Ah, New Year’s Eve! The final hurrah of the holiday season before something called “Dry January.” Apparently that’s when people take an entire month off from drinking…who would have thought. For bars and restaurants, New Year’s Eve is the last opportunity to take in ungodly amounts of revenue before the inevitable slowdown until Valentine’s Day. So we pull out the glitter and disco balls and charge people half a month’s rent to gain entry to a modern-day Bacchanalia, where DJs spin and Champagne pours at a volume equivalent to Niagara Falls. And the outfits. Goodness. It’s basically black-tie Halloween.
One such event occurred at a New York hotel I worked at years ago. Imagine a beautifully appointed rooftop lounge right on the water, skyline views in all directions. Vaulted ceilings, gold trim, velvet seats, lighting so dark that even on a tame night it encouraged all sorts of bad behavior. The kind of bar where you’d learn more about human anatomy just by watching the crowd than you ever thought possible. I’m pretty sure I received an MD after working there. Now take that image and dial it up to 11 because it was New Year’s Eve. The allure of a midnight toast brought in all the hottest movers and shakers on the West Side, tempted by Dom Perignon and a performance by the legendary Gloria Gaynor. (I did, in fact, survive!)
We had a regular start to the evening: dinner service, jazz, your usual tourist crowd lying their way past the doorman with promises of buying a table only to snap a few pictures for the ‘gram and then leave without buying anything. You could almost forget that it was one of the big drinking holidays if it weren’t for that infectious energy that only NYC seems capable of emitting. The urban vibration of excitement, danger and feral sexual energy. If you know, you know.
The dining room eventually cleared out, and around 10 p.m. the doors opened to the revelers — all 500 of them. At the time, I considered myself a fast bartender, and I was teamed up with five of the fastest club bartenders I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, one of which we shall call Bobby. What started as a reasonable flow of guests — nobody wants to get to a party on time, let’s be real — turned into an absolute avalanche of flesh. It was single-digit temps outside, so I can only imagine that the coat check team was drowning in leather and fur downstairs.
Now, over the course of my career, I’ve learned that when bartenders get overwhelmed, they do one of one thing: drink. This night was no exception. Bobby and the rest kept running around behind the bar passing out shots to soothe our fraying nerves. I had an open bottle of Champagne that I drank like I had just walked across the Mojave. Into this setting walked a gaggle of young women, among them an absolutely stunning blonde. The kind that occupied the walls of teenage boys in the ’90s. Even as grown men who had seen more than our fair share of good-looking patrons, we all had to do that thing where you drop everything and point her out to your colleagues.
Well, my boy Bobby was smitten. He immediately asked me to switch work stations with him so he could serve “Blondie,” trading flirtations in between slinging drinks to the other revelers. It must have worked because as the night progressed, Blondie kept leaning in closer until it looked like she was gonna tip over onto our side of the bar. Close enough that Bobby could have nestled into her ample bosom. I will neither confirm nor deny whether he actually did.
Confessions of a Bartender: The Thanksgiving Shift
What do a bunch of bartenders do after service winds down on Thanksgiving night?Faster than I thought possible, 4 a.m. rolled around and last calls were given to the handful of people who were coherent enough to understand the transaction. The rest were simply handed a check and shown the door. Except Blondie. Blondie stayed right there in front of Bobby as he cleaned his station, her Champagne glass mysteriously refilling even though we were closing down. Eventually we finished up and I saw that both Bobby and Blondie were nowhere to be found. I was told he’d gone home, and I really didn’t think much of it.
The next day we all reported to work for what is historically understood to be the slowest service of the year. Idle hands being idle hands, we all started interrogating Bobby about his night. What happened with Blondie? Did he get her number? Turns out that Bobby had accomplished a good deal more than that. It so happens that after disappearing from work the night prior, Bobby had given Blondie a full-service tour of his nearby apartment. And yes, I mean full-service. Oddly though, as he was telling us the story, he was hesitant with certain details, and we could all tell he was holding back.
I approached him a little while later, wanting to know what really happened. So Bobby recapped the story, beat for beat, until he got to the, let’s say, finale. Now keep in mind two things: I have no issues whatsoever with who people choose to take to bed (assuming it is all legal and consensual, thank you very much), and we were all quite drunk the night before. It turns out that after Bobby gave his guest the tour, he was headed towards giving her the ol’ one-two, and it was during the preamble when he discovered that his lovely Blondie was not quite what he expected.
Far from being just some random drop-dead gorgeous woman, Blondie had turned out to be the daughter of the owner of the hotel. How this had failed to come up before then is beyond me. As one can imagine, New York City is the prime setting for the “Do you know who my father is?” crowd, and yet this very crucial detail remained obscured until it was too late. Now, engaging in carnal relations with the boss’s daughter is already what I would consider…complex, but this hotel happened to be owned by a man with a particularly fearsome reputation. The kind that, anecdotally at least, led Bobby to believe that he had a better than good chance of ending up in several trash bags scattered across the five boroughs.
Out of an abundance of caution, our boy Bobby quit that week, and I’m not joking when I say I never heard from him again. Hopefully that’s because he was keeping a low profile and moving on to greener pastures, and not because he was fitted for a pair of concrete shoes.
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