Something Else (11)

Chapter ELEVEN – Party with the Crew

The next six weeks were a blast and a blur at the same time. I was on the schedule five nights a week from the start with Sunday and Monday off. The place was a gold mine for Bud Winner Enterprises and the money I was making at the bar was even more than I expected.

It was a cash business. No credit cards accepted. Bud was no fool. He knew the risk of a robbery was high, especially around midnight on a busy night when the take was several thousand dollars. He hired a uniformed cop to patrol the outside of the building from 9:00 pm to 3:00 am. This not only protected the business but endeared him to the other local cops who always looked for side gigs in this sleepy little suburb. And this gig was great duty with so many hot ladies all dressed to the nines strutting their stuff. The back lot got less attention when the action with the ladies was at the front of the building.

I found Eddie to be a pain in the ass. Over time I realized how insecure he was. Richie road him hard, trying to make sure that his mistakes didn’t recur. He was forever forgetting things. He’d make several trips to the storeroom for supplies instead of consolidating. He’d leave lights on, and doors open, and we would cover for him as much as we could just to keep the ripples on the lake to a minimum.

But when Richie wasn’t around Eddie took out his frustrations on the bartenders and waitresses. He criticized just about everything. He didn’t like the way I cut the garnishes. I had reordered the liquor bottles in my rack, and he made me put them back. He made the waitresses wipe down their station almost every time they picked up an order. But he wasn’t critical of Jaycee. She got a pass on everything. We all knew that he suffered from unrequited love, or at least lust. When the bar was slow, he would stare at her at the other end of the bar.

I was usually assigned to the middle station, and I would purposely position myself to block his view. Just for fun I’d catch him staring and I’d turn, smile, and wave at him. Initially he’d quickly avert his glare but after several instances he caught onto my little game, and he would almost growl at me. Once I even blew him a kiss, just for fun. And he responded with a middle finger salute. Fun times.

At the end of each night that Jaycee worked, Eddie would hustle to do the final deposit into the safe and get back to the bar in time to ask her if she needed a ride home. It was pretty common for her to have car trouble and need a ride from her mobile home across the river in St. Charles. Her ’65 Mustang had seen better days. She was lucky that her sister Lucy lived with her and her six-year-old daughter, and that Lucy had her own car.

My apartment was a two-bedroom, one bath unit on the second floor of a thirty-year-old complex called Village Square just off Highway 270. I found a roommate named Fred, who worked at the Ford Motor Company factory in Hazelwood, across the highway.

Fred and I had gone to the same high school, but he was a year older than me. His father worked at Ford as a supervisor in the paint department and got him a job right out of high school. It was a great union job, he told me, with good pay, lots of overtime and great benefits. He said that the only drawback was that each person on the line did the same monotonous task over and over 420 times per shift as the line moved past them.

Fred worked the two to ten thirty shift and loved to party when he got home. By the time I got home after work at around 2:00 am Fred was mostly in the bag, along with some of the cohorts from the assembly line. They usually got a start during their dinner break. Food wasn’t that important, but a beer and a joint in the parking lot got them through the rest of the shift. That might have affected the quality of the Mercury Marquis that came off that assembly line, but what the hell…

Fred would inevitably encourage me to ‘catch up’ but his crew had a three-hour head start and they would fade while I was on my third beer.

I got along with just about everybody at the bar but initially I kept to myself, getting the lay of the land and finding my place in the hierarchy.  After the first few weeks I felt I was accepted into the ‘family’ at work and was invited to an after-work party at the house of one of the cocktail waitresses, Madeline, or ‘Maddy’ as she liked to be called.

I followed her home and was the first to arrive. We were able to talk for a short while as she made simple preparations for her guests. Maddy was a sweet girl; maybe a little naïve for a thirty-year-old single woman who was just recently out of her parent’s house for the first time. Mom and Dad offered to pay her rent and she took advantage of that for some time until she got on her feet financially. Now she could cover her bills with what she made as a cocktail waitress and her parents became her safety net, offering the wisdom that comes with age.

Her apartment was nicely furnished and decorated in a very feminine fashion with lots of pastels, candles, and dishes of hard candy. In the bathroom I found a dish filled with what looked like bits of colored bark and leaves. When I asked about it, she laughed and said it was something called ‘Potpourri.’ You learn something new every day.

Soon Jaycee and the other cocktail waitress, Cassie, showed up followed by Mo and Larry, two of the three stooges. Eddie was not invited.

Maddy had some Strawberry Hill and Miller Ponies in the fridge, and she had told Jaycee and me not to bring anything. Cassie liked vodka and brought a partial fifth of Smirnoff that must have been waiting for her in her car. Mo had a split of Montezuma Tequila and a liter of Squirt. I laughed when he said it was a poor man’s margarita. He offered to share the Squirt with Cassie so she could have a mixer with her vodka. Cassie declined, preferring her liquor ‘martini style.’ Larry had a bag of weed. “Good Shit!” he promised.

Jaycee helped Maddy select a few albums for the turntable. She squealed with excitement when she found the new Styx album and said “I just got this last week. Play side one. It’s the best! I love ‘Come Sail Away!’”

We settled in with the women side by side on the beige Naugahyde couch. Having gotten there first, I found the comfy side chair. Larry found the shag carpeted floor and proceeded quickly remove a Zig Zag paper from the pack to roll a big fat joint. With a flick of his Bic the pungent smoke began to rise above him, and he passed it to Mo, who settled in a beanbag chair. Maddy got up and opened the sliding glass door, then she turned on the ceiling fam to clear the air. While she didn’t complain I thought that maybe she wasn’t a smoker. As the joint was passed it was confirmed when she declined to take a hit. She sipped her Strawberry Hill on ice.

The rest of us toked away on the joint and Larry’s comment was confirmed…It was really good shit. Conversation flowed with the usual complaints about asshole customers and bad tippers. Cassie brought up Eddie and his nit-pickiness then said to Jaycee “You know Eddie is hot for you, right?”

Jaycee was a little embarrassed and said “Yeah. I know. He’s been nice and all but he’s not my type.”

“I guess you don’t do dweebs,” Larry said, and Mo laughed loudly.

“He’s not a dweeb,” she said. “He’s given me a ride home twice when I had car trouble, and my sister couldn’t come get me. You know I live all the way out in St. Charles. That was really nice of him. But we don’t have anything in common.”

Cassie asked, “Well, if he’s so nice why isn’t he your type?”

“I guess I’m a little embarrassed to say it but he’s Jewish.”

There was a moment of silence. Jaycee finished off her Pony. “And he’s too short,” she said.

Everybody laughed.

Larry had rolled another Doobie but only Mo helped him finish it. They were both wasted and passed out on the floor when I left with the others at about 4:30 am. We probably shouldn’t have been driving…but we did.