Behind the Lights

Staying with that Service Job, Long After College

Waiting tables and bartending are jobs more commonly associated with students. A job that is flexible for during the semester as well as the summer.
Then there are the “lifers,” those older bartenders and waiters who continue to do the job.

Waiting tables and bartending is not considered to have very much security. There are no 401Ks, and no stock options. The base pay is about $3 to $4 an hour or $15 to $30 a shift. Each shift can last for 12 hours or more depending on the day. The security provided in a 9-to-5 job is not there. So when people choose this as a career path, this choice can sometimes see this as a sign of irresponsibility or underachievement.

The lifers themselves see it differently. Toby Holiday, for instance, expressed it thus: “It’s hard knowing that now I could lose my job because I took four days off for thanksgiving. I might be getting phased out. But when it works, it works. I make three hundred dollars a night outside of tips. I only need to work three nights a week to pay my bills.”

There are reasons behind the choice of these controversial career paths and their stories are not homogeneous. Not all lifers have found themselves stuck and unable to get a job in any other field. Their hobbies and quirky personalities make this interactive career perfect for them.

Mark James, a waiter, and Holiday, a waiter/manager, are examples of people who don’t see their service jobs as one of transience. Their career path has worked for them for over a decade.

James is a waiter at the River Café in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Floating on the East River, the restaurant’s incredible view of the NYC skyline makes it the perfect spot for a romantic evening. The lights hang low, and a live pianist plays throughout most of the evening as the waiters and bartenders walk around in classic waiter uniforms.

At 46 years old, James has been waiting tables off and on for 25 years. At his current job his coworkers range in their time there from only a few months as waiters to even longer than him.

James sometimes gets bothered by those in the industry temporarily. “Sometimes I get a little bit frustrated by the people who do see this job as a transient one. Because they don’t care. You’re working side by side with these people making the same money, and they don’t care. There are some of us who do,” he said.

He has waited tables in Taos, New Mexico, his home in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, as well as a sprinkle of cities around the country from San Francisco, California to here in New York. “I can’t claim to be a glorified world traveler. But I have been to enough places in the US to know that there are a lifetime of places to see even here in the northeast,” he said.

James graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in English, but never had anything published. He calls literature the re-writing of works and “never got the hand of rewriting things,” he said in a half joking manner.

In his free time, which James agrees to have a lot of, he explores the metropolis of New York on his bicycle while performing “antics” as he calls them. He listens to the music he loves and rides around, usually in circles with no hands.

After “a lifetime without photos” James has recently taken up photography, mostly with his doll named Wanda that he carries around with him. Together they take photos around the city and explore the different sites it has to offer.

James lives a life of relative ease and playfulness, and he’s sure that there will probably be a 9-to-5 job sometime in his near future. He doesn’t want to wait tables when he’s 70 and is considering working with children, maybe teaching dance or yoga, something along those lines. “They understand me,” he said, and admits that it has something to do with his being a sort of child himself.

“I have always wanted to live a happy life and meet a lot of people,” James said. His job as a waiter has provided him with the opportunity to meet so many different people and make a connection with them for the short time that they spend together.

There are in fact so many people going in and out of his life that James admits forgetting most of them is best. “If I remembered everybody that I met, it would be too much. Almost a sort of over stimulation,” he said.

“There are people who consider my job to be one of transience, but I think that if you return to anything for 10 years, then it’s no longer [that]. There are people who work 9 to 5 and after four months they quit or are fired,” said James “… but some people would go crazy without the job security of those types of jobs. I don’t.”

There is also Toby Holiday, a 35-year-old waiter turned manager of a restaurant in New York City. He’s been waiting tables for 15 years. And was a waiter in his home state of North Carolina.

TOBY HOLIDAY

Today, Holiday works as a manager, host and waiter of Duplex in New York City. Once a month, Toby performs his drag show titled ‘Too Ugly for TV’ in a well-known gay bar ‘Pieces’ which is not far from the Stonewall (a bar made famous for the riots in 1969).

Armed with fake breasts and a large wig, Holiday transforms into the beautiful Telulah de Bayous and gets on stage with her co-star, Vodka Stinger. The onstage duo sing their theme song with the same title about attempting to make it on stage and the big screen but always being pushed to the back row and ostracized because they were considered being too ugly for the screen.

The song is a comic satire about real events not just in their lives but also in the lives of other drag queens like themselves. They spend the rest of the show making fun of new stories and you-tube videos. In effect they laugh at those supposed to be considered ‘normal’.

It’s not all fun and games in Holiday’s life. A few times a week, he speaks to gay people in violent relationships and gives them advice about how to get out of them; who to call and where to go for help.

Because he did not go to university, his decision to be a waiter started as a way to make money based on his experience. Today that experience has paid off. But it is no longer about money for him.

Working in the service industry has allowed the time for him to be an active member in the gay community. He is there for the members in attempting to fight violence from outside of the community as well as within.

Holiday confesses that working in the industry can sometimes be taxing. It is an industry where the number of shifts that you work can be cut down at anytime without any reason. The managers that you work with won’t fire you. Instead, they give you only one day to work and wait for you to be so sick of it that you quit.

Holiday pouts his lightly glossed plump lips and flips his mid-back length blond hair to sip his glass of white wine. His attitude is unavoidable as he bats his eyes lashes and ends every statement with “ok?” and his hands articulate everything.

“There is a lot of backstabbing and dishonesty sometimes,” Holiday admitted. “I might not be able to go home for Christmas. If I do that, I could come back with half a shift on my schedule cause they’ll have a bunch of new people. I am the best at my job, and they know that. But it’s not about them. Waiting tables keeps the rent paid. Volunteering and my show, those are what I do.”

Holiday plans on going to nursing school in the near future. “I’m getting too old for this,” he said about his age and the service industry. But he doesn’t see the standard 9-to-5 job to be an option. “Too many hours and too many uptight people. Nursing will allow me to connect with people.”

Harvard-trained psychiatrist, Meghan Jacobs, agrees with this sentiment about the connection with people that stay in the service industry for so many years. “Professions often choose you. If it’s synergistic with who you are then why wouldn’t you?” she said.

Jacobs appears to be more of the creative and artistic type, than the stereotypical psychiatrist. She bartended in the years before starting her residency in Massachusetts, working to save money for the year that she spent traveling through Europe and Northern Africa.

She confessed that while she was traveling, she didn’t do much bartending, but did spend a lot of time on the patron end of that relationship. The environment provided her with a surrogate family while she was traveling alone.

Jacobs is currently working on starting her own practice and has proven to be a successful and highly sought after therapist. Her amicable and warm personality makes it easy to talk to her, and Jacobs admits that working in the service industry taught her some of the most important lessons for talking to people.

“Bartending has helped in my career. It has served as a training ground for understanding how to listen to people, tend to many needs at once, prioritize and listen on many layer, something you do in the room with your patients all the time,” Jacobs said.

This suggests that bartending is not inherently a job for those who are irresponsible. As Jacobs expresses it: “People stay in jobs that allow them to feel like one version of their best self”.