Essay: Being young, free, living on tips

By JEN ROGNERUD
Special to the Times-Union

We were waitresses, all of us, with different stash spots for tips.

Mine was a tattered old envelope in my underwear drawer. I kept the amount written on the front, scratched out and rewritten over and over, to keep myself in the know and to protect from unlikely thievery.

We made next to nothing in actual paycheck wages. The minimum for servers in Boston was in the $2 ballpark, and by the time we declared our tips, or the specific fraction of them we were forced to, we barely covered our taxes. The big bucks came from the customers, from the particular brilliance of our smiles, from the speed with which we refilled iced teas .

Money was fluid. We got paid in actual green stuff every single day. It rarely got deposited because there wasn’t enough of it to save. We always owed someone something—the phone company, the landlord, even the library for crying out loud. And when we didn’t owe, we wanted. We wanted to go out, we wanted haircuts, we wanted a new pair of jeans, or rather, an old pair of jeans from the thrift store, new to us.

Giving up a Friday night shift to go out dancing meant that rent would be late. Let’s be honest, dancing or not, rent was always late. We hid from the landlord when he knocked. Sometimes we walked into the restaurant — your typical cheesy American chain — with determination and gusto, desperate and ready to make the full amount in one double shift. If we were hormonal or heartbroken or hung over, our chances of doing so were slim. Tips don’t flow to the bitchy, the blotchy, the ambivalent and aloof.

We were serious about our young lives — the boys, Boston, the big old dreams.

But we were not very serious about money. We dodged phone calls from Sallie Mae. We wrote bad checks to the Fort Hill Market and Deli — $25 checks for grilled cheese supplies, generic granola bars and Marlboro Lights. We had to eat, after all. And more important, we had to smoke.

If there was a choice to be made between the overpriced and overrated oil heat and necessities such as Diet Coke, smokes and booze, we would choose the necessities. And so, we never had heat. But we had fancy journals from funky bookshops, and we’d write cruel things about each other in them, with fresh, vibrant purple ink.

My mother was appalled by our heating situation. It was easy for her to talk, sitting on her California patio, with her freshly painted toes and sparkly flip-flops, fluffy cats and gourmet coffee, her endless supply of cigarettes. She would occasionally kick in and buy us a two-week supply of oil, usually coinciding with one of her visits. The heat, set to a conservative 67, was glorious and we drank it up, stripping off layers as if at a beach. It felt decadent sleeping under one blanket, wearing only one pair of pajamas at a time. It was a newly erotic experience, making out with boyfriends and casual lovers with lips that were pink and warm and not shivery.

Bargain-brand frozen pizza was considered a luxury around the pad, but we often went out to eat and ordered the moon. We loved being waited on for a change and we tipped big.

We went to the movies; we bought shots at bars. We had Christmases, birthday parties and Thanksgiving dinners for all our friends. In the summer, we saved up to go to the Colonnade pool, a popular rooftop oasis that charged 20 bucks a head for non-hotel guests. While there, we drank daiquiris and ordered fancy sandwiches.

When the “budget” was especially tight, when rent was really late, when business at the restaurant was slow, we would find ourselves, after many days of making do, very, very bored. Dance parties in the living room and lighting butts from the ashtray were never fun for long.

When we were “brokety-broke,” as we called it, as if it were something different, we would share a cup of coffee and sit on the stoop in front of Berklee College of Music. We’d sit there for hours, taking time to sketch out tattoos that we’d never actually get and daydream about boys we’d never get either. In our notebooks, with our fancy pens, we’d make lists of things—ideas for art projects, favorite songs, different kinds of candy. And didn’t candy sound good? We’d scrape together enough change from the bottoms of our backpacks for a candy bar and some chips. One of us would go to the convenience store and then race back to the sidewalk spot, giddy with the promise of pleasure.

There was always the next shift, you see. You didn’t know how good it would be, but you knew you’d come home with something. Even on your days off, you could go in. Someone was always looking to go home. Money was always there, even if you spent it stupidly.
Of course, we were beloved little waitresses. We were good, smart girls. We were in and out of various college programs, stacking degrees. We had creativity in spades. We made art. We read books. We voted. We had moms and dads and aunts and friends who would bail us out if the shaky beams ever snapped. We had places we could go, no matter what. But we would never ask. We didn’t want to go back to our hometowns, however warm, however familiar.

Going back meant giving in. It meant giving up our crazy lifestyle of big tears and late night laughter, pretty journals and pretty boys. It meant losing the freedom to make and spend our own money; it meant losing the freedom to make mistakes. So we rode it out—the panic and the promise, each chintzy tip, each greasy shift, each exhilarating run through the city streets, another piece of candy in our hands.

Jen Rognerud received her BFA in creative writing from Emerson College. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two children, where she works as a postpartum doula and writes when she can. She is the founder and editor of the multi-writer essay site, Memoirs Are So Yesterday (memoirbloggers.wordpress.com).