by Leanne Shear
“No, I worked here last weekend. I was at the main bar with Jake.”
“How was that?”
“Good,” I said. “Jake’s great to work with. He’s so fast.” I hoped he’d get the hint that he needed to pick up the pace for the remainder of the night.
“He’s the best bartender in the Hamptons,” Kyle said. “He can ring up to ten thousand dollars in a single night. The man’s a machine.” He took out the tiny ziplock bag of cocaine once more.
“You’re going to have a heart attack before you reach thirty,” I said.
He laughed. “I can’t believe that guy tipped us in coke. It’s like Studio 54.”
“I prefer getting tipped in cash.”
“I should give Jake some of this,” he continued, ignoring my comment. “He hooked me up big time last weekend.” Kyle lifted himself over the bar and sprinted toward Jake. I watched the two of them disappear into the bathroom together. Suddenly it all became clear: Jake’s hyperefficiency, frequent trips to the bathroom, and crash at the end of the night. I wondered if he’d still be able to ring $10,000 a night without blowing lines and—wryly—if a coke addiction would increase my rings and make me eligible to work at the front bar again.
Kyle returned from the bathroom talking a mile a minute. “So anyway, I’m a model-slash-actor, and I’ve been getting a lot of gigs in the city but most of it is bullshit catalog work, so I need to work here to make some extra cash, you know? I just read for this stage adaptation of the play Under Milkwood by some dude named Dylan Thomas, you ever heard of him? It’s pretty cool. Anyway, my agent said I should hear back next week about it, but you never know, sometimes these things take a really long time, but I’m really hoping to get onto the big screen, that’s where the money is, you know what I mean? Plus the chicks, I met Cameron Diaz over the winter at Chateau Marmont . . .”
I tuned him out and decided to focus on organizing the bar before the next onslaught. I dipped my head into the cooler to pull out the white wine that Kyle had forgotten to put in our ice bins and looked up just in time to see James sauntering up. He had changed into a yellow, lightweight button-down shirt that accentuated his tanned skin. His presence immediately raised my spirits.
“Hey!” he greeted me. “What are you doing back there?”
“I got demoted,” I said.
He laughed. “Demoted? I’ll have to put a call into your boss.”
I smiled back. “Jack and Coke?”
“No, we’re actually sitting at a table tonight.”
I looked up and saw Tom, Glen, all four of the Pearls Girls, and some other vaguely familiar people milling around by the front bar, waiting to be seated. I waved at them but felt a twinge of anxiety at the sight of Rosalind and her friends. I hated that they saw me working.
“That’s cool,” I said. “Are you guys going to be outside on the patio or—”
“VIP,” James finished, motioning for his friends to come over. Rosalind was wearing a beautiful white Vince top that showed off her sculpted shoulders and she looked impossibly perfect. Her long blond hair framed her flawless features, and her tiny pearl earrings gave her an aura of classic elegance. She sidled up next to James and slid her arm through his, appraising me coolly.
“So I had so much fun at the Blue Parrot,” I said to him, smiling as flirtatiously as possible. “Do you want your keys back now, or should I hold on to them for you?” I knew I was being foolish, but I couldn’t help wanting to show Rosalind and the girls that James and I had a relationship. Rosalind turned to James with a not-so-subtle raise of her eyebrows.
“Tom and I ran into Cassie and her friend at the Blue Parrot and had a couple of margaritas before dinner,” he explained.
A wave of humiliation and apprehension rushed through me. Why was he making it seem like our date was a mere run-in? Did he not want Rosalind and her friends to know we were dating? I stood there, stung, trying to figure out what—if anything—I should do or say in response.
“So, I’ll talk to you later, okay?” James said, leaning over the bar and bypassing my mouth to plant a kiss on my cheek. I tried to smile, but inside I felt the same burning insecurity I had at the barbeque. He’d been kissing me on the lips nonstop at the Blue Parrot.
“Look out for Annie,” I said with forced cheer. “I think she’s cocktailing upstairs.” Rosalind flashed me a menacing smile as they turned to go.
I watched with a heavy heart as James placed his hand solicitously on the small of Rosalind’s back as they walked upstairs and settled into the prime table that looked out right over the crowd and offered me the perfect vantage point for viewing every second of their night. I felt categorically rejected. While I was stuck downstairs, behind the back bar, clearly the lowliest of stations at Spark, James and the Pearls Girls would be upstairs mingling with the rest of the Very Important People in the Hamptons. How could I ever expect to compete with Rosalind when I was covered in grime and sweat and wearing a dirty uniform that made me look like a slut? Furious, I grabbed a bar rag and tried to scrub off some of the stains on my skirt, fighting back tears.
“Did you see that guy?” Kyle asked excitedly, his eyes nearly popping out of his head. He was still sweating profusely and kept wiping his brow with bev naps.
“What guy?” I asked bitterly.
“That guy in the gray suit with your friends,” he said, gesturing upstairs toward James’s group.
“What about him?”
“I just saw him on that HBO documentary about all those rich kids in Manhattan. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“No,” I said.
“Some rich guy made a movie about all his friends—the Trump and Bloomberg kids, and all those dudes that have nothing to do but live it up and party like crazy. And that guy was on it. You should watch it. It’s really cool. You get to see how rich people live.”
“What do you think we’re doing now?” I muttered. But before I could dwell further on images of James drinking expensive champagne upstairs in VIP with the heir to a certain Q-tip fortune, while I was downstairs, knee deep in discarded beer bottles beside a coked-up pseudomodel who didn’t know how to bartend, drink orders started flying fast and furiously.
“Hey, Kyle, let’s do a shot!” I called out. My hangover was dissolving in Cuervo and a volatile drunkenness had taken its place. I sure as hell wasn’t going to spend the night feeling sorry for myself. I turned toward Kyle and poured two enormous rocks glasses full of Cuervo and held one to my lips.
Kyle grabbed his shot and held it up. “Cassie, you gotta look me in the eye when we do a toast before a shot, it’s bad luck if you don’t—everybody has to look everybody else in the eye, it’s like some old bartender legend. And it’s probably bullshit but I’m superstitious so I always do it—”
“Just shut up and drink it!” I said as I downed what was clearly ten times a Finton’s baby shot in one gulp.
“Hey, gorgeous, what are you doing back there?” I looked up to see Burberry Plaid Man standing in front of me. “I was looking for you in the front.”
“I go where they put me,” I said.
“I’ll take a bottle of Goose,” he said. Like a machine, I grabbed the bottle from under the bar and rang it into the register.
“Three-fifty,” I said, glancing upstairs to see if James happened to be watching. But he was obscured behind Glen, who was gesticulating wildly while telling a story.
He counted out $600. “Keep the change, gorgeous.”
I was annoyed that I had to split my tips with Kyle, who now hadn’t made a single drink for over twenty minutes, a lifetime on a busy night. He kept yelling riotously at the customers, “Jack and Coke? You want a Jack and Coke, I like Jack and Cokes, Jack and Cokes are great, I can make a Jack and Coke, did you say you want a Jack and Coke?” His lower jaw seemed to disconnect from the rest of his face, and it swung around like a pendulum. He sucked his spit in loudly while he talked and moved his tongue around maniacally. Sweat poured off him,
and he was literally running around in circles behind the bar as he played air guitar along with “Sweet Child o’ Mine.”
“Kyle, chill out,” I yelled at him. “The owners are going to see you on the cameras, and you haven’t been making any drinks all night.”
His bloodshot eyes widened so much that I feared they would pop right out of their sockets. He abandoned Slash’s famous guitar riff. “Shit! Do you think they’re watching?”
“I don’t know. Jake says they watch the tapes from home every night and that the cameras are connected to the Internet.”
“Oh, shit. Oh, no,” he said. I watched the color drain from his face as Axl Rose droned in the background, Where do we go, Where do we go now?
“Look,” I said, “don’t worry about it. Just get to work.”
For the first time all night, he really tried to buckle down and start mixing drinks, but by this time he had so much cocaine, Cuervo, and Red Bull coursing through his veins that he was pretty much useless. I saw him struggling to make a vodka soda for a girl with fringy bangs and black eyeliner, his hands shaking uncontrollably, spilling liquid everywhere. “I’m really tired,” the girl whimpered, looking up at him and batting her eyelashes. “Do you have a bump?”
He disappeared outside with her, and I straightened up and smiled at the relentless crowd of people waving money in my face, even though I felt like screaming. All I could pray was that I looked like I had it together and was having a good time should James be watching. To that end, I flirted relentlessly with all the male customers, hoping that I’d also make enough money to offset the share I’d have to give to useless Kyle. I poured and mixed and shook and changed money, and it took every bone and muscle in my body to avoid looking up at the balcony. But I couldn’t resist a peek every now and then. Unfortunately, the one time I actually saw James, Elsie was leaning over him, her breasts practically brushing his face. I could tell even from forty feet away that she was trying desperately to work her skanky charms. I made a mental note to mention exactly what I thought of her and the other cocktail waitresses to James later.
Hey, Cass, can I drive you home?” James materialized out of nowhere around 4:00 A.M., just as the bouncers were herding everyone out the door and I was about to head to the bathroom and give in to beer tears, since he hadn’t so much as glanced downstairs all night. Between fretting over James and being furious with Kyle, I’d passed the time doing shots of Cuervo every half hour or so to drown my sorrows.
“I guess,” I replied flatly. “But it’s the same deal as last time. We have to wait for the waitresses to count out and it’s going to take a while.”
“No problem. You know I don’t mind waiting,” he said, smiling and kissing me on the lips.
“Oh, so now you want to kiss me on the lips?” I said saucily, then instantly regretted it. My beer tears apparently had been replaced by beer balls.
“What do you mean?” he asked, giving me a funny look.
“You’re so weird to me when Rosalind and the girls are around,” I glowered. “One minute you’re all over me in the Blue Parrot, and the next minute you’re kissing me on the cheek like I was your grandmother.”
“Come on, Cassie. You were working, and I was just trying to be respectful.”
“Well, those girls have been really fucking rude to me and Annie.”
“I’m really sorry about that. Try not to take it so personally. It’s just that we’re a really tight group, and sometimes they can get a little territorial,” he conceded, extending a chilled bottle of Cristal, two champagne glasses, and a bucket of ice as a peace offering. “I brought this to share with you.”
James looked so cute holding the champagne and its accoutrements that I wondered if I’d been overreacting. I decided again I wasn’t going to let a bunch of catty girls ruin what was shaping up to be the best thing that had ever happened to me. “Okay,” I said, my expression softening as I rested my elbows on the bar.
“How was your night?” he asked.
“Let’s put it this way,” I began. “The eighties are officially back.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had no idea the coke scene was so huge out here.”
He laughed. “Yup, all summer long it snows in the Hamptons.” He opened the champagne and the cork flew out with a celebratory POP! as if to signify that my night of work was legitimately over. “Champagne?”
“I’d love some,” I said. I’d never tried Cristal, but I knew it was listed as $500 a bottle on the Spark menu and was the drink of choice for everyone from Ron Perelman to Ludacris. I took a sip. It was bracingly refreshing, not too sweet, but perfectly flavored with elfin bubbles that dissolved on my parched tongue.
“How about a toast?” James asked, raising his glass. “May all your joy be true joy, and may all your pain be champagne!”
“Cheers!” I exclaimed, thinking how adorable he looked all disheveled from the night’s revelry. I gathered up my money and the tip bucket and we slipped into a booth to sip our champagne.
“Cassie, are you closed out?” Chris asked. I hadn’t seen much of him in my first two weeks at Spark, but my overall impression was that he was overworked, overmedicated, and overwrought. Even though he was the manager, relatively high up on the totem pole, Shalina treated him like her bitch and ran him ragged all over the club on a nightly basis.
“Yup, all done,” I said, handing him my report to look over. “How was your night?” I asked, trying to make conversation.
“It was a fucking nightmare,” he said. “I can’t wait for Sunday. It’s my only day off.”
“You should go to the beach,” I suggested, thinking he could use some color.
“Nope. On my days off I smoke a blunt, take two Quaaludes, and drink a bottle of red wine. It’s great. I don’t feel anything.” He gathered up my money and report. “Your ring was good tonight. How was it working with Kyle?”
“A little erratic,” I said.
“Yeah, that kid’s a trip. I swear, he sprinkles coke on his cornflakes in the morning. See you tomorrow.”
After an hour or so, James and I had polished off the rest of the Cristal, but the waitresses still weren’t finished closing out. I ran back behind the bar to grab us two Bud Lights and, on my way, noticed Jake and Elsie huddled in a corner. He was snorting coke off the web of her hand. When he saw me coming he wiped his nose and straightened up. “Hey, Cass, how was your night?” he called. “Miss me?”
“Um . . . yeah,” I muttered.
The sun was just starting to peek through the skylights, and I almost laughed out loud when it occurred to me that most of the staff looked vaguely like characters from The Dawn of the Dead: coked-out zombies with dark circles and mascara stains under their eyes. They seemed surreal and slightly terrifying.
“This place is crazy,” I said, sliding back into the booth and burrowing into James. “No wonder it takes everyone three hours to close out. Everyone’s wasted—including me.”
“You seem to be in pretty good shape,” James said.
“I don’t know. First I had those margaritas, and then I drank about a liter of Cuervo with Kyle, and then I drank half a bottle of champagne with you, and now we’re drinking beers, and I’m technically still at work.”
James smiled as he twisted the cap off his beer. “Hey, what are you complaining about? I wish I could drink Cristal at work. Think how much better life would be.”
“I know, it’s just so weird, you know?” I said, taking my first sip of beer. “Still, I can’t imagine working here sober. It’s hard enough to relate to these people when I’m drunk.”
Cassie, wake up,” Travis urged, his hand shaking my shoulder. It was eight-thirty in the morning, and after another late-night/early-morning beach rendezvous with James, I had been asleep for only fifteen minutes.
“Why?” I moaned, twisting around under the sheet and pulling the pillow over my head.
“The owners are coming, and we all have to leave.”
> “What?” I asked, struggling to open my eyes.
“The owners of the house just called. They’re coming over right now, and we need to leave.”
“I don’t get it,” I mumbled. “Why do we need to leave?”
“Because according to the lease, there are only supposed to be four of us renting the house, and at least thirty people slept here last night. If they see all of us here, they’re gonna freak out.”
“What?” I cried, alarmed. We usually had a minimum of about four people per bed. Wearily I sat up. “Where should I go?”
“Just hang out at the beach for a little bit. I don’t think they’re gonna stay here that long, they just want to check in on the house.”
“Okay,” I said, stumbling out of bed. I wondered if I would have the opportunity to sleep at all over the summer, or if like everyone else at Spark I was going to be a chemically fueled Frankenstein for the next twelve weeks.
“Thanks a lot. Sorry about this,” he said before disappearing out of the room to try to scatter the other twenty-nine people. I pulled my favorite key lime Banana Republic bikini out of my bag and slipped it on, threw my hair in a ponytail, slathered on some sunscreen, stepped into the same cotton dress I’d worn on the train, and headed out the door. Annie was already standing in the hallway, holding a beach bag and a pro Kadima paddle ball set.
“Come on, lady, let’s hit the beach,” she cheered.
“How can you be so perky?” I grumbled. “It’s not even nine o’ clock.”
“No whining,” she said. “Grab your sunglasses and a towel, and let’s get out of here.”
I wordlessly did as she’d instructed, pausing only to toss my notebook and a pen into my beach bag in case inspiration struck later on.
“I’m bringing the Kadima set,” she said cheerfully. “We can have an active beach day. Wanna go for a run later?”
“I want to go back to sleep for another eight hours,” I groaned as she swung open the rickety screen door and we started walking south toward Indian Wells Beach.
It was a perfect beach day—already about 85 degrees, with a warm breeze blowing off the ocean and bright blue skies stretched overhead. As exhausted as I was, I was happy I wasn’t wasting such a flawless day cooped up inside the share house, breathing in the stench of sweaty socks and mothballs. Annie practically skipped the whole way.