Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (23 page)

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unless the customer was standing right in front of the bartender and watching him pour, call liquors were magically transformed into well liquors. If patrons knew that this was going on, they didn’t seem to care. A dollar drink is tough to beat, even if it is watered down. Usually, I averaged a 100 percent tip on each one of these drinks. Although we had specific stations, the crush of people was so great inside the bar on these nights that we could count on doubling our tips just from people who were wandering the floor waiting for a place to sit. But money aside, dollar night was absolute madness. A typical interchange went something like this:

Customer pulls on my sleeve, taps me on the shoulder, or waves frantically.

I say, “What can I get for you?”

Customer, who can’t hear me because the music and the din of voices drowns everything else out, says, “Hey, can I get a drink?”

I shout, “What can I get for you?”

Customer can finally hear me but still feels he has to move his mouth precariously close to my ear and says, “Hey, how much is a screwdriver?”

I roll my eyes and shout, “Everything’s a dollar!”

“How much for a beer?”

“One dollar!”

“I’ll have a beer and a screwdriver. That’s two dollars, right?”

“I can only bring you one drink at a time.”

“What?”

“I can only bring you one.”

“One what?”

“OK!” I scream. “I’ll be right back!”

But the customer is not finished. He grabs me again as I’m turning toward the bar and shouts with such force that he sprays me with spit, “Hey,
smile
!”

Unlike Le Jardin, which was a haven for lonely men looking to fall into the bottoms of their glasses, The Columbia was an
active meeting place for singles. Somehow, this was no less depressing than what went on at Le Jardin. Again it seemed to me that I was surrounded by an awesome loneliness. Fortu
nately, I was usually too busy to focus on the mating dances around me. Nevertheless, the feeling of desperate, forced gaiety in that bar was one that stayed with me forever and I am reminded of it each time I so much as smell an alcoholic drink.

Working at The Columbia had certain advantages. Unlike the other jobs I’ve had serving cocktails, The Columbia was usually too loud and crowded for patrons to really get personal with the cocktail waitresses. Touching aside, customers couldn’t make themselves heard with rude comments, so most times they opted just to communicate their orders.

Surprisingly, the rudest customers I’ve ever encountered were in the cocktail area of an upscale restaurant where I worked many years later. Here patrons had much more money, much more free time, and much less human decency. When I worked cocktails in this restaurant, I found that after the first tip, and it was usually quite meager, the customer felt he had purchased me for the evening and expected service bordering on slavery. I also received some comments bordering on harassment, such as the ones I got from three golfers one evening. After a few beers, these three men started asking all kinds of personal questions about what kind of men I liked to date, how old I was, and whether I liked to go skinny-dipping. I finally cut them off and passed them over to the bartender after one of them stared hard at my breasts as I placed his beer in front of him and said, “Are those real?”

The Columbia also had the advantage of being quite prof
itable. Most nights I collected so many bills it took an extra half hour to count them all when I cashed out. I was averaging over a hundred dollars in tips on dollar-drink nights, which was very good money at that time. Often I would limp home at two in the

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morning and be too wired to sleep but too exhausted to undress or even move. I’d throw all my singles, fives, and tens on my bed on those nights and just lie there in a pile of money. The green bills, smelling vaguely of gin and beer, were visceral reminders of why I had just spent the night beating myself up. Unfortunately, at the age of twenty-four, I felt like I was already too old to keep up the pace it took to maintain that kind of cash flow. When I calculated that I was making about a dollar a drink and then thought of how many drinks it took to reach the hundred-dollar mark, the work-to-profit ratio didn’t seem very good at all.

I hadn’t been working at The Columbia very long, however, before I started having problems that overshadowed those of the job. As quickly as it had blossomed, my relationship with John was beginning to unravel. I have never been able to put my fin
ger on the exact reason why it came apart so rapidly. Perhaps part of it was the fact that we hadn’t allowed ourselves sufficient space to step back and evaluate whether or not we were truly compatible. We had both leaped headlong into the relationship with our feelings unguarded and exposed. We had been so caught up in the thrill of each other that when some basic differ
ences began to surface, we were both surprised and disap
pointed. I believe that for a time we were really in love with each other. But it soon became apparent that love (by whatever defini
tion of the word) was not going to be enough to keep us from trying to change each other to more closely resemble what we expected or wanted to find in a mate.

It was John who pointed this out while we were having lunch one day. Over dessert, he told me that he thought we should stop seeing each other for a while and then see how we felt. I saw this as his way of trying to dump me “nicely” and walked out of the restaurant in tears.

The next few weeks at The Columbia were almost impossi
ble. I was nursing my own broken heart while watching others
start drunken liaisons. It had been less than a year since my last birthday, a day that had found me taking stock of all that was missing in my life and vowing to move on. Such a short period of time later, I found myself missing even more. I had embarked on a “real” relationship, only to see it burn into cinders. This loss, which ran deeper than the physical absence of John, had left me even lonelier than before. At Molto’s, at least I had counted some of my coworkers as friends. In exchanging this job for the one at The Columbia, I’d lost that camaraderie as well. My coworkers at The Columbia were truly a hard-living crowd. There was not one among them I could really connect with. And, I had to face it, I really hated my job. I saw a reflection of deep misery in the face of everybody I served. Cocktailing and that old feeling of raw desperation were now interchangeable.

It became supremely difficult for me to serve alcohol while in this state. I started getting upset over things that had never both
ered me before. For example, it was par for the course for an ine
briated customer to claim that I’d brought the wrong drink by the time I got it to the table. Most of the time, the customer himself had forgotten what he’d ordered. Usually I’d just ignore the com
plaint and keep going, but I began taking it very personally and finding myself on the verge of tears every time it happened.

Up to this point, too, I had experienced a certain elation after every shift. It was the kind of endorphin-based euphoria that I’d felt since my days in the luncheonette. After a hard night’s work, I’d feel that I’d successfully completed a singularly demanding task. In a way, it felt as if I’d conquered the odds. But a few weeks after my breakup with John, I ended my shifts with only a feeling of depression. The odds, it seemed, were conquering me.

Besides the psychic disturbances, I was experiencing some brand-new physical discomforts. The late nights, cigarette smoke, and close quarters seemed to be getting to me. I felt exhausted all the time and vaguely nauseated. The sight of the one-armed cook

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smoking Marlboros over the onion rings, alone, threatened to make me vomit.

It was Belinda (on whose shoulder I’d regularly been crying) who gave voice to what should have been obvious.

“You’re not pregnant, are you?” she asked.

“Well,” I answered, “
that
would certainly make things inter
esting, wouldn’t it?”

Belinda and I went shopping for a home pregnancy test at an all-night supermarket at midnight. She’d come into The Colum
bia and drunk scotch and milk until I finished work. There was something surreal about the whole adventure. We stood in line with several transients buying fortified wine and she babbled on about how exciting it was, what was I going to tell John, would I want a boy or a girl. . . .

“It’s probably all moot, because I don’t think I’m pregnant,” I told her, realizing as the words left my lips that I most defi
nitely was.

“Want me to come over tomorrow morning?” she asked. “I could be there with you when you take the test.”

“That’s OK,” I told her. “I’ll call you and let you know.”

The following morning I sat by myself for a long time watch
ing the sky change from white to dusty to the gunmetal color of rain. It was only December and already one of the wettest winters I could remember. I stared at the results of the pregnancy test for thirty minutes while I held a blanket around my cold feet. Too many thoughts had crowded themselves into my head, and all I could hear was the brain equivalent of white noise. I picked up the phone and dialed Belinda’s number. It was very early for cock
tail types like us and she answered the phone sleepily.

“Well,” I told her, “it looks like I’m going to be somebody’s mother.”

[ ]

se ven

in the family wa
y

If work at The Columbia
was difficult before, it became just about impossible soon after I learned I was going to have a baby. I finally confided in Sherry, another cocktail waitress, and told her that I didn’t know quite what to do. Sherry was rail thin with a witchy shock of curly red hair. Of all my coworkers, she seemed the most competent, energetic, and articulate. It had been Sherry, in fact, who had helped me through my first Buck Night, taking me over to the bartenders before the shift began and telling them to be extra patient with me since I’d never “worked the meat market before.”

“How exciting!” she gushed. She was my age and already had two small children she was raising without the benefit of a husband.

“Exciting, yes,” I told her, “but I’m thinking that maybe this isn’t the best environment in which to grow a new life.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she said, taking a deep drag from her cigarette, “you’ll be fine.” She smiled as if to reassure me. “I’ve just got one piece of advice,” she added. “When you have the baby, make sure they give you an episiotomy. That way they can sew you up
tighter
than before. Know what I mean?” She winked, nudged me, and put out her cigarette. “Back to work, then.”

I didn’t find Sherry’s advice the least bit comforting, and every day the smell inside The Columbia (a combination of alco
hol, grease, cigarette smoke, and bar fruit) grew stronger and more oppressive. On a few nights, the only thing that kept me from running to the bathroom was the fact that it smelled even worse in there.

I’d gone into something of a “one day at a time” mode since discovering I was pregnant. I had a suspicion, before ever speak
ing to John, that I’d probably be marching into parenthood alone. We had ended our relationship on bad terms and he was in no way interested in a reconciliation. We hadn’t so much as spoken to each other for weeks. I was almost positive that he had very little room in his future plans for me, much less a child. Given these misgivings, I decided that I could probably manage without John’s active participation. My family’s reaction to the news, on the other hand, would be critical. I knew I would be lost without their support. I broached the subject as diplomati
cally as I could at a family dinner.

“You know, I think that possibly I might be . . . that is, I think there’s a chance I could maybe be pregnant,” I said. In the silence that followed, I added, “And I need to know how you all feel about that because I’m going to need your help.”