By the time I got home, showered and pulled on clean clothes, it was time to get to work. I locked up my apartment and walked a few blocks past the body shops and garages to where the sidewalks ended at the road that fronts the marshland at the edge of Jamaica Bay. The bus I had to take to get out to Kennedy airport followed a route along the bay, winding along the back roads past more garages, junkyards and small factories until it turned onto the Grand Central Parkway where the driver could finally hit the gas pedal and join the traffic speeding toward the airport and then on to the city, beyond.
There was a chain-link fence near the bus stop where I waited that prevented access to the reedy wetlands beyond. The waters around here had once been an oily morass but were better now, after years of clean-up efforts. In the spring, there were often egrets standing along the shoreline, looking like white handkerchiefs blown in with the breeze, and even the occasional heron or cormorant. But it was winter now and the migrating birds had not yet returned. The appearance of the gray water lapping against the rocky shore was dulled by cold; the leafless trees planted along the street side of the fence looked skinless, barely alive.
When the bus arrived, I got on and took a seat among the other workers on their way to put in their hours on the night shift at various service jobs at JFK or the hotels around the airport that cater to the traveling public. We all knew each other—not by name, but recognized one another from this daily commute, though no one exchanged a greeting. At this time in the afternoon, we were generally the only people who used this bus route: maids, cleaners, cooks, clerks, mechanics, waitresses, bartenders, and other low-rung personnel, with our identity cards hung around our necks. Except for the clatter of traffic and the airplane engines screaming overhead as we got closer to Kennedy, we rode together in silence, disembarking singly or in small groups as the bus finally entered the airport grounds and made the rounds of the terminals.
I worked in the oldest terminal, in a sports bar that’s part of a regional chain called The Endless Weekend. Our motto, printed on our napkins and on the black tee shirts we were required to wear with black jeans was, We Party All the Time. (I sometimes entertained the idea that I had been hired for this job less because of my bartending skills, though I did have those, than for the fact that I was dark haired and dark eyed, which fit in with the color scheme some corporate manager somewhere had picked out for the hired help.) We had five high-def TVs in the bar and they were all tuned to either a game of some sort or a sports-talk program; those were the rules and there were penalties for breaking them if any of the supervisors who did random spot checks of our operations found that we had tried to fiddle with the preset channels. In the bar, where there were no windows, it was always meant to be some version of a boozy, neon night where serious drinking was celebrated and team rankings were debated with unbridled fervor.
Five nights a week, on a rotating schedule, I was the bartender at The Endless Weekend, working with just one waitress. We used to have more staff but the company had downsized the workforce when the travel industry took a nosedive after September 11. I had worked at this same bar for a couple of years but the waitresses tended to come and go. In the past year or so, many of them were laid-off flight attendants whose lives had been upended by the problems that the airlines were experiencing. Bankrupt airlines—particularly a few notable regional carriers—had looted the employee pensions, sold their computers, their furniture and even their planes, and left their workers with little to fall back on. It was a sad story that I had now heard over and over from more than half a dozen women who had thought of themselves as professionals with good jobs that provided both decent benefits and serious responsibilities but had to face the fact that, in the end, once the world of work stripped their résumés down to the essence of what they did, potential employers thought of them as waitresses. A woman handing you a beer and a napkin, whether on a plane or in a dive bar on some lonely road, was a waitress. At The Endless Weekend, the main skill required for this job was that you could stand on your feet eight or more hours a day, smile even at idiots, and fit the jeans and tee shirt. It was supposed to be a big secret and, of course, completely illegal, but if you wore anything larger than a size ten, you’d never get the job.
I tried to be sympathetic every time I heard this tale of woe from a new waitress—and I was—but only to a point. It was hard for me to really empathize with the loss of something I had never had, like a real career. For me, bartending was just one more in a series of similar jobs I’d had after I graduated from high school. That was in 1972, an unsettled time of international crises, abundant Acapulco gold and disco music invading all the radio stations. I had no close family ties anymore and no idea of what to do with myself, so I joined the vestiges of the wandering tribes of kids in vans who had headed to California, then up to the Pacific Northwest, and then, finally, dispersed to rural communes to wait for the revolution that everybody already knew was never going to come. I had lived in Canada for a while, in Alberta, and then in rural upstate New York, but plains and mountains were not my thing; if I couldn’t see water and know the ocean was nearby, I felt trapped. The edges of the country, the coasts, were better for me; I liked the feeling of being able to sail away if I needed to. Not that I was going anywhere anymore or knew the first thing about sailing in any real sense; it was just an idea I had, something dating back to my traveling days. Given a few minutes notice, I thought I could still throw some shirts in a backpack and head out. Where didn’t matter as much as the fact that I could just go if I had to. If the need arose.
Eventually, I made my way back to New York—home was home, no matter how rough a start it had offered—and had found work in restaurants and shops. I worked cash registers, managed a kitchenware store, even fired pottery in an old warehouse on the far west side of Manhattan for a while and then delivered packages on a bike I navigated through the New York City streets, keeping myself just a level or two above an existence that involved real deprivation. It did occur to me now and then that I should go back to school, though for what I didn’t know. I paid attention to those ads that came on TV late at night, offering the chance to enroll in a school that taught sound engineering or how to be a medical assistant or a pastry chef, but I couldn’t picture myself doing any of these things. I just wasn’t a mainstream person; I knew how to manage at the margins of the system but I just couldn’t quite push myself up onto even the lower rungs of the middle class, where I suppose I should have been at this point in my life, at the tail end of my forties. It was the same with the relationships I’d had—boyfriends, girlfriends—things just seem to come apart without my really understanding why. I didn’t stick to things, I drifted away from people. At least, that had been my pattern for as long as I could remember.
My current job, which I had more or less lied my way into (though I had worked at enough restaurants to have picked up some bartending skills and learned more as I went along), was actually one of the longest I’d had. A lot of that had to do with changing times. There just weren’t that many jobs available anymore for someone with the kind of post-hippie-jack-of-all-service-trades résumé I had, so for once, I was playing it safe and not even looking around for another job. Having already survived a round of staff reductions at The Endless Weekend, I was just more or less keeping my head down, my mouth shut, and serving drinks with an ever-present smile, as instructed by the supervisors who also dictated our all-sports-all-the-time TV fare. They were in charge; I just did what I was told to do. At work, they—the supervisors, the corporate bosses I never saw—more or less owned me, and I understood that. I didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I needed to pay rent, I needed to buy groceries, and so I needed to work.