"You think a lot of things when you're tired," Gary Cooper's sheriff says to Lloyd Bridges' character who's encouraging him to hop on a horse and leave town just as the bad guys are coming, a movie written, by the way, with the Hollywood blacklisting of 'communists' as a real background.

Sunday was the end of a long busy hard week at the Bistrot Wine Bar. Bastille Day, then big parties over the weekend, a lot of going at full gas. I brought in two copies of the book for co-workers of mine, presenting them to my two friends downstairs after service had began. The waitress chuckled at the picture on the back, "Is this from the '80s?!" "Yup," I said, nodding. "No!" "I know, cheesy, but that's when it was written." When you work in a restaurant you're used to keeping a sense of humor at the ready, about your own foibles as much as anything.

At the end of the night I found our venerable waiter Robert (row-BEAR) reading it at table 14 there by the window, as I made my way to the kitchen to spare the busboy from having to run the last desserts of the night, a pear tart and a creme brulée. "Hey, I am reading your book. I am waiting for my wife. It is good." I wrote an inscription for him, honoring his taking good care of everyone. He knows the many talents and eccentricities of restaurant people. He is a veteran. He has waited on Salvador Dali, and Sophia Loren and Jackie.

I come back the other way to go back upstairs, after Blanca has gone out of her way, just having finished cleanup to make dessert. "Now you have written your first book," he says in accented English. "Hey, you know, it's hard to do," speaking quietly above the peace of a dining room silent and empty at the end of the busy weekend. "All you go through, working, taking care of everything... a little drinking... the people you wait on," he smiles, honoring the accomplishment of one's first, a foundation, perhaps, to build on.

It's a good feeling to be understood. That's restaurant people for you.



Promoting a book is near the last thing you want to do after writing it. People dear to you have begun to read it, again, in its newest and final form. You feel bad about what you people through, for dredging things up, for addressing intricate matters. You wish to reemphasize that it's a work of fiction, and that they tell you in every writing class you ever take that you need TENSION, and so you take raw material and perfectly happy childhoods and basically exaggerate.

The aim was to show humanity, to respect a complexity in life. Maybe you did so awkwardly, without much sophistication, maybe downright clumsily and annoyingly. (But this is where a mensch comes from.)

As they also say in writing classes, if life were all hunky-dory, 100% peachy keen, everything all fine, then people wouldn't read, or write, books. On top of that you try to write good sentences, one after the other, with maybe a melodious ring now and again, a reflection on life.

But it is a highly complex thing, writing your first book, and you go through a lot, yes. And maybe somedays, you want to bury it, so that it won't be found for years and years.

Maybe that sense of things helps you move on to the next thing.

You go through a lot, working in a restaurant. Mentally, emotionally, physically. The heart pounds with anxiety some times. You can't unwind 'til it starts to be light out again. And then you sleep. And you don't get up early enough to do much more than stretch, have some green tea, and get ready for work, waiting for a day off, and recovery. As if life and professions had found a symmetry to that other side which is the writer's work, 'self-appointed,' as Frost said. And just like being in the restaurant business as a way of making a living, you're never certain you're doing, in fact the right thing; you just keep on doing, having not many other choices.



Victor Erofeyev has a good piece back in the December 27, 1999 issue of the New Yorker, about his father, the diplomat, and how he came to be a writer.