Working in a bar wears thin...
posted by jeremy on April 09, 2005
I work at an extremely popular bar on Decatur street, a bar called Mollys. I dated a girl named Molly a long time ago & she was beautiful, ferocious, drunken, often as crazy as a motherfucking motherfuck.
Very much the same, these two Mollys.
I am the kitchen troll in the back, I make the mexican food happen (good if fancy gringo) as well as serve said food, bus the dishes, prep & take orders. Often, my mantra is "Fuck drunk people." But usually, I manage to survive the blak-blak barrage of tequila-driven tourist retards from small towns in Iowa, Nebraska, France, Spain. It's a good job, in the sense of meeting a lot of bizarre, interesting, insane people, observing nearly constant weirdness, working generally by one's lonesome. I can't, or shouldn't, complain. The tips are decent, the owners are great, the birdwatching is divine, the contacts many. Still, the hours are hard in the long run, getting off at 2, 3, 4AM. Then the mandatory post-work hanging out, always, unless one is very very good, until dawn or later, sometimes much later, depending on who you just might meet.
After several months of working night shifts, I always find an increasingly disturbing tic! in my circadian rhythm, my subtle inner peace machine, my already skewed view of this universe.
But I am not alone in this town of 24 hour bars. There is an entire sub-culture of bartenders, cooks & servers for whom dawn is evening & evening, sunrise. People understand one another, make plans around the fact of our bat-eye employment. "You off at 5? Cool, I'll meet you at the Abbey at 6." In the AM, kicking back for a beer as the sun rises & the joggers emerge, pitter-pat down the broken sidewalks, past the last of the hookers & stumbling puke-faced tourists.
It's an exhausting if interesting pattern, fun for now, but one that will not hold.
