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 shoulder 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 happening 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. Somebody 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. “Sometimes 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 sometimes 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 automatically raised the tray out of harm’s way. When other waitresses 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 veteran waitresses, I started to kick at the shins of some of the most rooted customers to get them to move. This was sometimes 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 anonymous 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 working at The Columbia was about as futile as a fireman complaining 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 scariest 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 layered with a coating of grease that smelled as if it had been around for years. There were large cockroaches visible in every corner. Fortunately, 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 occasional 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 training 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 bartender 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. Bartenders 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
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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. Fortunately, 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 profitable. 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 finger 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 differences began to surface, we were both surprised and disappointed. I believe that for a time we were really in love with each other. But it soon became apparent that love (by whatever definition 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 impossible. 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 bothered me before. For example, it was par for the course for an inebriated 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 complaint 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 interesting, 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 Columbia 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 definitely 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 watching 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 cocktail types like us and she answered the phone sleepily.
Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress Page 16