Page 3 of Dirty Money
“Hopefully it gets busy, I’m sooo bored,” the other girl whined.
“Yeah,” Aullie replied bluntly, breaking off the conversation and making her way past the bar and around the tables, to the back.
Some Tackleman’s guests weren’t even sure the bar had a kitchen because it was tucked way back in the far-right corner. There was a short, metal expo line where the kitchen served up the food. Around the corner, it opened to a semi-cramped kitchen that had probably once been pristine and white but was now stained, yellowed and dirty.
One by one, the on-duty cooks acknowledged her, their greetings ranging from ‘Yo, Aullie!’ to a sultry ‘Hey, girl!’ and she nodded or waved in return. Most of them had worked there as long as she had, and some were even like family.
The kitchen backed up to another partial wall, behind which were the manager’s office and two rows of coat hooks for the staff. Several jackets and various sizes of backpacks hung from the hooks already and Aullie wriggled out of her sweatshirt and hung it off one of the hooks on the lower rack. She tied her apron around her waist, securing the strings with a double-knotted bow under her belt buckle and tucking it under the flap. She checked her pockets; coasters on the left, order book in the center, and a cluster of pens in the right. She was good to go.
The door to the manager’s office was most often closed but not on that night. Through the opening, she heard a familiar voice call out, “Aullie, is that you?”
The nasally utterance grated on her nerves. She took a deep breath and rolled her eyes, then crept up to the door and peeked around into the office. As per usual, it was tiny, cramped, and the desk was littered with papers. Shelves on the walls were packed with books and binders and there were six huge bottles of pineapple vodka, leftover from another promo flop, crowded in the back corner.
A very short, very thin, very pockmarked man in a stiff, charcoal gray button-up with a pair of wiry glasses sat in the bulky, black office chair, typing furiously on a keyboard attached to a clunky desktop monitor.
“What do you need, Eric?” she asked, the airy, pleasant professionalism in her voice masking her deep, preoccupying loathing for the tiny man and his huge attitude.
“Hey, I just wanted to say thanks for coming in and helping me out tonight. We had two servers call in tonight if you can imagine that, and as always, I just wanted to thank you for all your hard work and being such a team player.” Eric said it all without looking away from the screen. The lack of eye contact only added to the professional yet wildly insincere tone that he always seemed to have.
“Yeah, of course,” she replied. “You know me, I need the money.”
“Yeah, art majors usually tend to need help with that.”
“Yeah,” she replied bluntly. “Can you come clock me in?”
Eric stood and Aullie, at only five-foot-seven, could see straight over his head. His height, or lack thereof, coupled with his hair-trigger temper and inflated self-importance had earned him the nickname Napoleon, among his staff. As they walked together back up to the point-of-sale computers, Aullie nursed her battered ego.
She wished his playful jab at her chosen career path still hadn’t damaged any hope she had harbored for making it as an artist, but after the show that weekend, there wasn’t much left there for him to damage.
Truth was, she was coming up on three years of learning to draw, and to paint, and which colors to do it with, and which artist was responsible for every painting. Three years of late nights spent sketching, erasing, re-sketching, smudging, coloring, color-mixing, painting, and swearing. Three years of smudged fingertips, washing brushes, and praying countless stains come out in the wash or the shower. And in three months, when she had walked across the stage to receive her fine arts diploma, she knew that she was walking into an unforgiving world whose approval she would need if she ever hoped to pay her rent.
Sure, she had known that going in but she hadn’t really known it until she’d put her heart and soul up on the walls in front of gallery owners and private buyers and walked away with only sixty dollars and not a single showing contract. It had been five days since the show but the wound still sucked at her gut like a raw, angry hunger.
‘I’m going to be waiting tables forever’, Aullie thought morosely. She pictured herself as an old woman, liver spots on her pale, slender hands and shots of gray through her inky black hair, serving Irish car bombs to college boys and her heart sank halfway to her knees.
She tapped her login code, 8134, into the POS which popped up a window that read, ‘Clock in time was: 4:30 PM. Are you early?’
Eric swiped his manager card to complete her clock-in and she was good to go. Ready to serve all of the tables that weren’t there.Awesome!
“Where’s your name tag?” Eric barked, short and snappy like a little Yorkie.
With a resigned sigh, Aullie said, “In my pocket.” She began to dig it out.
“Why isn’t it on your shirt?” Eric asked, smugly.
“It’s getting there,” Aullie said, locking eyes with him as she fussed with the magnetic back to attach it under her collarbone. Her tone was playful but her eyes said beware. Eric turned and walked away, an ugly, smarmy smile on his little face.
Nobody else would be there until five and she had forgotten to ask Eric what the new host’s name was. Aullie didn’t really want to talk to her anyway, so she wandered around the restaurant wiping crumbs off chairs with a wet rag, refilling the already full ice bin, brewing new tea they probably didn’t need, anything to keep her mind off her failure as an artist.
Not a failure. She chastised herself for her negative self-talk. A lot of the greats didn’t make it big at first. The thought perked her up a little bit; it was true, a lot of stellar artists weren’t big and famous right off the bat. She was only twenty-two, she had time to get better, right? A sinister voice nagged at the back of her head. A lot of the greats still didn’t make any money either.
The next few hours dragged on. There was supposed be a pot for the football game at seven, but at a quarter-til, there was still only about one table per server and a few bearded men cluttering the bar. Aullie had only made thirteen dollars in almost three hours and once again, she was regretting helping Eric out. She practically lived there, especially on the weekends, and she was beginning to wonder if she should try to find another job.
As if on cue, about four minutes to kickoff, a small herd of men in team colors lumbered into the bar. They yelled, high-fived, back-clapped, and whooped as they all blazed past the host stand and began seating themselves at random around the bar.
Aullie exchanged looks across the drink station with Brittany, a beautiful, full-figured Latina who was probably Aullie’s only real work friend. They rolled their eyes in sync. The two of them straightened out their aprons, allowing the men to settle themselves in as the other three waitresses hovered around as they all readied to strike.
Three of Aullie’s booths filled up and she started at the furthest, number eleven.
