I worked at the Speedway in Orlando, a race car themed restaurant. Blue Sunoco leaded gasoline pumps on either side of the entrance. A Red Lion Gilmore pump by the restrooms. Motor oil drums transformed into gleaming seats in the cocktail lounge. Sheet metal walls with wavy images of a Bluebird V, a Stanley Steamer. Race car drivers in caps, leaning forward. The kitchen a garage. In fact, it had been a garage a century ago. Everything cleaned up and shiny. Historic. Sides of beef on display in coffin-sized glass windows, floor to ceiling, directly across the room from me at the bar. Did the chefs just grab a side like a suitcase and cook it? Or were their bloody, marbled white torsos just decoration? The chef I had a secret crush on left a few months earlier, to a new restaurant downtown.

Behind the bar, a long slab of shining mahogany separated me from everyone else. I’d once thought of going to bartending school. A sign “Bartending School” near the AA clubhouse downtown, visible as I drove down Colonial Drive. An outside staircase led up to a door, below the sign. No windows. Alley beside it. Even now, years later, sober, I wonder about the school – the set up. Did everyone have a separate station with bar glasses and bottles, ice clinking, mixers, sinks? Or was it a kind of performance behind a makeshift bar, everyone watching you make a drink? Would it reek of sour rags and bleach, sticky floor, alcohol a blue flame in the air? Would it be like the dancing school where I did sign up for lessons? At noon a glassy-eyed man with stiff cornstalk hair moved me like a doll in his arms from one foot drawn on the floor to another. Each time he said, Step, a fume of alcohol exited his mouth, diffused across my face. The floor was like a crime scene of feet. No whirling or twirling or grace, just stepping clumsily where I was told.

Instead, I taught myself how to bartend. Got promoted from hostess to bartender when I turned 21. Had a book with drink recipes, like a Bettie Crocker cookbook with a plastic accordion spine. I wanted to make pink squirrels, but no one ever ordered one. It wasn’t the kind of drink I could sip while working – had to be something I could mix with a soda. The pink squirrel was white crème de cacao, heavy cream, and Crème de Noyaux which we didn’t have, but you could substitute amaretto. I also wanted to make a grasshopper – green creme de menthe, white creme de cacao and heavy cream – also never ordered. I served a lot of beer, rum and Cokes, Bloody Marys, mai tais, margaritas…

The dark-haired slouchy manager came behind the bar, walked around as he sometimes did. Opening and shutting the cash drawer. Above the register, a blond wood sign, black lettered: THE BIRTHPLACE OF SPEED. It was dim behind the bar, with a row of lights below the bar top, illuminating the ice. Underfoot the squishy black rubber mat full of holes. Once he picked up my rocks glass of coke, and took a sip. Made a gesture of phew with his left hand over his forehead. As if he would have hated to taste alcohol. Have had to fire me. He smiled.

The other manager was blond and thin – his white dress shirts looser. Room to spare. The bones in his face made him handsome, his way of never looking me in the eye. He always seemed to wish he were somewhere else. Behind the bar was like a little stage. I greeted everyone as if they were thrilling. What would you like? Made their drink. Placed the glass or bottle on a square napkin with a race car stamped in black and red. Took their money. Smiled. Transactions clear. I took orders from the wait staff at the side bar. No order stumped me. So far, there was no drink I couldn’t make.

The short serious waitress who rarely smiled and wanted to go into marketing, told me the blond manager had a friend with coke. We could go over his house near the lake to party after work. I was not a fan of coke. The few times it had been offered to me, I couldn’t stop talking. Even when I got home past my curfew, my parents exhausted and furious and awake, I couldn’t stop talking.

But the serious waitress and the blond manager were usually distant and cool with me. I’d been chosen! Yes, I said. It took ages to close down the bar, clean up. My hands bleachy from the bar rag, wearing my black work pants splashed with alcohol and suds, black stretchy long-sleeved leotard with an orange juice spill soaked in. I lived miles away, so had to go as I was. The waitress drove us to a new development past the 7-Eleven where I used to ride my bike as a kid, buy Pixie Sticks, fizzy powder in a straw that I dumped into my mouth until it frothed purple. Pixie Sticks discontinued years later as it was considered a health threat to middle schoolers, supposedly leading them to drug use by snorting the candy powder.

These new houses all had cathedral ceilings which only made them more expensive to air-condition. So spacious and off-white walled, they had a cardboard feel. As if you could just push it all down. The blond manager had already arrived. Two other men watched TV. Two couches. A low coffee table. There was not enough furniture. The couches and TV were an island on a sea of off-white carpet. The kitchen far to the right, lights off. A wall of sliding glass opened on the pesticide drizzled grass, draining off into the lake which was just darkness.

After the pleasantries, it was all business with the coke. I could have skipped it, but didn’t want to seem weird to the waitress and manager. After all, why was I there? Not to make friends, ha-ha. I liked to be quiet. Listen. But the coke had me talking nonstop to his faceless friends. I truly cannot remember their faces, just their couches. I could have been talking to the sliding glass, the lake. The manager didn’t buddy up to me, or fall in love with my conversation. The waitress was her usual self, round brown squirrel eyes lined in heavy black liner, top and bottom, but melted into shadowy tears. During the dinner rush, she could carry a surprising number of plates at once. All up one arm, like a circus performer, and without breaking a sweat. At the beginning of each night, she reminded me of someone prepping for a marathon or half-marathon. Determined, focused. Biceps pumped up. What motivated her to work so hard? Just the money?

I had the sense it was time to go. Seriously, the party was pretty boring. I’d hoped the manager might have looked into my eyes for once, but he was focused too, on getting high.  It was just men walking around like shadows, the main light from the TV. I’ve never been a fan of watching TV with a group either – no one has the same taste. The waitress and I left. She dropped me off at work, and I drove the long way home. Brittle and blinking and thirsty. Past the sleeping mall and the strip clubs and all-night Dennys.

The next night, I was behind the bar, and the waitress came up. Leaned close. The manager had told her we had to pay for coke. That we all had to pay. That I owed $200. It was ridiculous. I don’t have any money, I said. I didn’t. We have to pay, she said. He owes the dealer. The manager owes him. Who invites people to a party, and then asks them for drug money? I could never figure it out. Unless, after we left, they did more coke than expected, or got more. Anyway, I couldn’t pay. What could he do, fire me for not giving him drug money? The manager so put together and quietly patient, like a nurse practitioner politely averting his eyes. I had a sense of danger from the waitress, of someone coming for us. But if the manager was such a gentleman, couldn’t he cough up the money? I mean, he was the manager! I couldn’t even afford an apartment.

There was one older hostess he looked in the eye – tall, early 30s, big-haired with waves made on hot curlers. One night at the side bar, she cheerfully explained gonorrhea to me in a blithe way, as she’d had it, but laughingly waved it away as if it were a little cough. The blond manager quit long before I did. There were more parties with the waiters, but just beer and alcohol, just ourselves. No management. The waitress did enroll in school, I saw her at my university. She was on the sidewalk between tall buildings, surrounded by several fellow marketing students, a study group. And she/they had that same air of marshalling all their forces to barrel ahead. I could never be in marketing. She had charts and plans, a presentation to make. It looked exhausting. And again, I couldn’t see the point. The waitress probably now has a big house with cathedral ceilings and acres of carpeting, looking out on a gator-filled lake. We were never really friends – she remained a little brusque, clinical. Except once, after one of the waiters’ parties, she’d driven me home.

Unlike coke, alcohol was something I’d loved, poured into myself with no ability to stop. I only stopped if I passed out or vomited or both, ran out, or fell asleep. That night the waitress drove me home, I was still conscious. I had fitted myself under her glovebox on the passenger side, sitting on the rubber mat, head between my knees. Crying and crying. A hurricane of crying. No stopping it. The chef and I had met again, at his new restaurant. A love story. Maybe my only one ever. It ended. And I couldn’t get off the floor of the waitress’s car. Find my way back into the seat.

I would have to stay crushed beneath her glovebox into eternity. In my carport, the waitress kept saying over and over, He loves you, he loves you, I’m sure, he loves you. Maybe she just wanted to get me out of her car, go home. But her words wound around my body like bandages, wrapping me up so that all the pieces stayed inside. Her certainty lifting me from the floor, propelling me forward.