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Authors: Cindy Dyson

And She Was (3 page)

BOOK: And She Was
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Another addition, this time in black marker, responded “Who the fuck cares?”

The exchange got me thinking. Maybe there was something to be learned from the messages we leave for each other to pass the time while waiting to excrete. Latrinealia, or the art of bathroom writing, goes all the way back to the Roman Empire. It’s part of the human urge to be creative when the body is, well, predominately at rest. I’ve collected some great stuff over the years and filled two half-size ledger books with messages from bathroom writers across the country. Never once had I written anything myself. This hobby was pure voyeurism.

The Elbow Room had the usual. A few messages about guys who were bastards. A few names and dates. The expletives that stand alone, those little words—
Fuck, Asshole, Dickhead
—summing up all a writer needed to say. One line about a death-trap boat: “Keep off the
Northwind,
it’s a hole waiting to flood.” Nothing of special interest.

I finished up, reached for the toilet paper, and began to pull. I don’t get drunk easily, and watching toilet paper unroll has always been my way of discerning just how far gone I am. If I get kind of mesmerized by the process, if the paper takes on an odd ribbonish quality, I’m drunk. This time, however, the toilet paper acted like toilet paper.

But because I was staring so intently at the toilet paper holder, I saw another bit of writing peeking out from underneath the roll. It was actually scrawled on the metal holder itself. I leaned down till my head sunk below my knees. I still couldn’t see enough to make it out. I know it seems idiotic, but I’m really into this latrinealia thing. I had to read this. It could be a real gem. And the curiosity of it. Why would anyone take the trouble to remove a toilet paper roll bar just to write something like “Fuck You,” where no one would read it?

I don’t think there’s a locked toilet paper holder in all of Dutch. I simply slipped the roll and bar off the holder.

Killing hands.

I touched the words, just barely, but the metal sent a signal through my finger and up my arm. Not like electricity or heat exactly. More like the sudden sense that the metal was touching me. I jerked back, causing the toilet seat to slip against the rim, nearly dethroning me. I ducked to look at the message again. Scrawled words in felt-tip pen.
Killing hands.
Just words. I took in a slow breath. Odd, but not particularly insightful. I slipped the roll back on, finished up, and headed to my bar stool.

Marge examined me from under creamy blue eye shadow when I’d situated myself back at the bar. “You need a job. Thad says you’ve cocktailed before, and we haven’t had a drink girl for a few weeks now. Last one upped and got a cooking job on a boat. Me and Les get slammed.”

“What’s the money like?”

“Eleven an hour. Tips usually come in over two hundred a night. We need ya between ten and three. Thursday through Saturday.”

“How bad are the guys?”

“Oh, you know, most of them are teddy bears. When something breaks out, you just yell ‘fight.’ Les and me’ll handle it.”

JULY 6, 1986

this way and that

I
never said I’d take the job, but I did. I had nothing better planned. I can’t say what I had imagined myself doing when I took the three-day ferry ride from Homer to Unalaska. I just knew I’d be with a man and out of the roommate problem.

A few weeks before, in Anchorage, Thad had introduced me to two other women-in-waiting whose men were fishing. He’d left me with his Camaro, $3,000, and the company of women. We had an executive apartment, the kind that’s set up for traveling light and fast. It came with a supply of all the basics, two pot holders, a dish set, pots, corkscrew, bedding. I unpacked my couple of boxes, and presto, a home. I didn’t even have to buy towels. The three of us hit it off okay, at first. Then Kathy hooked up with a hard-drinking guy who hung out at The Hub. It didn’t take a week before he was smacking her around. I listened to Nan try the roommate-girlfriend talk. “You’ve got to lose that guy. Have more respect for yourself.” Silly words, useless words.

One afternoon I came home from a successful Nordstrom shopping trip to find Nan, car keys in hand, rushing off to the hospital. Kathy hadn’t faired well after the last argument. She had a dislocated shoulder and a brain hemorrhage. Nan, ever hopeful, thought we should both be there when Kathy woke up.

“You go ahead,” I said, lifting a new angora sweater from a shopping bag.

Nan stared at me. “She doesn’t have any family here. We’re all she’s got. Come on.”

I held the sweater against my chest, feeling the tickle of it along my neck. “You go ahead. You know her better anyway,” I said. I knew even then I was shirking my foundling girlfriend role. Living with women had set me on edge. I didn’t know what to expect from them or what they expected from me. Men were just so much more reliable. Besides, I couldn’t pretend it mattered to Kathy if I showed up.

I was pulling the pale suede jacket from another bag so I couldn’t see Nan’s glare before she turned and slammed the door on her way out, but I felt it smash against me and rummaged around for the matching boots.

Three-inch heels. Mom would be proud. “Never wear flats outside your own house,” she’d say. The floor of her closet was a wreck of strappy sandals and high leather boots. “You wear flats, people will think you don’t have any pride in your stride. Got that?”

No flats. No flats.

Kathy was released the next day. Nan brought her home and tucked her in bed before she told me to leave. I knew I could still salvage the situation, but I didn’t want to. I needed out.

I packed up my two boxes of stuff and my Nordstrom’s loot and moved to Super 8. I got through to Thad the next day on the ship-to-shore radio.

“I ran into some trouble here. I need to move on.”

“Move on?”

I’d chosen the wrong words. Words that telegraphed too much. I lay back on the motel bed and stared at the ceiling. “It’s just not working out for me right now. Nothing to do with you.”

He paused, and I listened to the static across the curving surface of ocean between us. “Why don’t you come out to Dutch?”

When I didn’t respond, he continued. “Brandy, it’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. It will blow you away, I promise.”

“That’s not what you said before. I remember you calling it the rainiest, windiest hellhole on earth.”

“Well that’s true too. But I’ll be coming in every few weeks.”

Perhaps he understood me better than I knew. What I needed was him, any him, just someone to steady myself in. I thought about the alternative, finding a cocktail waitressing job, waiting. I knew if I said yes, I would cross some threshold. I’d been following men a good deal of my life. I’d followed one to college for a couple years in Seattle. I’d followed another to Austin, Texas, for five months, another to Redwood City, California, and, of course, Thad to Anchorage. I tried to count the number of times I’d gone somewhere simply because I wanted to. The answer—zero. But until now, I’d never considered following a man someplace so remote, so far from what I knew. It clarified my situation; I had no place, no plan, no pride. I’d drifted so long, I was willing to drift anywhere.

“Will there be anything for me to do?”

“You can see me,” Thad said. “We’ll be coming in pretty soon, taking a week break.”

I sat up, planted my feet on the beige carpet, and said it. “I’ll be on the next ferry.”

I left on July 2. Three days later, I was in Dutch.

The next day I was the Elbow Room’s one and only cocktail waitress.

 

The Elbow Room began in the 1940s as a military bar, the Blue Fox Cocktail Lounge. Unalaska was buried in military buildings at the time, as American forces beefed up defenses along the strategic swoop of the Aleutians during World War II. The bar was all but forgotten in 1966 when two guys bought it for six hundred dollars and renamed it the Elbow Room. They had to haul crates of burlap sandbags, camouflage netting, and C ration cans to the dump, but soon Unalaska’s three hundred residents had a sit-down place to drink. By the mid-seventies, the crabbing boom hit Dutch and transformed the Elbow Room. It was big money, loads of drugs, and hot tempers. It entered legend. Nearly every book or article about king crab fishing mentioned the Elbow Room. That notoriety was holding strong in 1986 when I stepped inside and became part of its infamy.

A reckless, shameless place. Even before my shift began, I knew this job would be different.

Most bars don’t allow employees to drink. This is a standard, hard-
and-fast rule that is secretly, unilaterally ignored. The reason is simple—the absolute worst place to be is sober when everyone else is drunk. Cocktail waitresses the world over know this and practice seditious acts to avoid it. There is a system. Bartenders slip rum into the Coke you sip on by the waitress station. They slip shots of tequila into your hand at thigh level as you come behind the bar. You turn your back, pretending to look for a clean tray or more straws in the corner, and gulp it down.

At the Elbow Room subterfuge didn’t exist.

“What do you want?” Marge asked, knocking an empty shot glass on the bar the minute I stepped into the place.

“Schnapps.”

She poured; I drank. She poured another.

“Where’s Thad?”

“He had to run some gear out to the boat.”

She nodded. “It’s gonna be busy,” she said. “This is Les.”

A slim, stunning man at the cash register fluttered his fingers in an over-the-shoulder wave.

“He’s a fruit,” Marge said. “Half-Aleut, half-white, all fruit.” She handed me a tiny cash box. “You got a two-hundred-dollar bank for making change. If someone gets out of line, let us handle it.” She turned away.

The tables and stools were full, and about ten men clumped in standing groups. Three dogs lay near their owners’ bar stools, occasionally yelping when someone stepped on a tail. Swirling patterns of muddy sand had already formed across the painted wood floor. I worked the tables first. I noticed the Aleut guys seemed to prefer them, sitting shoulder to shoulder, while the white guys like to hold the center, standing in armored clumps. Not that the place was segregated. A few white locals squished in at the tables with their Aleut buddies. And a few Aleut guys mingled with the standing white hordes. And they all drank the same stuff—beer, rum-and-Cokes, screwdrivers, and dirty-mothers.

I knew within five minutes that I’d overdressed. Dressing is performance art for a cocktail waitress, and your audience can sour on you fast. I’d worn tight jeans and a tightish black T-shirt with crocheted lace around a V-neck. I’d left my hair down and done a medium
makeup job, which meant everything but eyeliner, brow, and contouring pencils. The object is to look sexy enough to bring in the tips but not enough to bring on the hassles. In Dutch, I could have rolled an old piece of carpet around myself and been too sexy. The mistake had been made, and all I could do now was make the most of it. I snaked through the crowd without meeting eyes. I took orders and delivered drinks without small talk.

The tips were astounding. I’ve worked in lucrative bars before, but the Elbow Room was like nothing else. Five-dollar tips were average and a ten common. Once that night a guy threw a fifty on my tray.

Les was good. By ten-thirty he had lines three deep around the bar, but the second he saw my cork and plastic tray waving above the crowd, he was there. “What do you need?” And he was fast, he could fill my entire tray in two minutes. I noticed a gold earring dangling from his right ear and wondered if it gave him any trouble. I didn’t imagine this was a progressive crowd.

By midnight, the Elbow Room had become a mass of men and very few women drinking and swaying to a jukebox that played mostly George Thorogood, Fleetwood Mac, and Judas Priest. I don’t know how Marge and Les kept all those guys drinking. I’ve never seen bartenders as fast.

Thad came in a little after midnight. He kissed me and slid his hands up my lower back and into my hair.

“Having any trouble?”

“Not much.”

“I’ll sit right here,” he said, nodding at an occupied stool next to the spot I wiggled into to order drinks.

I set my tray on the bar and shouted a lengthy drink order at Les. Thad turned to the man on the stool he wanted.

“You’re in my seat.”

I couldn’t see their faces, but neither moved for maybe five seconds. Then the man grabbed his drink and left. Thad lifted his oilskin and sat. Les slid a beer in front of Thad and leaned toward him, cupping his cheek in his palm and bending his elbows on the bar so that he was looking up. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I left the two in earnest conversation to make another round.

The price I paid for misjudging my audience came each time I
snaked through that crowd between the bar and tables. I’d hoist my tray over my head and search for openings. I pressed my hand lightly on one back, another forearm. Sometimes one of the guys would see me coming and make a show of helping me out, shoving his buddies aside, yelling, “Blondie coming through. Get out of the fucking way.”

I could never tell who was doing the groping. I’d feel a hand squeeze a chunk of my ass, and no matter how quickly I turned or how closely I scrutinized the mass around me, I couldn’t finger the culprit. Not that I wasn’t used to it. Cocktail waitresses handle groping in one of two ways. We either play the oh-I-can’t-believe-you’re-so-naughty part, giggling innocently and pretending we haven’t been pinched a dozen times in the last hour. Or we play the get-a-life part, acting a touch disdainful and pretending to be beyond caring. I do both well. But at the Elbow Room, the attention was so persistent, so frenzied and exuberant, I had trouble keeping in either character. Out of necessity, I stooped to ignoring it and tried to vary my route each trip. All I did was present my ass to a wider spectrum of gropers.

Bellie came in a little after one o’clock. She slid into a booth with three guys in the back.

“Hey white girl, you’re still here.”

I shrugged. “Looks that way.”

“Sex on the beach and a tequila.” Her sparkling fingers played with dark loosening curls.

The guys ordered shots and beers.

I returned with their order and felt the table rock on uneven legs when I tried to set the drinks down. I clustered them all in the center to avoid a spill.

“Found a place to live yet?” Bellie asked, picking up her shot glass first.

“No.”

“Tell Thad to meet me tomorrow sometime. My aunt has a place.” She set the empty glass down, and the table tipped toward her.

At quarter after two, we had a minirush. Apparently, the other bar on the island, the HiTide, closed at two o’clock, and several determined drinkers, along with the cocktail waitresses who had been serving them, swept into the Elbow Room.

My counterparts at the HiTide were also blond. That made five of
us. They seemed to know a good number of the men and immediately fell in with a loud group in the center of the room. These women had definitely overdressed. Two had short black skirts and nylons; one wore black tights topped with a sweater that descended to the bottom of her butt cheeks. The other actually wore a dress, striped with a wide sailor collar.

Marge flicked the lights twice. Last call. I made one more pass of the tables and kept my eye on the cocktail waitresses. Blond hair gets attention. Something about the light in dark spaces makes it hard to focus on anything else. Even fellow blondes fall victim. I’ve noticed it when watching a Marilyn Monroe movie; your eyes just keep straying to her, even when you make a point of watching another actor. Anyway, one of the cocktail waitresses was cradling some man’s ass with both hands. He lifted her up, yelling something unintelligible. They had big, throaty, head-back, too-many-cigarettes laughs. I decided not to like them. Partly because they had brought their flash into my bar and were upstaging me, stripping me of the attention I’d been arrogantly ignoring. Partly because I just have a policy of not liking bleached blondes. And even in bar light, I could see the signs—orangish, stiff, the kind of hair that must be curled, sprayed, and untouched to look good, and good is too generous. To look like hair. Anyway, no one pinched my ass for the rest of the night, which wasn’t long.

Marge turned up the lights and yelled “Bar’s closed” four or five times. That’s when the chant started.

“Rodeo Song! Rodeo Song!”

Someone in back started, and by “fuck” the entire bar was singing.

Well it’s forty below and I don’t give a fuck

I got a heater in my truck and I’m off to the rodeo

And it’s alaman left and alaman right

Come on you fucking dummies get your right step right

Get off the stage you Goddamn goof you know

You piss me off, you fucking jerk

You get on my nerves.

Well here comes Johnny with his pecker in his hand

He’s a one ball man and he’s off to the rodeo

And it’s alaman left and alaman right

Come on you fucking dummies get your right step right

Get off the stage you Goddamn goof you know

You piss me off, you fucking jerk

You get on my nerves.

BOOK: And She Was
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