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A week before rent’s due, Scott gets his first paycheck. Even with my saved-up tip money, we’re two hundred short. After work, I go hand out more résumés and pick up a second job working the dinner shift at a fancy steakhouse downtown.
Here, the stress is heavy but the tips are a hundred bucks a night. We work in teams of two. One of us rolls out a cart loaded with raw steaks and a live lobster and does a menu presentation, a four-minute scripted speech that describes the menu. Meanwhile, the other partner fetches drinks and tends to the other tables in the section. The assigned partners need to decide between themselves who is going to fill which role. I prefer not to do the menu presentations, as that involves picking up the lobster and holding it up to impress the customers. The claws are bound, of course, and the lobsters are pretty docile since they’re kept in the cooler until it’s time to place them on the cart, but I just feel so sorry for them. It’s one thing to hold up a piece of dead meat, but a living creature is something else. My co-workers say I look into it way too deeply, but it just seems barbaric, using these living creatures as props.
It’s even worse when I have to go into the cooler to grab something. There they are, in their bin with a towel over them, their claws pushing the towel up as they try, unsuccessfully, to climb out. If one were to climb out, it would just be thrown back in the bin, which makes their efforts even more pitiful. The whole thing seems very inhumane to me, and I can’t understand why no one else seems to have a problem with it.
Is it worth quitting over? No, I need the money. In fact, I pick up shifts. Pretty much every day off I end up working and bringing home another hundred bucks. We’re able to pay our rent and our other basic bills, but the trade-off is that we barely ever see each other. By the time I get home Scott has left for work, and by the time I get up in the morning, he has just fallen asleep. Weeks go by where we literally only see each other for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time, in passing. Some days, we don’t see each other at all.
Then one night in the fall, we miraculously have a night off together. We stay home, listening to music and talking.
“Do you want another glass of wine?” Scott asks, heading into the kitchen.
I laugh. “I’m a closet white zin drinker!”
“What do you mean?” He refills my glass.
“All the servers I work with make fun of people who order white zin because they say it’s not a ripe grape. It’s made from un-mature red grapes, so it’s for un-mature tastes.”
“That’s snobby.”
“Yup. Is your job snobby, too?” I imagine the five-star hotel might be.
“Probably, but I don’t see much of that because I work overnights. The only one I see all the time is Eduardo, the concierge, and he’s stuck up. He has a problem with me for some reason.”
“Probably has a problem with authority.”
“Well that’s funny,” Scott says, “because I have a problem with authority too. I’m not some big power-tripper security guard. I’m just trying to pay my bills.”
I suggest that he tell Eduardo that. But of course he never would.
“Do you like your job okay, though?” I’m almost afraid to ask: “Better than Customs?”
He thinks about it for a minute. “I don’t like it any worse,” he says, “but what I don’t like is how much more we’re struggling than we would be if I worked for Customs. I’d be earning more than we’re earning together now. And we’d see each other more.”
With every passing week, we see each other less and less. As the new millennium approaches, Scott’s hotel has everyone working overtime to prepare for the unknown. He’s a security guard at one of the largest hotels in downtown Portland, and the place is booked solid for New Year’s Eve. It’ll be a party; it’ll be wild. And, potentially, it’ll be dangerous. With Y2K, no one knows what’s going to happen. The city could go completely dark. There could be looting and injury with no way to get help. Security needs to be prepared. In addition to his overnight shifts, he has to sit through meetings that go over different scenarios and try to anticipate anything that could possibly go wrong at midnight 2000.
All I have to worry about on New Year’s Eve is how to provide great service to six tables that are seated at each of the five, seven, nine and eleven o’clock seatings. It goes smoothly, for the most part, because tonight, for once, people seem to be thinking beyond themselves, even if just a little. They’re patient and forgiving, appreciative of the good time out. And they’re generous. They leave twenty-five, thirty, and even forty percent tips, perhaps just in case the world actually does end at midnight. Then, before we know it, midnight is almost here. The mood is positive, the energy level is high, and there’s excitement in the air. No one, not the rich or the famous or the beautiful, knows exactly what will happen at midnight.
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