all the provo- cations to dyspepsia encountered while eating out in Manhattan. The waiter who cannot con- ceal his indignation at the effete Limey fussiness which will not accept a Californian Muscatel as a substitute for a French Muscadet or the pedantic European obstinacy which denies that Soave Bolla can be classed as a white Burgundy. The law of supply and demand has obviously been repealed in vast areas of this metropolis. Though a deep, hard core of poverty can be glimpsed continually beneath the glossy, shellacked surface—half a million of the city's eight million inhabitants live on national assis-
tance—it is rare to find anyone who behaves as if his job depended on his efficiency at it. This. is the homeland and the heartland of the universal tip. But it is given like a tax and extracted like a fine. It is as though the whole hierarchy of. employment had been settled according to some Hindu caste system which guaranteed each per- son a perpetual place in his appointed layer, without fear of falling, but equally without hope - of rising Only luck, the random spin of the tumblers in the economic computer, can prise an occasional individual cog out of its place.
All the faults of the welfare state, as imagined by classical economists, can, in fact, be found in this Empire City of free enterprise. The average New York wage-earner does not behave as if he felt himself participating and sharing in the rewards of an expanding economy. His em- ployers do not enjoy the thrill of risking capital to reap dangerous profits. When business is threatened by one of the natural hazards of cut- throat competition, such as the current strike, both sides assume that their standard of living should be protected by by the intervention of a Hero in a White Cadillac—a Mayor or a Presi- dent. The commercial pressure groups complain that the city's businesses are losing $100,000,000 a day, but almost none of them is willing to adopt the traditional measure of lowering prices to encourage sales. They refuse to pay em- ployees to stay at home, but instead increase costs by hiring transport, or meeting taxi bills, which then are added to the price of staying open for customers who do not appear.
If the richest city in the world had given its workers a week's free holiday last week, the effect on the morale of the strikers would have been devastating. They would have become the only people in New York out of work and out of pocket. Those who most hate the imprisoned union leader, Mike Quill, who spat on him, as he was arrested, who telephone threats to his hospital ward, who write to the papers demand- ing that he be (literally) put to torture, are the same proletarians who would be solidly behind him if only he were their union boss. There is no class solidarity and no metropolitan patriot- ism among the citizens. There seems little realism and pragmatism among the politicians. The only commentator who could understand New York at this moment would be an expert in the economic life of ancient Rome. Here is a huge complex of unimaginable wealth and desperate poverty, which spends $1,300,000 a day paying off its municipal debts, forced to a standstill by having only motor-cars to travel in.
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