The Gansvoort

April 22, 2006

"I've never had this kind of trouble finding a job before," Deborah complained with an exasperated sigh, shaking a fistful of resumes in the air before slamming them onto the coffee table. She'd been job hunting for weeks and was frustrated that all she'd been able to find was a one-day-a-month bookkeeping gig.

I tried to reassure her. "Something will click soon," I said, hoping it was true.

It was.

Finally, a flurry of job offers have started to roll in — everything from tending bar at an ultra hip hotel that Deborah was told, "Grossed 80,000 dollars last Saturday night alone," to another dive not unlike the one who's owner looks like the Thing from the Fantastic Four, and who fired her after she complained about only making six dollars in tips at the end of a twelve hour shift.

"I'll probably make a lot of money if I work there," she said about the hotel, "but I don't know if I can do it. I mean, I seriously don't know if I can physically do it. For one thing, I don't know if I'm fast enough to make that many drinks, but they want me to waitress, too. Bar tending for twelve hours without a break is one thing, but waitressing? I'd better start working out."

The job offer was a fluke, and it's still not clear whether she's actually been hired or not. She answered an ad for a bookkeeping job at a bar that hasn't opened yet, and the interviewer asked if she'd be interested in bartending at the owner's other bar until the new place opened. Not really, she thought, but things were getting desperate, so she agreed.

"Go over there now," the guy said, "and tell the manager I sent you."

Something I didn't know until recently is that no matter how much experience you have, when you start a new bar tending job, you have to suffer through a few unpaid training sessions. Sometimes it's just a few hours while they show you how to open and close, other times it's a few days. Not too long ago, Deborah bailed on a job after they strung her along with their "training sessions" for a week. Apparently, waitresses are generally trained the same way.

"I'm trailing tonight," Deborah said with a sigh when I called her from work on Friday afternoon.

"Trailing?" I asked. "You mean training?"

"Training, yeah. They call it trailing because you trail behind someone else, watching them work. It's not fun. I'm not sure how late I'll be. Just a few hours, I think. Hopefully I'll get out by eight o'clock."

I told her I'd kill time after work, and we could meet when she finished.

Before moving to Brooklyn, I lived just a few blocks north of the trendy hotel where Deborah was training. I lived there for eleven years, so the area is quite familiar to me; however, I've been away for six, and six years is a lifetime for a Manhattan neighborhood. I was curious to see what had changed.

"That's new," I said to myself as I passed a designer boutique glowing greenish-white through giant storefront windows. It used to be a hardcore lesbian bar called the Clit Club. It used to be a lot of things, actually, but on certain nights it was the Clit Club. I knew a girl who tended bar there, and I remember stopping in to see her once. I sat at the bar, had a free drink, and, after looking around at the clientele, said something to my friend like, "The girls here must love you."

"Not really,” she said.

"Seriously? I figured a pretty girl like you would clean up at a place like this."

"No," she said again. "I think they can smell the dick on my breath."

I turned the corner to see more giant windows and another boutique. "And that's new, too. And that, and that..." A banner hung from the building around the corner from the old Clit Club: "Diane Von Furstenburg COMING SOON."

The transvestite prostitutes who used to clomp along the cobblestones in size fourteen heels are long gone, but the galleries, restaurants, boutiques, and bars that chased them out are so utterly high class and striving for the other end of the fantasy spectrum that they've nearly come full circle. The way Communism and Fascism can look so much alike.

At eight o'clock, I sent Deborah a text message to see if she was done working or to find out when she would be, but she was too busy to respond. The glass hotel juts out of the sidewalk like a giant green crystal, and Deborah was still on its top floor, trailing a waitress serving 250-dollar bottles of Bacardi to banquettes of high rollers.

I sent a second text, “I'll just meet you at home”, then took one last lap around the Meatpacking District before jumping on the subway to my Brooklyn loft, beside the idling trucks of the Boar's Head Meat distributor.