To be an excellent waitress or bartender, it is good to be physically coordinated and a linear thinker. I am neither of these. I am an unfailingly clumsy and largely disorganized person. It’s okay. I’m good at lots of other things.
I think I glamorized the notion of me as a surly, self-assured bartender long before I actually found myself in the role. Throughout college, I mostly earned a living caring for other people’s children. I had been a camp counselor before that. Sick of my demanding, underage clientele, perhaps I did fantasize about a job that, by its very nature, prevented me from ever having to wait on a child again. I did not realize then that tending bar can be very like babysitting, with only slightly more money and a lot less cuteness to soften the embarrassment of it all.
In the summer of 2010, I had just finished undergrad and was still living in my college town. I was finally working my first post-grad, kid-free job: packing boxes at an embossing plant outside of town. It wasn’t glamorous, but it provided a nice break from the rapidly deteriorating situation with my college boyfriend. It was a seasonal gig with a definite end in sight, and I really liked the people I worked with. That said, it was clear that things were not magically coming together for me despite my shiny new Liberal Arts degree. But I was bearing up, I told myself. I was handling it. Basically, I had to get out.
So I moved home. There was a messy break-up. There was my parents arriving at the glorified flop-house where we lived, and covering their noses like those people on Hoarders, as they helped me gather what remained of my halcyon days, and load it into the car in bundles and piles.
Back in my hometown, a suburb of a slightly larger town, where no one I knew lived anymore, I set about sorting out my life. I applied to a temp agency. I interviewed at the mall. It was all very weird. Then I signed up for bartending school.
I could go on for pages about the various absurdities of my bartending alma mater. Its proprietor was Joanne, a middle-aged mom of two who wore three-inch acrylic fingernails and a waist-length, platinum party mullet. She had run several bars in Atlantic City in the 80s and somehow you just could tell she’d been the life of that particular party. We had textbooks. We took weekly tests. We memorized various acronyms for popular drink recipes, all of them completely ridiculous and incredibly helpful. A Blue Hawaiian is composed of Lite Rum, Blue Curacao, and Pineapple Juice; Hawaii is the Light Blue Pineapple state. Etcetera. The gist was you paid a certain amount of money to drive out to this shady-looking storefront in an unassuming strip mall every day, but once you got inside, the classroom was, for most intents and all purposes, a bar. Liquor bottles were filled with water food-colored to look like the real thing. Liqueurs were harder to replicate with dye, but they made sure that each bottle basically evoked the spirit of the spirit it was meant to represent. The “drinks” we made almost always came out muddy brown.
I wish I could say that I entered into all of this with any sense of irony, but I was pathetically earnest and full of expectation every step of the way. I was looking for anything to which I could hitch my wagon, and this really did seem like a good enough way to pick up a marketable skill. I didn’t learn until later that bartending schools like this one are widely considered to be a joke by reputable restaurants and bars. After three weeks of daily lessons and a grueling practical exam in which I had to prepare twenty “drinks” in fifteen minutes, I received my diploma and was given the option to purchase my own bar kit from the school for thirty-eight dollars. I was told by my instructor that my name would go into a database of trained bartenders-for-hire and she would call me if she heard of any openings.
The call came a few weeks later. The local Elks lodge was looking for someone to manage their clubhouse. I had been passing my days doing chores and watching TLC on the basement television. Joanne gave me the details as I folded my father’s underwear and watched snow gathering in the little crook outside the basement window. It had been almost four months. I told her to schedule the interview.
I suppose I’d expected something akin to a country club. It wasn’t like that. It was more like those rumpus rooms some kids had growing up—large oblong room with cheap paneling, sectional sofas, and a Ping-Pong table. The bar, with its oversized counter and comically cramped service area, reminded me of the one my second cousin had had installed in his McMansion a few years back. The interview was brief, conducted by Andy, an overweight construction foreman who was also chair of the House Committee. “We don’t need you to be perfect. We just like things done a certain way.” I smiled and said I would do my best. I was given a golf pencil to fill out my paperwork.
I was a bartender for the Elks lodge for about seven months, and it wasn’t that bad. There were the regulars—a motley crew of core Elks who came by most weeknights, to hang out, get tipsy like teenagers and, I eventually realized, to be away from their families. Each regular had a preferred beer. We stocked Budweiser, Bud Light, Miller Lite, Busch, and Pabst Blue Ribbon. These were the choices. It was explained to me right away that I would be expected to have the beer of each Elk’s choice cracked and waiting for them when they approached the bar. Should I mistakenly place a Bud Light before a PBR-drinker, I should understand that I would be committing the most serious of Elks Lodge faux pas. Gun to my head, I could probably list the beer preferences of each and every patron of that bar to this very day. I have brain cells that are currently, actively dedicated to retaining this information.
The core Elks also loved shots. They were on Jaeger Bombs when I started. They liked me to serve them in those little plastic washroom cups, and at the end of the night I’d hit the floodlights and find them littering the patio, slightly crushed, translucent, looking for all the world like deep sea crustaceans as I swept them into piles.
When June came, the seasonal Elks arrived. These were family folks who bought summer memberships so they and their children could make use of the pool. Now, at the far end of the bar, a drive-through window, to which I’d never paid much attention in the winter months, slid and slammed throughout the day. Country music playing over the poolside loudspeakers seeped into my strictly rhythm-and-blues-filled bar. Soccer moms and baseball moms and swimteam moms with their leathery tans and neon string bikinis flocked to the window to order (did I mention that the bar doubled as a snack bar in summertime?) “three corn dogs, two rocket pops, a pretzel… oh! and a strawberry daiquiri with a 151 float, please. Thank you, Chelsea! How’s your Mama?” The tips had never been better, but I was now serving people I knew. The families of kids who’d been bullies to me in my teen years were now singing the praises of my frozen margaritas.
I drove the empty small-town roads back to my parents’ house in early morning and drank beers alone before the glowing basement television.
When I found out I’d been accepted to the New School, I let Andy know I’d be gone by summer’s end. The word spread fast. “Why in the hell would you want to move somewhere like New York when you could live someplace like this?” “Oh honey, be careful. You’re a southerner. Those folks up there are mean.” Etcetera. I smiled and nodded. I cracked beers. I bought them shots. I’d saved the money that would nearly pay for my first year in New York City.
The last night I worked at the Elks Lodge was the annual end-of-summer Jamboree. They had the grill kids and the lifeguards handing out Jell-O Shots and sparklers, and I was three rows deep around the bar all night. I remember hitting my wall that day. I remember being tempted to walk out and light a match to this strange, exiled time in my life. Then, at the end of the night, T.R., one of my favorite Dad-tastic regulars, a core Elk, brought me an upturned baseball cap. It was filled to the brim with fives, tens, and twenties. “We passed this hat around the bar. Just wanted to see you off right. Good luck.”
I know bartenders, and I’m not a bartender. Not really. I don’t think I ever had much talent for it. If I’m not careful, I tend to remember that time in my life as a kind of lacuna. It felt, in the moment, as if my life had somehow jumped the tracks. I had switched onto a different, undesirable course, and was now lashed to a certain, finite list of things I could expect to be and do. I think most people go through something similar, usually after college. It takes a few more years to see things clearly. It was always the same set of tracks I was on—or there are no tracks. The point is, I suppose, that figured that out.
Chelsea Whitton holds an MFA in poetry from The New School. Her poems have appeared in such places as Ilk, Sixth Finch, Bateau, Cimarron Review, and WomenArts Quarterly, among others. She earns her living as a copywriter and lives in Ridgewood, Queens.
Chelsea: Exquisite prose, vivid storytelling, penetrating self-observations! Well-done!
Posted by: tree turtle | March 14, 2015 at 05:25 AM