9 Months

It’s been 9 months in New York City. I've worked behind 7 bars since I arrived. 7 bars for some amount of time: a night or two, a month or more. Lucky breaks, mistakes, one or two I thought might be home and a couple to pass the time till the next place opened.
I've been hired and laid off, I've been discovered, mentored, passed along, passed over, called back, reconsidered, offered more than I wanted and earned less than I was worth. I've quit, I've come on board, I've moved on, I've moved up, I've lobbied and networked. I've fought for people and had them fight for me. I've worked hard, learned fast and had dumb luck. I was fortunate that people liked me and I liked them back. I was lucky that those people were the best people in the whole world.
I’ve been told I was good for a girl, good for a hotel bartender, and just plain good. I’ve been told I made the best thing someone has ever tasted, I’ve bussed whole trays of unfinished drinks, dumping an hour’s worth of stirring and ice cracking down the drain. I've made delicious drinks and smart choices, I've made bad drinks and dumb choices. I've been good and drunk and sad and sick and have learned to stop when it was too much but not before some painful mornings. I’ve made more money in a night than my friends with desk jobs make in a week. I’ve been so broke I’ve had to call my parents to bail me out.
I've been punch drunk with love for the people I know, so high on this industry that I didn’t want to leave the party until dawn. I’ve been so sick of it all I’ve wanted to never talk to another bartender ever again and stayed in for nights on end. I've stayed out until 6 am and couldn’t get to sleep once I was in bed. I've crashed at 10pm and woken up at noon the next day wondering how people do it.
My muscles have no idea if we are working out or just working. I run stairs in a corset. I lift boxes of booze like it ain’t no thing. I palm three to four glasses at a time. I can free pour a perfect 1.5 ounces. I test myself for fun and do a mini fist pump when it hits that meniscus.
I've worn uniforms, button downs, loafers, black pants, petticoats, high heels, bustiers and combat boots. I've gone to work hung over, sleep deprived, broken hearted, stuffed, starving, exhausted and vibrating from caffine. I've danced and sung, been lifted and twisted, crawled across bar tops and thought I might all together lose my hearing or my mind or both from the repetitive whomp of overamplified music.
I learned to do crazy math in my head. I calculate percentages in under 2 seconds. Without ever meeting them I know if someone is an asshole, a saint, just from France or two out of the three. I over tip at bars and coffee shops, I consider it karma, but I also get most of everything I drink for free.
I’ve worked for gentlemen, businessmen and charismatic crooks. I would do anything for some and not lift a finger for others. I’ve laughed and drank and fought with them. I screamed at one in a basement at 3 am as house music threatened the foundation of the building and the party tried impossibly to move ahead without glassware. I spent the night on one’s couch after we stayed out so late it wasn’t worth going home before heading back to work again.
At times it’s felt like war when facing 40 drunk Nigerians demanding more palm wine or 200 kids from Long Island shouting for their home town’s namesake beverage like broken records. Nights have passed in a blur of drag queens or the downtown hip kids shelling out fifteen bucks a beverage and asking over and over how one might get to the VIP area.
I've kissed and crushed and wondered if he’d call. I’ve collected numbers and thrown them all away. I’ve declared dating in this world impossible and then watched friends and co-workers meet, fall in love and plan their weddings. I’ve been lonely in a sea of people. I’ve shown up at odd places at odd hours and found comfort and company.
I've watched dawn rise over Tribeca after a 12 hour shift, sitting on the front steps of the bar with a body too tired to hail a cab and an extra hundred dollar bill slipped into my worn out hand for being a good sport. I walked off in the rain and decided to quit. Fuck being a good sport.
Here all this happens in 9 months.
Here this is not just a means to an end. Here there are bartenders who carry encyclopedias of recipes in their heads. Men with arm garders, moustaches, tattoos and muscles and men who roll their eyes at all that. Here there are girls who drink tequila from the bottle, who could model, but like this life instead. Here there are competitions that feel more like fight clubs- loud rooms full of rum drinking, shit talking pirates with nothing less than their pride on the line. Men and women who boast they bartend better drunk, who dance as they work, who make 12 drinks in 4 minutes or less.
All this in New York. Only New York. This city of contradictions and contrasts. This city of blurry borders where nothing is quite just personal or professional, private or public. We are still breaking eachother in. Finding eachother’s rythmns. I am feeling out a way to be a bartender, a friend, and a functioning member of society.
Here the cab drivers know hole in the wall places in Chinatown where the servers take such pride in their work and smile past stained uniforms and dirty hair. They serve all night- refilling my glass with luke warm tea I gulp as I sit and stare and listen and write. It’s cash only and the walls are lined with headshots of actors who probably never made it. Outside the street smells like rotting fish while inside drunk girls with heavy neurosis and painful pasts sit and talk loudly over lo mein of questionable origin about the men who broke their hearts.
I scratch notes in messy writing- looking at all the bleary eyed people stumbling in- thinking- I did that. I scribble thoughts about the new job. I write about the chandeliers and the drinks and my co-worker with sweat that smells comfortingly of booze. I pay and leave. Outside I almost slip on a storm drain slick with animal fat and find a stray cab home to Brooklyn on an empty unlit street. It’s 3am and I have a flight to catch in a couple of hours. I won’t sleep tonight.
The bridges appear over the water like beautiful women in the night. Like mast-heads, like mothers of mercy, so profoundly feminine and I can almost hear them singing me home. “Leave?” I write on the back of my training paperwork, “Leave this magic and misery?” and then I think, but do not dare write, as I fear the mountains of California might overhear my thoughts, I write the word that is both a question and an answer as Brooklyn breathes into my view, “home”.