Caroline :: Poor Richard’s :: June 2006
“We’re closed, sorry,” I said to some guy on the other side of the door.
I was exhausted and it was almost two AM. My boss usually made me close exactly when the clock chimed, but he wasn’t there and I wanted to go home.
Thus, the 1:57 close time.
I still had to wipe down all the counters, restock a bunch of stuff, go over receipts and tips as head waitress, and lock the place up. The whole thing was overwhelming, and I wasn’t quite sure if my heavy-lidded eyes were up to the challenge of staying open.
My entire schedule had been backwards lately. Tom, my old manager, had left and gone to manage some fancy-schmancy bar in upstate New York. That left me with a new manager, Phil, and a huge headache.
He didn’t seem to understand that I required sleep and couldn’t work three shifts a week by myself, during the crazy part of the season. The part of the season where people actually came to Scranton. Poor Richard’s was pretty much the only place to get a drink, and we were always busy.
So, most of the time, I wasn’t really working by myself. I was working with undertrained, overpraised, college girls that didn’t have a clue what I was talking about half the time. In over my head didn’t even begin to describe what it was like some nights with Samantha, Joanna, and others I couldn’t recall the names of.
But I was bitter, more than I was willing to admit to being. I figured I was allowed, seeing as I would enter my tenth year of waitressing that fall.
And maybe I was a Samantha or a Joanna once, who knows.
I certainly didn’t.
I’d gone and gotten my bar tending license three years earlier. Tom knew this, but Phil didn’t want to listen. Stuck with crappy sections and usually all the creepy guys thrown along with it. And the guys handling the bar, slow as ever. I could make drinks twice as fast.
God, I had to stop talking like this.
Another excuse started to form when the guy came in and sat down in a booth. I know I hadn’t locked up yet, but it was 1:59. Unless you could drink faster than the speed of light, I wouldn’t have bothered.
I threw all the lingering ones out almost a half-hour earlier, and lied when they tried to bargain with me that they still had a couple minutes left.
“Can I just get a beer?” the guy asked. “I mean, if it’s too late..”
He was really sad. I’d seen him around before. I think his name was Tim, or something similar. Maybe it was the time Samantha spilled a whole tray of drinks and he offered to help me mop the floor.
“I’ll leave,” he said kindly. “You look tired.”
Yes, yes. That was definitely him.
The Scrooge-y part of me diminished, if only for a second, and offered him twenty minutes. “As long as you fill me in with some good gossip.”
“Gossip?” he asked, running a hand through his hair. “Trust me, I don’t have any of that.”
“Why else would you show up at a bar, one minute before closing time, by yourself, then?” He just looked at me. “Okay, wrong word. Not gossip.. just, what’s up?”
Why was I so mean? This guy was obviously hurting. And there I go, rattling off something that could have hit some major, painful memory that he was just trying to forget with a couple drinks in the first place! There I was, with a dirty dish rag in my hand and a bottle opener in the other. And I was cold-hearted, rude, and most of all--
“I don’t even know why I would tell you this, but..”
He launched into a story, making me remember all the things that made this world so insanely crazy and hard to understand, and more importantly, what made people so bitter.
Stuff like this.
“This girl, I told her I was in love with her, put it all on the line. She said no. I can’t ever get anything right--”
I handed him his beer, listening as the tale wove in and out. He’d picked me, confessing in a different sort of way. Confessing that he’d failed.
Even though I knew, deep down, that he hadn’t.
He was so cute, and if I’d been younger, I might have offered him a hug or my phone number to talk. I might have considered being a shoulder to lean on. But I was older, much older. What was he, twenty-five?
I had my other job at eleven AM the next day. I was a part-time hairdresser, working my way up to owning my own business. I was angry and sleep-deprived and heartsick--
And I didn’t even have half the stuff going on in my life as this guy did.
So as I drank a beer myself, nodded my head and watched as his eyes lit up when he said her name, I made a vow to myself.
No more bitterness, only positives.
Then I heard her name again, again. Pam, Pam, Pam. He liked saying it. But the final time he that one-syllable word left his lips, I sensed and reverted back to my original thought.
People were pretty shitty.
“Pam, she let go of my hand. She left.”
I ended up staying at the bar that night until almost four. I slept in the next day, through my twelve alarms, and missed my first appointment.
She was supposed to have her hair curled and styled for some party.
It was one girl I’d never seen before.
I’d never see her.
And I made sure of it, passing her along to other hairdressers in the salon each time she came in.
I’m sure she was perfectly nice, but I just couldn’t erase the image of her letting him go.
Especially from what little I knew.
Author's Chapter Notes:
right after the confession, Jim goes to the bar
Chapter End Notes:
thanks for reading :)
