And as cliché as it may sound
I’d like to raise another round
And if your bottle’s empty help yourself to mine
Thank you for your time
And here’s to life!
In the middle of my busiest morning so far this cruise, my office phone rings, causing me to jump a few inches in the air because no one really ever calls me in the middle of the morning in the middle of a sea day.
Library & Café, Shaughnessy speaking how can I help you?
Hey hun, so…I signed us up for bartending tonight…
You did…what? What time?
Um, midnight.
That’s so way later than I was planning on staying…
Yeah well it was the only shift available…
I was on again off again fuming at Amras for the rest of the day. After you’ve worked a full sea day, the last thing you usually feel like doing is going out, and I wasn’t even certain that I wanted to go to the crew party, I had vague intentions of making a sort of swing through right after work and then going home and crashing…which probably isn’t what would have ended up happening but it was kind of my plan. Instead, midnight found me behind the bar…doing something I haven’t done in a seriously long time.
I bartended my way through my performance degree in England. I would come home from pulling an all-nighter without having consumed a drop of beer or handled a single cigarette but smelling as if I’d had a bottle and a pack dropped over my head; fall into a shower, collapse and do it all again the next night. Amras had remembered this, and had somehow remembered the part of it that he must have picked up from conversations with me but that I had actually forgotten:
- I loved it
- I was good at it…really good.
Back in the day I could tend bar for a wedding of a 150 almost by myself. And the ironic thing is, I did it in the same outfit I now wear to crew parties; so once I got behind the bar and Amras handed me a bottle opener, it took me about ten minutes to shake off the rust – and then it was just like stepping back in time. After a while, your fingers forget to go numb from plunging into the ice, you forget that your hands are slippery from holding onto the wet bottles, and you remember that you can scamper in high heels in any lighting, past any obstacle, and that half the fun of being a female bartender is letting yourself be observed (how do you think I went on vacation on tip money?), and you find yourself almost reaching for the permanent bottle opener that you’re used to having under the bar, before remembering that oh right this isn’t that, this isn’t then…
Yo Gab, I need another San Miguel up here…
Coming up…
Do we have Corona?
NO! We ran out ten minutes ago, no coolers either.
About half way through the night I leaned over to Amras and said thank you, at which point he just grinned like a shark and said “you’re welcome”
I forgot…I’m bloody good at this.
Yeah, I know!
Oh stop looking so damn smug…
My personal favourite moment, because you always keep an ear on the rest of the bar even if you’re working your own station.
Jeeze, what is the trick to these damn openers.
Here Gabe, slide over
And I step reach over, without breaking stride, flip the caps off the two bottles that aren’t co-operating, slide them across the table and turn back to my own station almost all in one motion.
Like climbing back on a bicycle.
I hate it when Amras is right…