The Waiter, author of Waiter Rant and this week's guest blogger for Powells.com, writes about giving up his anonymity.

July 28, 2008:
Photo Shoot

It's 11:00 in the morning and I'm walking towards the intersection of Spring Street and Sixth Avenue in SoHo. It's a hot, humid day and sweat is already starting to soak though my polo shirt and khaki pants. Normally I wear t-shirts, shorts, and flip flops in this kind of weather, but today I'm meeting a photographer from an online magazine that’s running an article about my book. I have to look nice. I even shaved.

This is my first photo shoot as a published author. I'm excited, but I'm also ambivalent about having my picture taken. On a good day the camera makes me look like a constipated man on his way to the gallows. On a bad day? Don't even ask. But there's another factor that’s making me uneasy — people are finally going to see who I am.

For the past four and a half years I've been anonymously chronicling my exploits as a server in a white tablecloth restaurant on a website called Waiter Rant. I wrote under the nom de plume "Waiter" because I didn't want my customers to find out I was writing about them and start leaving me bad tips. But as the website grew more popular and attracted media attention that eventually resulted in a book deal, the effort to keep my identity under wraps became more intense. Remember that scene in film Munich where the paranoid Israeli spy's hiding in a closet with a loaded gun? Well, things weren’t that bad, but you get the picture.

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Bear found himself in the Twibels' driveway, surrounded by strangers. A dog on the porch was staring straight through him. What was up with that?

"I'd imagined so many scenarios," Bear tells Bagheera and Oreo, Zooey and Chester. "Not one included Fup running away the instant I showed up."

Ugh, their guts tell them. Bagheera and Oreo, Zooey and Chester — they know Bear, and they know that Fup came back to Portland, and yet each is beginning to realize that they don't know the half of it. How much do we ever know about our friends? So many blanks to fill in, infinite room for error.

"Fup tore the Doberman apart," Bagheera volunteers. He has no idea, of course, but that can't stop him from rooting.

Bear says, "When Fup took off into the woods, I froze. Was I supposed to follow her? It was an awful lot to process in just a few seconds."

"Duh," Oreo counters. "You had no choice. Tell me you followed her?"

At once they understand that five guys are present for the telling of this story. It's an awkward realization. Two dogs and three cats — Zooey and Chester, Bear, Bagheera, and Oreo, all of them guys. Might as well print it on their collars: Beyond the bluster, we haven't a clue what we're talking about.

"I followed her," Bear says. "Of course I did. But I'd hesitated, and by the time I ran, she'd disappeared. Then the Doberman barked. And then Bandit starting barking. And running. Was he coming after me? I didn't wait to find out."