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.