Serving a Few Too Many Dirty Martinis

This editorial is supposed to have an opinion in it, so here’s my opinion: the Columbia Bartending Agency is a super awesome organization that lets college students make lots of money for doing fun work, eating gourmet leftovers, and seeing the nicest apartments Manhattan has to offer. I dare you to challenge my opinion. It is tried and true—I should know. I tried it. But there’s a dirty underbelly to the sweet deal, and I’m writing to tell you about it.

Everyone has crazy stories about bartending jobs. Someone made Spike Lee a mojito using basil leaves instead of mint ones, and Spike Lee spit it back in the glass. Some other handsome devil worked a bachelorette party with 20-something drunk 20-somethings, and ended up walking home at 3 a.m. with more than one new notch in his bedpost. I’ve met the music manager of John Legend and the Black Eyed Peas, Barack Obama’s sister Maya, and a handful of published writers who invited me to smoke pot with them (I declined) while discussing how Toni Morrison wanted to boycott Vintage Books for publishing Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, referring to the aforementioned as Toni and Bret respectively. I swear, these stories are true, and I am certain they are only the tip of the iceberg.

A few weeks ago, though, I was called upon last-minute to cover a job in the Financial District. It was a quiet dinner party thrown by a husband in celebration of his wife’s birthday. It started off slow, people trickling in between 8 and 10 p.m., ordering vodka-and-cranberry, or a Manhattan, or martinis. The friend I was working with, we’ll call her Carol, and I were bouncing between the makeshift bar and the oven, heating prepackaged puff pastry and pigs-in-a-blanket. The first two hours were mind-numbingly boring, though Carol and I kept each other laughing. The host of the party, a stout man in his early thirties who we would’ve sworn was a closet homosexual, checked in with us regularly, took frequent refills on his dirty martini, and could be caught staring in our direction more often than not. Let’s call him Joe. We assumed Joe was keeping an eye out, to make sure we weren’t sneaking sips of Kettle One. He didn’t smile, wasn’t friendly. His guests milled around him and seemed perfectly at ease with his vacant gaze. We learned that most of them had graduated together from Harvard 10 years ago, now worked in some department or another of a very prominent investment-banking firm, and no one was making fewer than six figures. It was an impressive bunch—the women wore high heels and muted colors, the men had collared shirts and shiny, black shoes.

Around 10:30 p.m., Joe stumbled over and told Carol and I that we should start drinking with them—it’s a casual thing, he said. Have some fun. His friend, we’ll call him Eric, followed along, asking us to mix up something fruity and new. Tall, openly gay, and very thin, Eric seemed like a nice guy to talk to, though he was intent on asking uncomfortable questions: Do you have boyfriends? Where do you live uptown? What are you studying? How do I look? Carol and I laughed along. Joe looked on, blankly, going through martinis like a fish swims through water. He pulled me aside and said, “Is it okay if I write you a check for the job and tip you in cash?” I said that was fine, in fact we prefer it. “Good, good,” he said. “Here’s your tip.” He pulled a stack of bills out of his pocket and crushed a wad of them into my hand. “Thanks a lot,” I said, stuffing it into my pocket without looking, trying to appear polite and grateful. I tried to communicate to Carol that we had just received a monster tip of indeterminate amount, but she just looked at me quizzically. I ducked into the bathroom and counted out the wad: twenty $20 bills. Four hundred dollars. Now, my dear readers, take a wild guess where this story is headed.

As Joe got more and more drunk, he seemed less inclined to stray from the bar. He hung around, staring and looking sullen while Eric made awkward small talk and Carol and I laughed sportingly. Joe would interject, demanding direct answers to questions about our lives. Have you ever been with a woman? Do you like to party on the weekends? He’d press for serious answers instead of our vague deflections and ironic absolutely nots. We thought it was so funny. But when Joe came behind the bar and told me to follow him into the hall, and put his hands on my waist and lips on my neck, I knew something had gone wrong. Carol stood to the side, horrified, and I shook him off and said that was ridiculous—it was his wife’s birthday party. She was sitting a few feet away talking to three other successful 30-somethings. No one batted an eye.

After 30 minutes, a few more advances, and terribly uncomfortable questions, Carol and I told Joe that it was time for us to leave. He scribbled a check while we bid adieu to his wife, who said brightly that we’d been great bartenders and she hoped to have us back. We gathered our coats, tipped our hats, and ran for the elevator. We heard him call my name down the hallway as the doors slid shut.

What makes this story stick out in my mind? The money, obviously, which Carol and I split evenly, and the lighthearted way in which all those present politely ignored Joe’s drunken behavior. But before he was completely wasted, Joe divulged that his favorite book was The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, a tragically beautiful account of her husband’s death and her daughter’s coma in the same month, and the year that follows. How could a man we considered such a monster love such a beautiful book?

I won’t give you a moral. I don’t know what one is. Bartending is a great job—you meet lots of cool people, see different sides of the city, gather up great stories. But you can’t always know what you’re getting yourself into. You can’t be sure it’s a happy home—you can throw $600 at college students for mixing simple drinks, but you can’t keep your hands to yourself on your wife’s birthday. Here I am, my dear readers, judging Joe and his investment-banker friends. He made some bad moves, but they all pretended nothing was wrong.

If you’re pouring their alcohol, is that your job, too?

The author is a Columbia College sophomore.