Bad Waitress

When I was nineteen I followed my boyfriend to North Carolina and landed a job as a waitress at a cool BBQ joint in Chapel Hill called Crooks. It had a big pink plastic pig on the roof. They sold purple t-shirts with yellow typewriter type printed across the front: "Pig In The Sky."

I remember wiping down the big round black and chrome-edged tables while David Bowie's "Let's Dance" was blasting on the jukebox. I loved Bowie's music. I was a pretty good cashier because I could count backwards and remembered to line all the presidents up. One day I told them I could waitress, though I never had. One waitress was going back to art school to study photography, and she said she'd recommend me. I thanked her and applied for the position.

After I got hired I ran out and found a 1940's crepe pink-and-blue A-line dress and vintage alligator pumps. On my first day a fellow waiter, older, tall, with wire-rimmed glasses, warned, "You don't want to be out-dressing your customers!" I had nothing else to wear. All I owned in the world was a VW bug, a dog, and a few pairs of t-shirts and shorts. I lived in a tipi. I swam in ponds every day after work to bathe. (I was constantly getting ear infections because hot NC pond scum is overpopulated with bacteria.)

One day I was serving a family and they needed more BBQ sauce. Our very distractingly-handsome gay boss made it clear that we must always carry a tray even if delivering just a spoon. So I placed a tall narrow bottle of BBQ sauce on the tray and rushed back out to the table, holding the skinny bottle on the tray up by my ear. This is a lot harder than just holding it in your hand, and requires some practice! I lost control, and the bottle made a double forward somersault in the air and landed, spinning, madly spraying thick red sauce across the floor onto a customer's bare ankles. I apologized profusely, and the woman said, "I'm fine, but look over there." I turned around and saw the back of a very large man in a huge white shirt. He had a red stripe of BBQ sauce down his shirt like a stripe in the road. I turned away pretending I didn't see it, because after all he hadn't noticed yet.

After my shift, as I was walking across the gravel driveway to my blue VW bug, the boss ran out and told me not to come back. I was fired. I cried over my failure, the rejection, my posing revealed. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise because soon after I packed up and came home to my beloved Rhode Island. But I never forgot how bad I was at waitressing. I never got better at it, which is also a blessing. And to this day I never try to balance tall skinny bottles of anything on trays. I'm happy to use my grubby little hands.