A Long Expected Scandal

I think many of us can feel a sort of cultural shift in the air right now. This odd sort of ripple effect that I can only assume the Weinstein scandal seems to have a hand in. Many of us are angry and by the looks of things we intend not to take it anymore.

Recently, in my own city a bar and popular venue for shows called the Needle Vinyl, was shut down indefinitely due to sexual misconduct. I’m told that complaints about a misbehaving employee were brought to those in charge and pretty much brushed off. It was only when performers started pulling out that that anybody paid attention. I’m impressed with those who said they wouldn’t play at a place that treated their employees like this, but I wonder why it had to go so far before anything was done.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that things are changing. Hopefully there are great shifts in the way things go on behind closed doors in the service industry. But I also can’t help but think that we need to tread carefully right now. Because if we don’t we may all be branded crazed feminists and our stories discarded as nothing more than prattle.

An old acquaintance of mine, who is now a sort of feminist rights writer (and who used to work in the industry), commented that if every bar and restaurant where sexual misconduct went on were shut down, there would be none left. And its comments like this that are going to make this inquisition shut itself down from the inside.

I am no stranger to sexual misconduct at work. In my first waitressing job, I was barely eighteen and still had no notion of myself. And so, when my boss took to sliding a hand across my lower back as he passed, I shook it off as nothing. Finally, one evening he pushed up against my ass so hard with his hands that I lost my footing and went pelvis-first into the corner of the kitchen deep-freeze. I had a triangle shaped bruise just above my pubic bone for weeks.

Telling him off the next day (because that’s how long it took me to work up to things then), is still one of my most satisfying memories. Though at the time it was his surprise more than anything that astounded me. He was actually visibly shocked that someone like me might turn down any kind of physical contact from someone like him. I doubt that our encounter brought about long term changes in him. But I can hope.

There have been other occurrences, but the things that I watched happen to others were much worse. Unwanted cellphone photos of the boss’ genitals sent to them without warning. Bosses who had sex with so many of their employees that when they heard the word “no” it seemed incongruent to them.

But I think at this time, when change is actually happening, the worst thing we can do is clump everyone together. There have been establishments that made me feel safe, and fellow employees, supervisors and owners who have made it clear that it is not part of my job for me to feel abused and that I should not hesitate to speak up if I ever felt my safety compromised. I refuse to paint them with the same brush as these other monsters. Yes, they too were men, but that’s all they had in common with these scumbags. And I refuse to call them by a name that they do not deserve.

The Ninja. Kiev, Ukraine. 2017. 

Warsaw or The Place Where Chopin’s Heart is Buried

When I was a kid my father’s friend Kevin used to play a game with my brother and I. He would drive us to a place (usually the town dump to watch the bears scavenge) and afterwards he would insist that we give him directions to get home. Neither of us could ever manage it, and we’d end circling the small town for a long while before Kevin finally gave up and told us, “You were close,” and drove home. The town had less than a thousand residents. Of course we were close.

My sense of direction has not improved over the years. On a recent trip to Budapest I spent the days that I was there following a curving road to a bridge where I’d cross and walk up the hulking steepness of Gellert Hill. It was only a couple of days before I left that I realized I’d been going the long way and that the hill was much closer than I’d thought. I’d have known this if I’d just looked out the window of my bathroom to see Liberty Statue, an enormous land mark that sits on top of the hill.

I had a similar experience in Warsaw, Poland a few weeks later. It was my last day in the city and I decided to walk through Old Town. I was sure that I’d been to Old Town several times, but upon looking at my map I realized that I had only wandered along the edges of it. I wove deeper in and found the market, a number of statues and the plaque recognizing this part of the city as a UNESCO world heritage site.

Being in Warsaw was a special kind of lost. I was often distracted from my original plan by the city’s parks. They were hidden behind what seemed like every sky scraper, and if you just looked behind you half the time there were willows and silvery maples that guarded the entrance of yet another grassy expanse that stretched for kilometres. And then suddenly it was getting dark.

I had read before arriving that Chopin’s heart was buried in the city. Years before, I visited the cemetery that held his body in Paris and was equal parts disturbed and delighted to read a story about his dying wish to his sister. He had wanted his heart to return to his home city, though he knew that Paris would never let his body go. She had honoured his somewhat grotesque death wish by carrying the enlarged organ in a bottle of what was rumored to be cognac, hiding it beneath her cloak so as to get it past any over-zealous border guards. The organ was buried beneath a pillar in one of the churches. And aside from a bit of hot-potatoing between priests during the war, there it remained.

I realized only when I saw a couple dart into an under-construction building, that this was the place when I had been searching for. Should there be any confusion, when you type in Chopin’s Heart on Google Maps the Holy Cross Church comes up as the first result. The pin on my phone screen showed me that it was right in front of me. And following a parade of Japanese tourists, I walked in to share a room with an organ that had been out of commission for over seven decades.  

On my last night in Warsaw, after a late performance of Swan Lake, I ran for the train in the chill air. I stumbled through what I only then discovered was called Pilsudski Square. A huge mausoleum stood to my right, with little fires lit up all around it. It was the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I realized I had passed just a block beyond it many times, and sheepishly I wandered past, taking a couple of very dark photos, sure that I was not giving the memorial the respect it deserved.

My plane home scheduled to take off in a few hours and there was nothing I could do but fly home and try to imagine what the place looked like in the light.

Lazienki Park. Warsaw, Poland. 2017

Which One is the Gentle Cycle?

Recently I spent a couple of weeks in the Ukraine. I was curious about the country my ancestors came from, and while it wasn’t exactly the most peaceful time in the place’s history to go I felt like I just couldn’t wait.

“Maybe you could hold off,” my mother suggested.

“You felt the same way when I went to Cambodia,” I said, “And it turned out to be fine.”

I didn’t mention that it was on the border of Cambodia that I discovered I had been relieved of most of my cash. You need a bit of scratch to get from that no-man’s land between Cambodia and Laos to pay for cash-grab temperate tests and other fees. A dollar less and I might still be there.

I took a short flight from Budapest to Kiev and upon landing met up with a handful of friendly Ukrainians, an American, and a brother and sister who’d been born in Russia but now lived in Seattle. I felt, when piling into their friend’s communist-era van, like were the premise for some great joke.

What followed was a week in Kiev in which I found myself shuttled from baptisms to house parties to churches (the latter of which were several times the age of my home country). I tasted what was once the only available flavour of soviet iced cream, got used to people playing the accordion in my ear on the metro and learned that de-boning a fish in a dark bar after a few beers is just about as difficult as you’d imagine it to be.

I was lucky to have my new friend Alexei when sorting out how to use the washing machine in my subletted apartment, and luckier still to have him waiting for me at the train station when a too-friendly local decided to escort me there and use the time on the way to try and convince me via Google Translate that I didn’t really have a boyfriend back in Canada.

I saw what it was like to be read poetry in a park by an intoxicated Polish man (the experience of having to help him back up off his one knee afterwards doing nothing to diminish it). I experienced what traffic is like when most people prefer to purchase a licence rather than go get one in the traditional fashion. And I saw that my flat butt just might be part of Ukrainian inheritance.

I understand that Eastern Europe is not on everybody’s to go list. There were downsides. I don’t really know how anyone finds their way underground when some of the stations have two names, or why my apartment had both cockroaches and shag carpet, and somehow putting things into the mail in the Ukraine is pretty much the same as lighting half of your letters on fire (though not nearly as satisfactory).

But for its downsides I did feel like no matter how lost I was there would always be someone there to gesticulate wildly until finally, I realized that I had been in the right metro station all along.

Spacemen in Love. Kiev, Ukraine. 2017

Berlin or Sorry About What We Accidentally Said in Your Language

I’ve often gone off by myself to foreign places many times but recently I went to Berlin with company. My friend Niklas, who I’d met more than a half a dozen years before when the two of us were both travelling in Thailand, made the trip something it wouldn't have been had I been alone.

Back when we'd first met he’d invited me to hop on the back of his motorbike (and I spent the remainder of the night pretending I didn’t tear my dress up the back, shuffling along walls so I wouldn’t have to turn my back to him) and we sped off to a guesthouse to watch Carlito’s Way. Later he would show me Lost in Translation, The Omen and Silence of the Lambs, making it his personal vendetta that I have a proper education about movies. And in Berlin he was the same, ensuring that I was that same wide-eyed girl, learning about things that I’d never have come to on my own.

I doubt that without him I’d have ever found the Through the Window Cinema, and certainly not the window one has to crawl through to enter the place. While in what used to be someone’s apartment, we watched dubbed episodes of Star Trek (realizing that our command of German was worse than we thought), seated on old car seats, as the screen took on a progressively hazier quality as the room filled with cigarette smoke. 

Nor would I have gone to Jungle Bar—said to be an old hangout of David Bowie’s when he came over from London trying to escape the influx of heroin in a city where it was almost as rampant—where we drank wine until I found the hole in the plaster of ladies washroom, that someone had labeled “glory hole,” truly hilarious.

Without Nik there would have been no one to laugh at the way I misread a sign for healthcare claims as Kranken Kase (or “sick cheese” in German). This later became our name for the courtyard of the building where were staying. Someone had vomited there, and this combined with the smell of the garbage bins on the hot days put us in the habit of taking great gasps of air before leaving and sprinting through the smelly area, me the non-smoker always somehow trailing behind.

Alone, I never would’ve inspected a box of VHS tapes on the sidewalk and come across one entitled Fessel Mich, the title of which in North America is Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Nik and I spent the week whispering the German words at each other and giggling, until we realized that the German translation is actually somewhat more X-rated and we had to look at each other guiltily, wondering who’d overheard us.

I also wouldn’t have a dozen pictures of my boots protruding from the bodies of stuffed seals, or around stair railings or from beneath parked cars. Though my favorite part was not the product, but the actual taking the picture. With Nik directing me to move a bit to the left or the right, with bemused patrons stepping over my legs in surprise. Then I’d have to get up, wander over and weigh in as to whether the shot was quite right. All the while holding the back of yet another torn dress closed as I leaned in closer to the screen.

Berlin, Germany 2017

The Shitty Gardener

Some months ago I told my partner that I wanted to grow a garden. It was something I hadn’t done since I was a kid, though back then I hadn’t really gardened either. It was more about leaving the thing to its own devices and coming out with is turnips the size of your head.

Yet on my birthday I came home to find a cedar box in the backyard full of already planted vegetables, as well as a set of hydraulic oil pails that housed some peppers and two canvas sacks that contained potatoes. Best of all he’d run a sort of watering system through it.

It was like the idiot’s garden, and I was thrilled. All I had to do was check for weeds every few days.

In the mornings, I would go out and look at my spiralling green charges and wonder at the way they seemed to grow overnight. This was partially because I’d begged for squash, and it really does grow a noticeable amount—if not every day then every week—extending like a long, stretching arm.

I watched as the potato plants climbed and the tomatoes filled out and spread like hips. We were perplexed by the orange bell peppers and how they seemed intent on becoming long green, finger-like things. We thought that perhaps the wrong ones had been bought. Then they turned red and we waited for orange. They wilted. We ate them anyway. They tasted like peppers.

Meanwhile the squash crawled out of the box and seemed to be making a run for the fence, as if things were so bad with us that it needed to escape. We watched as it split itself into different tendrils and then rooted itself down into the grass every few feet so that we could no longer mow the lawn. It was like the premise for some horror movie where the plants decide to rise up and eat us instead.

Then the squash began to wrap itself around other plants, the odd, spring-like parts of new vines climbing onto our tomato plants and trying to choke out our jalapenos. I kept having to pull the squash back to where it belonged. It was like separating two tussling fighters.

By now the squash gourds were the size of my feet, squashing down the overgrown grass with their heft.

“What do you think it wants?” my partner asked me in a whisper.

“To take over the world.”

“What should we do?”

“The only thing we can do,” I said calmly, pulling a pair of hedge clippers from behind my back, “We roast it.”

In Transit

I love to travel, but, save for the handful of night trains I’ve taken, I’ve never cared much for the actual experience of getting to my destination. I’ve long had a theory that airports are the actual various circles of hell that Dante’s Inferno described.

Say you were only moderately evil—no murder for you, just a bit of petty thievery and lying on your taxes—and so you end up in the Montreal airport, always missing your flight and having to try to determine where you are supposed to go by the Frenglish that is being broadcast over a fuzzy intercom. When you do finally make it onto the plane, you’re seated next to the love of your life (this is the only time the two of you see each other on this side of life), which would be great news if the two of you didn’t always fight on planes and he wasn’t six foot three and shameless about taking up all of your legroom.

Or, say you’d made some bad life choices and either had to go to Toronto, where it seems like every woman pees on the toilet seats (seriously, if you don’t have the thigh strength to hover, then at least clean up after yourself), or Tokyo where the toilets are a wonder of modern technology and flushing them is its own small mystery—one that leads you to try switching on the stall music and the bidet, which then refuses to be shut off again, and you must therefore either sit there for an eternity because you’ve missed your flight, or have to fly all the way to Sydney soaked to the skin.

Or perhaps you end up at LAX with your parents, only to find out that your airline has disbanded, that the airline has lost your luggage in Miami, and that you will be spending the night in the sort of hotel where cockroaches rain from the ceiling each time you flip on the light, and when you go out to try and buy a toothbrush with your father, pimps will continually approach him. Thus, there in an all-night 7-eleven, with its jaundiced looking sushi, he will decide that now is the time to have a conversation about the right times to have sex (never for profit and always within the bounds of marriage), as you hunt in vain for deodorant in hopes that when you do find it, the conversation will end.

Throw in an endless security line up, a thousand so-called random pat-downs, a Chilis and Adolf Hitler standing behind you asking if you’d mind hanging onto his backpack until the two of you get on the plane (because if you ever make it on, you know you’re going to be sitting together, and he’s going to take up your arm rest and the entire luggage cabin above your heads), and then dashes off to use the washroom, where no doubt, none of the hand dryers will work for him either.

Prague, Czech Republic 2015

I’m Not Doing That

If you live with someone for a while they tend to rub off on you. Suddenly drinking before 5 o’clock is okay on the weekends, you realize that the kitchen floor never looks that much better after washing it and that laundry needn’t be done until you literally have no clean clothes and have to spend laundry day running around in a makeshift toga running from room to room yelling, “friends, Romans, countrymen lend me your ears.”

The thing I’ve noticed most though is the changes in my attitude, particularly at work, where before I’d just go along with whatever my boss said, thinking that it was what I had to do to stay gainfully employed, now I take a page out of the boyfriend’s book and argue back once in a while.

 My partner approaches every day at work like they should just be glad to have him, and he wants to be treated as such. This is not to say that he doesn’t work hard, he does, but the swagger he has would be enough to get most people fired.

Recently I got a new job, and at the end of the second job interview, after congratulatory handshakes were shared, my boss told me that I’d have to wear heels. “Not super high ones,” he told me, “Just an inch and a half to two inches.” He said the words like he was gifting me with the opportunity to be a little bit taller, and I’d just never thought to do such a thing before.

I went home, took off my shoes, and stared at what ten years of waitressing and a genetic disposition to bunions looks like (I had my mother’s feet at age five, which look like most of the bones have exploded out either side. I don’t own a single pair of sandals), and decided I couldn’t take the job.

I spent that night awake, looking at shoes that might’ve fit the dress code, researching the new legislation in BC that made it illegal to force women to wear heels (and in California where it’s illegal to deny employees of either gender the right to wear pants), and my own province of Alberta where it will soon be illegal in part because a woman in my city sent out a video of her bloody feet after a shift.

When I shared all this with my partner he accused me of being on a witch hunt. “Am not,” I countered.

“Yes, you are. You want them to sign a paper that says, ‘I’m a sexist.’ It’s not going to happen.”

“It’s still bullshit.”

“So why not phone them and say so?”

I did call one of the two managers that hired me the next day with the intent of telling him where he could shove said high heels. Though it went more like this, “Hey, how chained to my wearing heels are you?”

“Not very.”

“Oh.”

“No sneakers though. When can you start?”

I went out and bought a pair of ugly little flats complete with arch support, and neither of the managers have said a word.

So it seems to me that if I’d just stood my ground in the first place it would have been easier, I’d have lost less sleep, started the job sooner and not spent three days storming around the house accusing my bosses of being sexist. Another five years of living with this man and I reckon I should be there, the laundry pilled up around us, me in the fitted sheet and him in the top sheet, as we clink our Saturday afternoon beers together in celebration.

Moving On

When you spend the better part of a decade working in a little Irish bar, that due to sewage issues, some people refer to as “fart bar,” the next logical step is probably to move onto a breakfast place where it’s you, a bunch of truckers and someone’s always trying to flip you a fifty to meet him in the bathroom. By the sounds of it that’s what happened to my old boss.

But a classy restaurant in my neighbourhood took pity on me and gave me a job. I thought at first, that I’d have some trouble fitting in. Yet as things progress I’m starting not to think so.

Though it’s true that the other night, when a table asked me for a funny story about my former place of work and I decided to tell them about the time we found a deer leg in the men’s toilet, and only after I finished did I think that maybe it was inappropriate. This anecdote was of course followed by silence, because really, what had I expected these people with their lovely white teeth to say?

Mostly I left my former place of work because its been a rough year. And I’m tired of having to parse things out for drunks at one in the morning. There have been many words that came out of my mouth that I really never expected that I’d say like, “I’d like it if you’d stop drinking in your truck and then returning to the bar,” or, “Sir, we have two perfectly good urinals and if you’re shy, which you seem not to be, there’s also a toilet. So, perhaps you could not pee on the building.”

People wear on you after a while and I’m just sort of done with having a good shift consist of not having an argument with someone about why they have to clean up their own puke (seriously I saw you do it, now’s the time to be a proper adult and show some shame).

Even my partner has noticed a change. When I come home from work he’s impressed and will reach out to touch my hair. “Oh my, did you wash it before you went to work?” It like I really forgot what it was like to try.  

In this new setting, I imagine I’ll get to see a fair bit of the sort of people who order a glass of Rose and are surprised when it comes out pink (as happened recently), and are prone to suggesting that you made a mistake. But I’m more prepared for that than I am to serve another 18th birthday party—something I’ve been doing pretty poorly as of late (well I don’t think he really needs that 8th shot, but what the hell, let’s see what happens…).

I know that people are people, that you’re always going to get the weaving idiot that needs to convinced that he’s too drunk to drive, rather than just taking your word for it. But I feel like I’m going to see less of them, and for that, I’m grateful.

Rabbit Cigarettes anyone? 

The Lurking Waitress

When you’ve got just one table things can get a little odd. You have to check on that table eventually, and how much is too much? If you’re coming over every few minutes to see how full their beers are they’ll think you’re lurking or trying to scare them off (I’m about 5 “9” and lanky as a mantis, there’s no way to just breeze past someone without being noticed). So what do you do to keep them from getting the feeling that Big Brother has an eye on them (shy of sitting in the office watching the camera that’s trained on their table)?

I’ve tried a number of things over the years. Most of which consisted of doing laps through my section, sometimes with a tray of empty glasses on one arm (the idea being that somewhere else in the building I have other customers, even when I don’t and you know that I don’t), but even this gets a little odd. “What is that waitress doing? This is the third time she has come past.” You know by the fourth lap (of a bar that’s the size of a tree house), that I’m obviously keeping an eye on you. I’m trying to provide good service, but it comes off as me being suspicious that you’re going to walk on your tab.

I did go a while with lunging through my section, the thought being that no one really notices waitresses and if by chance they do it’ll at least look like I’m busy doing something else. But this turned out not to be the case when I paused mid-lunge, went really low and snatched a glass from their table as they all stared, now completely silent.

In recent months I’ve decided to face this problem head on. At the end of the night, when it’s just me and one table, I bring out the cutlery that needs to be polished and sit diagonal to them, staring right in their direction, my eyes hawk-like and obvious. It’s uncomfortable to everyone, especially when I pull out the kitchen knives and begin to lovingly polish them, as if making a silent threat. But at least your beers won’t go empty. Unless you’re already done. And chances are, long before I finish the forks, you will be.

Seattle Museum of Art

Adult-Proofing Your Home

For Easter, I decided to hide 24 beer around the house and wake my significant other and tell him to go find them. He was less than impressed at first to be presented with an empty beer box, but after I explained what was going on a third time (he was still groggy after all, and when I’m excited my words run in one long string), he got into it.

We found most of them (how do you forget where you put something in ten minutes?), but there were two missing cans that we weren’t too worried about. After we go the one out of the microwave none of the rest posed much of a threat. Besides what’s better than sitting down to find a beer in the couch cushions, sure it’s warm, but sometimes you’re desperate (I figure it beats the one couch in a house I once lived in, which, when lifted, produced four pairs of red sunglasses, 100 beer caps, 13 dollars in change, and a plastic dinosaur. None of this was too surprising as our other couch was called the coffin and had cup-holders cut into the arms, but I digress).

All of this made me realize—and given that our stairs don’t have a railing, the floor just ends in the pool room and you fall down the stairs when trying to line up that perfect shot—that our house is basically booby trapped.

It’s not as bad as some of the places I’ve lived, say the apartment I was renting in Bratislava where I tried to change my sheets and got electrocuted from a gaping, broken electrical socket hidden by the bed, but it’s pretty interesting at times.

We keep a Nerf gun upstairs for what I call, “conflict resolution” and the refrigerator door just sort of explodes every few months, the shelves in it collapsing suddenly, and shoots tiny bottles of hot sauce at you. Now that I’m at the age where friends are coming over with dogs and children (and how to explain to your favorite mother of two that her youngest just got a hold of a bottle of malt liquor by accident and is now drunk and punching spare tires in the garage?), I am considering that you have to sign a waiver upon entry.

I can assure you that anything that happens in our house that ends badly was probably an accident. But this is what happens when you don’t have to spend your days installing baby gates and covering the electrical sockets. You might just forget to clean up the slip and slide that you built in the kitchen.  

To the man terrorizing the woman at the bar who is mouthing “help me,”

Consider your appearance before leaving the house, in your case something other than sweat pants would’ve been a good choice. Right now, you look like the guy who was about to dump a body, realized you didn’t actually have a body to dump and came in here to pick one up.

Also, if you wanted this woman to take your advances seriously maybe you shouldn’t have led with, “My wife has a restraining order out against me, so I decided to come here instead.” While honesty is always appreciated your particular brand of crazy would perhaps be better suited to a therapist’s office, rather than another shot of Jack.

Learn to read body language. If the woman you’re interested in is edging away from you, has her hand on her purse and is staring at the door, maybe you should read that not as, “She wants to get me home immediately,” but rather, “I am terrifying this poor woman.”

Know your limits. Are you the kind of guy who can get away with a lame pick up line like, “Would you like to see my tropical fish tank?” In short, are you Rob Lowe? Or do you and your pedophile glasses give off the notion that any offer to see your dwelling should be read as a threat?

Note the actions of the woman you’re with, did she tell you that she doesn’t speak English when you sat down, lapse into some unknown dialect for a few minutes and then order another drink in perfect, accent-less English? She doesn’t want to talk to you.

Look around you, is there any other female in the bar besides this woman and the waitresses? No? Then chances are everyone else has noticed her too, and is watching you. When you were in the washroom I was asking if she needed assistance and if I should call her a cab, and when she insisted she was fine we developed a signal just in case.

Know that I’ve gone in the back to make popcorn not because I see you as non-threatening, but because bartender Steve and I like to treat the sorts of things like a movie, a rare cinematic event right up until we have to threaten to call the police. It’s not just your imagination, Steve is actually staring at you.

So, if you can’t even be bothered to put on real pants when you go out to terrorize the female population, why don’t you just do us all a favour and stay home and clean that fish tank? The thin shred of patience that I’ve still got a hold of thanks you.

Sincerely,

One Angry Waitress

God is in aisle 16. Stockholm, Sweden 2015. 

Impermanence

One of the side effects of working in the bar is that you’re never really all that chained to your life. It’s easy to quit and start again, a heck of a lot more so than smoking, and so this aspect starts to bleed into other parts of your life too. Most of us bar lifers rent our apartments (and have a roommate until we’re older than everybody else we know), lease our cars and spent much of our twenties with partners that made our mothers shake their heads.

The job is as permanent as you want it to be, so when all of the patrons start running together and saying things like, “Oh, you’re still here…” in a tone that is soaked with disapproval, why not just leave? On the other side of the world, no one needs to know that your greatest claim to fame is the ability to carry three plates and strangers don’t have the luxury of being disappointed in your writing career if they don’t know a thing about it.

So, this is how I end up leaving, working that final shift that ends boozily with my trying to remember if I locked the back door of the bar and wondering why anybody is surprised that I have a worse credit score than all of the newly immigrated cooks.

I think my mother is hopeful that each time I’ll come back as someone more responsible (as if each trip is a sort of reincarnation, and who can blame her, I’ve been to Asia so many times that it’s easy to be confused on this point), that I’ll buy a condo, keep a plant alive and stop trying to convince my doctor to tie my tubes.

But it just never quite works. I just come back with a new set of antibodies for whatever parasites I encountered, a depletion of my savings and no recollection of whose field I parked my car in—realizing only now that I forgot to take the battery out all those months ago and by now it’s surely dead.

And so I return to the dimly lit bar, where no one can tell that I’m the same shade of pale I was when I left, having spent my days at the beach under a vast umbrella, where people ask me what I’ve learned: to travel light, that books are the heaviest things you carry (and somehow the most valuable when you sell them along the way), that it’s helpful to learn a bit of the language before you go, that no one appreciates bare shoulders and knees in a temple, and that not being able to leave still seems akin to stopping breathing.

High School Never Ends

It’s true what they say about high school being an enduring part of life: the same archetypes will keep showing up throughout your life no matter what you try to do to avoid them.

There is always going to be some form of that kid who no one but the teacher liked, you know the one. They tattled on everybody else way back then. But now you’re both adults and they work with you, and you’re not passing notes anymore, you’re trying to keep a job.

Sure, you might’ve waltzed in, ten minutes late, with a drink ticket still plastered to one cheek, but the boss really doesn’t need to know about it. Except now they do thanks to the tattletale, and you’re furiously trying to backpaddle, never really having developed the skill in the first place.

It’s a bar job, and in order to do it you occasionally need to get so drunk that you slide under the kitchen table and spend the night there, dreaming that you’ve never peered into a patron’s used pint glass and tried to determine whether it just contained beer with napkins shoved into it or actual vomit. And now you’re wondering why you never can just get off with detention in your adult years (though this might actually be what prison is).

There is also the popular kid that you did actually go to high school with (why didn’t you move further away?), still wandering in every now and then to tell you that she doesn’t know how she ended up the head of her department, it just happened, tossing her hair and smiling as you wonder if her skin always was like that because of voodoo. Meanwhile the only leg-up you have on her is that you still weigh the same thing you did back then (a hold you’re just perilously hanging onto).

Then there are the same sort of mean girls that you remember who pretend to want to know what else you do with your time. “I mean, you must be in school or something…” they say trailing off, with no sense that others might have feelings, (it seems they’ve sold theirs to the devil for something).

And then they order something ridiculous (because who wants to drink a Pina Colada in Edmonton in January?) as if the world owes them something with coconut rind. “Is it organic?” they ask, looking around them at a bar that could only be improved upon if it were leveled.

“Yeah, we source the coconut puree from Toronto.”

“Oh, that’s just lovely.” 

Three Broken-Down-Golf-Carts down the road you’re watching her shove hair extensions into her table mates’ mouths (how does this monster still manage to have friends?) and berate them until they swallow. 

Various jocks may make an appearance too, except now that we’re all adults and they so rarely have time for organized sports anymore, and you can take a little bit of comfort in the fact that they couldn’t catch you to shove you into a locker anymore. Sure, you still have to serve them, but life is a little bit better with the knowledge that their cocktail straw was up your nose.

So, it turns out that life is pretty much the same unless you’re the really weird kid that figured out how to turn phones into tiny, sentient beings and now you own your own island. But try your best to enjoy it, and the knowledge that at least you get to home at the end of the day and laugh about it, even if tomorrow you don’t have a job.

Stockholm, Sweden 2015  

Phoning It In

I do a lot of experiments on regular customers. They’re not so very scientific, but I like to see if my level of service changes will it alter my tip, and the answer is always no. Whether I steer customers away from ordering what’s in the bottom of the soup pot, or I serve it to them while pretending that I don’t notice that some hours ago it congealed into something other than food makes no difference at all.

I’ve been at my place of work for a long time now, and there are some patrons that just can’t be pleased, though I find there are perhaps a handful a shift that tell me how glad they are to see me—if only after having one of the other girls spill their beer in their laps and promise to come back with a towel, never to return—their expectations suddenly devastatingly low.

Though one of my coworkers often tells me that her entire Thursday night shift is just people who aren’t pleased to see her. “It’s like, well, we can’t get drunk because tomorrow’s Friday and we have to work, so give us our Virgin Caesar so we can be mad about it,” she tells me shrugging, staring into the empty well of her beer glass.  

I have to admit then that for the last little while I haven’t really noticed people like this, because I’m phoning it in. It’s a method of self-preservation at this point: if you’re going to hate everything anyway, and I can feel my need to cut you off coming on like a sneeze, then I should probably distance myself from the situation and avoid you anyway.

If you find your waitress apathetic to your situation then one of two things has probably happened: a) she recognizes your abusive face, and has deduced that nothing can be done to cheer you up or b) you’re spouting nonsense (I’m talking about you, man that claimed to have found the Avro Arrow first) and she wants to make a clean getaway before you see anything like interest in her eye.

Apathy has become like a sort of self-preservation at this point, the thin line that holds me back from madness. If I care that this is the third time you’ve ordered the lamb burger and it’s still terrible my head might explode as I try to sympathize with you.

If instead I nod pleasantly, meanwhile thinking about something completely different, say the overdose scene from Pulp Fiction, I might just be able to make it through another 35 years of this without attacking you with your fork. It’s a weird limbo to be in, but trust me as you spoon your non-soup into your face, that this is probably the best position for both of us to be in.

Battleford, Saskatchewan. Date Unknown. Taken of Don Hefner's Don't Fence Me In. 

Forget It

Recently, on the dregs of a Friday night, at the point when we just wanted everyone to go home, a patron came in and began telling myself and the bartender that he knew how we should run the pub. He figured that there should be girls behind the bar, a security guard at the door and scantily clad women everywhere—the very thing that would cause me to quit my job in a second—at this point I’ve been doing this job so long that if you so much as tell me to take off my sweater, I’ll unclip my apron and walk out laughing.

I’d seen the guy around for years, he was a neighbourhood resident that used to come in with his girlfriend who was a very open, aging call-girl that drank double vodka slimes who, judging by the way he now sits alone at the bar, had finally had enough of him too.

There had been a time that we had the sort of owner who forgot that he too had daughters, and we had to wear these ridiculous short skirts. I was embarrassed to go to work back then, and even more embarrassed to leave it if I had to be somewhere and had forgotten to bring a change of clothes. I can’t for the life of me remember why I put up with it.

At work, I am there to bring you food and beverages and I might even smile when I do it, but the service stops there. I suspect that this is widely understood because of the general sourness on my face (at this point, it’s like crossing your eyes: your mother was right, your face can freeze like that), that no one has so much as laid a hand on my shoulder in years.

I don’t miss the places that I worked in my early twenties, where the waitresses wore mini dresses in January (even when the heating was questionable and the oysters froze to the buffet table) and we all stomped around in shoes that no one wants to spend an eight-hour shift in. Power to you if you want to curl your hair before noon and be helped into a dress for the lunch rush, but I’m enjoying the rolled out of bed look these days.

There are a lot of things I don’t like about my job, but I do love that it’s not a whole bunch of leaning low over tables and giggling. Something I doubt I would’ve ever been much good at anyway.

Late Frost. Edmonton 2017

Dirty Hair Proselytizing

If you ever find yourself cornered with me at a party, it’s probably best that you try not to mention your hair washing regimen unless you want to get sucked into a really long conversation. I have spent years perfecting the level of filth on my head, and if you’ve got a solid half an hour I will tell you how I manage to do it without looking like I’m as dirty as I am—just don’t reach a hand into my hair.

This habit started years ago, when I was working for a bar that forced us to sign an entertainer’s contract with our terms of employment. This meant that, though they were only paying us minimum wage, they could fire us for coming to work without makeup, for gaining a few pounds or having our faces disfigured in a horrible pizza accident.

Meanwhile a few of us heard tell that up in BC the strippers were unionizing. This meant that they could come to work in sweatpants if they wanted to and gain the weight of a second person if they so chose—sure, there was the argument that it might affect their careers, but they’d still be laughing.

A few of us decided that, while our contract stated that we had to look polished, it didn’t say anything about us actually having to be clean. And so began the hair washing competitions. We’d chose a start date and then all of us would try to go as long as we could without washing our hair. I scaled back my showers to every second day, but unfortunately it seemed impossible to push it beyond that—fryer grease really gets into your skin.

My record at the time was six days (though now I’m certain I could go a couple of weeks), and I tied with one of the other girls for second. The winner was at nine days before we suggested that maybe it was time she give it a rest, her bun so shiny under the bar pot lights that your eyes cast a halo around her head as if it were the sun. “I’m just riding the musk,” she explained to all of us.

When asked to elaborate, it was discovered that she had misunderstood the terms of the agreement and hadn’t been showering at all.

In the years since I’ve settled into about every four or five days between hair washes and now work for the sort of guy who wants us not overly made up, dressed conservatively and insists that we not smell bad—basically the sort of man that has daughters and doesn’t pretend otherwise when it comes to his business. But I still laugh over that quiet rebellion of so long ago.

And sometimes when I find myself having a drink in the sort of place that insists on black cocktail dresses and fake tans, it gives me so much pleasure when my waitress steps into the light. And it’s clear that her hair is quite possibly the filthiest thing I’ve ever seen. 

The Ice Castle. Edmonton, Alberta 2017

Come Back When You’re an Adult

Sometimes it’s like I forget that the function of my job is basically a terrible recipe for decision making: first I dull people’s common sense with booze and then I ask them to spend the rest of the evening making choices that will not affect my livelihood, and preferably theirs as well.

In the years that I’ve done this job I am flabbergasted time and again by the things that drunks do and the sheer malleability of their brains. Sometimes the latter seems almost like witchcraft, as if the idea for zombies didn’t originate from Haiti, but rather a bar full of stumbling drunks being relieved of their wives and wallets.

More than once I’ve caught someone lurching towards the door holding their car keys. I find it’s best to nonchalantly approach them and ask, “What are you up to?”

To which they’ll reply, “I was just going to drive myself home.”

To which I say, “I thought you told me you weren’t going to drive.”

And, momentarily hypnotized by confusion they’ll falter and say, “I told you I wasn’t going to drive, didn’t I?”

“You did. You also told me you’d pick up your keys tomorrow… there they are, thank you. Which one belongs to your front door? I see, there you are. And that I was to call you a cab.”

“I’ll come for my keys just after you open at eleven. Could you call me a cab?”

“I’d be happy to.”

If you’ve ever been curious as to how someone has stolen your locked car and your identity it was probably the shady the waitress from the night before that you gave your pin number and keys to.

Over the last decade or so AGLC[1] has become stricter and stricter, to the point that any mishap that befalls your customer can be traced back to you. Should they have driven drunk you can be placed at fault for serving them (even if you insisted on calling them a cab and they slipped out the back door while pretending to wait for it). This is ridiculous. If you are old enough to drink in a bar you’re old enough to make your own decisions. Waitressing is already like a type of adult babysitting, but now we also have to risk being sued along with accepting that adult humans sometimes vomit in public? 

Why is it the server’s fault if you woke up missing a kidney and that you fell asleep with your door open and now everything is missing from your house, even the doors? I do feel bad that strangers took the time to clean out your stash of Pop Tarts and then were so bold as to stick around and do their dishes, but don’t you think the responsibility might fall on you in the end?

Call me negligent if you like—but you can drive, vote and even marry the broad on the bar stool next to you that just might be your second cousin—at this point I think that’s on you for deciding that you absolutely needed to have another beer.

[1] Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission

Old Airport Beach. Kona, Hawaii 2015 

The Therapeutic Drunk

Recently, following a particularly boozy Saturday night I puked in my boyfriend’s slipper. This is the sort of action, when you’re accused of it, that will make you assume that your significant other is joking. He was not, nor was he terribly impressed with me. On the upshot, I then knew what to get him for Christmas. 

It will sound defensive to claim that I go long periods between nights like this, but it’s true. It’s as if I allow myself to forget, over a span of six-or-so months how bad hangovers really are and then come six am I hear what I’ve come to think of as the voice of god, assuring me that, “There is no rest for the wicked,” after which there is no chance of falling back asleep and having a decent day. 

Some months ago, a friend told me that there is a sense to a therapeutic drunk, but I really can’t see it. If there’s something magical about waking up, realizing that I attempted to make toast smoothies at one in the morning and then had to throw the blender out, then I must be missing it.

I suppose it’s a hazard of a job where you still run into people from the high school in your home town and they tell you that they’ve gone onto a very successful career, to own property and generally have the appearance of having their shit together. Meanwhile you just want to know what they want to drink and your only claim to fame is that you still weigh the same thing you did in high school.

As they tell you about the tribulations of condo fees you find yourself wanting to make a half serious joke about the sense behind living in your car in the summers. There should be little shame then in wanting to wash this memory away with a mickey of Jägermeister while sitting in the dark on a swing set near your boyfriend’s home.

I like to worry about a lot of things, one of which is whether I am going to be in my late forties still sitting around the bar at work drinking with a bunch of 20-year old’s (though one regular tells me frequently that I am not just on the cusp of realizing how much I actually do like blue eyeshadow and going to work in a pancake house. It is, not surprisingly, this same regular that shows up often with black eyes) and wondering why we have so very little in common.

Something about working in the bar makes it acceptable to stay up until three am on a Tuesday night, never have anything in savings and be leery about signing a lease that spans more than six months. Basically, it makes becoming an adult seem like a superfluous thing—or at least this is what I tell myself when I finally remember to do my taxes sometime in May.

These are excuses I realize—but when you’re coming around the corner of the end of your twenties, wondering if you’re too old to attend raves (you are, or at least I certainly am)—still holding onto the notion that one day you might grow up to take care of yourself and maybe a pet too, they’re awfully nice things to cling to.

Owl, Kona, Hawaii 2016

Too Old for this Shit

I’m just finally starting to get used to myself as everything is falling apart. It’s true what they say that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Just when your skin finally clears up and you decide that you don’t look half bad in your favorite pair of jeans, the wrinkles start coming.

My mother maintains that it was the same for her, that by the time she decided she was pretty she was looking back on the photos thinking this about a woman twenty years younger. I like to think that I’ve come to this conclusion at an age younger than she was when she thought this of herself, but the thing is it’s all relative. She still looks fantastic in her sixties, but with the way I’ve been living by the time I get to her age it’s the most I can hope to think that I’ll look like I’ve been backed over by a bus instead of an entire conga line of cars.

I wonder if we’re not supposed to like ourselves that much because it’s easier to let go of things that we didn’t know we had—cellulite isn’t so crushing if you never realized you had nice legs in the first place.

I never had the confidence to ask for the things that I wanted. Even the way I wanted to be treated was somehow off the table. At waitressing jobs in my late teens and early twenties I was confused when someone said inappropriate things about me or grabbed at me. I usually just ended up deciding that the person who’d done it had made a mistake because they were behaving the way you would with an attractive woman and I believed that I was not that.

Now that I’m almost considered to be too old to dress the way I like I’m finally comfortable enough to do it. I imagine that I’ll be the senior citizen wearing a top hat and black lipstick, finally brave enough to read at open mike nights and purchase a pet fox.

Sometimes I feel like we should get two lives: one to figure out how to get used to ourselves and how the world works, and another to have fun and enjoy the things we’ve learned. I’m realizing only now that my mother was right about so many things, and perhaps our parents are the only leg up that we really get in this life. 

It feels like I’m just starting to catch up, and yet my twenties are pretty much over and I imagine that I’ll feel the same way at the end of my thirties. I’ll be the woman disrobing in the middle of the store before someone finally takes me aside and shows me that there are fitting rooms for such things and that yes, I really can have my own.

Life is like a test that you didn’t get to study for. I feel as if I just haven’t learned enough at this point to keep up. It’s like being stuck in your own version of Groundhog Day, and whatever I’m meant to learn I refuse to. As if I’m continually being reincarnated as a stink bug.

Kona Hawaii 2016

In the Event that You Want Another Drink

It’s probably best that if you want another drink, you don’t remind me of the time that friend of yours didn’t realize he was supposed to blow out his flaming shot of chartreuse before he downed it and then proceeded to spill it and light the table on fire.

It’s also a decent idea not to bring up the Halloween that you wore a children’s superhero costume and were left at the end of the night sitting on a bar stool in your underwear and a wife beater, only your thin eighteen-year-old forearms still covered by the leftover shreds of said costume. It’s not that I won’t serve someone who’s dressed inappropriately (I do it for the recently divorced all the time. To the 55-year-old guy in a fedora: I know what you’re doing. It isn’t working on me or anyone else in here.) it’s just that you’re likely to get fewer beverages because I don’t exactly trust your judgement.

In fact, it’s probably a good idea that if you’ve ever done anything of a suspicious nature in the bar where I work (for example: starting a fistfight, brought a particularly horrible friend along that swore at me last time, or cried (and loudly too)), that you just not mention it in hopes that I’ve forgotten.

I would also advise against yelling at me or telling anyone else in the room to fuck off—the quickest way to get rid of a problem that’s on fire (especially one that walks in already drunk from somewhere else) is to not to pour booze on it and hope it goes out on its own. Remember that as a waitress pretty much the only power that I have is to not serve you (or to lick your straw before I bring out your glass—which is always an empty victory unless I tell you about it), and so if you make me squeamish right away I’m going to exercise that right.

If there are any drugs in your system you probably shouldn’t mention them. The same thing goes for if you’re waiting for your dealer. I realize that cocaine makes you think that you’re a sparkling conversationalist, but this isn’t small talk right now. It’s a felony. I will quickly go from thinking, “Geez, he has fantastic pupils,” to thinking, “I need to get this guy out of here.”  

And if you really want that second martini, don’t comment on my physical failings. I don’t care if you’re on a terrible blind date right now and the woman next to you would rather that you died before the end of the night than spend the rest of it with you. Do not try and deflect from yourself by picking me apart as some odd manner of validating her. That’s your last cocktail, you’ve done this to yourself, and I’m about to call you a cab. Actually, I’m going to call you two cabs. Because if I don’t your date runs the risk of murdering you too. 

Under the Bridge. Bratislava, Slovakia 2015