The New York City Journals, Part IIX: Teachers Drinking & Scensters Creeping
It's all fun and games until someone documents it, and 20 years later, the written account surfaces.
Of all the flirting, the filth, the fruit flies, overpours, nip slips, bottomless shift drinks, and the promise of promiscuity, what I cherished most about tending bar as an underage naive attention whore at notorious, Welcome to the Johnsons, were the humans I connected with—the patron and the passerby, the problematic drunk and the harmless regular.
All strangers at the start, those who leaned in, listened, and lifted me, lauding friendships unfathomable and unforgettable.
It began with two women, teachers at Marta Valle High School, a block from the bar. The duo shared a dismissal bell cue there, signaling the end of the day and the beginning of the happy hour.
Like clockwork, Ariel and Rebecca were typically the first people I served during my Monday and Tuesday shifts. They arrived moments after I opened for business and bantered back and forth about, "Just one or two this time.”
After a few weeks, the teachers pulled me out of my shell of abandonment trauma and thick skin facade, assuming sisterly roles, though both adamantly proclaimed they were, in fact, "old enough to be my mother."
All these ladies wanted was a few stiff ones to remove the edge, wipe away the resentments harbored by high schoolers, and dissolve the workday into a buzzed evening. But I brought them out of their shells, too. All three of us learned more about ourselves because of it.
By Christmas, we drank together outside of my workplace.
Ariel, who would later become my roommate, taught a culinary class. I want to say Rebecca taught sewing, not to be confused with Becka Diamond. I think it was sewing or quilting, but I can’t confirm.
Without their knowledge, they both taught me the difference between women and girls, sex and love, priorities and impulses, and acquaintances and friends.
Ariel stuck to one or two most of the time.
Rebecca was just one more. She and I watched the sunrise more than a couple of Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Though I cannot remember which subjective skillset she imparted to the burgeoning youth she lectured, I do have it on excellent authority that she gave one hell of a blowjob.
A hypocrite is me, who slut-shames a busty blonde, teacher, lush, friend, a woman afraid; a wanton pot, me, to call the kettle loose.
Inhibition is appealing, though, right? Someone back me up here.
In the early aughts, there in the scenester cesspool of unresolved trauma and avoidant attachment, during the primal phase of development, I swam with sharks, floundering like anxious autonomy awakening.
Tell me, while weaving your web of unraveled identity, was it skin, bones, teeth, or cocaine cocktails that hooked you? Or were you signaled by school bell cues, habitual and ingrained, splashing and swearing each lap was the last—steadying, sailing, sinking?
Don't tell me you're a patron and a saint, the killer and the whale, a puritan and a slut?
Perhaps where the pendulum of one's carnal convention falls between lust and prudence matters naught to the sacred and majestic illusion of time and tenure.
Fawn or feral, satisfaction is a dangling carrot meant to distract. Comprehend the parallelism within all perceived diametrical opposition, and you will reach the Zenith.
No?
Yes, yes, you will.
Human beings are inherently wired for limitation.
Yet, we possess free will.
Fuckin'a, the universe is the gnarliest writer of all time, man. Yikes!
Anyhoo, we are swaying trees with knobby limbs, deciduously weathered, teachers, day drinkers, old creepers, young scenesters. We are all ancient and pulmonary, bodies like sturdy but rigid trunks, healthy and hollow, twisted and varying in roughness, and no two are identical. Stripped bare without our consent, then fruitfully in bloom once again. We are all rotten and primeval, barring an appearance which we instinctively compare and contrast.
Yet, we are all born from the same root system—one essence.
Now, I know that personal connection is not forged—flirted into, fucked out of.
Connection neither ends nor begins; We choose whether to tap in or tune out.
xo,
ACC
