On Pete, Which is Not His Real Name
Pete must have been about thirty-five years old, and he terrified me. We worked together as waiters in a little tourist town restaurant that served decent Italian food and overpriced wine. On summer nights, when the dinner rush came late if it came at all, we’d have several idle hours together, and I got to know him pretty well.
I’m sure he’d been good looking once, but now he was middle-aged and just holding on, though his vanity lived on in a million little ways. He carefully combed and sprayed his longish blonde hair in the men’s room before each shift, and took a little time between tables to make sure his uniform was just so.
He’d once been lead singer in a rock band, and he told me of his exploits. I don’t remember much about these. Mostly they were stories about girls he’d screwed after shows, and I was already too old to be impressed by these. The only one of his stories that I do remember is about the time he got so drunk during a show that he pissed himself on stage. He wore a perpetual sneer that might have come from those rock band days, but just looked pathetic and mean on a middle-aged man in a waiter’s apron.
He told jokes, unfunny jokes that he ended with his face shifting from the sneer to a forced smile and back again in just over a second and forced machine gun chuckle. Every joke had an undercurrent of rage because Pete was always angry.
Any little thing might set him off, a bad tip or a kitchen screw-up. He’d quietly bitch and threaten to quit, but these were small storms and I learned to ignore them pretty quick. They never involved me directly, and besides, he reserved most of his anger for his wife. Pete hated his wife. I don’t remember if he ever said so out loud, but he made it clear when he spoke with her. At least once a shift his phone would ring, and the conversation would begin with ice and gradually intensify to a fiery series of screams, after which he’d hang up and storm outside. When he returned a few minutes later, he’d recount the conversation in a way that made it clear that he’d be happier if she died before he got home.
It wasn’t his rage that frightened me. Rage is common as garlic in an Italian restaurant, so it hardly made him special among my co-workers. Yes, he was angrier than most, but the thing that frightened me was that Pete was a failure.
I was a decade younger than Pete, and already a failure myself. Like Pete, I’d had rock star dreams of a literary kind, but they were fading fast. I had no prospects and the future seemed to hold nothing but that was any different than his. Except for the one consolation was that no woman would ever want me enough to marry me, so I’d never have to hate my wife.
My own lack of self-awareness, or my careful self-denial, kept me from acknowledging the reason for my dread of Pete, but I must have thought about it some because otherwise I doubt I’d remember him at all.
Maybe Pete’s example is the reason I started making different choices about the way I lived my life and the way I pursued those rock star dreams. If so, then I owe him a debt of gratitude.
So thanks, Pete. You made a difference in my life, and I hope things got better for you, you miserable bastard.
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