It's Still Happy Hour, Isn't It?: An Ode to Waitressing in Four Parts

Twenty years. I think about that number a lot, as in, "Where will I be in 20 years?" or "20 years ago, I was doing [insert whatever]" or "Why can't my mom have 20 more goddamn years?"

Lately it's been this zinger: "20 years - as in the number of years I have waited tables." Was that an audible gasp? Because that is what I usually get when I lay down that fact. There have been breaks, sure, a year here or there and my 4-year-stint in the corporate world, but essentially, it's been 20 freaking years. I retire in a short month's time from this world of restaurants, and felt it deserved some sort of homage before I leave it behind forever. So, I will regale you all with a four-part series of these lo 20 years, one post a week until right around October 15, which will be my final night serving mojitos to douchebags, and hopefully, the last time I will ever have to answer the question, "It's still happy hour, isn't it?"

First, let me take you back to the winter of '91, when I graduated early from high school and moved to Southern California. I lived with family friends for six months before finding a place of my own, but in the meantime, I had to find a job and I knew just what it would be: waiting tables. I had worked for the McCormick & Schmick's chain in high school as a hostess/cashier, and as I watched those servers in their terrible short white jackets and bow ties count all that cash at the end of the night, I knew what I had to do.

Enter The Wind and Sea in Dana Point, California. You know, near where those Hills kids hung out in Laguna Beach. (Unbenownst to me, this spot was also known in the 80s as The Whiff and Sin, for its reputation as a kind of cocaine massage parlor, and the fact that its waitresses had to wear corset-type things under their uniforms until a few years before I arrived. Business men from Tustin were heard to drive all the way from deep inland to the coast of Orange County for lunch.  By the time I got there, things had mellowed quite a bit, and the waitresses  wore tiny Hawaiian Island themed tank tops and wrap skirts, which could expose your entire ass if you passed over an air conditioning vent the wrong way. Or right way, I guess, if you were one of those Tustin businessmen).

The things that first struck me about the restaurant as I waited in the lobby to be interviewed was the endless view of the ocean it afforded and the beautiful women who worked there.  It was full of them, stunning, grown-up women with caramel colored skin, most of them cocktailers.  I was barely 18 and awkward with pale Northwest skin, but I got a job working lunches during the day and the patio at night. (You had to be 21 to sling drinks in the lounge). Have I mentioned I was barely 18 and awkward and had little to no idea what I was doing? I knew I wanted to go to school in California, and that I needed residency because my parents couldn't afford the out of state tuition.  I also knew that I looked really good with a tan. That was about it.  As for my parents, my dad knew I was going to fuck it all up, most likely by getting knocked up by some surfer dude and living out of said dude's Volkswagen van. My mom knew I was going to be ok. Thank god for Ma.

Turns out I was sort of a natural at it, this waiting tables thing, which if you've ever worked it a restaurant with someone who isn't you know what I mean. There is an inherent talent in being able to multi-task and not lose your shit when the steak is overcooked or someone doesn't like their drink. Somehow,  I did it all pretty well, selling $1200 worth of $6.95 nachos on a busy weekend night, all while constantly being yelled at by a manager simply called "Coach" who sported a thick, nearly handlebar moustache and was never without a tall glass full of Cutty Sark and a bump of coke. He barked when he spoke, called everyone by their last name and was completely frightening. He liked me though, because I worked hard and hardly complained. The place was always packed, often running two-hour waits on the weekends. (All of us girls had a mantra on those 12-hour days, which was, "Whatever you do, don't look at the line. Don't look at the line!) I usually closed the patio on Saturday nights, fell into bed exhausted at 2 in the morning and got up at 8 to work Sunday brunch. I fucking bounded out of bed, which is very hard to imagine at this stage of the game.

Nights I didn't close the illustrious patio, I was making out with a surfer named Thad.  I had met him in art history class at the junior college I was attending  This "college" was in essence a very large high school with ashtrays, in the middle of Orange County. What I remember most about the place were the low, parched hills of Mission Viejo in the background and the copious amount of sweat I experienced on campus. My own, that is, as the temperature averaged about 87 degrees. Thad had me not at hello, but at the line, "Do you ever smile?" and the greatest make-out relationship ever was borne. We never saw each other in the daylight aside from class, and we never had sex, as Thad had a girlfriend. She was 17, and I had my own apartment. He usually knocked on my door around midnight, and the make-outs would last into the early morning, when Thad had to leave for his job in construction. His skin was caramel-colored like the cocktailers I revered, and he had a tattoo of a wolf on one shoulder, and the sun on the other.  I would trace these tattoos with my fingertips in those rare moments where we talked to one another, Thad telling me I would find a nice guy someday or about his day job in construction and the way crystal meth felt when you snorted it, like a red hot poker through the nose and up into your eyes, he said, then a cooling, a melting moreover, when it hit your conciousness.

At the time, waiting tables was so glamorous to me, so grown up, that I couldn't get enough of it.  I stayed to close if I could, took extra shifts.  I met many, many slutty, squirrely busboys and arrogant bartenders and creepy managers and an ass-load of rude people. I learned that when you wait tables you are actually doing three jobs, that of a server, an actor and a psychologist. I experienced my first zero tip. I got an apartment. I talked to my high school friends who were settling into the dorms at U of O like normal 18-year-olds.  I freaked out. After calling my mom and freaking out some more, crying and saying I had made a terrible mistake, but no, no way was I coming home, she sent me a "Pick-Me-Up Bouquet" that she has never lived down. I piled up the cash I made every night on my nightstand and felt proud. I made out with Thad.  I did one too many shots of tequila at a bar in Newport Beach, dirty-danced with a guy named Rio and was so hung over the next day at work I almost lost my job. I fell hard and fast for a waiter ten years older than I was who never intended us to get past our first date; I stretched our relationship out to six months. I freaked out again. I watched people who had been consecutively enrolled at said junior college for four, five years in a row, who would eventually drop almost all their credits every semester. I watched the lifers drink too much and smoke too much, and do too much coke and sleep with the wrong people, the stress of restaurant life and nicotine permanently working its way into the lines in their faces and broken blood vessels in their eyes.  I knew I had to get out, I knew this wasn't the way I wanted to live my life. Somehow, I stayed focused, I paid my bills, I applied to Berkeley. The older guy built me a mountain bike as a congratulations gift and told me that he had to let me go, it wouldn't be fair for him not to.  Ma always told me he was right.  It took me many, many years to believe her.

I was certain my life would be vastly different once I got to a real college and after I graduated, there would be no more waiting tables. It would be the Real World, everything I had wanted since I was 13 or 14. What exactly that was remained fuzzy in my early 20s mind - I was only sure that it involved sharp business suits and lots of money. (I majored in Mass Communications if that gives you any sense of my cluelessness).  But those last nights before I left those endless rows of  blue and white checkered tables, I would gaze into the dark wood of the bar, and watch those caramel-colored girls.  There was only a thin wall of glass that separated me from them, but I never made the transformation. The closest I got was when they propped the doors open late night and the sounds of our resident lounge singer, Don Duncan, crooning "Sexual Healing" (for the third time that evening) wafted out across the patio.  I would close my eyes and imagine I was one of them then, full of grace and power, men surrendering to them at every turn. I could almost see him if I let the song wash over me long enough, the one I was supposed to meet. I would set his drink down and he would gently touch my wrist.  When our eyes met, there would be no doubt.