I kind of always wanted to bartend. Bartenders always look so together, unless they are really drunk, and then it just looks they are having fun. I think that’s why bartenders get hit on so much.
But with the exception of making a few classy cocktails at dinner parties, it seemed unlikely. My life just didn’t look like it was heading in the bartending direction. I spent my late teens and early twenties completing two degrees – neither of which was even remotely related to bartending or hospitality, unless becoming a member of a profession of alcoholics counts. I got a serious job, and then another serious job. I wore a suit to work.
Now I’m in my mid-twenties (and clinging to them). And somehow the last crazy year of my life has led me to become a bartender at a dive bar in New York City. A really dive-y dive bar. Like, the kind of dive bar where women get free shots for dancing on the bar and the juke box only plays country music and Elvis and old men sit for hours – hours – drinking the same goddamn beer, probably a PBR. The kind of dive bar where a PBR is $2.
The dive bar where I work only hires young, relatively attractive women (or wild looking women) to bartend. No experience necessary, especially if you have big breasts. Sometimes the customers ask to see a bartender’s breasts, at which point she can decide whether to kick them out, make them buy her a shot, or accept a tip and flash at will (technically against the rules, yet a widely accepted practice).
Before I started, the owner who interviewed me – let’s call her Lady Chatterley for reasons that will remain undisclosed for now – gave me some free drink tickets and told me to bring friends and check the place out. I took my friend KM, an engineer doing his PhD at Columbia, who had been to the bar before. He told me that I could not, under any circumstances, work there – didn’t I know about the breast flashing policy?
But the bartender, Elle, was nice to me and gave us free shots, and she looked so together, and confident, and like she was having a nice time, sipping her beer, chatting with the eight customers who were in the bar (I was the only woman). I texted Lady Chatterley and told her I was in.
The rest is a long story that is getting longer with every shift.
