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Joseph Torra’s Call Me Waiter
Joseph Torra
Taxes (a year’s worth of receipts to sort out and tally up), poems I’m trying to write, a day-long gig up in North Jersey, Maisie’s 15 month checkup, laziness because it’s finally spring: My excuses for not posting for over a week. I read though, and particularly liked Joseph Torra’s new “autobiographical novel,” Call Me Waiter, just out from Pressed Wafer, a Boston-based small press run by the poet-editor-impresario Bill Corbett. Pressed Wafer publishes limited-edition broadsides and postcards and chapbooks of prose and poetry, which you can order directly by writing to 9 Columbus Square, Boston, MA 02116. I make a yearly donation to the press and get everything Corbett publishes; it’s a great deal for a lot of very good, handsomely-designed stuff coming at you in the mail all the time.
At 133 pages, Call Me Waiter is small for a novel, but no chapbook in scope. It’s an account of 20 years spent working as a bartender and waiter. Torra, who’s also a poet, writes wonderfully about work. Ron Silliman called one of his previous novels, Gas Station, “an extraordinary document…[Torra] has a real eye, not simply a literary one.” There are two kinds of writers, those who want to imitate literature, and those who want to imitate life, and the second kind are better, and Torra’s in the second category.
Torra’s anecdotal narrative, which tracks him from job to job, is fast, clear-eyed, full of insider information entertainingly delivered. He’s not particularly gentle with his characters, but he approaches them with a matter-of-factness which, however badly they behave, allows them their humanity:
Never the same after he owned the restaurant, Chub’s drinking increased and he became more of a brute dealing with the staff. He took on a girlfriend. Chub had married a hometown girl two or three years after we met and she was expecting their first child when Chub began fooling around with Erica. Erica was a plain-looking young woman, small and heavy who acted like she was thirteen. Nothing outstanding to commend her to guys her own age—but to Chub, never a looker, she was a princess.
Chub met Erica secretly for lunch. They went to her apartment for sex. At the end of the shift she sat down with Chub for dinner and the staff waited on them. After dinner she followed Chub out to the cocktail lounge where the regulars gathered to watch the game she rubbed Chub’s back as they swapped little kisses. Then one night while Chub and Erica were eating dinner, Chub’s wife Anne appeared with their six-month-old baby in her arms. She called each of them every name that they could be called then knocked the cocktail and water glasses all over them. Chub moved out of his house for about six months and then his wife let him back.
That feels like a mini-novel inside the bigger one—and this book of full of quickies like these. Isn’t that how we experience the novels of other people’s lives as we walk through our own, that is, glancingly, in a rush, no time for back-story, just lives and lives rolling by? The fight in the restaurant is like the tip of the iceberg, the rest of which is underwater: We know it’s there, but can’t see it. Maybe that’s a poet’s approach to narrative.
Torra is a plain-speak writer with a penchant for brusquely graceful spooling sentences which sometimes run on—as in the second paragraph above—to nifty effect. Elsewhere, a boss runs down a list of complaints:
The volume of his voice escalated with each phrase until he was screaming at the top of his lungs, banging his fist on the bar with his face turning blood red I thought he might have a heart attack.
The sudden slur of language, often happening where somebody’s getting excited, sounds colloquial, like someone recounting a story in a hurry, and calls attention to the act of writing itself. Naturalness and offhand artifice.
Descriptions of work from the inside, news of the restaurant industry—which sometimes seems like news from another planet—always makes for entertaining reading, though there’s less of it around than you might expect. What is around tends to read like amusing griping. Not Call Me Waiter. One reason for that is that is the melancholy that runs through the book, which has to do with the question of how to live as a writer, how to live honestly, how to make enough money, how to keep going when you hit mid-life. Questions, really, of how to make something of life at all.
Joseph Torra’s a writer who should be much better known.
Posted in Books, Group Blog on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 by Daisy Fried.
Comments (4)
Joe Torra should also be recognized for the extraordinary hand-made magazine he edited and published some years back, lift. Not only was it great reading, Joe brought together all sorts of very different people to do what many speak of and seldom accomplish: he helped create a community of writers and artists.
You can read some of the back issues here.
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Call Me Waiter is totally great — and so was lift, the very first magazine I was ever published in. (And then Joe and his wife Molly created the lift chapbook series which published my first chapbook.) I am eternally grateful. Joe’s — and Bill Corbett’s — dedication to art & friendship was the better part of my poetry education. Their mantra: “Just do the work!”
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“Call Me Waiter” is fantastic–totally gripping, funny, melancholy, an amazing conjuration of work and a period vibe and scene (Boston and environs in the ’70s and ’80s). The set-pieces are incredible, the characters and restaurants well-known to those who know (I don’t) but instantly memorable regardless–. Portrait of the Artist as a Young and not-so-Young Waiter: Congratulations Joe!
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This is a review I wrote for The Somerville News, Joe’s hometown. I live down the block from him in Somerville–Doug Holder
Call Me Waiter. Joseph Torra.
Call Me Waiter. Joseph Torra. (Pressed Wafer 9 Columbus Sq. Boston, MA $10)
Joe Torra, poet, writer, and publisher, has lived down the block from me in Somerville, Mass. for many years. For the longest time I have heard about his literary accomplishments, be it his critically-acclaimed novel “Gas Station,” his literary journal “lift,” his numerous poetry collections, etc… When I asked him what he was doing for a living he always told me that he was a waiter. Recently though Torra, a man in his 50’s, is now teaching at U/Mass Boston.
Now Torra and I have a few things in common. We are contemporaries, and like him I have always been involved in the writing life in one shape or form. Like Torra, I had many jobs that afforded me the time to write. I was never a waiter, but I worked as a dishwasher at the long-defunct Ken’s Deli in Copley Square, Boston in the 70’s, and I was a short order cook at the “Fatted Calf” in Boston, where I flipped burgers, and appointed little balls of cheese on the bloody pucks of meat. So I know what it is like to work in the food industry and it ain’t easy.
Torra, has written a memoir “Call Me Waiter,” that recalls his many years as a server and his struggle to establish himself as a writer. The waiter jobs he had were transient, grueling, often well-paid, and most importantly provided him with the flexibility to write. Torra writes of his slow ascent as a writer, and his vocation as a means to an end:
“My poetry was bringing a modicum of success and that is where I would put my energy. Poems were being accepted by various little magazines. After reading at the Word of Mouth, I also gave readings around the city. Friendships developed with writers I came in contact with. If it took working shifts in a restaurant at night to support this life, so be it.”
Torra goes into detail not only about his working life, but also about the subculture of restaurants: the gay waiters, the alcoholic managers, the sociopath cooks, the parade of grad students, artists, musicians, supporting their lifestyle, and pocketing tips. In this passage Torra describes the typical reaction when he tells people at work that he is a writer:
“I’m always bemused at the way they react when they find out I am a writer. It shouldn’t come as any surprise. There are probably more artists in the restaurant business, pound for pound, than any other industry, I’ve worked with jazz, rock, folk and classical musicians, sculptures, dancers, female impersonators, actor, singers, photographers, poets and novelists—I even worked with a guy who painted with spoons. Why else, they must wonder, would someone my age be doing this…?
I tell them . They look puzzled. If I publish novels what am I doing here? I attempt an abridged account of the publishing industry. They’re bewildered. Then a friendly grin, perhaps they figured it out—I can’t be much of a writer if I publish books and tend bar for a living.”
At the end of the memoir Torra realizes that he is at the end of the line with being a waiter, and cuts himself loose. Although frightened, he enjoyed a sense of freedom:
“I have no idea where I am headed, what the future holds. Images of working all night as a shelf stocker, a cab driver or variety store clerk cross my mind. I know I must remain out of the business no matter what it takes. Something is out there for me. Standing on bike pedals to stretch my legs, I feel like I am floating.”
“Call Me Waiter” is one of the better books I have read about the writing life. Torra has a workman-like style, that lays out the consuming need to write, and the need to support it anyway you can—no matter what, in a straight, no chaser fashion. Torra, born to a blue collar family in Medford, Mass brings a work ethic to his life and art that is a refreshing change from all the Left Bank, Iowa Writers Workshop stuff that lines the bookshelves.
Highly recommended.
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