by Leanne Shear
“Hello, dear,” Martin bellowed, beckoning me with his stubby right hand to lean over the bar and give him a kiss. Feeling I had no choice but to comply, I stretched across the bar and pecked him on his shriveled cheek, holding my breath to avoid his acrid, musty odor. “It’s lovely to see you.”
“Lovely,” Lily echoed, perched on a bar stool, her posture so straight and perfect she looked like she could balance twelve books on her head.
“It’s great to see you too,” I said. “How’ve you been?”
“Fine, fine, dear,” Martin answered, rubbing his protruding belly. “Just had dinner at Della Femina.”
“How was it?” I asked. “I hear that’s the best restaurant in the Hamptons.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” he grumbled. “It’s mediocre at best.”
I busied myself wiping down the bottles in my speed rack, while Martin went on about how his New York strip steak had been tough and chewy, and Lily’s pasta had been terribly overcooked. I looked over at Lily’s infinitesimal waist, imagining that after eating one lonely strand of linguini, she announced that she was “uncomfortably full, and couldn’t stand to eat another bite.”
“What can I get you to drink?” I asked them.
“I’ll have a Ketel tonic, and Lily would like a Ketel soda,” Martin said, placing a fifty-dollar bill on the bar. “And I believe some congratulations are in order.”
“Congratulations? For what?” I asked. I couldn’t think of any recent accomplishments, other than perhaps my hard-earned gold medal in burning the candle at both ends.
“The word around town is that you’ve been having a very successful summer,” Martin said, savoring his drink.
“Yeah,” I answered. “Spark’s been great. I’m having a lot of fun, and making a lot more money than I do at Finton’s.”
“I’m not talking about Spark, darling,” he said, raising his grizzly eyebrows suggestively.
I looked at him uncertainly. “What are you talking about?”
“My sources tell me that you’ve landed the most eligible bachelor in the tristate area,” he remarked coyly. Lily smiled down into her drink, gently stirring her straw.
I had no idea how to respond, so I nodded my head awkwardly, feeling more than a little vulnerable. While part of me was happy to know that someone in the Edmonton clan had been talking about me, rendering our relationship official, images of Martin and James Edmonton II playing golf and talking about how James Edmonton III, heir to the throne and family fortune, had taken up with a mangy barmaid instead of the prescribed socialite/heiress tortured me.
“You must be very proud,” Martin continued, placidly sipping his drink. “His father says that James usually dates quite the bevy of models and actresses but seems to have eschewed them all lately in favor of you. You must have done a real number on him. Good for you.”
“Yeah, well . . .” I stammered, feeling my face flush a dangerous shade of crimson. I only hoped he didn’t notice my eyes sparking with resentment.
“Please excuse me while I go to the little boy’s room,” Martin said suddenly, sliding his stumpy body off the stool and ambling over to the restrooms.
Lily was staring into space, her eyes vacant, and I could tell she’d had a little too much to drink. I hoped I wouldn’t have to make conversation with her. She sucked delicately on the little red stirrer straw until her glass was empty, then stood up unsteadily and leaned her porcelain arms on the bar. “I’d love another drink,” she said.
“Sure,” I said, grabbing another plastic cup.
“No plastic, please,” she interjected. “Can I have a real glass?”
“Okay,” I tossed the cup in the trash and bent down to where the glasses were stored.
“Thank you,” she said, pulling a Chanel lip palette from her Louis Vuitton clutch and painting her lips a bold shade of red. The combination of her pallid complexion, blank eyes, auburn hair, and red lips made her look like a haunted Snow White.
I handed her another Ketel soda. “Fabulous,” she said, taking a long sip.
I tried my best to occupy myself over by my register, but soon she summoned me back over. “Cassie!” she called, interrupting my stewing over exactly how, and under what circumstances, Martin had learned about me and James.
“Yes?”
“Come here,” she motioned, draping her upper body along the bar. “I need to talk to you.”
I leaned in. “What is it?”
“Don’t worry about what Martin said,” she began, elucidating a thought for the first time since she’d arrived. “He’s always saying that a young girl needs a benefactor. He’s just happy for you that you’ve found somebody who can take care of you.”
“James isn’t my benefactor, Lily. He’s my boyfriend.”
She took the straw out of her glass, then put her mouth to the rim and downed half the drink. “I know what you’re thinking,” she slurred.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Of me and Martin,” she went on. “But I want you to know, we’ve been together for almost two years now. Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“We broke up for a couple of months last summer, and I dated this man in Pacific Palisades, where my parents live. He was sweet, but he was in his mid-sixties and he still didn’t have his life together . . .” Her voice trailed off.
I didn’t know how to respond, so I said nothing. Apparently Martin wasn’t her only lover three times her age. I started to walk away, but she called me back. “Cassie,” she pressed, “don’t you understand? That’s what I like about Martin. He has his act together, you know?” Her eyes were glassy and expressionless. “I’m just accustomed to a certain lifestyle. I’m not going to give that up.”
Just then Martin hobbled back to the bar. “What are you little girls buzzing about?” he asked, taking a seat and placing his hand on Lily’s thigh.
As the two of them sat stroking each other, I thought about all the young women in New York City who would rather have someone provide for them than go out and try to make it on their own. And the hordes of older men who were more than willing to raise their liver-spotted hands for the assignment. I couldn’t really blame these women for preferring Lily’s Manolo Blahniks over my ragged, flat bartending shoes that were permanently sticky on the bottoms. Still, it didn’t seem like an equitable trade-off.
My mind wandered to the previous week at Finton’s, when I’d been serving Sal and Vinny, two goomba “associates” of Baby Carmine. Sal was a nice, quiet guy who came into the bar maybe once a month and drank Amaretto di Saronno with one ice cube. Vinny was a chauvinistic pig who looked on lasciviously whenever I bent down to get his Beck’s out of the cooler.
“Sweetheart, I’ll order Beck’s all night long if you keep bending over like that for me,” he slobbered, pulling a fifty-dollar bill out of his gold, diamond-studded money clip and placing it on the bar. “That’s for you. God bless you, honey, you got gorgeous legs.”
I’d looked down at the fifty-dollar bill, wondering just how much that money was worth. He’d been slipping me big bills all night long, and while I wanted to reprove him for his lecherous comments, I found myself biting my tongue in favor of taking his money. But once the money was in my tip jar, there was a tangible shift in power. I felt like I owed him something, and he knew it.
“You give great head,” he’d said with a wide grin, after I’d poured a customer a pint of beer with a lot of foam on top. Then, “Six dollars for draft beer? Does he get a blow job with that, honey?” He knew just by the mere fact that I was behind a bar that I needed money, and he was testing me to see just how much I’d put up with as long as the tips kept rolling in. In the end, I’d swallowed his comments all night. But there had been a bar between us the entire time—very different from crawling into bed with the man who furnished your lavish lifestyle.
“Darling, I’ll have another Ketel tonic,” Martin ordered, forc
ing me back to Spark and the present. I grabbed the bottle of Ketel and hastily poured his drink. The crowds were starting to trickle in, and I hoped a new wave of customers would give me an excuse to abandon Martin and Lily.
“Cassie and Jake, I need to speak to you for a moment,” Shalina snapped. Jake had finally just shown up, and we hurried over to her, as she went on. “I just received a call from P. Diddy’s personal assistant. She said he’s on his way over and will be here any minute. Now, while he’ll clearly be seated at a table in VIP, a couple of his friends may choose to order some drinks at the bar. Obviously, I need you to be extremely gracious with them. P. Diddy expects to be treated like a king, and with the amount of money he spends, he very well should be.”
“No problem,” Jake said, nonplussed, while I felt a surge of excitement. There were celebrities and then there were celebrities. I’d seen Carson Daly and Nick Carter skulking around a handful of times and hadn’t been that impressed, but P. Diddy was the king of the A-listers. “We’ll have the bar back stock up on Hennessy.” Jake turned to me. “All they ever order is Cristal, thug passions, and incredible hulks.”
“Cassie, darling.” Martin was beckoning me back over.
“Excuse me,” I said to Shalina, and walked back to Martin. “Yes?”
“Lily needs another drink, dear.”
I glanced over at Lily, who looked like she needed a lot of things, but a drink was not one of them. I grabbed the bottle of Ketel One and poured her a very weak cocktail.
“So tell me,” Martin said, “has James taken you out to his mother’s home on Nantucket yet?”
James had never even mentioned that he had a mother. I’d always been too afraid to ask about her, since he never brought her up. I figured we’d get there in due time.
“Nope,” I said, forcing a smile. “Not yet.”
“Well, you must have him take you there. It’s stunning. In the divorce settlement, James’s father kept the Hamptons residence, but his mother got Nantucket. If you ask me, though, Jim got the better end of the deal. Then again, he did have Raoul Felder, the best divorce lawyer in Manhattan . . .”
Martin’s ramblings were suddenly interrupted by a screech of microphone feedback and then a booming voice that yelled: “Yo! Yo! Yo! Party people at Spark!”
I looked up from my ice bin just in time to see a ghetto fabulous entourage of about fifty parade in, led by a man holding a microphone.
“I’m Doug E. Fresh and I’m gon’ be your emcee tonight. Let’s get this party started. Unh! Unh! Unh!” he shouted, as Run DMC came blasting out of the DJ booth.
True to all stereotypes, I was immediately blinded by all the bling. It looked like Jakob the Jeweler, the L.A.-based diamond mogul who catered to the hip-hop crowd, had personally overseen the assemblage of each and every outrageous accessory now swarming around the bar.
Gaudy diamond nameplates spelling names like Deebow, Kid Funk, and T-Money were everywhere. I caught a glimpse of a colossal gold dollar sign titivated with glinting diamonds and a similarly jewel-encrusted emblem in the shape of the Cadillac seal. Every last one of the guys had at least four huge diamond studs in his ears—stones that easily rivaled those set in the engagement rings of some of the Hamptons’ richest socialites. High-end monograms—Gucci, Fendi, Chanel, Prada, Hermès, and Louis Vuitton—were emblazoned on every available surface on their clothing, and they all wore bright white sneakers. One guy was even wearing a floor-length mink, despite the 90-degree heat of the Hamptons summer.
Doug E. Fresh’s voice beat-boxed over the din of the music, while the rest of the Spark crowd parted like the Red Sea to let them pass. They were a royal procession, beating a path for their king: P. Diddy. He appeared wearing the signature diamond-encrusted Sean John shades that he’d personally designed and listening to his diamond-encrusted iPod, which, according to some show I’d seen on VH1, was worth $100,000. The way Shalina, Teddy, and even Chris were watching in nervous awe, I expected one of them to genuflect and kiss the enormous canary diamond ring glimmering on his right hand like a disco ball.
“Let’s all say a big wazzzzzzup to the man of the hour, P. Diddy! Unh! Unh! Oh, yeah!” bellowed Doug E. Fresh, chanting along to G. Unit’s “Stunt 101,” The ice in my teeth keeps the Cristal cold. . . .
P. Diddy waved at the crowd grandly, basking in the warmth of their admiration. Martin, however, was looking on scornfully. “These thugs are taking over the Hamptons,” he muttered.
“It’s horrible,” Lily slurred in agreement.
“We’ve been trying to do something about it, but we can’t seem to get rid of them, which is exactly why we’re working toward establishing Dunehampton. We need to preserve the unique feel of what the Hamptons were like before people like this could ever afford to come out here. Cassie, have you heard about Dunehampton?”
“No,” I answered, thinking that if Martin had his way, the old-money residents of the Hamptons would be allowed to shoot the “other” people trying to get in, just as they might take out a pesky deer in their oceanfront backyards.
“One town councilman had the nerve to call it ‘Richampton’ when they rejected our petition,” he went on, “but we’re not giving up. We’re going to keep fighting the town until they let us incorporate. Then we’d have voting rights. The bottom line is that most people would prefer not to be accosted by a booming microphone and out-of-control behavior. Let’s face facts, these people would rather buy their ‘bling-bling’ than feed their children. Is that the kind of people we want running around the Hamptons?”
I took a deep breath and held my tongue, but inside I wanted to throttle him. Here he was, running around, hosting orgies at his house, and yet he considered himself superior and his own morally dubious behavior acceptable simply because he came from old money. In fact, he was just as fucked up as anyone I’d ever met. The hypocrisy was so thick I felt like I could tie it around his neck and choke him with it.
“Excuse me, miss,” a member of P. Diddy’s entourage said, disrupting Martin’s sermon. He was wearing a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar throwback jersey and a thick gold chain bearing a diamond Mercedes-Benz symbol. He wore his Gucci monogram baseball hat with a gangsta’ tilt, so that only one of his big brown eyes was visible.
“Yes?” I said.
“Can I buy bottles of champagne at the bar?”
“Of course.”
“Can I get four magnums of Cristal?”
I fought the urge to gape at his request. Magnums of Cristal sold for a grand each. “That’ll be four thousand dollars,” I told him.
He reached into his pocket and took out the thickest wad of hundreds I’d ever seen, held together by a rubber band. He counted out fifty of them. “There you go,” he said, with a wink.
I did the quick math. A $1,000 tip! By far the biggest tip I’d ever gotten. Not to mention that my ring would definitely exceed Jake’s with a single sale of $4,000. I looked forward to Teddy’s reaction when we closed out.
“Thank you so much!” I exclaimed, glancing over at Martin, certain he’d be grousing to Lily about his distaste for the flagrant displays of wealth perpetuated by the nouveaux riches. But it seemed my new clientele’s presence had been too much for him—he and Lily were nowhere to be seen, though I noticed they’d left a $5 tip for me tucked under Martin’s empty glass.
I pulled four oversized champagne buckets from beneath the bar and filled them with ice, lining them up in front of me next to a multitude of polished champagne flutes. I gathered some cloth napkins together and wrapped them around the neck of each bottle, then reached for the first one to open it. But the customer grabbed it out of my hand with a flourish.
“I’ll get that,” he said. “I like to open them myself.” He expertly popped open the top and slowly poured the first glass at a side angle. He poured another, then handed one to me. “This is for you.”
He rammed his glass into mine. “Cheers.” The champagne fizzed as our glasses collided and spilled out of the flutes and
onto the bar. I brought my lips to the glass and savored the delicate bubbles. I would never get over the thrill of drinking champagne that cost more than my rent.
I contemplated that the hip-hop personalities in the Hamptons really did epitomize what it meant to be nouveau riche. A lot of them had grown up impoverished in the ghetto and were now dripping with cash and Cristal. I looked around at all the diamonds and name brands they were wearing, thinking they must swathe themselves in status symbols to make up for their humble beginnings. Then, thinking back to when I’d tried on the string of pearls in Tiffany, I realized that I wasn’t much different. The second I had a little disposable income, I ran to the extravagant stores on Main Street to drape myself in expensive clothes and accessories, trying to impress James and the Pearls Girls. The main difference was that I couldn’t really afford it. In the Hamptons and New York, it was nearly impossible not to fall into the consumption trap.
Drink orders were flying left and right, so I multitasked, sipping my champagne while shaking cosmos for two hootchie mamas wearing golden glittering pasties and Daisy Duke jeans shorts—hangers-on of P. Diddy and his entourage. Before long James and his entourage of Tom, Glen, and the Pearls Girls made their way up to the bar, a surreal parody of P. Diddy’s group. When it came right down to it, the Botkier bags and Carolina Herrera ensembles sported by the old-money socialite set were interchangeable with the more overtly labeled attire of P. Diddy and his crew. A diamond and platinum watch from Cartier or a $300,000 ice-encrusted watch from Jakob the Jeweler’s—what was really separating them, except for taste? Except that, unlike the rappers, the old-money set didn’t generally feel the need to broadcast flashy monograms. Doug E. Fresh was still thumping “Unh! Unh! Unh!” and I smiled, thinking there was something highly amusing about seeing Rosalind and her friends climbing the stairs to a soundtrack of Biggie, who appropriately proclaimed, Damn right I like the life I live ’cause I went from negative to positive . . .