Tips

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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 two-dollar 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 without being asked.

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, hid under our covers actually, giggling like it was a game of hide and seek. 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. It wasn’t our fault if some bank was stupid enough to give us a pile of blank checks.

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.