Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (22 page)

“Are you going to school?”

“You got a boyfriend?”

There was a little game that went along with the cocktail ser
vice on these tables. I’d take the order, arrive back at the table with the drink, and set it down on the table. Most of the time, the customer would position himself so that I’d have to lean over him to get the drink within reaching distance. I’d ask if he wanted to run a tab or pay as he went, and he’d ask, “How much do I owe you?” I’d tell him and he’d pull out a large bill from which I’d make change. The customer would then fan the change out on the table, indicating that one of the bills was meant for me, but before he’d give me the tip, he’d ask one of the above questions. I’d have

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to answer, and the conversation started rolling. How long the dia
logue went on depended on how eloquent I was feeling on a par
ticular night, how drunk the customer was, and how personal the questions got. Usually we’d go back and forth a bit before he was satisfied, at which point he’d select a bill from the pile on the table and place it on my tray. The most talented customers would drink as they talked so that by the time there was a lull in the conversation, they could ask me for another drink and start the process over again.

I got be very creative at Le Jardin in the scant few months I worked there. Sometimes I was still going to school, studying psy
chology, biology, even archaeology. I was going to be a dentist, inte
rior designer, chef. I was never single. Sometimes I had a boyfriend who was a childhood sweetheart. Sometimes I had a husband who was a policeman. Occasionally, I had children. Twins. The specifics of these tales were irrelevant. All the customer ever heard was “unavailable,” and he stopped listening after that.

Often, the customer shared his own story with me. These tales were striking in their similarities. Wives who had lost inter
est. Ungrateful children. Divorce. Le Jardin wasn’t the type of place where people came to celebrate. It was more a place of quiet desperation. Alcohol was the common theme and the great equalizer. When I worked with Belinda, I was sometimes able to have a laugh or two at how pathetic our customers seemed. Most of the time I was just struck with a sense of the over
whelming loneliness around me.

Although my experience at Le Jardin was still fresh enough to provide vivid memories, I was sure that The Columbia was a different type of establishment altogether. There was a younger crowd here, I thought, one that was surely less lonely and less desperate.

The application process at The Columbia closely resembled an open audition. I arrived at the appointed hour to find all of
the front tables filled with cocktail hopefuls, busily filling out their applications. I counted at least twenty young women sit
ting poised, pens in hands, waiting for an interview. It was easy to understand why this position was such a coveted one. The Columbia was one of the most popular, busiest places in town. An old establishment, it had survived several changes in identity, going from bohemian to preppy, sophisticated to sloppy, and back around again. Part of The Columbia’s draw were its twice-weekly dollar-drink nights. Tuesdays and Saturdays, patrons could be found lined up around the block waiting to get extremely drunk for as little money as possible.

The Columbia’s bartenders also put on quite a show for guests every night of the week. The bartenders were all large, brawny men who tossed bottles of liquor back and forth, spun glasses, and poured drinks in seconds without ever spilling a drop. They were able to prepare several orders at a time, includ
ing those shouted at them by cocktail waitresses and those they read from the lips of patrons across the smoky room.

I’d logged many hours at The Columbia, and all of them flashed across my mind in Technicolor when I walked in there to fill out an application. The bar had been one of the meeting places of choice when I was in college, and later I’d spent time there with both Belinda and Deane after our shifts in the Dining Room.

I was waiting in line for my chance to speak to one of the managers conducting interviews when I felt a tap on my shoul
der and turned to see a very familiar face.

“Hey, what are you doing here?” Belinda said.

“Same as you,” I answered, looking at her application. I hadn’t seen Belinda since I’d left Le Jardin a few months before. Both of us, it seemed, had gotten very busy doing nothing. We caught up with each other as we sat and waited. I told her about John and she told me that she’d recently met someone with whom she

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was getting very serious. I filled her in on what had been hap
pening at Molto’s and she reminded me of the various times we’d crawled out of the very place in which we were currently trying to get hired.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we ended up working together again?” she asked. I agreed that it would, but I was doubtful that I’d get the job. I had little direct experience cocktailing. Some
body like Belinda had a much better chance.

I was interviewed by a harried woman of indeterminate age wearing expensive clothing and too much eye makeup.

“Are you willing to work very late hours?” she asked. “Some
times we don’t get out of here until two or three in the morning.”

“That’s fine,” I told her. “I want to work late.”

“Do you think you can carry up to six full beer glasses at a time?”

“That’s definitely not a problem.”

“You don’t have any back problems, do you? There’s a lot of lifting.” She eyed me carefully. “You’re kinda little,” she added.

“It’s not a problem unless I have to reach anything on the top shelf,” I said, pointing to the towering bar.

“Why’d you leave Molto’s?”

“I needed a change of pace.”

“What about Le Jardin?”

“It was very slow there. I really couldn’t make enough money to justify staying on.”

“What’s the difference between a martini and a Gibson?”

“Martini has an olive, Gibson has an onion.”

“Which has more alcohol, a glass of red wine, a bottle of beer, or a shot of scotch?”

“They all have the same alcohol content.”

“OK,” she said. “Thanks for coming in. As you can see we’ve got quite a few applicants here, so it’ll take a while to get through the interviews. But we’ll definitely let you know.”

Belinda and I left together and went out for coffee. Belinda was sure she had nailed her interview. I was sure I had failed mine. A few days later, the woman who interviewed me called and offered me a job. Strangely, Belinda never got a call.

I suspected that I was in over my head at The Columbia immediately, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit that I’d made a mistake. I understood right away why the manager, Donna, had wanted to know if I had any back problems. Unlike Le Jardin, where I’d barely had to balance more than two drinks at a time on a tray, the high volume at The Columbia necessitated that I carry several orders at once. The weight wasn’t so bad in itself, but trying to navigate the crowded bar without spilling anything required a combination of both grace and skill.

Donna’s comment about my size took on new meaning as well. As the course of an average night at The Columbia wore on, patrons became drunker and less inclined to move out of the way of fast-moving cocktail waitresses. Customers would some
times be stacked up three deep at the bar and I’d have to fight my way through them to pick up my drinks. Once I’d filled up my tray with orders, I’d have to turn around and bully my way out again. Every cocktail waitress at The Columbia carried her tray aloft over her head. When I first saw this, I was sure I’d never be able to do it, but the first time I was jostled badly enough so that my drinks went sloshing all over my tray, I auto
matically raised the tray out of harm’s way. When other wait
resses raised their arms, however, their trays were over the heads of the patrons. Because I was considerably shorter than most of the waitresses, my tray met most people at eye level when I raised it over my head. Although I thought this was going to be a disadvantage at first, it turned out to work in my favor. I found that most people will tend to either duck or move over when they see a tray of drinks headed for their foreheads. Nevertheless, the amount of pushing I had to do just to get to

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my tables was unbelievable. On the advice of some of the vet
eran waitresses, I started to kick at the shins of some of the most rooted customers to get them to move. This was some
times the only way to avoid losing valuable time trapped in a human gridlock. The Columbia was certainly no place for anyone suffering from claustrophobia. In addition, I was often assigned to work the balcony, since I was a new hire and the upstairs tables made up the least desirable stations. Fighting my way up the stairs with drinks and food made every night quite a workout.

Coming home every night feeling as if I’d run a marathon wasn’t a bad thing in itself. It was the utter lack of personal space that gave me pause. On any given night (although the busier ones were worse), I was knocked into, poked in the ribs, and brushed up against. I lost count of the times I felt anony
mous hands sliding across my behind as I squashed my way through the crowd. Most of the cocktail waitresses at The Columbia (myself included) avoided wearing skirts to work. It was just too easy, especially when we were climbing the stairs, for men (and occasionally women) to “accidentally” slide their hands along our legs. Of course, this was part and parcel of the job and I knew it. Complaining about being touched while work
ing at The Columbia was about as futile as a fireman complain
ing about smoke.

And as for smoke, there was plenty of it at The Columbia. The patrons smoked as much as they drank and the employees kept up the pace. Waitresses smoked in the service stations or kept cigarettes burning at the bar. Bartenders had cigarettes tucked behind their ears. There was no area, even the kitchen, that was smoke free.

The kitchen, in fact, was staffed with a collection of the scari
est characters I have ever worked with. One cook in particular delighted in terrorizing waitresses with the stump of one tattooed arm while he chain-smoked with the other. I’d heard that The
Columbia had been shut down a few times in the past for health code violations and it was easy to see why when I entered the kitchen for the first time. Everything, including the cooks, was lay
ered with a coating of grease that smelled as if it had been around for years. There were large cockroaches visible in every corner. For
tunately, most of them were big enough to be detected in the food before dishes went out to the table. Really, food was a secondary commodity at The Columbia. Almost all the dishes on the bar menu were either grilled or fried and dripping with fat. The occa
sional salad offerings were simply frightening to look at and didn’t get ordered very often. I felt that it was entirely unsafe to eat at The Columbia, yet many did, and none, to my knowledge, ever died from it. Perhaps the alcohol killed any existing bacteria.

Food, however, was not an issue on dollar-drink nights, which I started working immediately after being hired. No train
ing in the world could have adequately prepared me for the mania of Buck Night. Every drink in the house was a dollar, including draft beer and glasses of house wine. Drinks with higher alcohol content, such as Long Island Iced Tea, were two dollars, as were “call” liquors (pricier name brands, such as Absolut vodka or Tanqueray gin).

(Some stalwart—or deranged—patrons even managed to avoid paying a dollar for their drinks. In this case, they’d opt for a drink known as a Bar Mat. A Bar Mat is made when the bar
tender picks up the rubber mat on which he’s been mixing—and spilling—all his drinks and dumps the contents into a glass. The alcohol content is high. The taste—well, you be the judge. Bar
tenders gave these drinks out for free.)

Every bartender in the place took some kind of stimulant before and during a Buck Night shift. Before I worked at The Columbia, I’d wondered how the place could make any kind of profit on these nights. It took putting on an apron to figure it out. To begin with, the bartenders poured every mixed drink short. And