Before the pandemic, I had spent 25 years in all areas of the service industry (working artist and educator so, yeah bartender for well over 15 years).
I will never go back. The ghoul owner, who used to be my boss / chef who fought for our overtime when I cooked for him 18 years ago, is now the capitalist who stole our wages, stole our tips, added a service fee for “employee wellness” which did NOT go to employees, and fucking let a $40k benefitted general manager walk out the door before the holidays with no other management at all (2019-2020) on the back of my holding down the weekday bartender shifts and covering everyone else for $7.25 an hour plus tips.
As a result I was at once a bartender, host, expo and food runner with one disenfranchised server; The bar prep cook preparing all garnishes and accoutrement out of the kitchen in addition to my daily bar tasks of cutting fruit, squeezing fresh juice, grinding coffee, making iced tea, and iced Vietnamese coffee with a 24 cold soak of cafe du monde; The bar manager inventorying and ordering liquor, wine, beer, mixers and juices as well inventorying and ordering for the kitchen’s cooking wine and liquor needs and this gets worse I wasn’t actually a bar manager with title and compensation and benefits so they bump a server who has taken some (these are a joke too) sommelier classes to “Bev Director” so they can clock in and drink wine with reps and eat food and then… you guessed it, tell me what to order from the distributers and then hold me responsible for any errors they told me to make, while also asking me to design a whole bar menu of new drinks because “I’m so busy.”
I was responsible for opening the restaurant and setting up the incoming night shift. I was admonished for clocking in before my shift started when I came in early because there was no other way and scolded for staying late when their scheduled transition was a disaster and bodies were needed to keep customers happy; and then was asked to come in early and stay late to decorate for the holidays and tear that shit down, and to spend hours fixing the Sonos speakers in the ceiling on a fucking OSHA’s ghost ladder.
I had to shovel the fucking alleyway behind the place, not just the sidewalk out front. My old man gave me his ten year old snowblower which I brought over because we in a snowy spot, don’t cha know? No credit. No thanks.
I work 70 hour weeks from Thanksgiving to Easter, the time when the restaurant makes like 70% of its revenue. They let the manager resign with honors and leave the week before Thanksgiving. They schedule two people, bartender and server, no support, on a floor with seating for 50+ guests and another dozen or more at the bar.
We get shellacked. I begged for a third person to come in on that Monday and they called a great new hire in and she quit after an hour it was so bad. Busiest shit in the world, families looking to celebrate with fancy food and wine, bubbles and oysters, and expectations of a James Beard nominee owned place. My regulars appear on Beat Bobby Flay and magazines. I tried to quit, got in a fight with the owner (I proofed too much wine, I lost my cool) he mocked me thinking it was like we were in the kitchen and I was a stage. I’m fucking 40. I yelled. A lot. I stormed out and said I quit. They begged me back: both owner and surrogate manager from a different spot that they tapped to talk to me because they knew we were friendly.
I go back. I’m dying. It get worse and worse. I have ulcerated intestines which when stressed cause hemorrhoids. Behind the bar. Way past 40 hours. Paid for 36 with a pool-tip system that pits everyone against each other while they skim the top. I make it to the pandemic. Everyone knows I’m destroyed. No one knows whats happening inside me. No one cares. I start to be dark, my game show host replaced with cynicism. I have no one begging me to come work for them and having a regular schedule of days behind the bar was the most stable I was as my life/ work calendar has ever been concerned, but I was a colander leaking life and they were happy to let me do it.
Then the pandemic hits and on my last shift a boomer came in with their crossfit arms in a tizzy knocking shit over about how, “Covid is here I just ran straight to the bar because happy hour might get cancelled! Haha no I haven’t looked at the menu yet I’m so flustered, must be the Covid!” I shit you not. I was supposed to be out a 4. It was 530 on Friday the 13th of March 2021. We were furloughed that Sunday.
My partner’s brother died March 26th of 2020. James was 47, a design-build architect who worked hands-on and elbow-deep in every project in the shop making cabinets and cornices and paying his guys like brothers. He died at home from Covid and because of the early part of the pandemic, there were not enough tests for the living so his swab was set aside and his death written off as a home death due to a co-morbidity which was only legal because of the state of emergency. You don’t die from co-morbidity, it is a factor leading to cause of death: he drown in lung fluid because the thing moved so fast and he thought he was strong enough not to be a burden on the hospitals - this is when the refrigerated trucks started appearing outside hospitals and retirement homes. Our family can’t qualify for the Democrat’s blood money because he isn’t counted as a covid dead, just dead dead. So take the death toll and double right now ya’l we’ve been lied to.
I call and tell the restaurant about the death and that “I don’t know if the shutdown will end in a few weeks like they’re saying but if ya’ll are gonna call people back in could I not be the top of the list? We need time. His wife was a foreign national and suffers from schizophrenia, she was flying home the day it happened. She fled home in a panic, no one helped her, the cops terrified her. We got a text. Everything was fucked we barely got his body out of Boston’s Medical Examiner, his best friend who found him dead had to go ID his body for us because we couldn’t afford to safely cross half the country and there was a total shutdown.
They have never spoken to, acknowledged, inquired or interacted with me since. I had to do an end-around to make sure they didn’t fire me and I would qualify for the second stimulus.
I have a Master’s Degree in Music Composition and Theory. There are no teaching jobs, no professorships, adjunct is worse than being a bar tender, and I’ve applied to well over 120 positions is the arts, non-profits, and corporations since 2015 when I returned from developing a music curriculum, 90% at my own time and expense for a youth orchestra / school in Guatemala that gets kids out of the Maras and have a safe space to play, learn music, have two meals, and just be kids. Mostly I was ignored and never heard shit but because I was in Central America for 3 years I had this gap in my resume and no one took the most serious and moving work of my life seriously. But not one or two interviews and the one I thought was legit with an org let’s call my local PBS, took my CV with a Master’s on it and said I would be PERFECT as a door to door money canvasser! Wouldn’t I want to start right away!?
I learned a lot in Guatemala and I will never support 7th 8th or whatever wave of colonialism, tourist and ex pats running micro economy clubs on the backs of the poorest people, fake as woke illiberal liberals touring poverty like a fucking zoo and speaking of which fuck people who take pictures with drugged out tigers and other slave animals that take your tourist dollars out of the local economy. I also learned fuck the US and US imperialism but thats a different thread…
I’m not miserable in a suicidal way any more, nor will I ever be again, but I understand capitalist despair, and I have seen the privilege of despair close to the imperial core and I have lived that hypocrisy. I stand for neither. I choose solidarity over victimhood and live now only to build a little library of anti-capitalism for my nieces and to keep the word alive.
Fuck work. Solidarity to all. ☭
Tl/dr at just my last job in 25 years in service industry, I was at once a Bar Manager, Beverage Director, Prep Cook, Building Engineer, Host, Table Server, Bus boy / Expo / Runner, and Bartender all on $7.25 plus tips. Natural wine, my ass.