Blood, Bones & Butter - By Gabrielle Hamilton Page 0,21

oh-so-casual point of wiping the little trickle of coke-laced snot from my upper lip and then licking my finger so as not to lose that last shot of tongue-numbing tingle.

We were partial to an after-hours club called the Zodiac, which I’m embarrassed to say that in spite of having been there dozens of times, I couldn’t find today. Possibly it was in Soho, as I recall we always made a point to walk to Houston to get a cab home. I remember, with a kind of powdery nausea settling over me, coming out of it often and seeing droves of children coming home from school. Jake, the dealer, sat in a booth at the Zodiac and sold coke by the line. You slid into the banquette across from him, he cut out the line, you paid, snorted, and then vacated the seat after a soft and unpleasant handshake.

Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” was a constant pick on the jukebox and the last time I walked out of that place, late summer 1983, it blared out the doors as I pushed them open and, wincing from the daylight, hailed a checkered cab, one of the last of a dwindling fleet. In that spacious backseat with so much room for your luggage and the round low stools for extra passengers, I lay down and thought, “Does anyone know where I am?” and rolled whichever way Tenth Avenue bumped me.

Obviously, I had learned how to work my fucking tables. Everybody was working their fucking tables, I soon learned. The girl at the door was selling tickets for the show while keeping half the “sales” for herself. The waitresses were not getting lost in the mayhem and accidentally not writing down drinks on their dupes and the bartenders were not supplying those unrecorded drinks unwittingly. They were in business together. I too, learned to sell them at the table, to keep the cash from the sale of a drink that didn’t, on paper, exist, and to share that profit with the bartender, through tipping.

The tip-out at the end of a night when the waitress has pocketed seven hundred bucks is obviously a little more appealing than when the stupid sixteen-year-old lunch waitress hands over a “fucking” twenty. Chris and I had become, tentatively, friends. He slipped me an occasional shot of Cuervo for myself and only once spiked it with Tabasco.

There was a bartender upstairs, at the bar that serviced all the tables on the balcony with great views of the stage, who was rumored to have his own cash register, which he’d bring in zippered up in his duffel bag, set up under the counter behind the bar, and ring up drinks all night long that never made it into the company till. I never saw this, but the rumor was persistent and sworn to more emphatically the more I dismissed it as urban lore.

Even the coat-check girls were on the take. They invented a two-dollar fee for checking your coat and then were tipped as well for the pleasure. I was now cutting most of my classes at school but becoming friends with everybody at work. I, too, was frantically chatting away in the dressing room with Tooney and Duggan and Auntie Mary, the ninety-pound Englishwoman at least forty-five years old who kept right up with the coke and the job and the short denim skirts. Laura, an unexpectedly Upper East Side type of girl who kept her hair in a short pixie cut and wore penny loafers, had become an especially good friend. She always doubted her ability, after a certain point in the evening, to keep track of things, so she had the habit of bundling up her cash in hundred-dollar increments, rubber banding it, and putting it in the waistband of her stockings throughout the night so she wasn’t walking around with half a grand in twenties bunched up in her denim apron pocket.

There was so much money being passed around at that place—legitimately and otherwise—that the owners had all of us bonded. We all went through a long, paperwork-filled process by which they insured themselves against theft.

Lloyd, the Jamaican night porter who drank warm milk with Guinness stout and a few drops of honey, had a whole substantial second income derived from doing our closing sidework, for which we tipped him lavishly. The sooner we got out of work, the sooner we could get to the bar at 1 Fifth, or the Zodiac, or a place on