B4Y Mag Issue #17 May 2019 May 2019 Issue #17 B4Y | Page 94

More money, more problems
At this particular place, everyone supposedly pooled their tips at the end
of the night and split them equally. Being the idiot that I was, I agreed to go
in on it. I mean, I’m not going to be the fucking guy who dissents. It’s good
money—I’m going to share it, I’m not greedy. I threw in. I had started my
shift at 9:00 PM and by the time I was done it was 3:00 AM. I was helping
them clean up. I was drained, just drained. If you had put a Fitbit on me,
I would have probably walked like nine miles back-and-forth. Like I said, I
was usually 215 lbs. at that time, but when I went home and weighed myself
that night, I was like 206.5. I sweat out nearly ten pounds.
Then, the manager goes, “You did great, but this was a practice run so we
can’t pay you.” That really pissed me off. How much practice do you need to
be a barback? Are you fucking kidding me? Meanwhile, the bartenders are
walking away with $500, $600. A couple of them were really cool. They each
gave me $200 from their own tips. They said, “Listen man, you busted your
ass tonight, you deserve this.” So, all along, that guy wasn’t even planning
on paying me. I still came back there, because the work was good and con-
sistent, but it was nuts.
You’d always see guys getting cut off or thrown out. We had a couple of
350-lb. bouncers working round the clock. It was a completely different at-
mosphere than Splash, which was campy yet somehow classy, exactly what
you think of when you think of gay New York.
This spot was like ratchet as fuck. I got in even better shape being there
because it was so much physical labor, carting stuff around and batting peo-
ple off. I could eat as much ice cream as I wanted because I was burning so
many fucking calories that it didn’t matter.
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