Thank You, Eddie Deezen, For Showing Us All How Not to Treat Waitresses/People

Because I am fascinated by the myriad ways in which men are terrible I belong to a Facebook group called I Said I’m a Nice Guy, Bitch. 

It’s devoted to the sadly ubiquitous online phenomenon of clueless “nice guys” who see themselves as good people with solid values but who transform instantly, dramatically and predictably into bitter, hate-filled misogynists the moment they’re rejected. 

For these creeps, “niceness” is a mask, a pose, something to be haphazardly discarded if it doesn’t produce the desired effect. They’re not genuinely nice; they just want to be seen as inherently benevolent. 

As you might imagine, the “nice guys” exposed in this group tend to be random and anonymous, seriously misguided, short-tempered, easily-triggered fools who want desperately to get laid and/or find female companionship yet go about it the absolute worst way. 

But a celebrity of sorts recently entered the “I Said I’m a Nice Guy, Bitch” game with a vengeance in the form of character actor and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen, who is best known for playing exuberant nerds, geeks and Poindexter in cult fare like Grease, Grease 2, 1941, I Want to Hold Your Hand and Polar Express. 

Where it all went down, appropriately enough.

Deezen recently went viral when he subjected Facebook to an ALL CAPS rant about a beautiful, much younger waitress at a restaurant he frequented who wore false eyelashes that, unfortunately for the poor woman, seem to have found a place in the white-hot epicenter of Deezen’s sexual imagination. 

In a post he unwisely shared with the world, Deezen wrote about going to lunch every Wednesday at a restaurant where he was bewitched by a waitress (young enough to be his daughter, needless to say) with false eyelashes who he would tip twenty dollars (a magical number in his mind for some reason) and leave a note telling her she was beautiful and also a wonderful waitress and human being. 

Then one day Deezen went into the restaurant and the waitress wasn’t wearing the fake eyelashes he liked so much and praised so extensively. 

Deezen felt betrayed. Shattered. Disillusioned. What kind of a world do we live in where service workers don’t cater to the specific fetishes of every regular? He was so distraught that he decided to stop going to the restaurant and asked social media whether he owed her a note or “should I just end it off?” 

In order to end a relationship it has to begin in the first place. Despite what the 64 year old actor might want to believe, he and the waitress did not have a relationship: he was a customer and she was a waitress. That was it. That’s all it ever was. That’s all it could ever be. 

In now-deleted Facebook posts Deezen said that in his weekly notes complimenting the waitress on her appearance he also made sure to praise her personality and waitressing skills. How could he possibly be a creep if his unwanted, unsolicited notes to a waitress with no interest in pursuing a friendship or personal relationship with him didn’t exclusively dwell on her looks? 

When Deezen writes that the waitress in question wasn’t just unbelievably hot but also was nice and had a good personality what he unwittingly means is that she was able to fake a smile for the sake of professionalism until she wasn’t able to anymore. 

All it took for Deezen to go from thinking of his fantasy waitress as a nice person and kind soul to an evil parasite was responding to Deezen’s Facebook posts by acknowledging that his obsessive attention made her deeply uncomfortable and that the emotional/romantic connection he seemed to feel with her exists only in his vivid imagination. 

Deezen went directly from “I’m a nice guy” to calling the unfortunate object of his romantic obsession a bitch in so many words. 

What makes Deezen’s outburst of toxic masculinity even more unfortunate is that the veteran actor outed himself as a creep who objectifies and harasses women but specifically attractive waitresses in a whole different thread that might be even more embarrassing than the one that seems to have ended much of what was left of his career.

In this other thread, Deezen wrote about going to the local takeout place with his brother to get his mother her poached eggs and toast and a cup of hot cocoa for Deezen (the details really add a lot to the whole sad story). 

The joint in question employed a lot of attractive college students so Deezen told a waitress young enough to be his granddaughter, “You guys sure are pretty.” 

When Deezen’s comment was understandably met with silence he made things even more excruciatingly uncomfortable by leeringly joking, “Who runs this place, Hugh Hefner?” 

Reader, I hope you are sitting down and holding onto your monocles tightly because you are going to be SHOCKED by what happened next. 

the fun spell is over for all of us at this point, I’m afraid.

The waitress didn’t laugh at a stranger’s bawdy joke comparing her place of business to a bastion of old-school sexism where college-aged women posed naked for the prurient delight of horny men old enough to be their dads and grandads. 

Rather than simply take the L, Deezen wrote a long lecture he imagined subjecting the unimpressed 20 year old waitress to about how, if she wants to get by in the world as a straight woman she’ll need to learn to start using the “fake laugh” and “fake orgasm” as often as possible because that’s what the egos of men angrily demand and, in Deezen’s mind at least, deserve. 

It’s ironic to me that a man who poignantly does not understand that if an attractive waitress is nice to you that’s because being nice to people you can’t stand is literally half the job, and not a matter of the sexy waitress being in love with you and eager to start a romantic/sexual relationship, feels qualified to lecture anyone about HOW IT IS WITH MEN AND WOMEN THESE DAYS. 

Here’s the things, fellas: waitresses don’t you a goddamn thing beyond adequate customer service. They don’t have to laugh at your jokes. They don’t have to say thank you if you compliment their appearance. They don’t have to flirt with you or wear make-up or tight clothes. 

They don’t have to do any of that shit! And you should not expect them to, let alone angrily demand it of them. 

Waitresses and bartenders are professionally and economically obligated to at least try to be nice to people who don’t always deserve it but you should not take advantage of that. 

Eddie Deezen had the misplaced arrogance to think he could lecture the young people of today on how the world works and how you should treat people. 

Instead, the young people of today showed Deezen that the world works much differently now and that the consequences of acting otherwise and thinking that it’s the sacred obligation of attractive women to behave exactly how they think they should can be huge, both in terms of getting banned from local restaurants and getting a well-deserved reputation as a creep rather than the nice guy you incorrectly think you are. 

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