Entries from February 2004 ↓

I just turned the channel to find my friend Matthew’s award-winning documentary, Jimmy Scott: If You Only Knew airing on PBS. Right now! On T.V.!

He told many months ago about the PBS deal, but swore me to secrecy so I nearly forgot about it. It will run all month, so there are still a few days left. To see a wonderful, thorough and touching documentary about Jimmy Scott I recommend you find out what time it’s playing and watch.

It’s so beautiful.

I am now one of those people who wake up before 8 a.m., even on her days off.

NEXT: Geritol, complaining about the noisy neighbors and early bird specials. Oh, and I’m totally getting a Hoveround.

I read your diary today.

I read about how you kicked her dog just to make her cry. I know all about how you feel guilty about thinking of other women when we fuck, even if it is only sometimes. I know now that you don’t know how to spell “definitely.”

Your handwriting is really girly, you know that? It makes me sick. You obviously spent time perfecting it, working to make the loops look just right. I can’t believe those fucking To-Do lists in the midst of all the pages of whining and crying about how you’re starting to look old. Work on Backyard, Drink More Water, Think more about Retirement Investments. I should have added in red ink, just underneath, Stop Lying to Yourself in your own Diary, you Piece of Shit. The neighbor’s teenage daughter does not have a crush on you, despite your endless efforts to charm the low-riders off of her.

I didn’t see much mention of my name. Your wife, apparently, doesn’t come to mind much when you’re alone, blaming your mother on paper for your every flaw. You did mention though that you hate how slack my face has gotten around the jawline, and that sometimes when you look at me sitting a certain way I repulse you.

I already knew that. I can see it in the way you hold your mouth when you look in my direction. Your empty, whispered compliments roll off my flesh like beads of oil. I loathe the way you smile when you say that I’m beautiful–an ugly, teeth-baring smile that belies your every word. At night, when you touch me, I pretend we’re still new at this and that you didn’t turn the lights off again. Or I pretend you’re the boy from the copy center who touches my arm every time I visit.

I know your weaknesses. I know you hate your body and you shame yourself at every turn. Knowing what I know now I will pick at those scabs on your soul every day until they bleed. And scar.

I read your diary, and I’m not at all sorry about it.

It’s pretty interesting working in an upscale Nashville restaurant where lawyers and professors and music executives often meet for lunch and Big Talking. Everyone is Very Rich and Very Powerful. Hear Them!

I overhear attorneys laughing over playing tic tac toe in the courtroom while they are charging a clueless client $250 an hour. I hear statements like, “Truth be told, $500,000 is not that big an investment. It’s nothing. Chump change.” I get to see wanna-be country music-singin’ starlets complain to their agents about too many “pictures of me with hay bales.” The valets love to spill it about which suit owns the shiny Jag out front that stinks of scotch. You know, thanks to the clearly evident highball glass in the console’s cup holder.

The best is that since everybody is so clearly some fucking body that they all deserve preferential treatment. This 65-year-old waspy looking hag just tonight was all in my face, talking about, “It’s been over the thirty minute mark. I have an early flight in the morning. [It was 7:30 p.m.] We are such valuable customers that I really hate it that we are having to wait so long. You know we meant to get here at 5:30, but (pointing to a woman nearly in her 80s) she has dementia and they got lost on 8th Ave., and I had to go get them.” My cohort explained that the only server with an open table just got 3 big, new ones and that we had to at least give her 5-10 minutes to get caught up. Her response was, “Well, is the kitchen too busy? Because we can go ahead and order now, because I know what we are having. I know I am having the steak salad and he is going to get the pasta. She may not eat at all.” I walked away from her in mid-order.

Just about this time my other deft and cunning cohort had bussed and wiped a freshly availavble booth and was offering it to them generously. “Oh, well, we can’t sit in a booth, he can’t get out.” I’m am seriously fucking myself in the karma department for saying this, but I wanted to tell her she should have thought twice about bringing their old asses out and being all picky and shit, acting like because you’re old you get shit. Looking like a skeleton in a tired, old Chanel suit gets you fuck all, bitch.

It’s totally worth it though, when wiping down a table I get to hear this kind of stuff: “I told Reba, ‘Men don’t buy t-shirts with women’s pictures on them!’”

Yesterday at work, just before we unlocked the doors, my manager and the other waitresses were assigning animals to people we work with. No criteria was established, there was just discussion of what animal most personifies each individual. I was mostly eavesdropping as I was still Brasso-ing the brass and refilling my coffee mug.

I was shocked at how accurate they all were. They would rattle off a name and while I was thinking of one, would fire off the most accurate animal in all the kingdom to represent that person. And they were being butally honest. When A. #2’s* name was mentioned someone exclaimed, “Mouse!” And that was so fucking it. A. #2 is definitely a mouse.

M. asked what animal they all thought best fit her, and after just a few moments someone declared her a koala bear. And yep, M. is totally a koala bear. A. #1 was denoted a hyena and no matter how loudly she protested, we shook our heads firmly. This chick is a hyena.**

K. got to be an ostrich. (I don’t much like K., so I wanted to add, “Only if ostrichs are bitter old queens with monumental attitude problems.” I’m new; I didn’t.) And B. was crowned a lizard. Feeling left out I said, “I’m feeling left out,” and they looked me up and down and said “pony.” Then B. said, “A miniature pony.” Then S. said “My Little Pony,” at which time everyone shook their head in agreement.

A fucking My Little Pony. What the fucking hell? I don’t even get to be a real animal, but a fake, plastic, sparkly animal from the motherfucking 80s. Though it’s totally, way different when someone assigns it for you, what animal do you most think you’re like? And if you say stallion or jack rabbit or bald eagle or some shit you are fired.

*Don’t worry about keeping up with these initials. You won’t be tested.

**I was driving in that very morning and saw her through the front window wiping a table with a ferocious face and what I believe were bared teeth.

Let me tell you about this one time at the Outback Christmas party. The Christmas party that happened about three days before I quit.

My first year working at Outback, when I was a wee 20 years old, the Christmas party was this extravagent dress-up affair. It was held at the Vanderbilt Stadium Club and there was free liquor and beer until it ran out. Everyone got fancy cocktail dresses and smoke and drank and ate and danced and were generally extraordinarily shitfaced. Real fun.

Fast forward to six, long years later, to a party in a single room, crammed with about 100 people. At a local bar. The All-American Sports Bar. Drinks were $5 each and built for you by a seriously pissed off bartender. Who was plainly an idiot. This chick was selling drinks hand over fist to a room full of SERVERS AND BARTENDERS and was being a first class cunt rag. Servers also know full well how not to tip.

Anyway, my manager gave out raffle tickets to employees who brought in Toys for Tots donations. The more toys you brought the more tickets you accumulated. Six big winners were selected after DVDs and ghetto blasters were given away to the people who brought in the most toys in efforts to score mad goods. (It worked.) The big-ass grand prize, for which six lucky people would compete, was hyped by my manager as the most awesome, mindblowing prize one could ever receive. I actually got a little excited when my name was called. I waited in a huddle with the other lucky winners, $5 vodka gimlet in my hand, when he led us all to another room. After a brief countdown he opened the doors and the lucky winners began running in and screaming. I was sort of last in line and not so much screaming.

Once inside, I saw that there was cash. Not much left of it, mind you, but a couple of fives and twenty or so one dollar bills littered the pool table and the chairs and the floor. I scooped up a few bills while holding firmly onto my drink. I got $4 or so when I looked up to see my manager laughing and jumping up and down. For him, this was what Chirstmas parties were all about. Watching his employcrawl on the ground shrieking and groping wildly for a few measley bucks.

I went back to my chair feeling ashamed. What had just happened? Had my manager really just broken down a $100 into small bills and strewn them about for his $2.13/hr. underlings to snatch maniacally? My $4 grand prize was certainly appreciated but the way in which I haev to acquire it embarrassed me.

My manager bragged the following days how fun the grand prize game was. He’d loved it. He couldn’t wait to do it bigger and better next year. Luckily, I didn’t stick around to see if maybe I could scrounge for $5 next Christmas.

This Are You Still to be a Virgin ad from Tampax that dates back to 1990 has got me thinking. Well, mostly it has me laughing. “Absorb like crazy”? “Plug you up”? I doubt anyone’s truly ever been “totally psyched” to try a tampon. In fact, the first time I ever tried one was a terrible and traumatic experience.

I was a member of this all-girl Southern Baptist church group as a kid called Girls in Action. Our leader was this totally creepy woman with false teeth who always smelled like Dentyne and cigarettes. Her name was Rochelle. Mrs. Rochelle. She still repulses me to this day for some reason. Anyway, we went to the lake to go swimming, and I guess I was 11 or so, and had just a few months before got my period for the first time.* I desperately wanted to go swimming with my friends, but my mom told me I’d have to use a tampon in order to get in the water.

We went to Wal-Mart and stood poring over the options before us. Words like Super and Toxic Shock Syndrome had me totally freaked. I opted for the most slender, softest tampon I could find, something that was Junior and Petal Soft and very pink and in a tiny, tiny box. For whatever reason, I didn’t practice putting in a tampon before we got to the outdoor, doorless bathroom in the motherfucking woods. Eleven year olds are not smart most times. So my mom goes in with me to act as my coach and a pitiful excuse for a door. On our march to the public park bathroom she’s insisting I be relaxed. “YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE TO RELAX OR THIS WON’T WORK. Got it? Now relax!”

Even though I hadn’t practiced, I’d committed that little booklet of instructions they include with tampons to memory. I’d already selected what position I’d be using.** With my mother standing watch in front of the stall, my heart a racehorse in my budding chest, I made my first ever attempt at inserting a tampon. And nearly hyperventilated. I was as far from relaxed as one can imagine, more like totally frightened of great piercing pain or stabbing a stray ovary with the applicator. I began to cry. I was so fucking scared. And beaten. Despite how much I wanted to join the others on paddle boats, to talk to the cute lifeguard who I’d seen getting a hot dog, I gave up my first try at putting in a tampon.

I stuck a thin maxi pad into my bathing suit and made my way to the blanket to watch the others swim.

For about five minutes.

There was no way I could sit there and watch Janet and Carrie and Sally playing Marco Polo without me. I looked down between my legs. The slim pad was nearly undectable in my dry suit. In fact, if you didn’t know it was there, there’d be no way you could tell. And you could tell even less than that if my bottom half was submerged in water.

Again, 11 year olds are pretty much dumb asses. So I made my way into the water, and after fending off questions from my friends, began to relax and have a good time finally. I made sure to swim up near the lifeguard stand to get a better look at the blonde freckled cutie I’d seen at the concession stand earlier. I was floating on my back, eyes closed, sticking my bug-bite, 6th grade boobs up in the air when my blood-covered maxi pad floated up near my head.

I paniced. People one by one began to notice. Laughter. “Oh my God, is that a dirty pad!!” Freaking out. Thinking I may drown from embarassment. Instead I swam away–not too fast, as to draw too much attention. I swam determinedly away from the red, bobbing maxi pad. I denied all suspicions. I told myself it didn’t happen. It was the most traumatized my pre-pubescent self had ever been.

Hard to believe I’d forgotten that story until just now. Even harder to believe I just told it to you.

Thank God for no longer being eleven.

*The first time I got my period I told all my best girlfriends about it. I was the first of us to get “the curse.” Every single one of them called me a liar.

**The foot on the toilet stance. Which, for me–I don’t know about the rest of you girls–has never facilitated an easy entrance. They might as well ask you to cross your ankles first.

Two very bestest inventions for waiters and waitresses who have to wear all black: The Shout Wipe and The Lint Roller.

Without them, I would be a red-spotted, whipped cream-splotched, ferociously hairy server. May I take your order?

I took some pictures of trains.

Earlier today I got this phone call.

Me: Good afternoon, this is The-Restaurant-Where-I-Work.

Him: Hi, I am thinkin’ about driving my girlfriend down there from Kentucky for Valentine’s Day and I was wonderin’ if you could tell me about ya’ll’s motifs and menu?

Me: Uh, well… There is a tin roof and brick walls and a fireplace with a hearth that is very nice for sitting and having cocktails. There is plenty of colorful, modern art and track lighting. People often comment on how pretty it is.

Him: Alright. Now how about the menu?

Me: It’s an American Bistro so it’s a variety things. We have pastas, Mediterranian salads, eggplant parmesan, crabcakes. Anything you can think of.

Him: That’s good. What about dress code?

Me: We are casual, sir. You can wear jeans.

Him: Well, I figure with it bein’ Valentine’s Day and all I’ll be wearing a collared shirt with buttons, tucked in.

Me: That will look very nice, I’m sure.