“I can’t believe it’s come to this,” I said. “Seems like there should be something more momentous to mark my last night here.”
“So wait for me,” Wes said. “I’ll take you out.”
The two of us ended up at a bar near Molto’s. Wes bought me drink after drink and listened to my grand plans for the
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future. I told him a bit about my past, too, such as it was. He talked about Sue and how disappointed he was that she had decided to leave. Our conversation began to take on the strange elastic shape of drunken exchanges that happen in the wee hours. After we closed the bar, Wes drove me home and walked me upstairs to my apartment.
“Can I come in for a minute?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “What’s a minute? It’s almost three in the morning.”
My apartment was very small, but Wes managed to walk around it as if there was much to be seen.
“I don’t have much to offer you,” I said from the kitchen. “Definitely nothing to drink here. I’ve got some oranges, though.”
“Oranges would be good,” Wes said. “I’ll have an orange.”
We sat opposite each other and I struggled to peel an orange with motor skills that were severely compromised by the number of vodka tonics I’d ingested.
“Why don’t you let me help you with that?” Wes asked and took the orange from me. He peeled it gracefully without ever breaking the rind. I could see both the cat and the canary in the smile on his face. He sectioned the orange, handed me two pieces, and placed two in his mouth.
“Very good orange,” he said. “Thank you.”
The silence that followed soon became crushing in its weight.
“What are we going to do now?” I asked Wes.
“Well,” he said slowly, “we got the orange together pretty well. Seems like it’ll be easy from here on.”
Today, I remember strange details of that night. For example, I remember distinctly the sweet citrusy taste of the fruit and that it was the last decent orange of the season. I remember that the weather turned cold that very night, going from Indian summer to frigid winter. And I remember that all night I had the sad sense of something ending but no vision of a new beginning with which to replace it.
I began feeling nostalgia for Molto’s as soon as I quit. The few days I was going to give myself to relax and make plans turned into weeks. I kept going to work at the office during the day, but my nights seemed absolutely vast and empty. Suddenly there seemed to be a huge hole in what had been passing as my social life. Despite the fact I had sworn to move on, Molto’s still felt a bit like home.
It was with this feeling that I stopped in soon after I quit to say hello. Nobody seemed to understand quite what I was doing there since I’d so recently been adamant about not wanting to come in for as long as possible. As if to make me feel a little more comfortable, Barry invited me to a party he was throwing the following weekend.
“It’s for all the Molto’s survivors of the summer of eighty-six,” he said. “You definitely fall into that category, so you should come by.” I told him I would and wrote down directions to his house. “Tell Tiffany,” he added, laughing. “She can come, too.” Tiffany was still in town, although I saw considerably less of her at that point. After rehashing some of her most spectacular feats at Molto’s, I told Barry that I’d let her know about the party.
“I’ll just make sure she gets her drinks in a paper cup,” he said.
I’ve often wondered about the strange chain of events that followed that visit to Molto’s because, on the one hand, it seemed that what followed was merely a series of choices that could have been presented to anyone. On the other hand, what was to come seemed peculiarly predestined. I’ve never been able to figure out which was which.
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I didn’t want to go to Barry’s party. In fact, as soon as I returned home, I decided it would be a bad idea. I hadn’t left on particularly good terms with Sonny and I was sure that he and Barbara would be there together. Hostility would be high and I wasn’t in the mood to be dragged into a catfight. Nor, after my last night at Molto’s, was I much in the mood to see Wes. I knew from Barry that Sue was visiting Wes from California and figured I was the last person he’d want to see at a party. There was Barry, too, and his relationship with Pamela. I figured that the party was probably Barry’s way of safely inviting her to his house. The guy was so desperate to see her, he’d risk seeing the husband in a social situation. It could be quite ugly. Besides, I told myself, I’d resolved to leave this all behind. Why would I intentionally place myself in the lion’s jaws?
Then Tiffany dropped by. I have no idea how she’d learned about Barry’s party, but by some wrinkle of fate, she knew all about it and was determined to go. She was also determined to take me with her. I argued with her about it, but without sharing too many personal details I couldn’t come up with any valid reasons why I shouldn’t go. When she pointed out that I’d probably spend the night alone watching Miami Vice instead of going out “and having some fun for a change,” I found it difficult to turn her down.
So we went.
Barry’s party was exactly as I had suspected it would be. Barry was, if possible, more uptight than he was when managing the restaurant. I soon understood the reason: Pamela was there, without her child or her husband, nervously fussing around Barry’s kitchen. The torturous byplay between these two served to add an element of freneticism to the whole affair. Barry was besotted with Pamela by that point and she was playing quite a number on him. All the while he was trying to act as cool as possible, which wasn’t working very well. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed him drinking heavily and making various trips to his bedroom with various friends and various envelopes of white powder.
I paid little attention to this, however, since I was caught in the generous swell of my own soap opera. As I had predicted, both Sonny and Wes were in attendance and so were Barbara and Sue. Sonny had no idea what approach to take with me and ended up using several in the course of a few minutes, which made him appear like an utter fool. Barbara had decided to be extremely nice to me, which was much more frightening than if she’d leaned over and pulled out my hair—which was clearly what she would have preferred.
Sue’s looks had only been improved by her time in California. She looked ready for the cover of an alternative lifestyle version of Vogue. Wes made sure he had at least one of his hands on some part of her body at all times. For me, he had only a glower and this question: “Weren’t you leaving town?”
“Nice to see you, too, Wes,” I answered and escaped to the kitchen, where I was rescued by Charlotte, who knew all about uncomfortable restaurant encounters, having been part of a few in her day.
“There’s someone I want you to meet,” she said, leading me to a tall, dark stranger who was leaning awkwardly against a cabinet, looking as if he’d wandered into the wrong party. “This is John,” Charlotte said, smiling. “We worked together at Molto’s years ago. John’s a writer, too.”
With my eyes, I telegraphed a message of dismay to Charlotte, but she shrugged and smiled again as if to tell me that I might actually like this John person and promptly melted into the scenery.
While John and I spent the next half hour standing in exactly the same spot, we covered a tremendous amount of conversational ground. He, too, had wandered into Molto’s out of a sense
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of nostalgia a few days earlier and received an invitation to the party from Barry. He, too, was working on a first novel. He, too, was planning a move to San Francisco in the near future, having been convinced that finding work in Portland was impossible. We talked about Molto’s, past and present. I learned that not much had changed over the course of the last five years. We talked about writing and discussed the plots of our novels. I wasn’t at all surprised when he told me he’d love to read what I’d written. John was, quite obviously, very eager. In fact, it occurred to me that he’d come
to this party specifically to meet somebody he could leave with. I wasn’t about to go anywhere with him, but I was intrigued by him and told him that I was planning to attend a lecture a local literary agent was giving the following week.
“Why don’t you give me your phone number?” he said. “Maybe we could go together.”
“Sure,” I said. “Maybe.”
“I’m really glad I came to this party,” he said impulsively. “Until the last minute I wasn’t going to come at all. I didn’t actually think there’d be anyone here for me to talk to.”
I’d almost forgotten about John by the time he called me a few days later, but I was happy to hear from him. The lecture by the literary agent became our first date and was rapidly followed by a second. Within a couple of weeks we were inseparable. There was a level of intensity to my relationship with John that I’d never experienced before. The whole thing seemed to be operating at an accelerated speed. It almost seemed that if we slowed down, spent less time together, what was building between the two of us would vanish. It was actually a bit frightening to get so close to someone so quickly, especially since what was developing between us had the feeling of something serious.
At the height of our romantic bliss, we took a trip to Molto’s for dinner. It was only fair, we reckoned, that we go in and thank both Barry and Charlotte for helping us meet.
Barry seemed nonplussed but relatively amused at our gushing declarations of love for each other, but Charlotte just laughed.
“I knew you two would hit it off,” she said.
John and I continued to spend as much time together as possible, but it soon became apparent that both of us were going to have to start thinking of a future beyond the dawning of the next day. Neither one of us wanted to leave the other, but we hadn’t known each other long enough to suggest leaving together, so both of us put our plans to move on temporary hold. John had recently left a job working in a halfway house for troubled teens, because of the high stress and terrible pay. While he scouted around for a teaching position, he took a night job as a prep cook in a small Mexican restaurant to make ends meet.
My part-time writing work wasn’t nearly enough to float me, and without the income from Molto’s, I was days away from dipping into the meager savings I’d so carefully accumulated over the previous few months. Despite my new romance and subsequent lease on life, I began to have nagging feelings of insecurity. If nothing else, waiting tables had provided me with a sense of self-reliance. There was a certain security within the walls of a restaurant, which I was missing. Not wanting to admit that my plans to try to make it as a writer had been relegated to the back burner, I told myself that I wouldn’t be going anywhere if I let myself run out of money entirely. Waiting seemed, again, the only option. And again, it would be a temporary measure, something to gain a financial foothold while my future unfolded. The only question remaining was which restaurant I would work in.
I wanted to synchronize my hours with John’s, so I went looking for a restaurant with late hours. This meant that I’d be looking at restaurants that doubled as bars. I had only looked at a couple of these places before learning that The Columbia, an extremely busy, high-volume bar close to my apartment, was hiring cocktail waitresses.
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I liked the idea of cocktailing and, even after my unprofitable stint at Le Jardin, still thought there was something that sounded very glamorous about it. Of course, my ideas about these things were predicated on some decidedly nonfeminist notions. I had grown up idolizing Barbara Eden’s character on I Dream of Jeannie. And though I’d never admitted it to anyone, I thought that the bunny outfits the waitresses wore in the Playboy Clubs were really cute.
The cocktail waitress, I learned, is a unique breed. Her financial success often depends on her physical attributes as well as her ability to take any number of rude, sexist, even abusive comments with a smile and a quick comeback. Her job is to serve alcohol, but she is held accountable for those who become overly intoxicated. She has to carry several drink orders in her head and make change instantly with one hand while the other balances a tray of glasses, coins, and bills. Most of the cocktail waitresses I’ve known go home late at night and dream about the job.
Belinda, veteran of so many waitressing jobs, once told me, “Cocktailing dreams are the worst. It’s not like you’re dreaming about not being able to catch up with your tables. When you dream about cocktailing, it’s like you’re going crazy. People are shouting drink orders at you, you drop all your change, and you spill everything on your tray over and over again.” She was absolutely right.
When I set out to apply for a job at The Columbia, I was hoping not to repeat my experience at Le Jardin, which was both interesting and challenging but stressful beyond belief. The reasons for the stress had little to do with the physical demands of the job. Rather, the depression I felt after almost every cocktail shift had to do with watching the interaction between people and alcohol. The transformation I saw in average humans after the consumption of a few drinks seemed to me both raw and desperate—something I’d just as soon forget. It is often said that what one dislikes most in others is what one dislikes most in oneself. Perhaps my negative impressions of the cocktail hours I worked had something to do with my state of mind when I worked them: a bit raw and a little desperate.
Le Jardin, filled with blond wood, houseplants, and, every evening at happy hour, suited men drinking scotch and bourbon, was the most depressing place I’ve ever held a tray in.
Up to that point, my cocktail experience had been limited to a few shifts serving highballs to octogenarians in the Card Room. Le Jardin was different only in the fact that the mean age of its patrons was about thirty years younger. During the shifts I worked, at least, the clientele was almost exclusively male. They came down from their offices at five or five-thirty, picked listlessly at the cocktail wieners dying slowly on the happy hour buffet, and then buried themselves in booths, waiting for me, Belinda, or whatever other cocktail waitress was working to walk over in her high heels and little black skirt and offer to get them whatever they wanted. And what they wanted was usually a martini or a scotch and conversation. There were a few questions I heard repeatedly:
“How long have you been working here?”
“Are you going to school?”
“You got a boyfriend?”
There was a little game that went along with the cocktail service 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 dialogue went on depended on how eloquent I was feeling on a particular 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 psychology, biology, even archaeology. I was going to be a dentist, interior 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 interest. 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 overwhelming 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 sitting 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, including those shouted at them by cocktail waitresses and those they read from the lips of patrons across the smoky room.
Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress Page 15