The summer before the fall when my father’s bad business decisions caught up with him in such a way that my mother’s heart actually failed her, I worked as a bartender in Provincetown. First, I spent the shoulder season cleaning out basements for affluent gay adults and slicing deli meats for a woman with a Brooklyn accent who called me sweetie. Whatever the feminine equivalent of twink is, I was that: just androgynous enough; long hair, few curves, robust metabolism.I had all the ephemeral beauty of youth with no awareness of its power.
There were two big lesbian spots in town then: Vixen, where bartenders poured top-shelf alcohol into cocktail-specific glassware for customers who paid by credit card while they waited to see stars like Sandra Bernhard perform; and The Other One, whose manager had been instructed not to spend more than the cost of a single beverage on any kind of maintenance or improvement. The Other One had no barbacks, no credit card machines, no glasses made of glass. Their business model seemed to be extracting as much cash out of the place and its workers as possible while waiting for a buyer to agree to the absurdly inflated price that the owner, a Corgi-shaped lesbian, had been asking for nearly a decade.
Having only spent time in Provincetown during the deep winter and the slow thaw of spring with artists-in-residence, heroin-addicted houseboys, and a few Portuguese fishermen, I was not caught up on the ecosystem of its queer women’s establishments. When I saw the EXPERIENCED BARTENDER WANTED FOR A LESBIAN BAR ad on Craigslist while using free Wi-Fi at the fancy coffee spot with organic dog treats (the owner knew his demographic), I didn’t know that there was a good place and a bad place and that I was signing myself up for the latter.
I had bartended before exactly twice in my life, which mostly consisted of opening beers for European ravers. I was unaware of myself, still getting to know myself. Doing this with alcohol and mixers seemed like something I could fake until I could succeed, not so different from other things I’d pretended to know how to do and then learned on the job.
I walked up the long boardwalk that led from Commercial Street to The Other One in my finest American Apparel shorts and deep V-neck tee, then crawled up the stairs to the bar’s narrow attic office with my still-warm CV, printed at the fancy coffee spot moments earlier. The barista there was older—which means probably a year younger than I am now—and gorgeous. When she asked where I was applying to work and I told her, she said, “Have you been there before? Because you should work at literally any other bar. Have you tried Vixen?” I told her Vixen didn’t have an ad on Craigslist. She sighed this very sweet bless-your-heart sigh and told me to just go walk in—the first of many pieces of excellent advice I received and didn’t take that season.
My coworkers at The Other One were two lesbians (ex-girlfriends, to no one’s surprise) from New Jersey who had worked there the previous season; one of their current girlfriends, who was new and from Massachusetts; a manager a couple of years older than us who was paid only marginally better than we were to run everything; and two queer elders who spent their summers in Provincetown and the rest of the year in Providence. On special occasions when it wasn’t the five-CD changer providing music for our overpaying customers, a closeted heterosexual DJ from Hartford would show up, stash his girlfriend in the office, play records for a few hours, and leave. Gay customers who heard he had a girlfriend swore he was pretending to be straight. My coworkers theorized that he was pretending to be gay to get booked. The only thing we all knew for sure was that his knack for passing eclipsed his mixing skills.
The first thing the manager did when I showed up for work was tell me that under no circumstances should I hang out with the other bartenders. They didn’t go to college, she said, so they were very dangerous. This was, I thought, extremely classist. It was also, I came to learn later, somewhat true. I mostly kept to myself outside of business hours, spending the time I wasn’t tending bar at a second job running concessions for the town’s theater, also a hotbed of sordid histories, queer infighting, and dramatic social dynamics. As a result of making no alliances and not having any preexisting sexual entanglements, I ended up screwed over at the end of my trial period at The Other One. They hired me as their lone daytime bartender, the lowest paying hours to work at an establishment no fashionable person wanted to get caught in before six. My shift ended right as the after-tea crowd staggered over from The Boatslip and things finally picked up.
Every morning before opening the bar at eleven, I carefully lifted each of the five sliding glass windows from their runners and carried them one by one to the storage closet to let in the breeze (we had no air conditioning). I lugged the six oversized outdoor tables to their proper positions on the deck, set up the gleaming metal outdoor chairs that burned my hands when I touched them, hung the sign by the entrance while balancing on a barstool, unfolded the sandwich sign out on Commercial Street to catch the attention of foot traffic, then stocked all cups, cut all limes and lemons, refilled the cherries and olives, piled napkins and situated straws while I waited for customers to arrive. Working alone in the daytime also meant that I got to choose the music and cultivate a crew of regulars. This ensured I’d have customers on Tuesdays and Wednesdays before the two p.m. ferry brought daytrippers excited to be on holiday but annoyed to pay fifteen dollars for a pomegranate martini that was just Chambord and watered-down Grey Goose in a plastic cup. I liked the martini people a lot more than the frozen drink people. To this day, I will not order a drink that requires someone to pour individual ingredients into a blender. I remember the horror of a hot day rush: me alone with forty customers and only two blenders, thanks to the owner heavily advertising our frozen drinks but refusing to invest in larger-volume machines.
My regulars included Alan, who made it a point to inform me he no longer did any meth when asking if I knew anyone selling coke, and his older boyfriend Peter, who did something very important in New York and spent Memorial Day through Labor Day decompressing by reading the financial papers at the bar and screeching at customers who didn’t tip me. Three times a week, a lesbian couple who’d been together