I’ll Go to The Dentist in My Next Life

As a kid I had the sort of teeth that you notice before anything else, like a car accident that someone had jammed into my maw. My mouth contained a pair of prominent front teeth, flanked on both sides by members of an unsightly over-bite and a pair of fangs that now would be quite in vogue given some of the recent dental enhancements I’ve seen—at least on the bus anyway.

I was talked into braces by my brother who likened the decline of my teeth to Lisa from the Simpsons, who in one episode is shown to have teeth that will one day grow right through her head, something that is illustrated by her kindly dentist in a series of speculative time-lapse photographs.

Later I had headgear that was so tight that it’s likely the reason I carry my head slightly forward of my body, and finally I had a retainer that I often left in napkins and accidentally threw out (leading me to become the kid in junior high who could be found digging through the trash in the common area; something that likely helped with my lack of popularity).

It was also thanks to my teeth that I got Percocets for the first time when I was fourteen. My wisdom teeth were so crooked that they’d had to break my jaw to get them out. I was put out for the ordeal and the dental team took out my teeth in pieces. I came to with an over-sized sock full of ice tied around my face, an apparatus that would later appear in photos that will no doubt be featured in a slide show should I ever get married. I suspect it was the Percocets that made me so amicable for posing in said photos, my cheeks swollen and my eyes nearly shut, as I rested my hands on my non-existent hips.

I spent so many years with someone’s finger digging around in my gums as they tried to deduce whether this incisor was overlapping the tooth next to it and what could be done about it. Now I feel that I have been in that chair so often that I can run from it until at least my next life. I am an over-brusher (something that is most likely wearing away the thin coating of enamel on my teeth that was not helped by my parents’ thoughts that immunizations and fluoride were bad for children) and I floss constantly, thinking that if I stay on top of things I will never again need to sit back and have a stranger peer into the depths of my opened maw.

In fact, I much prefer the gynecologist’s office because when it comes to doctors I like for there to be an impermeable membrane between us, even as I’m scooting my bare ass to the very end of the examination table. I have no idea what colour my gynecologist’s irises are, yet my previous dentist’s were a mad sort of blue that you couldn’t help but look at as he prodded around and told you that he was worried about gum recession.  

I recently admitted to a friend that the last time I’d been to the dentist was in Northern Thailand years ago. It had been something of a dental emergency that had made me go. The bottom retainer that had been cemented in my mouth some years previous had made its way out and now I had two rather sharp mounds of dental cement cutting holes in the underside of my tongue. I had gone, begrudgingly, to a dental centre to have them filed down.

I remember the days leading up to the appointment and how I could not sleep, but instead lay awake thinking of the possibilities, the most ridiculous of these being that I would wake up in the dentist’s office with an empty mouth, my teeth having already been sold and shipped elsewhere (this seemed not overly farfetched after I learned that the large house lizards in Thailand are killed for their brains which are then sold and ground into various medicinal powders and tinctures in China).

Yet at the dental appointment everything had gone according to plan. The good doctor had poked around only for a few minutes and then he’d filed the cement down to little flat stumps that I still worry with my tongue, often until it bleeds.

After the appointment I’d found the dentist outside, his hair now loose around his shoulders as lounged against a tree and bid me a good day. I realized on the way home that it had been a moderately pleasant experience to sit back in this relaxed dentist’s chair and find out that I wasn’t going to need to have all of my teeth filled. I decided that it was time to grow up and I resolved to find a regular dentist as soon as I returned to Canada. That was three years ago.

Over-Exposed

I’ve been in Hawaii for the last couple of weeks visiting my parents, watching men and women lope across the sand with skin the rich caramel colour of a particularly expensive handbag—their skin often sharing the same texture as said handbag. While the rest of the beach is cooking itself (rotisserie style), I’ve been sitting in the shade, reading my book and layering on my waterproof sunscreen.

For my adult life I’ve spent a great deal of time under umbrellas and in the shade, cultivating a slightly olive shade of pale that makes it look, in some lights, that I suffer from jaundice.

When I travelled through South East Asia in my early twenties I followed suit with the local women and carried an umbrella with me everywhere. I favored the massive black models because then I didn’t need to worry about my feet, but the expanse of my sun-covering often caused my travelling partner to dodge out of the way when I swung around, the umbrella careening toward his eye socket.

South East Asia was one of the few places that I’ve actually felt genuinely beautiful. When I wandered through the streets and out to the restaurants I would often get local woman examining my skin, asking if they could touch it and muttering, “cow,” which translates to “white.”

True, they were over the top with their obsession. Most of their beauty products contained bleaching agents, the skin creams and body wash and even the deodorant. It was that way with the men’s products too, something that my traveling companion once discovered when we noticed that his armpits were a very different colour than the rest of him. I guess it just goes to show that you can take anything too far.

When I was in grade school my mother had frequented tanning beds quite often, until a few of her moles were found to be cancerous. She had them removed and is fine now, but I’ve been careful ever since, to the point that when I attended a French exchange in Moncton, New Brunswick and all of my girlfriends would loll about in the sun on the hill near our dorms, I could be seen under a vast sun hat, sitting alone because no one wanted the over-sized halo of shadow that I created to affect their tans.

Now when I go the beach I’m glad for having made this choice. I’ll see women who are probably forty but who look sixty-five given the condition of their skin. Last week I’d noticed the calves of the woman on the blanket next to me. The very tan skin on them hung in heavy folds reminiscent of blackout curtains that swung away from her body, as if the skin thought that it could escape.

I had a girlfriend visiting me recently and she is paler than I am, and so it was nice to head to the beach with someone just as intent on hiding out under a tree as I was. We got into a ritual of spraying each other down with sunscreen every hour or so and keeping an eye on how long we’d gone between each application. At one point I’d lost sight of her for a moment and then noticed her scrabbling along the volcanic rock, her white legs skittering along like an unsteady insect as I thought to myself about how easy it was to pick her out of a crowd. I have a photo of her like that, getting up bum first, the skin on her so juxtaposed with the color of the rocks that I can’t help but think of a chessboard.

On the last day of her visit we’d made our final pilgrimage to one of the local beaches and as we laid down our mats the friendly couple nearest us asked if we’d just arrived. “Oh yes,” I’d said, thinking that they meant we’d just arrived at the beach.

“We thought so,” the man said, “judging by the colour of your skin.”

“Oh. We’ve been here nearly a week,” my girlfriend piped up, and the looks on their faces was one of the things I’ll cherish about her visit for a long time.

I suppose all of this leads me to wonder what I’ll look like when I get old, if all of the care with sun exposure will pay off. Those who’ve tanned deeply for years often look to me like their skin has an unexpected thickness to it, and I can’t help but wonder if in the event of an accident—say if they’re on a scooter that skids out of control—that their skin might protect them better than mine would. As if perhaps they’ve cut out the middle man and made their whole body into a pair of chaps.

Reasons to Workout at Home

So for Christmas dad got me a month-long gym pass to use while I’m visiting him and my mother in Hawaii. He is most definitely more worried about my waistline than I am at this point. Thirty is just around the corner, I’ve got too much loose skin on my abdomen to ever dream of seeing whether muscles do exist there (as a teenager I was convinced that I’d been born without), and I basically workout so that I can eat without feeling too terrible about it.

Yes, I told my father that I wanted to stay in shape while I’m visiting him and my mother, but I meant like running along the beach and doing body weight training and so on because there is assuredly nothing worse than doing weights with your dad as some dude tries to pick you up, “So I noticed your glutes from across the room…”

I had almost forgotten how much I hated the gym. True, it’s not quite as bad as my hometown where the population is sixty percent transient male and going to the gym in the evening by yourself used to make my nineteen-year-old self reach for words that I did not yet know. Though predictive text always tries fill them in for me now.

At my first visit I got on one of a long row of treadmills, all alone, and some old guy decided to hop on right beside me and chat me up. There were enough treadmills that it looked like purgatory, as if you could jump on each one for and hour and by the time you reached the end you’d be able to have waited out Armageddon. So naturally my thought was: really sir, it’s common courtesy to take the next stall over so why are you crowding me when there’s so many other places for you to go?

I get the sense though that because there’s so many young women wandering around with their much older husbands on vacation here that the general population have also gotten confused (the last time dad and I went for beers the hostess asked me where my partner and I would like to sit. At the time I’d thought that he hadn’t heard, but the other day when we were out visiting the volcano he made sure to stress to the couple that offered to take our picture that I was his daughter. It was an uncomfortable enough exchange that I’m thinking of having a shirt made). So the old men usually make a go of asking you out. This often causes me to flash back to my great aunt’s response to a friend who’d asked her some five years after her husband passed if she was thinking about dating, to which she’d replied, “Why? So one day I can change his diapers?”

I find there’s usually some sort of sacrificial lamb at the gym usually anyway and I don’t understand why those of us that are actually just there to work out get targeted. There’s always some broad with full makeup in yoga pants so tight that you can see her outer and inner labia (call me a prude, but if you’re wearing pants I shouldn’t be able to feel like I suddenly have so much in common with your gynecologist), who has the elliptical on its lowest setting. Meanwhile I’ve committed to the double sports bra una-boob look and my facial expression is likely akin to Dr. Timothy Leary on acid because I’m actually here to halt my ass in its constant quest to settle somewhere around the backs of my knees.  

After a spin on the treadmill I’d gone in search of a quiet place to do some floor work. I was told that the upstairs used to be an area designated for women but that it was no longer so. When I’m moving back and fourth between cat cow the last thing I want is some muscle junkie staring into my asshole—which is precisely what happened.

Why must I always get stuck alone in a room with the men who assuredly would’ve picked on me in high school? In elevators, on flights and now in gyms. I almost long for the days when I was one big gangly pimple.

“So what are you doing later?” he’d asked me.

“Having flashbacks.”

This guy grunted so loud even over my music I couldn’t help but think This is the sound that you make right before you roll off of some poor girl isn’t it? I’m all for proper breathing, but there comes a point where it just looks like you’re faking it, which is like an odd way of looking into your future with someone like that.

He kept trying to talk to me, something about the impressive nature of my form (which I feel is nearly as creepy as telling me how easy my eyeballs look to scoop out of my skull with his lucky spoon or commenting on my bone structure), while the sunlight glinted off his tribal tattoos and I kept turning up the music. I think I may have to invest in some of those noise-cancelling headphones. One pair to wear and another to wrap around a brick to throw at meatheads when they just won’t leave me alone.

It Was An Accident

I agreed to help a friend do a fundraising catering gig recently, and so on a Thursday night I found myself in an igloo shaped tent while reindeer milled about outside and someone blasted Christmas music loud enough to shake the glass on a tank full of otters.

Once I’d arrived I quickly remembered why I’d taken such a long sabbatical from waitressing, it’s not the crowds that I mind, but it’s the pushing through them. I don’t know how anyone can pretend that someone isn’t coming towards them with a tray of scallops leveled at their face. Me, I move, trying to stay out of everyone’s way and not get soya sauce in my hair. But most people just stand there, as if the wait staff are invisible, though in all honesty they’re moments away from picking goose-liver out of their extensions later.

I worked with a girlfriend some years ago who wore Doc Martians for the specific purpose of kicking people out of her way. She’d been employed at a concert venue and when hauling a tray of drinks through a crowd she’d simply kick out at the shins in her way, “And that’s the warning shot,” she’d told me. “The second time it’s the back of the knees.” After that I had always pictured her as some pixie-like warrior moving through a crowd of stunned concert goers who looked up at her, dazed, from their spot on the ground. It was no surprise to anyone that she much preferred to be behind the bar rather than on the floor though I’d always wanted to see her in action, like Typhoid Mary felling the masses.

Back when I’d waitressed in a venue the size of a treehouse I’d taken on a habit of shoving people, kicking out was too hard with a tray of drinks. Friends of mine said that this was excessive, a manifestation of how pissed-off the job was making me, but the thing is you can say excuse me as much as you like and most people either aren’t listening or don’t care. So I took to wandering around with one hand under my tray and the other up in a gesture reminiscent of a full contact sport.

I noticed myself doing it when the bar was half empty too—but it seemed I just couldn’t stop myself, it felt like the one way to get back at the swaying blonde standing in my path, yelling that I was sorry as I picked my way over her limbs after I’d knocked her right off her too-high heels and onto the floor.

At the catering gig the thing that kept me steady though, the thing I’d actually missed about the job, was the comradery with the fellow wait staff. Those who, like me, were just trying not to call anyone an asshole. It’s so easy to make fast friends when you’re all just trying to get through the evening. I find that there’s always someone there for you to bond with, someone to join hands with and clothesline your way through the crowd, making your way through a sea of people that are simply too proud to duck.

Aging in the Service Industry

Aging in the service industry, particularly for women, is pretty much the equivalent of suddenly counting up your birthdays in dog years. You’re aging at a fast clip, rounding the corner to a career at Albert’s and the realization that the varicose veins that came with the job can actually be seen through your most opaque tights.

I went to a party a while ago and met a friend of a friend. The friend was 23, a waitress and in zero possession of any tact. I was about to turn 27 the following week and was feeling a little unsure about it. “Wow,” she’d said to me, “If I was 27 and still waitressing I’d kill myself.” Then we all sort of stood around staring at each other, me in a onesie because it was a wigs and onesies party and though everyone else had thought to bring a change of clothes I hadn’t.

My mother had called a few days later to wish me a happy almost thirtieth, and when I reminded her that I was only turning 27 she replied with a, “Yeah, it’s close enough.”

With each new year, particularly when part of your job is serving students you realize how old you’re getting. Someone will remark, “Isn’t it crazy that we can legally serve people born in ’97 now?” And as you nod your ascent it will occur to you that the person making this comment is five years younger than you and that they don’t know who Nirvana is and they don’t care.

I’d been off work for a little while and was considering going back to it, when a few days ago I’d run into some of the boys I’d been serving since my early college days. They went on to do other things and I just really hadn’t—my brief career as a personal communications assistant had somehow been more embarrassing than any of the waitressing gigs ever could be, not least because it had inexplicably involved a vast number of displays of public exercising, often in intersections and on the local news—and the last time I’d seen them they had suggested that maybe it was time for me to make a break for it and try something else. I suspect that my bitterness was starting to show like a rather obvious tan line. We’d all stood around gripping our drinks as I waited for them to ask me if I was considering going back to my old job (a position I’d quit a total of five times) and knowing that I’d have to say yes.

It's a catch 22 I suppose. I’m aging out of a career that by the time you’re really good at it, most bosses have no use for you and you’re really too pissed off to do the job anyway. Everyone else in the room is young and circling around the tables at a speed you no longer have an interest at moving at, and meanwhile you’re trying to break in a pair of orthopedic shoes.

Talking to Strangers

I’ve been off work for a couple of months traveling and have come to miss a lot of things about the job. Most of all I miss that point when you become almost too comfortable with your customers, allowing them to hang around long after you’ve locked the doors (though you’re not meant to).

I often think of the banter, and of the weird guys who try to touch your feet and the ones you become you become attached to simply because they’re so socially inept that there’s really nowhere else for them to go; nowhere that’s used to their strangeness.

There are those too that mistake kindness for interest. I’d had one patron walk me home one evening, thinking all the while that he was a little strange but harmless. It was a few days later that I looked up while cooking and nearly knocked a hot pan onto me because he was out the window staring at me. All of this was further compounded by the chocolate-covered cherry bombs that he eventually left on my doorstep. They were homemade and dipped and drizzled in white and milk chocolate, and as I chucked them over an abandoned bridge with my then boyfriend I could never figure out if he’d meant it as a threat or gift. Perhaps it was meant to be a bit of both.

Months later the bomb builder somehow got wind of my need for vitamin injections and had gotten his friend to teach him how to give needles. The effort might’ve seemed sweet if he hadn’t been dressed in a Jolly Green Giant Costume (it was Halloween) that he’d followed me to my car in the dark while wearing, tapping on the window of my driver’s side and scaring the life out of me.

I’d told this story to one of the bartenders that I often closed the bar with and she’d laughed aloud. “You think that’s bad?” she’d said to me, “I had a patron sneak in once and leave a gift for me on my pillow. I was living with my parents at the time and they hadn’t seen a thing despite being home the whole time.”

Still, it was at the bar that I found roommates and landlords and used bicycles, as if it were a sort of classified service in itself. I have always liked the way a couple of drinks leads people to perhaps open up in a way that they normally wouldn’t, handing you their keys and asking if you could house-sit for them the following week, and that if you’re going to throw a party at their place you best be cautious about drug use, because there’s a supreme court judge right over the fence.

It’s almost as if a couple of glasses of wine dissolves some of those degrees of separation, liquor and dim pot lights can make you feel like you really know somebody, even if it’s just from the terrible things their ex wives have said about them. You feel like you know them enough to sit down with them, listen to their upcoming vacation plans and suddenly find yourself with the code to their security system and detailed instructions for feeding their pet crammed onto the piece of paper twisted up in your palm.  

Uniformly Embarrassed

In the service industry as far as uniforms go you basically get a choice between matronly or slutty; there’s never much of a middle ground. Once in a while you’ll get one of those jobs where you get to wear all of the black things from your closet (as if you’re in morning for your life and the career path you seem to be on), but that’s pretty much the whole deviation.

My first gig included a knee-length black skirt (no pants unless you were the one male waiter on staff), a nasty mustard yellow collared shirt, nylons and a navy blue neck thing that Velcroed together (you could always tell who was getting some on staff because they’d wear the neckerchief wrapped around their throat like a choker, last night’s hickey blooming out the edges). The bane of my existence though was the nylons that we had to wear no matter the season. In the summer heat I got to learn what a yeast infection was. The older ladies imparted their age-old wisdom of cutting the crotch out of their pantyhose and I found myself burning myself in surprise on the coffee machine, the pot warmer leaving a perfect crescent moon inside my elbow—as they pulled up their skirts to flash the holes in their gussets at me.

After that job I’d gotten hired on at a steakhouse. I’d been without work for a few months in between so when I got told in the interview that I could be sent home if my skirts weren’t short enough or I wasn’t wearing enough makeup I hadn’t really thought about what that meant. I suppose it should’ve shocked me less that I ended up working with a bunch of overly-tanned retired strippers, the sort of women who make you think twice about breast implants because age has caused a strange sort of folding effect on their chests, the skin above their implants hanging like a perfectly turned-down top-sheet, but for some reason it all just seemed to fit.

I’ve finally gotten rid of the clothes from that time, a collection of shorts and tube tops and all of the things that a normal person would buy and designate as never to be worn for work. I remember flitting around in tiny mini dresses as the wind from the door blew right through me. One evening the heaters in the place went out and the oysters froze right to the buffet table because we were in the middle of a Canadian winter. Rather than close the place down I borrowed a jersey from one of the patrons and worked in air so cold that I could see my breath when I took orders. Later that night I was reprimanded for what I was wearing. The blue of my bare legs stark against the banquette seat where I found myself being berated. I got fired shortly after that. I don’t know why entirely, though I can only assume it was an act of god.

After that it was on to an Irish pub where they gave us what they called kilts, but were in fact a sort of expensive plaid napkin for your ass. Many of the girls on staff that I knew didn’t care too much and wore thongs to work, exposing both sets of lips when they bent over a table to wipe it. I wondered exactly what sort of hair the customers found in their food.

The odd part of it though was that we weren’t allowed to have exposed tattoos or piercings. I found myself shoving my septum ring up my nose and swallowing labret after labret. One of the kitchen guys, who had the same piercing, told me the jewelry would, “Show up again eventually, like the second coming of Christ,” as long as I was patient. I wasn’t patient or that desperate. Nor did I want to think about the guy flipping burgers rooting around through his stool at work. The staff bathroom was gross enough.

For those with tattoos on their arms, those with sewing skills fashioned long sleeves onto their uniform tops and everybody else wrapped tensor bandages around themselves so it looked like the staff were passing around a case of leprosy. I remembered one girl who had calf tattoos melting one summer afternoon as she stood in her knee-high socks on the patio. “Wool was a bad choice,” she said tersely to me.

When the pub got sold to new owners the staff were given some pity and the kilts were thrown out, though now we’d had to wear thin black v-neck tops. They were nice until you got a few washes in and had to play “can you see my nipples” with the other girls on staff. One of the girls, who clearly gave the least fucks, looked like she had gills in hers. We had to pay for the tee shirts and so most of us just let them fall apart, our sleeves falling into someone’s soup every now and then. 

After I quit I’d held onto the uniforms for a while, pulling the thin and now foul-smelling tops out every now and then. Shoving my fingers through the holes and remembering the time I’d dumped a beer on my chest and that one of the other waitresses wore two bras on Friday nights. I’d spent the remainder of that evening with my breasts in her bra, which she’d taken on in the middle of an order, sliding it out the sleeves of her tee shirt while asking whether the person she was speaking to wanted fries or salad. It was a fond and peculiar memory.  

That was the last uniformed job I had. I’ve waitressed and bartended since at gigs that required all black, something I’ve never minded, not having to really think about what to wear, just cycling through what was on hand. But I think I miss the uniforms sometimes, the ridiculousness of them that gave you a constant conversation-starter, as you tucked your tiny plaid skirt beneath you and sat down beside a customer at their booth saying, “It’s not really so bad. As long as nobody I went to high school with comes in I’m pretty okay with it.”

You Never Forget Your First

In South East Asia the way they break an elephant is to put it in a cage for several days and poke it with sharpened sticks. Throughout this time the animal is given no food or water. There is a point that the elephant caves to the process, its spirit so weathered that it can no longer fight back, though any of them die during this process. I’m told that it’s a necessary thing in order for the elephants to become trainable, that there is no other way to take the jungle out of them, even if they’re with you from birth.

I’m ashamed to say that I’ve ridden an elephant, my feet tucked behind its enormous ears and my jeans rubbing against the coarse hairs on its neck. At the time I had no idea what had been done to get her tame enough to get her to allow me to ride her like a giant heavily-wrinkled grey horse. I know now though and I regret it. I’ve since been to the sanctuaries where elephants stumble along on legs that have been left a little too broken; places where you’re allowed to wash the elephants but never to ride them.

I’ve heard about the elephants on Chang Mai streets at night, where there are still elephant beggars, though I’ve never seen it. In Bangkok elephant begging is banned, but up North supposedly you can pay steep prices for handfuls of bananas to feed to the elephants as they stalk the pavement, thin like something out of a Dali painting, incongruously pausing in front of a shopping mall, so very far from home.

I used to think about the elephants all the time when I was at work and someone was doing their best to break me. I found it always helped to put things in perspective, but it never made the unkind things that people said go away. Though the gropings I’ve received over the years are the most memorable of all.

Recently while I was in Budapest I turned around to some sort of kissing noise behind me, and saw it was coming from a thick-shouldered Greek man, checking me out and informing me with his shriveled lips that I had interested him enough to make noise about it. I was reminded of the tuk tuk drivers in Thailand and the way they make little popping sounds with their mouths when they’re trying to get you to come out for a ping pong show, the noise supposedly reminiscent of the popping noise the women’s vaginas make when they expel ping pong balls out of their vaginas.

The exchange reminded me of my first boss in the service industry, a thick-shouldered nightmare named Marcel. When his favorite waitress, a thick-bottomed blonde, got married she came back from her honeymoon aglow with stories about the beach and how in love she was. While the rest of us poured over her photos and listened intently to how her extensions refused to dry in the tropics, Marcel, never one to miss an opportunity, asked if he could see her tan lines.

I was freshly eighteen at the time, still getting used to myself and not overly sure of my environment still. Our clientele was made up of mostly rig pigs and so I got very used to the sort of men who’d slide their room key across the table with my so-called tip tucked around it. I fantasized about stealing their valuables, and some of my dignity back, when they left for work in the morning. I fancied myself as the sort of girl who had enough patience to stake-out a hotel room—wait to see the man who’d had his hand on my ass the night before slip into his lifted one-ton and drive away—before swooping in to loot the room of its electronics and any sort of liquor that he’d left behind in the mini bar. It was unfortunately this rather growing dependence on liquor that caused me to sleep until roughly the time they finished work, put on a thick coat of makeup and rush to yet another shift. I was preparing for a life at Denny’s, the place old waitresses go to die, or so I’ve been told since about the age of twenty-three, when the elasticity of the skin over my triceps first started to go slack.

Marcel was just the cherry on top of everything, brushing the top of your ass whenever he walked past and squeezing you against the cooler though there was plenty of room for him to get past. I had a habit of pretending that nothing was going on. My relationship with Marcel went like this: he palmed my ass and I pretended it was an accident; he shoved me against buckets of wet lettuce in the cooler with his groin and I pretended it was an accident; he closed me in his office and went over the schedule with me, pinning me against his desk as he leaned into my shoulder and I pretended his vision was bad. It wasn’t until he thrust me, groin first into the corner of a deep-freeze, his hand cupping my ass hard and leaving me with a deep purple triangle-shaped bruise above my pubic bone for a week, that I had to admit he was doing all of this on purpose.

The only person who could rein him in was Marcel’s girlfriend, a woman that we all knew was married and whom we referred to as the Queen Bee. When she got pregnant and left her husband for Marcel it just seemed like karma to all of us. She’d come in for lunch and we’d all watch Marcel slink up to her table, his spawn expanding inside her like the web we watched twisting around him. She was like an embodiment of karma, the implications of his future responsibilities increasing around her heavy hips and waist. There was nothing I liked more than when the restaurant emptied out and I could flit around them, stripping table cloths, drinking a tumbler full of wine and listening to the soon-to-be mother of his child berate Marcel. She was a twisted sort of answer to prayer. 

When I finally quit and went off to college it was with a sort of resignation. I’d gotten used to the odd sort of routine that my life had taken on. The endless parades of men who worked dangerous jobs, men who cackled the odd time that I still turned red, men who asked me if I knew what it was like to fingered my a man who’d had all of his digits on one hand cut off up to the second knuckle.

Since then I’ve worked almost another ten years in the service industry. I’ve had better bosses and I’ve had worse ones—though now I know to extract myself from those situations in a timely manner. And that working under the table is a good way to get abused under it too. But I will always remember my first. The towering hairy man who put me in touch with my instincts, instincts that awakened against the corner of a deepfreeze, my neurons suddenly firing all at once as if occurred to me that yes, this was indeed what sexual harassment felt like, and that in future, it just wasn’t worth that sort of price of admission to keep my job.

Ghosts in the Bar

I’m not a terribly big believer in the supernatural. Sure I think there are things that I don’t understand, I’ve seen my mother speak in tongues with a level of conviction that I couldn’t possibly fake, yet I’m still particularly unsure as to where I stand on the issue of ghosts. Especially because as a waitresses you get in the habit of seeing certain people every day, of being semi familiar with them, and then one day they just stop coming in. Does it stand to reason then that they might end up at their favorite watering hole for a time?

 While travelling through Thailand I got all sorts of advice for dealing with ghosts, it’s a nation where everybody has a spirit house for their dead ancestors and they put out snacks for them every day—which is why the stray cats seem to do so well I suspect. When talking to a girlfriend about what was customary to do when you saw a ghost she told me, “Oh you just take all your clothes off.”

“Sorry?”

“Yeah, I was in the jungle a while ago and I saw an old man ghost. I just ripped off all my clothes and he left.”

“Really…” I could not imagine how making oneself more vulnerable in a situation like that could help, but I wasn’t about to press the subject.

When you work in a bar, especially when you work in a bar during the day, you get to see a whole lot of people on their last legs. A procession of sometimes less-than-friendly alcoholics parading through with one foot in the grave, and it makes you very aware of your own mortality and that someday you might be the aged nun with Parkinson’s that wanders in every once in a while for a shot of Five Star whiskey because you think it helps with the shakes.

I remember some of them very well. Like the elderly man with diabetes who’d come in, order a white wine, play some songs about flowers on his ukulele, tell me he liked my boots almost as much as the legs that were attached to them, and then proceed to urinate on his chair before someone either drove him home or shuffled him into a cab. Word was that he’d broken his hip getting into the bath on Easter weekend and had had stayed there, half frozen for three days until someone had come to check on him, rising from the water like some ukulele-playing Lazarus; though diabetes got him about a year later.

I remember so well the bartender that I always worked with on those nights and the way we’d argue about who was going to take the chair the ukulele player had been sitting on out back. Though I’m sure I even bothered to broach the subject, since I always ended up losing. Once we’d taken the thing into the kitchen intending to hose it down, but there seemed something terribly unsanitary about rinsing urine onto the floor of a food preparation area—the cooks got mad enough when we used to kitchen mop to clean up vomit.

We’d end up leaving the chairs out by the dumpster and in the morning they were always gone. They were heavy wooden things that I imagine anyone walking through an alley might think to grab; until of course you got it home and the smell started to rise from the thing like a ghost in itself.

And there was another old man who’d come in and order a sandwich we didn’t have, arguing with whoever ended up serving him until some sort of deal could be struck up with the kitchen. The elderly man would then drink until he was even more unpleasant and proceed to not tip. I came to see his visits like a sort of penance for something I’d done, like a type of bad karma bellying up to the bar. Then one day he fell of his stool and left. And then an hour or so later he came in to retrieve the shoe that had fallen off that he’d failed to notice on his walk home, though it was winter. A week after that he stopped coming in.

One of the other waitresses had said she’d had a feeling it was coming and that she regretted not starting some sort of death betting pool. I couldn’t imagine it even though I really hadn’t liked the guy—all of us sitting around at the end of shift doing up our cash outs as she called out, “Who had Walter down for October?”—no one feeling particularly bad about it, even though it struck me as playing dice with the Grim Reaper.  

And then there were the couples that lost their spouses and decided to do a sort of wake in the bar, everyone signing a jersey that would be buried or some other sad article. I remember a few of these impromptu wakes, and one woman in particular because she was in her sixties and hadn’t yet given up cocaine, sometimes turning up in the bar with a nose that made her look like an animal that had gotten into a bag of flour.

There’s nothing sadder than balloons for dead person. And it’s hard not to wonder about the validity of all this. About supposedly celebrating someone’s life over a pint when it was the three or four pints a day that probably helped shuffle them into an early grave and you can’t help but feel like Dr. Kevorkian. Maybe you are just doing your job, but after a while it starts to feel a bit wrong. Like maybe you’re helping to fill the bar with ghosts, and maybe there’s a reason that every night when you shut off the lights you feel like there’s something there, something angry with you, the smell of urine suddenly and inexplicably rising into your nose.

This Isn’t the Library at All

There are times that I forget how much I dislike going to the bar and find myself there, a rude awakening sure to follow as I recall how much I don’t care for other people’s public drunkenness (my own is perfectly fine) or the pleasure of watching strangers yell at each other. It’s like having thirty people break into your living room and then trying to figure out how best to enjoy yourself around the carnage. When I was getting paid to do it I could stand it, now it’s just trying to ignore watching grown women vomit into their handbags without the pleasure of being able to short-pour their next drink.

Most of my twenties were spent slinging drinks, my Fridays and Saturdays taken up by parties of frat boys, poorly planned bachelor parties and my exhausted face wondering why I was even bothering to try to enlighten to the teenager in front of me as to why the ID they’d passed me was so obviously fake. When you spend your life around drunks it becomes a very real mussing to wonder why you spend any time with people at all.

The first time you fish a napkin out of a glass and realize it got stuffed in there to cover up vomit is also the first time you briefly lose your faith in humanity. I used to find my job very similar to babysitting, except when looking after a ten year old you generally don’t have to explain to them why they can’t do coke on the premises. Slowing down liquor service is nothing more than a time out, except that the person before you can vote, drive, and legally marry the woman they’ll be backhanding in the back parking lot later. It’s all very deeply depressing.

I think it’s because of this that I’ve become a homebody. Sure, I’ll attend a kitchen party, but why would I sign up for being around strangers in a strange place, where I can’t sleep if I get too drunk? I had patience once upon a time, but it seems I’ve left it somewhere, and I don’t really care. Spend enough time as a waitress and suddenly it’s no concern of yours if anyone likes you, and you secretly begin to prefer it if most of them don’t.

Now dragging me to the bar is like taking your pet to the vet—I need to be tricked. Friends have commented that I’m often absent from some get-together or another, but I find myself coming up with excuses so transparent that they’re laughable. Now I just claim to be watching the entire collection of the recorded Nuremburg trials and I’m done with it. It became too confusing to remember what family member I said was sick or dying as a means of begging off, my entire family tree seeming like a collection of Lazarus-like figures constantly coming back from some obscure disease. Going to the bar has become my adult equivalent of skipping class.   

Now it seems that all I can offer is this: come over, we’ll drink until we can’t see anymore and we’ll do this with no one else watching you fall down my front steps. And at the end of the night, don’t stress yourself at all, because you really can sleep here.

An Ode to Cheaters

As a waitress I often get the sense that some people think they’re the smartest and sometimes only intelligent people in the room. It’s as if they think the rest of us are too stupid to notice the wedding ring around their finger, that the woman next to them is different than the one they brought in two days ago and that I should be honored (because the date that they’re on is not going well and while she’s in the bathroom it’s totally the perfect time to ask me over) that they want to take me home. Even though my hair smells like French fries; the gentleman in them is willing to overlook it. The words, “My wife is out of town,” have just never really done it for me.

Do some servers actually go home with customers? I guess it must happen or we wouldn’t get asked. Sure I’ve dated patrons, but I’ve never looked at someone who was completely blotto and thought I should follow them back to their residence; unless I thought they deserved to have their wallet lifted and would pass out before they could lay a hand on me.

In real life most married men are thoughtful enough to take off their wedding rings and flip over their cell phones so you can’t see the photo of their wife on the screen. However, when you’re the one serving them you don’t get these sorts of courtesies. There’s this phenomenon that I like to call “the last vagina in the bar.” All of the female patrons have since blacked out and been piled into cabs, the other waitress is holed up either doing her cash-out or doing blow off the paper towel dispenser or both (it will never cease to amaze me that a drug as expensive as blow will be done in as many filthy locales as the person holding the eight ball of it can think of), so it’s just you and a bunch of men that you’re regretting not cutting off.

I don’t pull my punches anymore, hit on me and I’ll tell you that I think you’d be too drunk to do anything about it if I came home with you. Leave your wedding ring on and I’ll be all too happy to tell you that it makes me want to hang myself. What are you going to do? Complain to my boss that I didn’t handle your sexual harassment in an upstanding manner? As the years go on I find that my patience gets thinner with this. I’m sick of the phenomenon that happens when you put a name-tag on someone and have them hand out beer and suddenly all sense of decorum goes out the window.

Frankly I enjoy it when people bring in women who clearly aren’t their wives to their local watering holes. Do you honestly think that bad tips and years of verbal abuse is going to make me keep my mouth shut the next time you bring the mother of your children in? I’m not above telling you how nice it was to see you in here with your daughter the other day and let your wife figure it out. I’ve often thought it would be a good racket to hawk the camera footage of men out on an afternoon of infidelity. “Well you see ma’am, I’ve got just the thing to help you win that court case.” I may be a lot of things, but I’m not stupid.

My favorite story perhaps is that of a man, that we shall call Frank, who used to come in often with another man’s wife. The couple would have a few rounds and then leave, and it was a pretty regular schedule for a while. Until the woman’s husband burnt Frank’s house down.  

It was then that I learned of Frank’s own wife and his three children. I was terribly curious to know where they spent the winter while Frank slept in an arctic sleeping bag and spent the winter fixing up the place. It had seemed like a strange sort of karma to me at the time, particularly because no one ever caught the arsonist. Frank kept coming in and telling me about his progress—he’d rejoiced when he’d been able to get the heat finally going in February—though suddenly his girlfriend was nowhere to be found.

He liked to hit on me too, telling me about a six month contract he had in Louisiana and that he wanted to bring me along. This was further complicated by the fact that we were not so distantly related. “What if I get pregnant or something and the kid ends up with a cleft palette?” I’d joked.

There had been a long pause afterward and he’d said, “Don’t you think I have money to fix things like that?” It was the first time I’d ever heard his voice border on hurt. I’d actually pictured it then, me swollen and pregnant in a Louisiana swamp somewhere, standing in the shallows and waiting to be eaten.

A number of months after that I saw Frank again, sporting a tan and sitting across from his girlfriend;  I wondered then what he had left to set on fire, if maybe the bar would go up in smoke one night or I’d see flames up the street, bursting from the windows of Frank’s elderly sports car.

How to get Wait Staff not to Spit in Your Food

Most servers don’t spit in food, or at least most of the time they don’t. I think. Yet there comes a point in some customer interactions where you’re left feeling helpless, like your nerves have been stripped back to their wires and like there’s no way to make yourself feel better aside from doing something awful to a plate of chicken wings. The following is a list of how to avoid the occurrence of bodily fluids in your dinner, unless of course, you’re a complete asshole: 

1)      If you’re going to send something back don’t be a jerk about it. Mistakes happen, steaks get over-cooked and your dressing on the side ends up on the salad,  most of us are happy to make things right. Unless you’re rude about it, then all bets are off. I worked with a cook prone to leaving shoe prints in people’s food after it came back to him the second or third time for no good reason. I suspect he would still be back there in the kitchen if not for his fondness for Nike footwear and the woman who, upon the third delivery of her steak, noted a crisp check mark in its surface. Sure he got fired for it, but many times before that had he gotten away with it, sending the steak skittering across the kitchen floor with his shoe, popping it back on the grill and sending it back out to be finally proclaimed delicious.

2)      Know what medium rare is. If you don’t know tell me how you want it to look in the middle. If it’s pink in the middle, the way you ordered it, and you complain about it you’re the asshole. When we finally get it to well done, like you actually wanted it—the ends of the thing black and curling off the dish—know that while you were yelling at me for my so-called incompetence someone was sitting on your plate.

3)       Don’t think that not eating exempts you from the list of possible bodily fluids you might ingest tonight. I’ve seen a bartender that I knew very well come around the corner to talk to me, drop his testicles into a glass while speaking, and go back to his taps and pour beer into the now offensive vessel.

4)      Don’t tell me to be quick about it. Chances are, especially if it’s busy, that I am going as fast as I can. I had a job where we’d had to prepare our own salads for customers, dipping little crystal bowls into a none-too-clean bucket in the cooler. I had one woman advise me to hurry up. I had a cold at the time and so in my haste to shut her up I’d forgone blowing my nose for the moment. As I was fishing her salad out of the dregs in the bucket with my bare hands my nose dripped into her salad bowl. And, after my initial horror wore off, I decided to hell with her and served it up anyway.

5)      Never ask where your drink has been. Narnia obviously. Because the next time I come back with another beverage for you you’re sincerely not going to want to know where it has indeed been.

6)      Do not think that just because your ex husband took off with a waitress that I, your server for the evening, had anything to do with this. Waitressing is not a cult; we don’t all know each other so do not take your loss out on me. Because at the very least I’ll start short-pouring your drinks.

7)      Don’t think that just because your inappropriate comments are vaguely original makes it okay to speak them aloud. I once had a guy tell me he wanted to eat my ass like a cupcake. And after the initial surprise wore off I still had the bartender gargle with his straw.

8)      If after you’ve been terribly rude to me and I waltz up to your table with yours and your friends’ drinks, pausing to hold them up to the light and say, “Now, which one of these did I pee in?”

Do not reply by sipping the beer I’ve placed in front of you and saying, “Excuse me miss, there’s either too much urine in this, or not enough,” because that sir, is a challenge. 

Know that most of the time when you head out for dinner nothing happens to your food (unless the place has mice or has suffered a recent lengthy power outage. There’s nothing quite like wandering into work the night after a storm to find that the coolers have been off since sometime the night before, and that the Muslim cook has his nose pressed to a pack of bacon, trying to decide if that’s indeed what it’s supposed to smell like). But if you peer into your glass and notice something floating there, a jellyfish of phlegm wrapping itself around your straw, think about whether you just might, perhaps, deserve to be finding it there.  

Career Waitress

It’s funny to think about it, but after nearly ten years of slinging drinks and bad pub food it seems apparent that I have become the thing I never expected: a career waitress. There was a haze of something like embarrassment around this for a while, particularly at the moments when people from my past would pop up to exclaim, “You’re still doing this?” But I’ve long since realized that the job has very little to do with me.

I used to lie about what I did when I traveled. It seemed reasonable to me that I was in a new country and no one was going to find out what I really did so why not completely fabricate a new alias for myself? Though most of the time I was just the borderline alcoholic divorcee in the bungalow next door. Now I don’t lie. I’m a waitress and I have a job that says very little about me. It just permits me the freedom to do what I like.  

I’m in Bratislava right now, watching the days pass slowly, as I read and write as much as I want and wander through a tiny town square watching men play chess with pawns that come up to their waists, the clock tower ringing at odd hours and my desire for a glass of wine in the afternoons seeming suddenly normal here.

I hang out of my window at night, feeling the air cool around me and listening to the weird electronic polka music that spills from the bar up the street, swinging one foot in the dark space of the air below me. I don’t have anywhere to be for a while. I don’t have a job right now. My aunt calls and asks me what my plans are and I tell her that I don’t really have any; I’ve got time. I’m used to living on not much at all, and there’s nothing hanging over my head that I need to get back to. I’m not exactly messing up a pension.  

I hate that when you meet someone new they immediately ask you what you do, as if your job somehow defines you, and maybe it does and you care a great deal about it. But for me this is not the case. My writing defines me, my relationships do, my love of reading does; there are so many more important things in my life.

It’s for this reason that I don’t like being the date at work Christmas parties and weddings, as I get caught up in a corner with someone who asks me, “So, what is it that you do?” And I know that my answer will cause their eyes to fog over, because they’ve written me off after a single two syllable word. Afterwards I’ll find myself sashaying up to the bar to get us both a drink because in their words “I’m the professional.”

I talked about this with a girlfriend a while ago and she admitted to knowing the feeling as well, watching someone slowly turn away from facing you, their shoulder suddenly directly in your line of vision as they’re inching away from you, not even decent enough to excuse themselves to go to the washroom. “You’d think we were the registered sex offender in the neighborhood,” she said to me as she mashed mint in a glass. “I’ll sometimes make things up afterward, just to see if they’re still listening, like I’ll claim to moonlight as a wet nurse occasionally.”

“What kind of responses do you get to that?”

“Are you kidding? By that point in the conversation no one’s listening to me anymore.”

Some days I come home with hair that smells like French fries and my shoes squish with beer. Some days I’ll have to tell the married guy who tried to come home with me that his wedding ring makes me want to hang myself. Some days my job makes me wish that I’d done something else. But I am so much more than the job. And best of all I know that I really have nothing to lose. That I can just let my so-called career slip off my shoulders like the snow that’s falling from the sky in the place that I’m not just dreaming of going to at night, but am heading to next.   

The Fur Trade

I’m not terribly sure when it happened, but it seems to me that somewhere along the way my vagina became a unit of value. Suddenly it has its own black book value, which is sitting somewhere around a ten year-old family sedan, but in another five years will become a write-off if totaled. I have even started to wonder about what the ad would look like in The Auto Trader.

One refurbished, gently used set of women’s genitals. In trade there will be an expectation of a roof over one’s head, a meal in the evenings and the yearly remembrance of the day you answered this advertisement.

 My gender has made me into something to be provided for, and perhaps that was my first mistake in deciding, or rather realizing, that I would never have much of a career. When you flit from job to job, working as little as possible so that you will have time to do the things you love, men start to look at you like a sort of project that needs to be funded. As if by having sex with them on a regular basis and keeping the house in toilet paper you have become the most illegitimate Kickstarter campaign to ever exist.

 I find it really strange when men all of a sudden decide to offer to provide for me, “You’ll never want for anything baby,” they say, as if after a few dates they could possibly know what it is I want for myself, when I don’t even know.  Did my life really look so bad that you had to come in and offer me what you think will be a better one? I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time. Is this your way of saying that I’ve been doing a terrible job of it?

 And maybe I have been, but that’s my business. Because I have this terrible and very permanent thing called pride. I like the bombed-out apartment buildings that I live in with their bad 1980’s carpet in the hallways. I like that I know all of the homeless guys in my neighborhood by name so that when I yell at them for dumpster diving at two in the morning and waking me up it seems more authoritative. No one is going to stop rummaging for that pop bottle if all they hear is, “Hey you, knock it off.” As opposed to, “Hey Carl it’s two and I’m trying to sleep.” I do not know their names because we have parking lot parties every afternoon and we share whiskey out of the same paper bag. Although I like that I have the option to do such things if I want to. This is my squalid parade of a life, and I’d really like it if you’d stop raining on it.

 I understand that you think I need saving, that you’re doing a good thing, and it is kind of you to offer. But understand me here; there was nothing wrong with my life before you rolled in. I don’t need to go and hide out in suburbia where I’ll have to buy a telescope just so I can get a soupcon of the excitement that I could get just looking out my kitchen window. I don’t want to live in your mausoleum. Your house reminds me of a funeral parlor. I can’t decide whether to paint, burn it down or sell it while you’re at work one afternoon because I suddenly have a lot of time on my hands.

 If you move me in there will begin to have visions of myself donning the 1980’s blazer of my mother’s (because why would I ever buy business clothes?) and setting up an open house. Baking cookies and talking to whoever trounces through about the garage being just large enough to gas yourself in, the lawn just overgrown enough that it would look better paved, and the basement ridiculously large enough that why wouldn’t you consider building a bowling alley in it? Because while you were actually doing me a favor I’d look at it like you were taking away my right to vote.

 I have shitty jobs because I choose to have shitty jobs, and because at this point I feel it’s too late to try for anything else. At the end of a shift I have stories to tell about sixty year old women exposing themselves and a man who threw up in his own shoe. When are these things ever going to happen at your place of work? And yes, sometimes I have terrible shifts and I hate what I do afterwards. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t need to leave the house every day, throw on an apron and ask some asshole in a dark bar, who wants to take me away from it all, what the hell he wants to drink.

Transaction Failed

A few weeks ago I was forced to have this strange conversation with my mother about sex. She’s the type of parent that always comes right out and asks if you’re sleeping with someone. These conversations always lead to a ruined lunch and her looking at me like I’ve become some bizarre unreasonable species that she can’t believe she somehow hatched. 

She comes at sex from the point of view that it’s a sort of transaction and that each time you sleep with a new person you’re compromising your value. Given my recent track record I often feel like she’s was suggesting that my own personal dowry is sitting somewhere around the price of a pack of cigarettes. Becoming an adult is strange. You go from thinking, “Well my mother thinks I’m beautiful,” in your teen years, to, “Well my mother seems to think I’m a tramp,” in adulthood. It’s the kind of thing that can make you unreasonably glad they’re not going to last until you’re in your twilight years.

While I understand that my mother is coming at this as someone with a religious point of view (where women are still often viewed as a sort of chattel) I still find it upsetting. It’s a protection thing for her and she intends for me to sustain as little emotional trauma as I can, which to me looks a whole lot like marrying somebody from the church who may just use you like a human napkin anyway (unfortunately abstinence only education doesn’t exactly offer a whole lot of guidance).

Yet I think that as women, whether we’re raised by religious mentors or guardians or not, we can tend to have very skewed ideas of ourselves, of what we deserve and the sort of respect we can ask for, which is never a simple thing.

For me there was always a certain level of trade about my body, about the things I felt and allowed others to do to me. It took me a lot of years to feel okay enough with myself to get angry at someone for grabbing at me, and to even say that I was angry, because I was so unsure of myself and of whether I was worth standing up for my own skin. It was many years of going home after not saying anything and then feeling like shit for just choosing to carry that frustration, spending the night playing the scenario over and over in my mind.

Growing into adulthood and gaining a healthy amount of self awareness doesn’t always mix with the waitressing profession, and it’s not just the sometimes overtly sexual nature of the expectations of the job that are to blame. I remember a time I was interacting with a group of customers and the woman at the table behind us suddenly decided that she needed another drink. So she pulled my hair. And rather than throw her bill at her and tell she was a stain on the face of womanhood I said nothing. Though this was years ago I still find myself thinking of her and hoping that she has long since walked in front of a bus.

Yet it seems that I’ve come to a certain breaking point in my career because a few months ago I finally got angry. I could hear a regular customer talking behind me to his friends and saying some rather shocking things about the type of girl I was. I don’t know why some people think it’s acceptable to talk about your anatomy in public, to them it is as if the first moment you donned an apron you ceased to be human. 

So for some reason I took off my shoe and walloped him in the back of the head with it. As he sat rubbing the spot, his eyes bulging and frog-like, he'd sputtered, “Just what the hell was that?”

“Well, I’d have thrown the thing at you, but you’d have probably kept it and built a shrine around it.” And a few days later when he came in again I actually got an apology. 

And that’s how it should be. If a new boss comes right out and tells you in the interview that you should get implants for the love of god don’t take the job. I had a position like that when I was nineteen. There’s nothing good about working for a place that sends you home if your skirt isn’t short enough, if your makeup isn’t heavy enough and if, when the heat gives out and the oysters freeze to the buffet table and you throw a customer’s jersey over your mini dress to hide your goose bumps, the boss tells you to pack it in for the night because you aren’t following the dress code.  

Now when I watch the new girls try and navigate this I often see myself, that un-readiness to rock the boat and the frustration of it all, it’s the unfortunate part of working for tips I suppose, you feel you need to please because what you take home at the end of the night is dependent on how well you did with the customers. Now I don’t feel it’s worth it, fuck the five bucks if it makes you feel worse about yourself.  Even strippers don't have to put up with that.

Though we as women may get to dictate what happens to our bodies a bit more as time goes on, it’s still sometimes hard to speak up, to get angry, and ask for what we deserve though we should never had to ask in the first place. My thinking is that if you feel threatened or cheapened by someone’s comments or actions, sit down in a chair for a moment and remove your shoe slowly. Count to thirty. If you’re still upset and know this is just going to blossom into something so much worse later, then go ahead and hit someone.

Bitch Juice

I’ve long since discovered that when it comes to the service industry there is no solidarity in womanhood. Sure, we’ll pass toilet paper to each other underneath a bathroom stall, but once you’re the one delivering her cosmos all bets are off. There are a number of ways to tell if you’re serving the type of women who will regard your presence like you are a dog that has shit in a particularly expensive pair of her shoes. They are as follows:

1.      She orders chardonnay.

2.      She waves her glass around when it’s empty.

3.      She intends to make up her own order for dinner, complete with a typed ingredient list.

4.      She wants to speak with the hostess. She doesn’t care that you don’t have hostesses. She will wait until you get one.

5.      You attempted to tell her that he skirt was tucked into her pantyhose and now she has decided that you’re the one who tucked it there.

6.      Your uniform makes you look like someone parading around as a schoolgirl.

7.      Her husband left her for someone parading around like a schoolgirl.

8.      You could hear her jewelry from down the street (naturally, this gave you enough time to draw straws with the other servers to see who would have to deal with her).

9.      She pulls your hair when you’re speaking to the table behind hers to get your attention.

10.  You had to cut her off as soon as she got here and she is not taking it well.

11.  She threw up in the doorway of the pub as soon as she got here.

12.  She is mad that the bartender won’t give her his number.

13.  She is mad that the bartender is married.

12 Things You Should Never Do In a Bar:

1)      Claim that you’re a professional auctioneer and take it upon yourself to raise money in the pub for a children’s charity. Decide that you want to raffle off all of the waitresses’ panties to do this. Explain your plan to the bartender. Sum up your idea by then saying that you intend to sleep with all of said panty-less waitresses afterwards. Become irate when no one else understands your vision.

 2)      Urinate on your chair. Come back every week and continue this behavior. Continue this cycle until the bar explains that they can no longer afford to keep buying furniture in exchange for your patronage. Be heartened by the fact that they will miss your ukulele solos terribly.

 3)      Do cocaine in the washrooms. Wait until after the bouncer finds out and proceeds to spray Pam over all the surfaces to get in an argument with him over your right to do drugs in the bar.

 4)      Find out from one of the other waitresses that your favorite server is anemic and regularly gets needles as treatment. Learn to administer needles. Follow the object of your affection to her car at the end of her shift and call out to her in the dark asking whether she needs an injection.

 5)      Vomit inside the establishment and claim that because this is your bachelor party you needn’t clean up the mess.

 6)      Vomit in your handbag and pretend like nothing happened. Proceed to yell at your server about whether you do or don’t need a cab.

 7)      Vomit in your glass and stuff it full of napkins so that no one can tell. Let the server figure out what you’ve done much later when she’s pulling these napkins out of said glass.

 8)      Have sex in the washrooms, and when you get caught refuse to stop because, “We’re not doing anything wrong.”Continue what you’re doing until staff members have to physically separate you from your partner and throw you out separate exits.

 9)      Go hunting. Go to the bar in your bloody jacket and camouflage pants with a severed deer leg hiding under your jacket. Stuff the deer leg in the toilet of the men’s washroom. Assume that no one will know it was you.

 10)  Go on a first date and realize that things are progressing badly. Decide that your server is an excellent back-up plan and begin wooing her in a non-traditional way while your date sits quietly picking at your salad. Decide it is appropriate to ask about your server about pubic grooming habits and how she feels about fisting. Become enraged when you return from the washroom and realize that the waitress has taken pity on your date and put her in a cab.   

 11)  Expose your genitals.

 12)  Expose your genitals and proceed to urinate on the bar.

Letter to a Dirtbag

Dear Dirtbag,

You have found this letter on your person because you did one of the following things: made an inappropriate comment, touched someone you had no business touching, or were just a belligerent piece of trash.

This letter is my way of informing you that the previous night’s behavior was completely inappropriate and that the next time you think of going out you should instead do something else, like take a bath with your toaster.

Why am I so angry with you? Because you wouldn’t respond to reason, refused to imitate the behavior of a decent human being and so, when my bouncer was hurling you out the front door, I stuffed this letter into your coat pocket. I suspect it was the only feminine contact you’d had for quite some time.

It’s at this point that I’d like to ask you a number of questions:

1.      Does your mother often pretend that she doesn’t have a son?

2.      Have you ever been beaten up by someone’s pimp?

3.      Have you ever had someone suddenly disappear while on a first date with you?

4.      Do women tend to laugh when you ask them out?

5.      Was your only long-term relationship a result of her drug habit and you providing her with whatever illicit substance? 

If you answered yes to any of these questions it’s because you’re an asshole. Women do not like you. They don’t like your behavior or your flagrant disregard for the fact that they’re people.

I suspect that you know what I’m talking about and that you, in fact, have a shrine or drawer of some sort filled with female personal effects that got left behind at your place, and when you get rejected you go home and cry into someone’s discarded hair extension. I suspect that this behavior will escalate and someday you’ll be crying into a used implant, but let’s not talk about your latent homicidal tendencies quite yet.

First order of business is getting rid of your blow-up doll. Even she doesn’t like you and is probably making it easier to treat women like objects. Then I would suggest that you stop talking, at least for a while. At least until words like, “That outfit would look better on my floor,” and, “Too bad you have enough ass for both of us,” immediately come to mind when you’re meeting someone for the first time. I suspect that even the women at your family reunions avoid you.

If you fail to do to curb your disgusting commentary, I suggest you get arrested, thus sequestering yourself from the female population and doing us all a favor for your months of incarceration. Steal a car, rob a bank—I don’t care—just be sure to do something that leaves us the fuck alone, though I get the vibe that kidnapping is totally your style. I also suspect that being someone’s bitch will give you a completely different outlook, because let’s be honest, there’s no way you’re going to be top banana.

If, when you return to the outside world you still feel the urge to slap women’s asses and tell us we’d look better underneath you, provided we put a bag on our heads, then I suggest that you re-read this letter; though you can probably stop after the bit about the toaster.

Sincerely,

One Angry Waitress