Bar Experience

I was tending bar when Susan was hired to be our new Supervisor. Mini-skirt, 4-inch high heels, push-up bra and press-on nails (she lost one in someone's salad once. Yuck.) Mark, the lecherous putz of a Food and Beverage Director, said she had "a lot of experience working in bars" but we all wondered on which side. Apart from flirting with the cooks and just about anything in pants, Susan liked to decorate the Happy Hour buffet table. All well and good, but she didn't ever seem to take into account just how that table was going to be used, so plates could wind up just about anyplace and items that should have been placed in near proximity could be at opposite ends of the table. Susan's deal was "making it look pretty."

One particularly memorable "pretty" buffet was for a Mexican themed variety of hors-d'ouevres. Lots and lots of crepe paper strewn all around the legs of the chafing dishes - plenty of streamers and confetti and paper mache shared the table with candles and several large cans of Sterno. In a word: Kindling. As soon as someone walked in the front door, the wind blew the streamers into the open flame, setting off a kind of fuse that soon had the entire ten foot table erupting in flames. I managed to put out the fire with a couple of nearby pitchers of water and a wad of table cloths, while Susan said  things like, "Hurry!" or "Oh, gawsh!"

From time to time, she'd come behind the bar to "help." This usually meant, I helped her get her high heels unstuck from the floor mats while she helped herself to my tips. She didn't know how to make a drink, and she couldn't use the register, so mostly she just talked to the customers, ate the cherries out of my garnish trays and got in my way. Inevitably, she mistook the relieved look on my face when she finished "helping" for gratitude, and always promised to show up again when she was needed. (I should be so lucky.)

A Room at the Inn

When I tended bar in a hotel, I always had to work on Christmas. Hotels, of course, do not close on the holidays. They become large boxes of lonely people with no place to go except the hotel bar, hotel restaurant, or their own room. Every place else is closed on Christmas; sooner or later, they usually all wind up in the bar.

There is something sadistic about filling a hotel bar with Christmas decorations - reminding the customers of their isolation - by fate or design - from their families. It's like showing pictures of food to hungry children. Then you add alcohol to their misery and everything gets so much better. I think the decorations are nice enough in the two or three weeks preceding, but they might just as well be toned down a little out of respect on the Big Day.

One hotel I worked at tried to make me wear an elf hat on Christmas. I said, "I did not spend this much time doing my hair just to have it flattened out with a children's costume. No thank-you."

Televised Sports

"Hi ladies. Would you like to watch "National Tractor Pull" or "World Wide Wrestling" tonight?"

I worked in a hotel bar when big screen TVs first came on the market. At first, my boss rented movies and showed them over and over, but we got so many complaints from regular customers about the same films always showing or from people who didn't like coming in on the middle of a movie that he decided the TV was exclusively for sports. Didn't matter if the Academy Awards was on. Probably wouldn't matter if martians had attacked Kentucky. It had to be sports - or we'd be fired. Really, he was that much of a jerk.

Come late night hours on a Wednesday or Thursday, there's not usually much to choose from and the patrons of that bar - closer to the theater and business district - were decidedly un-sports-like, older and usually international. This was before all of the cable and satellite stuff so mostly, the volume was off on the TV and people just pretended like it wasn't there.

Years later, I worked one of the oddest cocktail receptions of my career in the suite of another hotel while folks gathered around the television watching the O.J. Simpson low-speed chase through L.A. Talk about a subdued crowd.

Custer's Last Stand

One convention I dreaded every year at the hotel where I was a cocktail waiter was hosted by the Native American Housing Authority. This is a lobbyist organization that would meet in Denver to discuss their grievances with the United States, which usually boiled down to grievances against white people. There's some history behind all of that. Oddly, the event coincided with the Annual Stock Show and Trade Fair. The same dates.

In spite of the fact that our particular hotel was filled almost entirely with Native Americans, in one of the grandest gestures of insensitivity, the hotel management insisted that we all dress like cowboys ... "for Stock Show." My favorite bartender used to describe this week as "Custer's Last Stand."

The last year I worked at that hotel, I cocktailed $1300 worth of drinks (at about $1.50 to $4.00 each) on the first night of the convention and made a total of five dollars in tips. That's about 450 drinks. I ran my butt off and I was yelled at, catcalled, pinched, grabbed and insulted all night, but I didn't have any support from the hotel because the room revenue was where they were making their money. Also, in spite of the alcohol classes the hotel had started requiring the f&b staff to take to lower their insurance premiums, they insisted that we continue to serve people who were clearly drunk "because they were staying in the hotel and weren't driving." (Never mind that bartenders and waiters are still responsible for the patron's safety if they fall down and hit their head or OD on booze.)

On the last night, after most of the conventioneers had gone home and only a dozen or so remained in the hotel, I was tending bar when a woman from their group walked in just before last call. The woman seemed relatively sober, and she sat at the bar in front of the taps and ordered a draft. These taps had the kegs sitting right underneath them, so at that area of the bar there was an extra 18 inches or so between me and the customer. I set the beer in front of her, she took one sip, put it down and started to go over backwards dead drunk.

Now, this woman was NOT small. I reached out quickly and grabbed ahold of her arms, but she must have outweighed me by 100 pounds (at that time .... only by about 40 pounds today). I held on as best as I could and started screaming for Chuck, the security guard, but she was pulling me over to her side a little bit more every second. By the time Chuck arrived, I had the toes of my boots hooked against the drain board of the beer taps and I was hanging by my waist off the edge of the bar. I was about to let her fall 'cos her head was only a couple of feet from the carpet by then and I didn't wanna go sailing over head first myself. Chuck got a good grip on her and let her down easy and she never did come to until we splashed her face with some water.

I learned later that there is a genetic mutation that aids in the metabolizing of alcohol that Native Americans do not have, so they are much more prone to its effects. I don't know if that would have made a huge difference in my feelings about waiting on that group, 'cos it's awfully frustrating to do that much work for so little money and to be abused that way. Mostly, it makes me angry that the hotel fueled that situation by threatening me with my job if I didn't keep serving them booze. (I'm pretty sure the cowboy getup didn't help matters either.) Thank God I'm not working there any more.