(Ed note: This is the fifth in our Ready to Serve series. Find previous posts here. sdh)
The next thing I knew I was waking up under a tree in Recreation Park next to a homeless man mumbling to himself. I was pissed off he woke me up in the middle of the afternoon. He looked at me dead in the eye. I lifted my head from a pile of leaves and a few stuck to my cheek, stained it orange. I must have looked like a pile of garbage. I told this man that I had no idea what he was saying then took a swig of warm beer from the glass bottle under my shirt. This man told me that there was dirt in my drink and when I looked down I saw cigarette butts at the bottom of the bottle. I must have found an empty bottle in someone’s garbage and grabbed it before making it to the park at dawn. After getting out of my waitressing job at O’s Pub at 11pm I hit the bars in downtown Binghamton then disappeared into the brush.
My routine at work involved hiding in the kitchen, and eating a few fries and peanut butter chicken wings then serving the basket of grease to some old man in a golf shirt. Sometimes this old man was my grandfather. He’d order two or three $1.10 drafts of piss colored beer during happy hour and I would try to pull myself together and make small talk. He paid with exact change and I would keep the money. By the end of the night I’d have an apron full of dimes and sweaty dollar bills. We’d reminisce about when I played basketball in high school and I’d try not to spill drinks. Carrying two beers was the most I could handle. I’d have to focus all my energy on the pint glasses, one in each hand, and take baby steps as I made my way from the bar to the table ten feet away. I remember biting the collar of my turquoise shirt and wiping my sweaty palms on my apron, crumpling dollar bills and not tallying the drinks on the check so that I could steal the money. This job didn’t last long. I passed out in the kitchen next to a bucket of sauce. I didn’t show up for work after that shift because I knew they were going to fire me.
The last shift I worked as a waitress in 2001 I licked the back of the toilet and had puke in my hair. The usual suspects came in and out of the joint and no one seemed to pay much attention to my reckless serving. Surviving as a waitress when I was twenty-one years old meant trying to act human and blend into society. O’s Pub was a little hole in the wall in Endicott, NY, a couple of miles from IBM, where my grandfather and uncles dipped computer parts in chemicals for a living. I think the land in this corner of upstate New York is poisoned with all those chemicals. And I feel like I drank that poison. I don’t trust my memory. When I think about the year I worked as a waitress I recall the times when I didn’t make it home after my shifts. I still wake up every day thinking it's a miracle I made it far away from that life.
Nicole Santalucia received her MFA from The New School University and her PhD in English from Binghamton University. She founded The Binghamton Poetry Project, a literary outreach program, in 2011. In 2013, Nicole won the Ruby Irene Poetry Chapbook Prize from Arcadia Magazine Inc. forDriving Yourself to Jail in July—published in January 2014. Her non-fiction and poetry appear in The Cincinnati Review, Paterson Literary Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, 2 Bridges Review, Bayou Magazine, Gertrude, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, Burlesque Press and others.Nicole received honorable mention awards from Astraea Lesbian Foundation Writers Fund as well as the Allen Ginsberg Award. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.
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