My Brief Bartending Career

In the early 1990s, I left a husband, a house, and a job because none of it was turning out as I had hoped. I could live off the proceeds from selling my house for one year, so I had one year to get on my feet. My plan was to work at night in the lucrative field of bartending while writing by day.

It seemed like a plan. I’d work at night in an atmosphere of noise, hubbub and congeniality, which would take the loneliness out of being single again and make me forget all my romantic and career failures while I lived in this netherworld. There would be the added bonus of big tips for mixing magical potions. I would be a wizard before Harry Potter was ever invented.

This was also pre-Internet and pre-blogging. If blogs had existed back then, and I had blogged my bartending adventures just as Diablo Cody would one day blog her adventures as a stripper, which got a book deal, then a movie, and an Oscar, where would I be now? Alas, I was ahead of the curve, and my bartending life didn’t last that long anyway.

I took a course at J. Sargeant Reynolds in bartending. There was such a thing then. We met once a week at Extra Billy’s for a couple of months, learning recipes, mixing tips, equipment, customer service, and listening to fascinating and hilarious bartending stories from our young, attractive male teacher. All my classmates were younger than me, but back then I could pass. I received my diploma, which no one ever asked to see, and a folder full of drink recipes, which I converted to index cards.

Getting a job as a bartender was just as impossible as getting a job as a journalist. There were seldom ads for the position. Cold-calling bars produced no results. No one wanted to let me start behind the bar. I would have to waitress first, with no promises of advancement. Even at the least trendy places, like Piggy's Attaché Lounge, I was told I had to waitress first. Men did not have to waitress first. They went straight behind the bar, either as a bar back (carrying ice and supplies from the back) or actual bartending. It was discrimination.

I don’t remember now why I didn’t agree to that. Maybe I thought it would be too degrading. With my shiny new diploma, I didn’t want to be out on the floor carrying a tray. I was ready to mix!

So I signed up with a temp agency that supplied bartending and catering services. I said I was a bartender, not a waitress. I didn’t want to do gigs where I carried food trays. I was very clear about that, so I worked less than girls willing to do it all. Still, I got a few jobs.

On the surface, it was glamorous. The uniform was a white tux shirt with a black bowtie, a black cummerbund, a black skirt, and black flats. I still had the legs for the skirt. I’d see older, exhausted women who had transitioned to black pants, but I wasn’t there yet. And my stomach was still flat enough then to rock a cummerbund. A bowtie and a tux shirt is a good look for anyone. I would see how the other half lived, and in Richmond there was definitely another half where life was sophisticated and elegant.

Under the surface, it was not so glamorous. It was a sticky job. You started the evening cutting up dozens of oranges and limes for your station, the juice splashing all over you. Since you had to report to work in your uniform, you were stuck wearing that sticky outfit for the rest of the night. During the course of an evening, you’d be making dozens of basic highballs with club soda, ginger ale, tonic water, orange, grapefruit or cranberry juice, mixed with vodka, gin, whiskey or rum, and garnished with fruit. You’d be rapidly cracking open the soda bottles and getting sprayed by them. By the end of the night, you were as sticky as a pest strip from head to toe, standing in a big wet spot -- and not the good kind either.

Four jobs stand out in my memory, and in the end, I didn’t work much more than those four because they sealed my fate as a bartender.

I’ve never been good at memorizing anything, a flaw that kept me from being an accountant (multiplication tables) and an actress (lines), both careers I wanted to do. So I was very nervous about a special afternoon event at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens where we would do more than the basic highballs. We were equipped to make a few fancier drinks, like whiskey sours, Manhattans, martinis, and others. I had some of my index cards in my skirt pocket and would peek at them. One of my table customers thought this was charming and would cheerfully talk me through his drink orders.

But at the end of the evening, the temp agency booker, who had also worked the event, chewed me out for using cards. It was unprofessional, he said. I was never going to make it in the bartending biz at that rate. Shame on me.

I felt humiliated. Here I was with a college degree, and yet I’m being made to feel like dirt because I peeked at the instructions for a whiskey sour. I would have cried all the way home -- and I did shed a few tears -- except for the fact I had a $20 tip in my pocket from my most helpful customer. There was a certain advantage to being a damsel in bartending distress that my boss did not fully appreciate as far as making money. As long as you looked like you were trying, there was always a mercy tip. But that turned out to be the exception, not the rule.

I didn’t think I’d be called again, but two big events were coming up and they needed everyone they could get. So I got a station at the Bal du Bois ball at the Country Club of Virginia, the only time I’ll ever see the inside of that temple of privilege. Here were Richmond’s most elegant young people and their very rich parents, dancing, eating and drinking in their very fine clothes. But despite all the good breeding, drunk guys are still drunk guys and there’s nothing elegant about being a sloppy drunk.

At the end of the night, as I was closing my station, one of those drunk boys came up to me and blubbered, “I jus wanda you to know you made me feel baaaad all night. Ever’ time I came to you for a drink, you looked at me that way.”

I knew what "way" had cut him to the quick -- a look of disapproval that despite his fine tuxedo and jazzy, multi-colored cummerbund, and his Porsche parked outside, and his future career as a corporate lawyer, he was still one sorry, sloppy drunk tonight and I felt for at least that moment that I was better than him.

I was going to have a serious problem as a bartender if I made my clients feel like crap every time they ordered a drink.

The downward spiral continued at New Year’s Eve at the Tredegar Ironworks, another expensive ticket for the rich kids. It was a BYOB affair. The catering service supplied the mixers and fruit. The guests brought their own liquor, which was name tagged and kept at the multi-staffed stations and poured on demand by We the Bartenders. The evening went okay until the end of the night when a very drunk young man came to retrieve what was left of his bottle from my station and I couldn’t find it. He accused me of stealing it, but his party convinced him to forget about it and leave.

Shaken, I ran to the ladies’ room, which was a disaster area. Every toilet was full and overflowing, a couple of inches of water on the floor. Sanitary napkins, tampons and wads of toilet tissue were floating in the bowls and puddling on the floor in white and pink heaps. Faucets were left running. Every sink was full of plates of leftover Swedish meatballs and chicken wing bones. Lipstick smeared the mirrors. Garbage was everywhere. There’d be no peeing here tonight. Girls who came from well-to-do families had trashed this bathroom. Had no one ever told them not to flush tampons and sanitary napkins in all their private school years? Had no one ever told them to put their leftovers in the trashcan, not the sink?

Out in the parking lot, my drunken nemesis spotted me heading to my car and tried to attack me again for supposedly stealing his liquor bottle. His friends had to tackle him as I ran for my car just as the police pulled up. There was yelling, accusations, and a disgusted police officer who clearly saw a very drunk boy and a pathetic older woman in her sticky tux shirt and bowtie with no liquor bottle concealed on her body. I'm just glad I wasn't strip searched.

You would think that would finish bartending for me, but I took one more job at a reception at VCU President Trani’s home in Windsor Farms. His house is like the White House, with a series of reception rooms for entertaining on the spacious ground floor. The kitchen was huge and impersonal, built for caterers as a staging area. The actual private quarters were upstairs and unseen by the public.

I dutifully cut up oranges and limes, only to learn I would not have a bartending station at this gig. Despite my request to only be booked as a bartender, I was assigned to pick up glasses. Only guys could bartend. The girls walked through the grounds and the reception rooms, picking up abandoned glasses and returning them to the kitchen. I remember being disgusted by a big fish with its face still on being used as a serving plate. It had been split open and its insides were filled with some mushy stuff people were scooping up with crackers. I feel your pain, fish. This is a humiliating way to end up.

When it was over, we were supposed to hang around to load up the caterer’s truck, but the truck was late coming back and when it did, it was parked at the end of the long, curving, downhill driveway. Let the guys carry the trays and stuff down to the truck. They hadn't been walking all night, picking up glasses. I physically could not carry trays of plates down a cobblestone driveway. I had not signed on for that duty anyway, so I left. I left without asking permission if I could leave. I left before the gig was officially declared over. I left confused about my career as a bartender, reduced to picking up glasses from the lawn of the president of the college where I had attended and graduated with hope and promise.

I never got paid for that job and I never called the agency to report that I did not get paid because I figured they’d just yell at me for leaving before the truck was loaded. I never got a call to work again either. And thus ended my brief career as a bartender.