“Stupid”
by Rebecca Tiger
Lorraine takes a sip of her drink, her drink, always. 7 & 7. The bartender, Sue, a friend of Lorraine’s, has poured it into a biggie size plastic cup. I stare with wide eyes as Sue holds the whiskey bottle over the ice, pouring in almost a bottle full of the tawny liquid. She tops it with the fizzy soda from the dispenser, puts in a straw and hands it to Lorraine, who mixes the shot of chaser into the alcohol that will almost immediately start to slur her voice. When Lorraine drinks, her words creep to the back of her throat; her croak, a permanent gruffness from two packs a day of Pall Malls, made more distant but also softer by the booze.
“And so I shot him,” she says. “That’s how I got rid of that husband.”
I am looking at her, trying to keep my face frozen. Sue poured me a vodka tonic, with almost the same proportion of liquor to soda as Lorraine’s and I am drunk, but it’s coming on too fast so I feel more dysphoric than happy.
“Wait, wait. I’m confused. What happened when you shot him?”
“What, do you think I don’t have good aim?” Lorraine laughs a low muted bellow. Sue joins in. They are looking at me as if I’m stupid. At this moment, I feel very stupid.
“Did you get in any trouble?” I ask.
Lorraine and Sue roll their eyes. Lorraine’s elbows are on the bar. She is looking straight ahead at the two long rows of alcohol. I look up too and we both watch her in the mirror behind the bottles as she lights another cigarette. She takes a deep inhale, her cheeks collapsing in on themselves with the effort of getting a lungful of smoke. She puts a hand to her hair, dyed dark brown, and smooths an unruly piece.
“Where exactly are you from?” she asks.
I know enough not to say suburban Maryland. She is not asking me a question, really. We are trying to understand each other.
“I mean, you ask some really stupid questions. Did you know that? I guess not stupid so much as naïve.” She pronounces this word slowly, emphasizing the diaresis.
I feel the quinine from the tonic pooling in my throat; I involuntarily pucker my lips at its combination of bitter and sweet. This is starting to seem like a mistake.
Lorraine is a cocktail waitress at Maison Bourbon, a jazz club on Bourbon Street, where I’ve recently started to work. She is an “old timer,” as she introduced herself. Her face is pale, the skin is fragile, with thin lines that are accentuated by the powder that clings to the crevices and the small fine hairs. Even though she wears bright blue eyeshadow and false eyelashes, she also doesn’t seem to give a shit about how she looks and she certainly doesn’t “goddamn care what any man thinks” of her. This is what started this conversation: her history of husbands. At 24, I can already see that men might be more trouble than they’re worth; 30 years my senior, she wants to confirm that my inkling is correct. So, she invited me for drinks after our Saturday night shift, to get to know each other. I was happy when she did; I felt like I was becoming part of the Maison Bourbon crew.
“I’m not trying to give you a hard time,” she says. “But if you intend to make it on this street, you need to wise up. Pay attention, yes. Listen, yes. But don’t ask so many questions.”
“Okay,” I answer. I thought asking questions was how you showed interest in someone.
“The conversation will unfold in its own time,” she says.
I nod and take another sip of my drink. The vodka coats my stomach, burning and warming it at the same time.
“You went to college, right?”
“Yes,” I say with a wince. I’ve been reminded many times since I started this job a month ago that this isn’t a place for college kids. On that first day, as the band in stained polyester tuxes played “When the Saints Go Marching In,” to a scattering of German tourists eager to hear “authentic Jazz,” tourists who drank the cheapest minimum one required drink per set - a warm glass of beer - I grabbed a New York Times out of my bag and started reading it. My second day Albert, the troll-like manager, short, rotund, with frizzy dark hair, instituted a new rule: no reading during a shift.
“He wants everyone to be as stupid as he is,” Lorraine had told me when I asked why Albert cared, if there was nothing to do.
“I’ll tell you, people do wonder why you’re here,” she continues. “Why you would take a job like this when you’ve got a degree.”
I don’t say anything. I am learning that Lorraine is not actually interested in why I would take this job. The answer isn’t important to her. It isn’t that important to me either. I was ready for an adventure so I had followed my clarinet teacher who I met in New York City, to New Orleans, to keep taking lessons with him. I couldn’t manage to land a job at the Barnes & Noble in town, despite having been a book buyer at Shakespeare & Company in New York City, right across from NYU. None of this impressed people here. My clarinet teacher, who sometimes subbed at Maison Bourbon and was sleeping with one of the bartenders, got me this gig despite my having no experience. I needed money and thought the job could be interesting for a bit.
“They think it’s funny. So, either you’re not quite right or the circumstances aren’t. Not that it’s any of my business.” She waves her hand as if shooing away a fly.
Again, I am silent. I sip my drink and she finishes hers. Sue comes over and pours her another. Lorraine remains steady as she lights a cigarette, blowing the smoke out of the side of her mouth, away from me.
She passes the pack over. I know enough to take one. She pushes her lighter toward me.
“I’ve been working on this street since I was 13,” Lorraine says.
“Wow, that’s a long time!” I answer. It’s not a question so I hope it’s the response she is expecting.
“I started dancing. Right over there.” She points at the bar across the street. Now it’s Fritzel’s Pub but before it was a hole in the wall, she tells me, where she’d get up on stage.
“My tits drove them wild then,” she says.
I instinctively want to look at her chest but don’t. She is still small, compact. But she is old. The skin of her decolletage is marked with sunspots.
“I couldn’t do that kind of stuff now,” she says.
I want to ask about her parents. I want to ask where she grew up. I want to know what it felt like to dance at 13 to men groping her. But still, I am silent.
“I’ve worked my whole life here,” she says. “Born and raised in the French Quarter. In fact, I’ve never left it.”
I am like a kid who can no longer hold her tongue.
“You’ve never left the French Quarter?” I ask. How is it possible that she’s never left this small area, bound by the Mississippi River on one side and St. Louis cemetery on the other?
“I’ve never had to. I have all I need here,” she says.
The cigarette is making me nauseous so I’ve let it burn; a long ash has formed on the end. I see her look at it. I flick it into the dirty silver ashtray and take another puff.
“Farina’s the same,” she says. Farina is the bartender my clarinet teacher got me the job through. She’s in her mid-30s but is like an old soul. Wise and sad.
“So, we, me and Farina, and the others, we wonder about your commitment to all of this,” she says, nodding toward Bourbon Street; the doors of the bar are wide open so we can hear music coming from other places, a cacophonous mix of trombones and trumpets and drums. I watch tourists stumble by with large plastic containers, tinted pink and blue, filled with Hurricanes, the potent rum cocktail cut with a bright red syrup that stains their tongues and teeth.
This is starting to feel like a job interview. I am trying to think of something truthful to say, to convince her that I want to be at Maison Bourbon. But her doubts aren’t unfounded. I’m young. I’ve already lived in three cities since I graduated college. I’ve never thought of staying anywhere my whole life. I’m not even sure I have the stamina to make it to Mardi Gras, two months away. Drunk people, like the ones walking by, have started to scare me. Their limbs move in directions they can’t control. They fill the street with vomit after hours of drinking, treating this real street in a real city like it’s Disneyland.
“I like the job. I like all of you. Everyone’s so nice!” I say.
Lorraine smirks and shakes her head. Albert is not nice. He’s a disgusting asshole. And he’s stupid. He’s in charge of the cash register but has trouble with basic math so it’s always off at the end of the night. Because he blames the waitresses, every shift ends with a screaming match; he threatens to fire us, and the long-timers tell him to fuck off. His wife, also a cocktail waitress, told me she is planning on leaving him. She has $120,000 from her tips stuffed under the mattress. When she gets to $200k, she’ll be gone. I asked if she was worried he’ll find it. “We haven’t slept in the same bed in years. You think I’d let that thing near me? I’d shoot him if he tried,” she answered.
All the women I work with have guns. Farina told me that shortly after I started. “You should get one too,” she said. New Orleans had just finished 1994 with the most homicides in recorded history, earning the designation of murder capital of the US, so her concern was justified. She warned me about walking home late at night, wearing a white shirt and black pants, the uniform that screams: I have cash on me! On busy nights, I’d have a few hundred in my pocket. I could make my $300 rent in a weekend of work.
“The money is good,” I say.
“It could be better.” Lorraine turns to look directly at me. I nod my head.
“There’s a lot to this line of work. Subtleties.”
It seems that we’re getting to the real reason she invited me out for drinks. I am starting to feel like I did when my father would sit me down and enumerate the punishments the B’s, C’s and occasional D’s on my report card elicited.
“Isn’t it always slow in January?” I ask. “That’s what everyone’s told me.”
“Honey, it’s never slow if you know how to set the pace.”
I have no idea what Lorraine is talking about. It’s not like I can magically make customers appear or convince Europeans that tipping is standard practice here. If people didn’t tip the first round, Albert told me on my first day, I should spill a drink on them. He made me do it. He filled a large plastic container with Maison Bourbon’s version of a Hurricane and instructed me to drop it on a customer with gray hair wearing a white Guayabera, nodding his head to the music. I did. When the man yelled at me, I went back to Albert and asked what to do. “Tell him we’ll reimburse his dry-cleaning receipt,” he said chuckling; his randomly missing front teeth made him look like a mischievous kid.
“That’s part of the job,” Lorraine explains. “Drawing them in.”
I am looking at one Lorraine but I see two of her; the cigarette exacerbated the effects of the well vodka. I’m feeling nauseous but know that vomiting right now, here, during the conversation, is not an option.
Lorraine looks me up and down.
“Let’s start with what you’re wearing.”
I am in black jeans and a white button-down shirt, the uniform I was told to wear. Albert was insistent. “This is a legit place,” he said. I didn’t think to ask why he would say that.
“I need to be straightforward with you,” Lorraine says. “Because this is affecting all of us. You’re a good-looking girl, you really are. Especially when you smile. So, the first thing you need to do is lighten up.”
“I can do that,” I say. “I’m starting to get comfortable.”
“And your clothes. They’re too loose. Those jeans, I mean, you’re swimming in them. And your shirt. You need to undo a few buttons.”
I look down. From my view, I can see the top of my white bra.
“So, you need to undo a button or two and you need a better bra, one that lifts everything.”
I can feel my face flush. Lorraine and I aren’t here to talk about her life on this street or her husbands. I am that terrible combination of clueless and drunk.
I’ve never known if I’m pretty or not and I have thought about that question. But once I discovered the Women’s Center at college and classes on feminist theory, I elevated not caring about my looks to a righteous cause. I took kitchen scissors to my long curly hair, thinking that I was cutting away the patriarchy’s hold on me, and my mother’s; she always talked about my “beautiful hair,” and I wanted to make it ugly. I stopped smiling at strangers, convinced that this kind of pleasantry was oppression. I had loosened up some after graduating. My hair was growing back. I bought some mascara that I sometimes remembered to wear. I was out of my depths now, though, and wasn’t sure how to get back to the surface, to familiar sights.
“I’m not a young woman, obviously,” Lorraine lowers her face so her eyes are staring at mine. “It’s not about attracting people at this stage. It’s about showing the world that you care. That goes a long way.”
I am feeling emboldened so I slur, “Why should I worry about what other people think?”
Lorraine’s laugh is deep and tinged with bitterness.
“Sue, this one says she shouldn’t have to worry what other people think about her.”
Sue looks at me. “What a luxury,” she says. She’s almost expressionless.
I’ve fucked up somehow and I kind of know this. Here I am with working women, the proletariat I read about in my classes. The real deal. And I don’t know what to do, what to say, how to interact.
“I know you’ve taken those college classes. I don’t believe you think you’re better than us. But I wonder what notions you got that are, I’ll be frank, messing with my, with our, livelihood.”
Lorraine has a point. We pool tips. Farina always gets good ones and I have considered that her bleached blond hair, blue contacts, and lacy bras help. But Lorraine gets good ones too. Her banter hides the lines; she never shows any disappointment at work. “It’s like I’m having a dinner party, and I want to make sure my guests are enjoying themselves,” she told me once.
I thought my concern for Lorraine was an expression of solidarity, that my worried look when she told me about shaking her tits for cash the moment they started to make an appearance was sympathy. But Lorraine is having none of it.
“We’re in this together,” she says. “No one is coming to save any of us. That hope died a long time ago. Some of us killed it! So, for better or worse, we just have each other.”
I am nodding my head slowly, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth to quell the nausea. I don’t know if I can do this, any of it.
“So, we ladies stick together. This is what we do for each other.”
I can feel my stomach about to rebel so I stand up. I fumble in my pocket and put a $20 bill on the bar.
“I have to go,” I say. “I don’t have your stamina!”
“Let’s do this again,” she says.
“I’d love to!” I am holding on to the bar stool, wobbling, trying to get steady. I turn and start walking toward the door, slowly, to keep my balance.
“Hey,” Lorraine says when I’m just about at the door. I know not to ignore her so I creep back with my hand on the bar.
“Don’t you want to know the end of the story?”
“Sure,” I say, not entirely certain which story she’s talking about.
“I killed him,” she said.
“Yes, because you have good aim!” I point my finger as a pretend gun at her.
“I had a friend who was a cop, he and some buddies came and took him away. He was a real bastard and they knew he had it coming. They cleaned up the mess for me,” she says.
“So, someone did come and save you.”
“No. You see, I did everyone a favor by murdering that monster. I saved them,” she says and holds up her finger, indicating that it’s time for Sue to pour again.
I turn and stumble out the door. I join the crowds on Bourbon Street; I am one of them, swaying, being moved along by the force of our bodies. I turn right on Dumaine Street, walk a few blocks, and vomit on the sidewalk. No one notices. My mouth is filled with the bitter tang of tonic as I weave my way home.
Rebecca Tiger teaches sociology at Middlebury College and in jails in Vermont and lives part-time in New York City. She writes on the long train ride to and from work. Her stories have appeared in Bending Genres, BULL, Pithead Chapel, Roi Faineant, Tiny Molecules, trampset and elsewhere. You can find her at rebeccatigerwriter.com and on twitter @rtigernyc.
by Rebecca Tiger
Lorraine takes a sip of her drink, her drink, always. 7 & 7. The bartender, Sue, a friend of Lorraine’s, has poured it into a biggie size plastic cup. I stare with wide eyes as Sue holds the whiskey bottle over the ice, pouring in almost a bottle full of the tawny liquid. She tops it with the fizzy soda from the dispenser, puts in a straw and hands it to Lorraine, who mixes the shot of chaser into the alcohol that will almost immediately start to slur her voice. When Lorraine drinks, her words creep to the back of her throat; her croak, a permanent gruffness from two packs a day of Pall Malls, made more distant but also softer by the booze.
“And so I shot him,” she says. “That’s how I got rid of that husband.”
I am looking at her, trying to keep my face frozen. Sue poured me a vodka tonic, with almost the same proportion of liquor to soda as Lorraine’s and I am drunk, but it’s coming on too fast so I feel more dysphoric than happy.
“Wait, wait. I’m confused. What happened when you shot him?”
“What, do you think I don’t have good aim?” Lorraine laughs a low muted bellow. Sue joins in. They are looking at me as if I’m stupid. At this moment, I feel very stupid.
“Did you get in any trouble?” I ask.
Lorraine and Sue roll their eyes. Lorraine’s elbows are on the bar. She is looking straight ahead at the two long rows of alcohol. I look up too and we both watch her in the mirror behind the bottles as she lights another cigarette. She takes a deep inhale, her cheeks collapsing in on themselves with the effort of getting a lungful of smoke. She puts a hand to her hair, dyed dark brown, and smooths an unruly piece.
“Where exactly are you from?” she asks.
I know enough not to say suburban Maryland. She is not asking me a question, really. We are trying to understand each other.
“I mean, you ask some really stupid questions. Did you know that? I guess not stupid so much as naïve.” She pronounces this word slowly, emphasizing the diaresis.
I feel the quinine from the tonic pooling in my throat; I involuntarily pucker my lips at its combination of bitter and sweet. This is starting to seem like a mistake.
Lorraine is a cocktail waitress at Maison Bourbon, a jazz club on Bourbon Street, where I’ve recently started to work. She is an “old timer,” as she introduced herself. Her face is pale, the skin is fragile, with thin lines that are accentuated by the powder that clings to the crevices and the small fine hairs. Even though she wears bright blue eyeshadow and false eyelashes, she also doesn’t seem to give a shit about how she looks and she certainly doesn’t “goddamn care what any man thinks” of her. This is what started this conversation: her history of husbands. At 24, I can already see that men might be more trouble than they’re worth; 30 years my senior, she wants to confirm that my inkling is correct. So, she invited me for drinks after our Saturday night shift, to get to know each other. I was happy when she did; I felt like I was becoming part of the Maison Bourbon crew.
“I’m not trying to give you a hard time,” she says. “But if you intend to make it on this street, you need to wise up. Pay attention, yes. Listen, yes. But don’t ask so many questions.”
“Okay,” I answer. I thought asking questions was how you showed interest in someone.
“The conversation will unfold in its own time,” she says.
I nod and take another sip of my drink. The vodka coats my stomach, burning and warming it at the same time.
“You went to college, right?”
“Yes,” I say with a wince. I’ve been reminded many times since I started this job a month ago that this isn’t a place for college kids. On that first day, as the band in stained polyester tuxes played “When the Saints Go Marching In,” to a scattering of German tourists eager to hear “authentic Jazz,” tourists who drank the cheapest minimum one required drink per set - a warm glass of beer - I grabbed a New York Times out of my bag and started reading it. My second day Albert, the troll-like manager, short, rotund, with frizzy dark hair, instituted a new rule: no reading during a shift.
“He wants everyone to be as stupid as he is,” Lorraine had told me when I asked why Albert cared, if there was nothing to do.
“I’ll tell you, people do wonder why you’re here,” she continues. “Why you would take a job like this when you’ve got a degree.”
I don’t say anything. I am learning that Lorraine is not actually interested in why I would take this job. The answer isn’t important to her. It isn’t that important to me either. I was ready for an adventure so I had followed my clarinet teacher who I met in New York City, to New Orleans, to keep taking lessons with him. I couldn’t manage to land a job at the Barnes & Noble in town, despite having been a book buyer at Shakespeare & Company in New York City, right across from NYU. None of this impressed people here. My clarinet teacher, who sometimes subbed at Maison Bourbon and was sleeping with one of the bartenders, got me this gig despite my having no experience. I needed money and thought the job could be interesting for a bit.
“They think it’s funny. So, either you’re not quite right or the circumstances aren’t. Not that it’s any of my business.” She waves her hand as if shooing away a fly.
Again, I am silent. I sip my drink and she finishes hers. Sue comes over and pours her another. Lorraine remains steady as she lights a cigarette, blowing the smoke out of the side of her mouth, away from me.
She passes the pack over. I know enough to take one. She pushes her lighter toward me.
“I’ve been working on this street since I was 13,” Lorraine says.
“Wow, that’s a long time!” I answer. It’s not a question so I hope it’s the response she is expecting.
“I started dancing. Right over there.” She points at the bar across the street. Now it’s Fritzel’s Pub but before it was a hole in the wall, she tells me, where she’d get up on stage.
“My tits drove them wild then,” she says.
I instinctively want to look at her chest but don’t. She is still small, compact. But she is old. The skin of her decolletage is marked with sunspots.
“I couldn’t do that kind of stuff now,” she says.
I want to ask about her parents. I want to ask where she grew up. I want to know what it felt like to dance at 13 to men groping her. But still, I am silent.
“I’ve worked my whole life here,” she says. “Born and raised in the French Quarter. In fact, I’ve never left it.”
I am like a kid who can no longer hold her tongue.
“You’ve never left the French Quarter?” I ask. How is it possible that she’s never left this small area, bound by the Mississippi River on one side and St. Louis cemetery on the other?
“I’ve never had to. I have all I need here,” she says.
The cigarette is making me nauseous so I’ve let it burn; a long ash has formed on the end. I see her look at it. I flick it into the dirty silver ashtray and take another puff.
“Farina’s the same,” she says. Farina is the bartender my clarinet teacher got me the job through. She’s in her mid-30s but is like an old soul. Wise and sad.
“So, we, me and Farina, and the others, we wonder about your commitment to all of this,” she says, nodding toward Bourbon Street; the doors of the bar are wide open so we can hear music coming from other places, a cacophonous mix of trombones and trumpets and drums. I watch tourists stumble by with large plastic containers, tinted pink and blue, filled with Hurricanes, the potent rum cocktail cut with a bright red syrup that stains their tongues and teeth.
This is starting to feel like a job interview. I am trying to think of something truthful to say, to convince her that I want to be at Maison Bourbon. But her doubts aren’t unfounded. I’m young. I’ve already lived in three cities since I graduated college. I’ve never thought of staying anywhere my whole life. I’m not even sure I have the stamina to make it to Mardi Gras, two months away. Drunk people, like the ones walking by, have started to scare me. Their limbs move in directions they can’t control. They fill the street with vomit after hours of drinking, treating this real street in a real city like it’s Disneyland.
“I like the job. I like all of you. Everyone’s so nice!” I say.
Lorraine smirks and shakes her head. Albert is not nice. He’s a disgusting asshole. And he’s stupid. He’s in charge of the cash register but has trouble with basic math so it’s always off at the end of the night. Because he blames the waitresses, every shift ends with a screaming match; he threatens to fire us, and the long-timers tell him to fuck off. His wife, also a cocktail waitress, told me she is planning on leaving him. She has $120,000 from her tips stuffed under the mattress. When she gets to $200k, she’ll be gone. I asked if she was worried he’ll find it. “We haven’t slept in the same bed in years. You think I’d let that thing near me? I’d shoot him if he tried,” she answered.
All the women I work with have guns. Farina told me that shortly after I started. “You should get one too,” she said. New Orleans had just finished 1994 with the most homicides in recorded history, earning the designation of murder capital of the US, so her concern was justified. She warned me about walking home late at night, wearing a white shirt and black pants, the uniform that screams: I have cash on me! On busy nights, I’d have a few hundred in my pocket. I could make my $300 rent in a weekend of work.
“The money is good,” I say.
“It could be better.” Lorraine turns to look directly at me. I nod my head.
“There’s a lot to this line of work. Subtleties.”
It seems that we’re getting to the real reason she invited me out for drinks. I am starting to feel like I did when my father would sit me down and enumerate the punishments the B’s, C’s and occasional D’s on my report card elicited.
“Isn’t it always slow in January?” I ask. “That’s what everyone’s told me.”
“Honey, it’s never slow if you know how to set the pace.”
I have no idea what Lorraine is talking about. It’s not like I can magically make customers appear or convince Europeans that tipping is standard practice here. If people didn’t tip the first round, Albert told me on my first day, I should spill a drink on them. He made me do it. He filled a large plastic container with Maison Bourbon’s version of a Hurricane and instructed me to drop it on a customer with gray hair wearing a white Guayabera, nodding his head to the music. I did. When the man yelled at me, I went back to Albert and asked what to do. “Tell him we’ll reimburse his dry-cleaning receipt,” he said chuckling; his randomly missing front teeth made him look like a mischievous kid.
“That’s part of the job,” Lorraine explains. “Drawing them in.”
I am looking at one Lorraine but I see two of her; the cigarette exacerbated the effects of the well vodka. I’m feeling nauseous but know that vomiting right now, here, during the conversation, is not an option.
Lorraine looks me up and down.
“Let’s start with what you’re wearing.”
I am in black jeans and a white button-down shirt, the uniform I was told to wear. Albert was insistent. “This is a legit place,” he said. I didn’t think to ask why he would say that.
“I need to be straightforward with you,” Lorraine says. “Because this is affecting all of us. You’re a good-looking girl, you really are. Especially when you smile. So, the first thing you need to do is lighten up.”
“I can do that,” I say. “I’m starting to get comfortable.”
“And your clothes. They’re too loose. Those jeans, I mean, you’re swimming in them. And your shirt. You need to undo a few buttons.”
I look down. From my view, I can see the top of my white bra.
“So, you need to undo a button or two and you need a better bra, one that lifts everything.”
I can feel my face flush. Lorraine and I aren’t here to talk about her life on this street or her husbands. I am that terrible combination of clueless and drunk.
I’ve never known if I’m pretty or not and I have thought about that question. But once I discovered the Women’s Center at college and classes on feminist theory, I elevated not caring about my looks to a righteous cause. I took kitchen scissors to my long curly hair, thinking that I was cutting away the patriarchy’s hold on me, and my mother’s; she always talked about my “beautiful hair,” and I wanted to make it ugly. I stopped smiling at strangers, convinced that this kind of pleasantry was oppression. I had loosened up some after graduating. My hair was growing back. I bought some mascara that I sometimes remembered to wear. I was out of my depths now, though, and wasn’t sure how to get back to the surface, to familiar sights.
“I’m not a young woman, obviously,” Lorraine lowers her face so her eyes are staring at mine. “It’s not about attracting people at this stage. It’s about showing the world that you care. That goes a long way.”
I am feeling emboldened so I slur, “Why should I worry about what other people think?”
Lorraine’s laugh is deep and tinged with bitterness.
“Sue, this one says she shouldn’t have to worry what other people think about her.”
Sue looks at me. “What a luxury,” she says. She’s almost expressionless.
I’ve fucked up somehow and I kind of know this. Here I am with working women, the proletariat I read about in my classes. The real deal. And I don’t know what to do, what to say, how to interact.
“I know you’ve taken those college classes. I don’t believe you think you’re better than us. But I wonder what notions you got that are, I’ll be frank, messing with my, with our, livelihood.”
Lorraine has a point. We pool tips. Farina always gets good ones and I have considered that her bleached blond hair, blue contacts, and lacy bras help. But Lorraine gets good ones too. Her banter hides the lines; she never shows any disappointment at work. “It’s like I’m having a dinner party, and I want to make sure my guests are enjoying themselves,” she told me once.
I thought my concern for Lorraine was an expression of solidarity, that my worried look when she told me about shaking her tits for cash the moment they started to make an appearance was sympathy. But Lorraine is having none of it.
“We’re in this together,” she says. “No one is coming to save any of us. That hope died a long time ago. Some of us killed it! So, for better or worse, we just have each other.”
I am nodding my head slowly, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth to quell the nausea. I don’t know if I can do this, any of it.
“So, we ladies stick together. This is what we do for each other.”
I can feel my stomach about to rebel so I stand up. I fumble in my pocket and put a $20 bill on the bar.
“I have to go,” I say. “I don’t have your stamina!”
“Let’s do this again,” she says.
“I’d love to!” I am holding on to the bar stool, wobbling, trying to get steady. I turn and start walking toward the door, slowly, to keep my balance.
“Hey,” Lorraine says when I’m just about at the door. I know not to ignore her so I creep back with my hand on the bar.
“Don’t you want to know the end of the story?”
“Sure,” I say, not entirely certain which story she’s talking about.
“I killed him,” she said.
“Yes, because you have good aim!” I point my finger as a pretend gun at her.
“I had a friend who was a cop, he and some buddies came and took him away. He was a real bastard and they knew he had it coming. They cleaned up the mess for me,” she says.
“So, someone did come and save you.”
“No. You see, I did everyone a favor by murdering that monster. I saved them,” she says and holds up her finger, indicating that it’s time for Sue to pour again.
I turn and stumble out the door. I join the crowds on Bourbon Street; I am one of them, swaying, being moved along by the force of our bodies. I turn right on Dumaine Street, walk a few blocks, and vomit on the sidewalk. No one notices. My mouth is filled with the bitter tang of tonic as I weave my way home.
Rebecca Tiger teaches sociology at Middlebury College and in jails in Vermont and lives part-time in New York City. She writes on the long train ride to and from work. Her stories have appeared in Bending Genres, BULL, Pithead Chapel, Roi Faineant, Tiny Molecules, trampset and elsewhere. You can find her at rebeccatigerwriter.com and on twitter @rtigernyc.