My Secret Identity Has Been Revealed

It's not easy wearing my secret identity mask to work every night, but I must. In order to maintain my Bitchy Waiter personae and not alert my co-workers to what I spend my free time on, I do it. True, my customers often question why I am wearing a black latex mask as I take their order and it;s fucking hot, but I cannot risk that someone uncovers my secret identity. At my "new" job where I have been for almost five months, I have not told a soul that there may or may not be stories about them posted on the Internet. I certainly don't need a retelling of The Restaurant That Shall Not Be Named and then I am forced to write an apology to the co-workers who read what I wrote about them. Awkward. But even Batman has a confidante. Sometimes I feel the urge to tell someone. And a few days ago, the urge got the best of me and I came out to someone at the new job.

I like this girl. She's smart, funny, efficient and most of all she has absolutely no problem making fun of customers with me as we stand in the dish room and check our cell phones while eating bread and butter. I had told her a couple of old war stories from my days in the trenches at Houlihan's when she discovered my Kryptonite. "Oh my God, you're so funny. You should totally write a book about waiting tables." Little did she know, she had just uttered the words that will unlock my secret identity to anyone. "Flattery gets you everywhere" is the understatement of the decade when it comes to me and my needy self. I pondered the possibilities of telling her about the blog. Could I trust her to keep the secret? Would she read it and then think I was some Bilbo Baggins asshole who supposedly gets people fired and cares not for the feelings of others? Maybe. I thought hard about it for a couple of weeks and finally decided that this young girl could be trusted.

One night at work, I called Ashley into the sidestand. No one was around. The owner/manager was doing paperwork, the other server was melting in the heat because said owner/manager never wants to turn on the air conditioning and the cooks were behind the line trying to out curse each other. "Ashley, I have something to tell you." We were behind the gauzy curtain that is meant to conceal the coffee maker in the sidestand but really all it does is serve as something for me to wipe my hands on when I refill the ketchup bottles. "Ashley, can you keep a secret?"

"Sure, I can. Why? What do you know?" I looked into her young, eager and innocent eyes and questioned spoiling her youth with my sordid tales of bitchery.

"My dear child. Before I go on, I need to know that I can trust you. What I am about to tell you can change your life forever. Can you assure me that what I am about to divulge will stay within this gauzy ketchup-crusted curtain?"

"Okay, sure. What?"

I took her left hand into mine. With my right hand, I pulled out my wine key and exposed the sharp pointy end and prepared to poke her index finger to draw some blood. I lit three candles and howled at the moon which retreated behind a dark storm cloud. A cold wind from the patio burst through the french doors and whipped our hair into unruly messes. (Truth be told, mine already looked like hell.) Mice scurried and cats fled. My plan was to then draw some of my own blood and share it with her to ensure her trust but then I decided that was too fucking nasty so we shared a piece of bread instead.

"So here's the deal. I write a blog called The Bitchy Waiter and I think you would like it but you can't tell anyone here about it because I don't want to get fired." I heaved out a sigh that made her question what the big deal was. I now had a partner in crime. When we work together, if she sees something that makes good blog fodder, she alerts me to it. When I post something new, she always lets me know that she read it. She knows my secret. She is the Alfred to my Batman, except she is not an old British man with gray hair who is my butler. She's just a cute a girl from Queens who knows my alter ego. And I like it that way. Hopefully she remains trustworthy and I won't have to drop her into a vat of boiling soybean oil after being dangled by a thin rope.

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