EPISODE 3: A flashback to summer 2019 when Lizzy worked at a German bar. Featuring: stolen drinks, the post-#MeToo world, what happens in close quarters, heroes of personal style, authentic old-world German clothing and the feelings it brings up, life in monochrome, why Lizzy prefers to dress baggy, yet another example of why Lizzy chose to pursue a career in management, a live oom-pah band, a temporary tic, a sudden wash of bodily dysphoria, and a coping choice.
EPISODE 3: DIRTY DIRNDLS, DUMPSTER PUDDLES
Old Town Road was dominating the pop charts, and I was pouring drinks at Heidi’s. This restaurant felt like what The Bar was always trying to be. It shone like a ruby, set into the neighborhood and inseparable from it. The brick exterior had long since grown a fine, salty layer of efflorescence by the time I arrived on the scene.
Heidi’s held down the corner of a block of tiny independent businesses: there was a Pinterest-friendly woman-owned event space, a divey American bar where a buddy of mine worked the door, and a Mexican joint with a hairy-chested owner who occasionally brought our staff margaritas in those clear plastic quart cups you find piled in every restaurant kitchen. We were mixed on that owner, in particular. His free booze was alright, but nothing we couldn’t sneak from our own bar, and he mounted the fine line of speech that might be creepy, but could be brushed off as nothing by someone hearing only the words later. Tone and setting are everything. We could see that he wanted our attention, but not in a way that felt good to us. This was after #MeToo rocked every industry where people work together, but I was still too young to understand that I had a right to set boundaries when my instincts suggested them.
By the way, if that owner wanted to get close to us, all he would have had to do is sit in the same section as us in the Heidi’s dining room. The tables were arranged tightly enough to touch elbows with your neighbor. The room was clearly designed before Americans started growing up heavy. During the Heidi’s yearly Oktoberfest celebration, the two-tops and four-tops got pushed together into long communal tables, where strangers were seated together as one big boozy family.
I used to see a couple different reactions when I brought folks to the party and showed them their seats within it. Some were excited, like puppies rejoining their litter, while others drew up short and tossed me a look that told me: “surely, you cannot be serious.” Not everyone goes out looking to dissolve into the group. I get it. But this place was only trying to be one thing, and that meant sometimes leaving people out.
Heidi’s was dialed into its aesthetic in a way The Bar never achieved: top to bottom, it showed the Swiss-German roots of its chef-owner. The staff uniform was jeans-and-tee casual, but no person or piece of equipment in the building was out of place or unnecessary. The bathrooms were spotless, without exception. Chef’s apron was always spotless, as well.
The business was owned and operated by a husband and wife team. This was something I encountered often while working in independent restaurants. In this case, Joe was the chef-owner and back-of-house king, and Heidi served as the front of house manager and official schmoozer.
I thought Heidi was supremely cool. She was the namesake of the restaurant, she rode a badass e-scooter to work, and she took zero shit but did it with a smile. She was my hero as far as personal style goes. I actually ride a similar scooter today now that I can afford it, and now people tell me I look cool too.
I did resent Heidi’s unwillingness to do the actual dirty work of managing a bar staff. Servers leaned against the wall, hands motionless during slow times. The bartenders stumbled and swayed from stolen shots. She refused to learn how to make the house cocktails because she didn’t want to get pulled away from admin, but that admin looked a lot like casual conversations with bar regulars.
One might argue that while the chit chat is lovely and the personal relationships keep the business alive, those guests might also like their drinks faster, please.
So it came to pass that Epstein died, and unrelated, out of the haze, clothing racks appeared in the basement of Heidi’s, elbowing for space between lager kegs. A riot of color, a bouquet of skirts tossed with suede overalls. I cocked my ear, doglike.
What was I looking at? The sheer color against the monochrome dark of the basement was a shock to my system.
Restaurant basements remind me of my dad’s old workplace, the one that ended up stressing him out so much that we had to move to a whole different town for the kinder job he found back when Baby One More Time first troubled conservative parents. We still hadn’t found a house near his new office, hours away, as his start date drew near. So, his new gig put him up in a Hampton Inn while my mom struggled to be a single parent Monday through Friday.
In both my dad’s old workplace and the many restaurant basements I’ve occupied, the light was strange and fluorescent: too bright in some places and too weak in others. A mathematician would tell you the light averaged out just fine. Both environments also had an odd monochromatic quality: all brown boxes in my basements, and graphite gray in my dad’s old machine shop.
In both cases, moving around the space was like living in a black and white photograph: what became interesting were the shadows, the shapes. In those places, bright color was a vomiting overstimulation.
Back to the days of Hot Girl Summer:
It was time to fit the staff of Heidi’s for their Oktoberfest costumes. A few of us at a time thumbed through hangers, searching for something that fit our frames. We weren’t told whether we needed to wear skirts or pants based on our gender, but I still knew that the expected choice for me would be a dirndl cut for my feminine form, and I didn’t feel like that was where I wanted to take a stand or a chance in my nonbinary expression.
(Shit, I didn’t even fully realize that I’m nonbinary until years after that evening in the basement staring down costumes. Back then, I just knew that I didn’t see myself anywhere on that clothing rack.)
I settled for a sky-blue dirndl that fit, and grabbed one of the standard white, cropped peasant tops from a nearby pile to wear underneath. I have great tits, but I don’t show them off, so I felt uncomfortable with how much the fit of the dress accentuated my curves. It had never been to my benefit to be overtly feminine around drunk people: as I mentioned before, this was in the height of the #MeToo movement and backlash. Women were scared, good men were also scared, bad men were on the defensive, and folks like me weren’t sure where we fit in, same as usual.
I worked with one other bartender most nights, a real she/her named Marcelina. She was more willing to play the girl game than I was, so I tried to let her take the lead with the creeps. Today, you might label her a Sabrina Carpenter type at first glance. One night, two guys sat at our bar: a burly discount Michael Clarke Duncan and a shorter-than-average Mark-Wahlberg-looking motherfucker. While I was at the other end of the rail pouring steins, they quietly asked her if she would sell them her socks. Later, she would confess the sale to me over post-shift shots and proudly display the fifty they had slipped her in exchange. My stomach curdled from the Jäger and the image.
A couple weeks later, those guys came back while I was bartending solo. My guard-dog gut perked up, but I decided to give them a chance.
Me: “Hey guys, welcome back. What can I get you?”
Great Value Michael Clarke Duncan: “Do you have any…socks?”
Me: “Just a second, guys.”
I made my way back to the kitchen where Heidi was hanging out with the line cooks.
Me: “Heidi, those two at the end of the bar gotta go, they just said some weird sexual shit to me.”
My boss: “Hmm…they already have drinks, so let’s not kick them out, just don’t serve them any more and try not to go to that end of the bar until they’re gone.”
Me, to myself: “…how the hell do I take care of that side of the bar? I’m working alone and you don’t know how to make the drinks so you can’t help me.”
Me, to my boss: “Ok Heidi, thanks.”
Yet another reason why I became a manager: I wanted to build a place where leaders do better by an uncomfortable young person seeking support and protection.
Marcelina didn’t mind the creeps or the dirndls at all. She cinched the ruffles on her top tight to show off her curves and pulled her neckline as low as it could go without needing pasties. I admired her comfort in showing off her body.
She had a mediocre boyfriend named Brad who sometimes visited Heidi’s while Marcelina was working. He was the type of guy you see in movies about Boston, all short-cropped hair and yawning accent. He seemed nice enough, but I couldn’t imagine fucking him enthusiastically.
Did I mention that during Oktoberfest, we had a full oom-pah band jammed into the tiny Heidi’s dining room that played for hours on end? Trumpet, clarinet, accordion, tuba, guitar, and bass in a space about the size of an American 3-stall public restroom. Jesus Fucking Christ.
Anyway, one hot Saturday night in early September, Marcelina and I worked a busy Oktoberfest shift in our dirndls. She asked if she could take the first cut, and offered to share a joint with me out by the dumpsters before she left in exchange. It seemed like a good deal to me.
We lingered by the dumpsters just outside the kitchen door, puffing and passing. I tugged my top up over my tits, a tic I had developed since the start of Oktoberfest. “I can’t wait to get out of this fucking thing as soon as I clock out.”
A conspiratorial look engulfed Marcelina’s face, and her smile winked in the moonlight. “I told Brad I’d wear it home tonight!”
Once again, I found myself grossed out and nonplussed by one of her sexual confessions. “That’s great. Go get ‘em, tiger.” I gave her a joking fistbump.
She laughed and pranced off into the night, her skirt bouncing as she danced over dumpster-juice puddles.
I looked down at my own bedirndled, alien body, then back to the waiting bar. I felt a sudden rush of revulsion at the thought of my own sky-blue self getting fucked by some other underwhelming straight white guy. I thought about how I never dressed that way any other day of my life, how I felt numb, invisible inside my body, pushed in a direction my toenails scratched against.
The dirndl didn’t feel like a fun traditional outfit. It felt like an invisibility cloak, like I was something carefully written on a dry-erase board and elbowed away in a moment’s turning.
I made my way back inside, through the narrow kitchen, past the rollicking and compact oom-pah band, to the richly wickered confessional of a bathroom. I locked the door and turned myself inside out. I raged into the toilet until I wept yellow fluid from my lips.
I didn’t feel any better after.
A familiar voice slithered into my ear: “Wouldn’t it just be easier to disappear?”
Hours later, I found myself in the basement, gathering my coat and backpack. The sky-blue dirndl swung slightly on its hanger, on the theatre-department style rack filled with skirts and lederhosen in such a rich variety that I almost wanted to taste their jewel sweetness. Shift over.
