by Leanne Shear
I looked at him and didn’t say a word.
“If you can’t do it, I’ll have you moved to the back bar where you’ll be lucky if you can scrape together a hundred bucks,” he whispered deliberately, spit flying out of his mouth and landing on my forehead.
His threats still ringing in my ears, I walked away from him to serve an older woman wearing a white pantsuit and draped in diamonds the size of golf balls. She looked like a clone of Elizabeth Taylor.
“What can I get for you?” I asked.
“Could I please have a glass of Cabernet?” she answered, blinding me with her ten-carat diamond ring.
I grabbed the wine bottle, but it slipped right out of my clammy hands and shattered, sending hundreds of maroon-tinted glass shards right in the ice bin. I called the bar back over to bring me a fresh batch of ice and leaned up against the bar to catch my breath. I didn’t know what to do. If I didn’t go along with Jake’s plan, I’d lose my position at the front bar. I cursed Spark for being so damn dysfunctional. Jake was the so-called head bartender, and his modus operandi was to help himself to fistfuls of the owner’s money. It was probably he who had gotten me demoted to the back bar earlier in the summer, I thought bitterly. As much as I couldn’t imagine doing what he’d asked, I was terrified of finishing up the summer in even deeper financial hot water. It seemed I was screwed either way.
For the remainder of the private party, Jake happily made drinks for the guests without a care in the world. Before I knew it, it was one o’clock, but the party still wasn’t over, and our chances for making legitimate money diminished with every passing minute. It wasn’t until after two that the club opened to the public. Hundreds of screaming customers who’d been kept at bay by the ominous velvet ropes came rushing over to the bar to order cocktails. I took a deep breath and dug in for my newest misadventure as Bonnie to Jake’s Clyde.
“Three Ketel tonics, two cosmos, and three Coronas,” someone demanded.
“Ninety-four dollars please,” I said.
He handed me $120. “Keep the change.”
I saw Jake whip around at the sound of those three magic words and watch me closely. I walked over to the register and as nonchalantly as possible rang in two Coronas for $20 and the two Ketel tonics for $24, hit cash, and put the $120 inside. On a little pad next to my register I wrote down in tiny numbers, 76. I quickly turned around and nervously eyed the cameras, wondering if anyone had witnessed my crime. Everything seemed normal, so I continued making drinks.
“Two Mount Gay and tonics, and three Pinots,” a woman ordered. I hated when people asked for Pinot. Pinot meant “grape.” What she should have said was Pinot Grigio or Pinot Noir. Thankfully, we didn’t carry Pinot Noir so the mystery was easy to solve.
“That’ll be sixty dollars,” I said.
She handed me $70. “Keep the change.”
Nervously, I entered in only two of the Pinot Grigios, hit cash, and put the $70 in the register, changing my 76 to 122. Again I scanned the crowd anxiously, convinced I could see a suspicious man in a dark suit taking notes on my reprehensible behavior. But I decided it was all in my imagination, so I continued to take orders, make drinks, and ring them in, taking the occasional twenty or so for Jake and me. It was easier than I’d thought. Before I knew it the figure on my little cheat sheet read 200. I figured that was enough and spent the rest of the night ringing everything else in.
Shalina materialized around 4:00 A.M. and gave Jake and me $25 each for working the open bar for four hours. That equaled $6.25 an hour. She cheats us out of money, so it’s only fair that we do the same, I rationalized. I promised myself I would never take money from Finton’s—even though Laurel and Dan drove me crazy sometimes, they always took care of their employees and tipped us out more than fairly. Dan even tipped us when he sat at the bar and had a couple of cups of coffee (or too many glasses of red wine).
“I can’t believe the night’s already over,” I said to Jake.
“How’d you do?” he asked, looking at me meaningfully.
“Fine,” I said, sipping my fifth glass of Veuve. “Can you give me a ride home? James went to Tavern for Richie Akiva’s birthday party.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Annie too?”
“No, she left an hour ago with this new guy she’s dating.”
The night might have been over, but I still had the little problem of how to remove the $200 from my register and slip it furtively into my makeup bag without any of my scandalous activity being caught on camera or by a spotter. My heart pounding, I collected all the money out of the register, stuffed it into the blue leather bank envelope, grabbed my makeup purse, and then bent down out of the cameras’ sight line pretending I had to grab something from the lower cabinets. Squatting over the grimy bar mats, I pulled two $100s out of the envelope, crumpled them up in my left fist, and pushed them to the bottom of my makeup bag. I then sealed the envelope, stood up, and walked over to one of the tables where everyone was counting their money. My heart was still pulsating madly in my stomach, and I had so much adrenaline in my system that I felt like I’d just sprinted past the twenty-six-mile mark in the New York City Marathon.
We cleaned up and counted the money in record time, probably since we’d only been using our registers for under two hours. I grabbed the bottle of Veuve on our way out the door.
“So, what’s the grand total?” Jake asked when we were safely sequestered in his car, driving home at the end of the night.
“I have an extra two hundred dollars,” I said.
“Not bad for your first night, but you can do better,” Jake said as he pulled into the Hess gas station down the street from Spark and parked the car. He pulled a wad of twenties out of his sock and tossed them on my lap. “Count that.”
Sitting in the dark car in a deserted parking lot with hundreds of dollars everywhere and an empty bottle of champagne between my knees, I felt like we were either in the middle of a huge drug deal or in the executive offices of Enron. “Four hundred and thirty-five dollars,” I said, amazed. Didn’t anyone realize that there was that much money missing from Jake’s ring? Together we’d stolen over $600.
“So that’s an extra three-seventeen each,” Jake said. “Not bad, so including our tips and the waitress tip-out, we made what—almost five hundred dollars?”
“Yup,” I said. Five hundred dollars. If it wasn’t for our little covert operation, we would have walked with less than half of that. It was oddly exhilarating. I was master of my own fate. I could cover next month’s rent check and maybe even get a new dress for the upcoming charity clambake James had invited me to. But as we pulled out of the gas station and back out on the highway, the sun slowly rising over Montauk Point, what bothered me more than the iota of paranoia gnawing at my consciousness was the fact that I didn’t feel guilty at all.
Fourteen
____________
KAMIKAZE
“Eighty dollars,” I said to the five-foot-ten, ninety-pound Giselle look-alike standing before me. I wondered if she’d ever eaten a carbohydrate. Maybe she was on the Hamptons cocaine-and-cigarette diet that did wonders for all the cocktail waitresses. She placed a $100 on the bar, and I could’ve sworn I caught Benjamin Franklin winking at me as he lay on the sticky surface, absorbing Johnnie Walker Black into his green skin.
“Keep the change,” she said.
Her magic words sent a small shiver of excitement through me, even at the height of the crunch on my second-to-last Saturday night at Spark. I peeled the soiled bill off the bar, blotted it on a dirty bar rag, and after ringing $20 into the register, I put it in the drawer—no spotter would ever be able to say I failed to put money into the register. Then I wrote a little 80 on the scrap of paper next to my register, following the 40, 20, and 20 I had already racked up. And it was only eleven o’clock.
For the first time all summer, I felt like I could really relate to Jake. Granted, I wasn’t a raging cokehead, but the minuscule bits of money I was skimming off
the astronomical Spark profits were addicting, and I could finally understand why he kept going to the bathroom to blow lines with increasing frequency and urgency as the night wore on. As my night wore on, I needed the fix of illicit cash more and more often. Adding dollar amounts to my list gave me a better buzz than shots. I envisioned myself a kind of Robin Hood—robbing from the rich to feed the poor. Only I wasn’t helping deprived peasants suffering under the king’s rule, I was helping myself.
I looked around compulsively. No spotters seemed to be in sight. Unless they were disguised as two gum-popping, big-haired Jersey girls who looked like they were headed for “the shore” (pronounced “shaw-ah”) but had accidentally gotten on the wrong train. As they compared their prominently displayed belly-button rings, I decided there was no way they were working undercover. In my mind, all spotters were male, beefy, and dressed in cheap black suits. These girls definitely didn’t fit the profile.
James appeared like a mirage behind the Jersey girls just as one was bending over to show the other the multichromatic butterfly tattoo located on her left butt cheek.
“Hey, baby,” he said, leaning over the bar to kiss me.
“Be careful, it’s a mess,” I warned. “We’re out of clean bar rags. I don’t want your shirt to get dirty.”
“I don’t care about that,” he said, leaning his body halfway over the lake of Johnnie Walker, taking my face in his hands and kissing me tenderly.
“I’m so happy you came in,” I said, ignoring the people standing impatiently at the bar giving me pointed looks and waving their cash around. As the summer neared its end, I found I’d grown less and less tolerant of the pushy Spark customers. I felt I deserved a break from their incessant drink orders and demands for attention. I bent my body over the wide bar as far as it would reach to kiss James again, this time a little more heatedly. He tasted like an appetizing combination of spearmint gum, sexy saltiness, and a tinge of alcohol. I thought I glimpsed Rosalind in the crowd rolling her eyes at my display of affection, but as I’d already had roughly ten shots, I didn’t care.
“Come on, James, our table’s ready,” Rosalind commanded from behind him. She was wearing a flirty pale pink dress and looked like a prima ballerina who’d pirouetted her way off the Lincoln Center Stage and all the way out to Wainscott. Her blond hair was pulled gracefully off her long neck, and she had a white leather Marc Jacobs purse dangling from her arm. Of all the girls, I had to admit that Rosalind’s style impressed me the most. Pearls or no pearls, she always looked like she’d just pranced off the pages of Vogue and had a fashion sense that Jackie O would envy.
“Go on up. I’ll be right there,” he said, turning back to me. She pouted her cherry lips and stormed off across the bar and up the stairs to VIP. The bouncer saw her coming and quickly lifted the velvet ropes.
“God, she can be so aggravating,” James said after Rosalind was out of earshot. At first I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly; I’d never heard him say anything negative about Rosalind or the other Pearls Girls. “She’s so high-maintenance.” I wanted to start listing my own set of complaints that I’d been harboring about Rosalind since Memorial Day weekend but was interrupted by Jake, who was sweating profusely as usual. His sweat reeked of Patrón, and his eyes were fairly popping out of his head.
“Do you have the bottle of triple sec?” he barked.
I pulled it out of my speed rack and handed it to him.
“Those bitches at the end of the bar keep ordering kamikazes,” he grumbled, indicating the fake-and-bake Jersey girls. I turned back to James. “Did you guys get a table in VIP tonight?”
“Yes,” he said, rolling his eyes. “But I think I’m going to stay down here with you. Can I get a Budweiser?”
“Budweiser?” I asked, aghast. “James, what if someone sees you?”
“Shut up!” he said, laughing. “I guess you’re rubbing off on me.”
I pulled the familiar molasses-colored bottle with the red label out of the cooler, twisted off the cap, and handed it to him. “You’ve gone from champagne in VIP to beer with the masses,” I told him. “And I must admit, you look pretty hot with a Bud in your hand.”
I reluctantly tore myself away from James and got back to furiously mixing drinks for the crowd, now three deep, which had continued to gather and yell impatiently during our interlude.
“Did you have fun at the barbeque today?” I asked James, midshake of a Moulin Rouge martini. He had invited me to come with him to a barbeque at one of the Pearls Girls’ houses, but for once I just didn’t feel like dealing with that crowd. After our dinner at East Hampton Point, my patience with them had worn extra thin. Even though I loved spending every waking second with James, I’d pretended that Annie was depressed about something (an occurrence as unlikely as snow flurries in July) and that I had to spend the day with her. Travis and the rest of the extended Animal House family had joined us (minus Camilla, who was also on the guest list for the barbeque), and we’d thrown the Frisbee around on the beach and splashed around in huge waves until we were all bright red and exhausted from the hot sun and exertion.
“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it fun,” James admitted. “The caterers served frisee salad and watercress finger sandwiches, which of course none of the girls ate.” I hid my amazement, but with every passing word out of James’s mouth I couldn’t help but feel that we’d turned a kind of corner. We were finally seeing eye to eye on that most important of topics: his friends.
“But you’re coming next Monday, right?” James continued. “To the clambake?”
“Who’s throwing it again?” I asked. If it was another Pearls Girls catered event, I’d at least remember to eat a burger or something beforehand.
“It’s a benefit for the Children of America charity. Rosalind and I are on the committee.”
“I’ll try to make an appearance,” I teased. He leaned in to nuzzle me, nose to nose, and I felt myself being transported away from the bar and onto the beach where we’d first kissed, the surf lapping at our feet . . .
“Hey! Gimme five shots of Cuervo chilled, two Goose martinis up with olives, and three Belvedere gimlets, rocks,” a customer roared, pulling me back from my latest fantasy just as I was about to imagine James asking me to marry him.
At four on the dot the lights flooded on, illuminating the war zone behind the bar and encouraging the remaining stragglers to finish whatever they had in their eight-ounce plastic cups and head out the door. I reviewed my cheat sheet and deliciously totaled up the amount of the night’s underhanded labor.
I gulped when I saw the total: $480. That was a lot. I guessed I had gotten a little overzealous, as I always did when given a challenge. Unfortunately, there was absolutely nothing I could do since it would look pretty suspicious if I started ringing drinks into my register at four-fifteen when there wasn’t a customer in sight. I had no choice now but to keep the money. I hoped my ring was high enough, but then I thought about it realistically and figured I was safe—we had only one week to go and I would never have to see Shalina or Teddy or the ominous owners (not that I’d ever seen them in the first place) again. I felt curiously immune to getting into any real trouble.
I clenched the contraband in my sweaty fist and squatted down to quickly wedge it into my makeup purse, then grabbed my bag from where I had presciently stowed it on the bottom shelf and stood up, careful not to look anywhere near the cameras. I pulled the rest of my money out of the register, took the tip cup and all my credit card receipts, and entered the drunken, drugged fracas in the dining room, but not before grabbing two bottles of Bud for me and James. I pulled up a chair at the table where Jake had stationed himself.
“How’d we do?” he asked, buzzing through dollar bills faster than the mechanical counters at banks.
“Really good,” I said, looking at him with a triumphant smile.
“Good,” he said. He finished counting his register, put his money in an envelope, and went upstairs.
&nbs
p; My dry eyes struggled to weed any fives, tens, or twenties out of the tip jar, so I could count and bundle the singles. But my brain was submerged in a deadly combination of Budweiser, Patrón, and champagne, and I was having trouble adding.
“Can I help?” James asked.
“Here,” I said, handing him a fistful of bills. “Count these.”
He wasn’t nearly as drunk as I was, and he quickly rifled through the wad of cash and the rest of the tip bucket, neatly stacking the twenties, tens, and fives, and rubber-banding piles of a hundred singles. We counted in silence, punctuated by the cocktail waitresses’ chatter.
“That fuckin’ guy at 21 only left a fifty-dollar tip on a five-hundred-dollar tab. What a fuckin asshole! I wish I woulda looked at his receipt before he left, I would’ve kicked his ugly Eurotrash ass,” Elsie slurred. She failed to mention that a 20 percent gratuity charge was automatically added to every single cocktail waitress tab, so in reality the guy had left her $50 on top of that. The waitresses were used to getting exorbitant tips in addition to the mandatory gratuity, because they neglected to inform customers that the tip was included. Elsie was smoking one cigarette after the other, lighting each new one with the butt of the previous one, and, as a result, was engulfed in a hazy cloud of smoke. In between puffs, she swilled out of a half-full bottle of Cristal that one of her “clients” had left on a table. Ariel, one of her cronies, was counting money while picking the almonds out of a salad she’d bought earlier at Citarella.
“I hate nuts on my salad,” she lamented.
“Do you like them on your face?” Elsie smirked, and the bleached blond contingent guffawed in appreciation. I looked over at them, amused. Garth Brooks played in my mind: I got friends in low places, where the whiskey drowns . . .
A shadow suddenly fell across my work space, and I looked up to see Teddy towering over me. “Cassie, I need to talk to you,” he said.