"After all, what is anxiety but fear without an object?" --Spalding Gray

Maybe it's because I say "thank you" too often. Maybe it's because I apologize too much. Maybe it's because no matter how little attention I pay to my personal grooming, I will always look like a patrician snob. Whatever the cause, the condition remains: I have the rare ability to alienate waiters and waitresses without saying a word.

Usually, their disapproval takes the form of subtle disdain: the rolling of eyes, a sharpness of tongue, the slamming of plates. Sometimes it's blatant hostility. Every time I enter an unfamiliar restaurant, though, I'm gripped by fear that the transaction between me and my server will become a hell of tension, acrimony, and contrition before the salad even shows up. Actually, "fear" is the wrong word. This is anxiety.

For the purposes of this confession, I'll make a conservative estimate and say that I eat 90 percent of my meals in restaurants. This means that of the 21 meals I supposedly consume in a given week, around 19 of them involve some kind of give and take with a server. You'd think by now that I'd have learned how to please them, or at least learned how to become invisible. No such luck. Instead, I have learned to cower in the shadow of the hand that feeds me. A fair first assumption about the root of this problem might be that I look down on food servers, but this is not the case. Quite the contrary: I revere them.

Wait staffers have insanely difficult jobs, which they do for long hours, low pay, and the condescension of people who look forward to any opportunity to lord anything over anyone. I have always hated waiter-baiters, the same way I hate anyone who behaves rudely for the purpose of vindicating a shallow, meaningless life. I hate it when people say "I want" or "Give me" instead of "I would like" or "Could I have." I despise the blustery entitlement of restaurant patrons with everything I am.

I cringe when people complain about their orders. I would rather run 1,000 miles through hot lava and then dive naked into a pool full of bees than send a dish back to the kitchen. Irrational? Perhaps. On those rare occasions when something is so off that I can't eat it, I'm the one who begs forgiveness for even bringing it up, for causing a fuss, for even being there. I'm sorry. I am. But why? I hate to admit it, but as with most neuroses, it begins in childhood.

Like most children of divorce, I ate a lot of restaurant food as a youngster. By the time I was five years old, the booth of a diner was just about the only place my parents could stand to be together. My grandmother--the haughtiest of the haughty--was a frequent dinner companion, which made the atmosphere of familial discord even thicker. Add a waitress to the picture and you have the recipe for disaster.

Check, please!

These are some of my earliest memories, and the old dynamics leap to the fore of my tender little subconscious every time I pick up a menu. I'm still ashamed, and it's either projection or transference that makes me anxious that servers everywhere are on the lookout for revenge. To those who treat me kindly, I offer eternal gratitude. To the others, I'm sorry, truly sorry. About everything. I'll try to do better next time.