by Leanne Shear
“Can I buy a bottle at the bar?” a customer asked. He was a short, stocky man with too much gel in his hair, wearing a button-down shirt covered ostentatiously in Burberry plaid. He was surrounded by a throng of attractive platinum blonds who—like me—were wearing next to nothing.
“I don’t know,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Let me ask.”
I hurried over to Jake, leaving hundreds of customers screaming drink orders and waving cash. Even though it was only eleven-thirty, the floor behind the bar was already filthy with grubby bev naps, bent stirrers, smashed plastic cups, and discarded beer caps.
“Jake!” I called out. “Is it all right for me to sell a bottle at the bar?”
He wheeled around so fast it startled me. He was sweating, and his eyes looked red and wild. “Are you crazy?” he shouted. “Of course it’s okay. The rule is: SELL AS MUCH AS YOU CAN! Just remember to tell him there’s a mandatory gratuity charge of twenty percent on bottles. And don’t forget the owners are watching the bar, so don’t just hand the bottle over to him, make sure you ring it in first, because they synced up the registers with the surveillance. The cameras are right there.” He pointed discreetly to the front of the bar where two small red lights were blinking. I felt naked and watched, like I was in one of those glass snow globes, being shaken up by the invisible hands that owned and operated Spark.
I scampered back over to the Burberry Plaid Man, much faster this time. “Sure,” I said. “What would you like?”
“Give me a bottle of Goose,” he said.
At clubs and lounges in New York City and the Hamptons, people had the option of buying entire bottles of liquor, instead of ordering separate drinks. Each bottle ranged from $200 to $800 or more, and was usually shared by a group of people sitting at a table. (In certain hot spots, agreeing to buy two or three bottles was the only way for some people to make it past the velvet ropes.) The setup came with glasses, ice, mixers, lemons, limes, and stirrer straws—a be-your-own-bartender extravaganza. Usually bottles were ordered through a cocktail waitress, but that night all of the tables were occupied. The great thing about selling a bottle at the bar was it was an easy way to bring up low rings. Tonight it was just what I needed.
After a few torturous seconds staring at the computer screen looking for the price of a bottle of Grey Goose, I rang it in and returned to the man, wiping a sweaty strand of hair from my brow. “It’s $350 plus twenty percent gratuity, so the total is $420.”
He leaned over and handed me a wad of cash.
“Keep the change,” he said with a wink, eyeing my bare midriff. “Just make sure you take care of us.”
I turned around to count the folded bills and was shocked to find he had given me $600—a $250 tip for doing next to nothing! I walked over to the Moët Chandon champagne bucket that we used as a communal tip jar and tossed the bills inside, pressing them down to the bottom of the bucket to make room for more bills, just like I did to the garbage bin in our kitchen when Alexis forgot to take it out. I immediately felt a lot better and, for the first time that night, turned around to face the angry mob of screaming patrons with a confident smile.
At around midnight, I was busy filling glasses with ice trying to keep track of all seven of the drinks I was working on, when I suddenly felt a sharp pain as my head was jerked over the bar. I looked up and realized to my horror that an angry woman wearing a Proenza Schouler top and Paper Denim jeans that looked painted on had climbed halfway over the bar and was pulling my hair.
“Stop it!” I yelled, trying to pry her hand from my head.
“I’ve been trying to get your attention for the last twenty minutes!” she screamed. “And you’ve been ignoring me. I need a drink!”
I succeeded in getting her to release her grip and frantically looked around for a bouncer to help me throw this psychopath out. Jake laughed from his side of the bar. “Are you okay?”
“I think so,” I said, rubbing the sore spot on my head. “This is insane! I don’t even know what I’m doing. I’m just grabbing the nearest bottle I can get my hands on.”
“That’s the way to do it.” He grinned. “I call it guerrilla bartending.”
During this brief exchange, while I caught my breath, Jake managed to take care of two different customers. He was also talking to two men dressed in dark, expensive-looking suits and open-collared silk shirts. He deftly reached down and pulled out a bottle of Chopin, which he handed to them to go along with a carafe of cranberry juice already sitting on the bar.
I glanced reflexively at the cameras mounted in plain sight above the bar. He had just warned me not to pass a bottle over the bar without ringing it up, yet he himself had done just that. I wondered if, as head bartender, he had some sort of comp privileges.
“Get over here,” he beckoned.
Hesitant to leave my side of the bar and the throngs of thirsty customers, I walked over and saw that he had two shots of Patrón Silver tequila lined up and ready for us.
“But I thought Shalina said we couldn’t drink.”
“Who are you? The fucking Virgin Mary? What’s the point of working at a bar if we can’t do shots?”
The last thing I wanted to do was piss off Shalina, but I knew I had to take the shot—my rite of passage into the Hamptons bartending world. Before doing so, I quickly looked around for any customers who looked like spotters—or what I guessed spotters would look like—and turned my back to the cameras. The coast seemed clear.
“I don’t usually drink tequila, just Jameson,” I said.
“Just shut up and drink it, prima donna.”
“Can I at least have a lime?”
“No training wheels. You’re a bartender. Learn to drink your tequila straight. Salud.”
“Salud.” I slammed the shot, which scorched the entire length of my esophagus.
“Now get back to work.” Jake waved me off.
For the rest of the night, every half hour or so, Jake would call me over and we would do a shot. I was grateful for the five-second break, but I didn’t know how I was going to make it until four in the morning if we kept doing shots so frequently. I’d only just gotten used to Jameson, and tequila was a whole new ball game. It was hard to imagine I had room in my system for tolerance to another type of hard liquor.
By one o’clock we were running out of everything. Like me, the bar was not equipped to handle such heavy volume, and all of the lemons and limes were used up, and we were running dangerously low on ice and cups. My hands were frozen from scraping the corners of the ice bin for slushy remains.
“That’ll be twelve dollars, please,” I said to a guy in a metallic blue Dolce & Gabbana button-down, who had just ordered a vodka tonic.
“How the hell can you charge me twelve dollars when there’s hardly any ice, and no lime—not to mention that I ordered Ketel One, which you don’t have, so you’re using your shitty house vodka?”
“I’m really sorry. It’s not my fault,” I said miserably.
“Forget it,” he said, and walked away from the bar, leaving the drink behind.
I was exhausted. My expensive uniform, once baby blue and white, was now a sickly shade of puke brown. My shoes were soaked in bar muck, and my lower back ached. All the tequila combined with my compulsive water drinking made me desperately need a bathroom break.
“Jake! I have to pee so badly but the line for the bathroom goes all the way around the club,” I said, hopping from foot to foot like a little kid. “What should I do?”
“Relax, rookie, there’s a bathroom upstairs through the VIP room for employees. Go ahead. I got this bar covered.”
On my way to the secret employee bathroom, I pushed through the wall-to-wall crowd of Beautiful People in VIP, all of whom were either dressed to the nines in Rebecca Taylor and Foley & Corrina or purposefully dressed down in the style known as “Hamptons cute”—hundred-dollar glorified metallic flip-flops from Calypso, with ripped-up Juicy Couture jeans skirts. (I’d been in New York long eno
ugh to be able to identify designer clothes, even if I couldn’t afford them.) The music pumped at a dangerous decibel level and I could feel the bass thumping in my chest cavity. The room was vibrating with hot, sweaty, drunken revelers. Someone bumped into me and nearly knocked me over.
I was just about to yell “Watch it!” when the words died in my throat. It was James Edmonton.
“Hi,” I said, flustered, self-consciously pulling down on my tiny top. Even in my tequila haze, I was immediately aware of the shortness of my skirt.
“Cassie!” he said, breaking into a smile, his green eyes lighting up. His cheeks were flushed from the heat generated from all the bodies packed into the room, but he looked relaxed, like a polo player who’d just won the world title. “I told you we’d run into each other this weekend,” he said, raising his voice over the volume of the crowd.
Barely twenty-four hours had passed since I’d last seen James. He’d shocked me by suddenly appearing at Finton’s with his father and Martin Pritchard. As soon as I’d spotted him walking in the door, I’d felt like I did in junior high school when my very first crush, Ricky Davy, passed my locker on his way to class—all butterflies and so stupefied by his presence that I barely even managed to get out as much as a “Hello.” I’d never entertained the fantasy that I would actually see James again. I quickly ran my hands through my hair to make sure it was laying straight and glanced at my reflection in the mirrors behind the bar in hopes that my Benefit lip gloss had some staying power. When Martin waved me over, I hurriedly thought of what I could say. What if he didn’t remember me? I didn’t know whether to ask James if he’d finished This Side of Paradise, conjure up another Ivy League football fact, or just say what I normally would to any customer: “Hi, what can I get you to drink?” Thankfully he’d saved me from my decision-making angst.
“Hey, Cassie.”
He remembered my name!
“Hey,” I’d said, with a smile I hoped was both flirtatious and casual.
“Cassie, this is my father. Dad, this is Cassie. I met her last weekend at the Southampton Club.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Edmonton,” I’d said, offering my hand over the bar.
“Macallan 25. Neat,” was his only response.
“Coming right up,” I said, flustered. Had he really just dismissed me as rudely as I thought? Maybe he hadn’t heard his son’s introduction. Or was it because I was a bartender? How humiliating. I stretched up on my tiptoes to reach the highest shelf, where the expensive single-malt scotches lived, and tried as hard as I could to avoid letting it get to me.
“Dad, what’s your problem?” I’d heard James admonish him.
“I need a drink,” his father had replied gruffly.
I returned bearing Mr. Edmonton’s scotch. He didn’t say a word.
“Sorry about my dad,” James said with an apologetic smile. “He doesn’t get out much.” I decided to set the father’s rude behavior aside and focus on the son.
I took a deep breath, smiled back, and asked, “Can I get you a drink?”
“That would be great. I’ll have a Jack and Coke, please.”
Just then James’s cell phone rang. He grimaced when he saw the number on the screen. “I have to take this. Excuse me,” he said, stepping away from the bar and making his way toward the door.
I made his cocktail, and took advantage of the moments he was gone to apply another coat of lip gloss and force my eyelashes upward with my fingers. Just like Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, I fiercely pinched my cheeks to give my face a healthy glow. I did this more for dramatic effect than necessity, since I was pretty sure I blushed naturally when James was near.
He’d walked back into the bar shaking his head. “They need me back at the office,” he said. “I have to work on a model for a presentation on Friday.” He looked down mournfully at the Jack and Coke. “Sorry, Cassie. It was great seeing you again. I’m sure I’ll see you this weekend. You’ll be out in the Hamptons, right?”
“Um . . . yeah.”
“Perfect. Good-bye, Martin. Dad.” And then he was off, more quickly than he’d arrived.
I’d wanted to scream after him “How will I find you?! The Hamptons are a really big place!” It seemed impossible that we’d actually cross paths. And yet now here he was at Spark, right in front of me.
“How are you?” he shouted over the chaos of the club.
“Great!” I shouted back. “How did that presentation end up going?”
“What?”
“Your presentation,” I yelled, making good use of the pauses between the throbbing bass of the hip-hop music.
“Oh, that. Good memory!” He smiled and leaned in closer so his shoulder was almost touching mine. “It went well. Are you having a fun night? This place is insane!”
I wished more than anything that, like him, I was drinking and socializing with my friends in the VIP section of the newest and hottest club around. “Actually,” I said, “I’m bartending here tonight.”
“Oh, that’s awesome! Which bar?”
“I’m at the front bar downstairs in the main room.”
“Well, I’ll have to come down and visit you.”
“I wouldn’t want you to have to leave the security of the VIP scene,” I teased with what I hoped was a sexy smirk.
“Listen, I can hold my own both upstairs and downstairs,” he assured me. “Besides, this whole club is practically VIP. You should see the line to get in.”
My bladder felt like it was about to explode.
“Well, I gotta get back to work,” I said, trying not to hop from one foot to another like a little kid.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll see you downstairs.” And like that, he dissolved into the mob of elite patrons. I fought the urge to turn around and watch him walk away, and instead made a beeline for the secret bathroom.
When I returned to the bar, my head was spinning, and I couldn’t decide if it was from the shots, the stressful labor, or the fact that I had just run into James. I glanced over at Jake’s end and saw him pouring a round of shots for all of the promoters and cocktail waitresses.
“Cass,” Jake called, “this one’s got your name on it. Try not to gag this time.”
Everyone was there—Teddy, Elsie and the girls, even Annie had stuck around after the dinner shift to soak up the scene. I hardly recognized the cocktail waitresses. They had completely transformed from straggly, strung-out, sleep-deprived girls in sweatpants to glamorous made-up Vegas showgirls in six-inch stilettos.
“To making a shitload of fucking money!” Elsie shrilled. The rest of the girls answered with rounds of high-pitched “woo-hoos!”
The shot didn’t go down easily. It got stuck somewhere in my throat, and I started to gag. I looked up to see Jake laughing at me.
“Jesus Christ, Cassie! Do you realize this is top-shelf tequila? I can’t imagine what would happen if I gave you Cuervo.” He chuckled. “Are you gonna make it, or should I do some mouth-to-mouth on you?”
“I’m fine,” I said, but I was sure my bloodshot eyes told a different story.
I turned my back to Jake and sucked greedily on a lime, which eased the sting of the tequila. I started bartending with a renewed vigor, hoping to look impressive and seasoned when James came down to visit me, and stashed a bottle of Jack, which I knew he liked, under my well. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling when I reflected on our conversation, and I furtively scanned the bar for his arrival.
I was still scanning hopefully at four o’clock in the morning, when, despite the crowd’s objections, Jake yelled, “Last call!” and the bouncers immediately started ushering everyone toward the door. I finally reconciled myself to the fact that James wouldn’t be coming by to see me. I pulled my Columbia sweatshirt over my tequila-stained halter top and stepped into my favorite pair of American Apparel black drawstring pants. As I tried to swallow my disappointment, a very intoxicated Annie staggered toward the bar.
“Cassie, I owe my lif
e to you,” she gushed, slamming both hands on the bar. “I love the Hamptons. I just danced with Fab Moretti of the Strokes! He’s so hot! What time is it in Rio? I’m calling my sister!”
I smiled in spite of myself. “Sounds like you had a pretty fun night.”
“I love this place. I love the Hamptons. I love our share house. I love our housemates. I love Amagansett. I love Spark. Anyway, Jake’s driving us home, right?”
“Yeah, but we have at least another hour of work to do. So you might as well go find Teddy or Fab. I have to clean up and close out my register. I’ll find you when I’m done.”
At least my first night of madness was over. The bar was a war zone of empty bottles, sopping bar rags, and overflowing garbage cans. Jake was nowhere to be seen.
After I’d bundled up all of my money, credit card slips, and tips, I was escorted by a three-hundred-pound bouncer to a locked cinder-block room where I joined the rest of the staff in counting out the money from the registers, filling out the night’s register reports, adjusting credit card tips, and counting out the cash tips. I couldn’t believe how tight the security was at Spark. At Finton’s we didn’t have a bouncer, and we counted our money behind the bar—right in front of the windows for all to see.
The snap of Jake’s lighter set off a chain reaction, and in quick succession every staff member except for me had a lit cigarette dangling between their lips. Quickly the room became hazy with smoke. We spread out our cash on the desk and started counting how many hundreds, fifties, twenties, tens, fives, and ones we had, putting them into piles all facing the same way “like little soldiers,” as Shalina had instructed, and then noting how many of each bill we had on our close-out sheet. I tabulated our credit card tips while Jake wandered off to talk to Elsie. Chris shuffled by, looking sweaty and harried. His eyes were so red they almost looked like they were bleeding.