I was a defective Hooters waitress - Salon

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My first date spiel put the best of meâ€"the quirks, the energy, the soulâ€"into a nutshell. I once worked in a school system where the principal required teachers to keep their daily lesson plans, worksheets, and resources in a three-inch binder. I left after a year. I could not fit into a binder.

But on a date, I treated myself as a package. I was the wild bird of prey handling, Renaissance woman, who sewed her own clothes, wrote her own books, won swing dancing competitions, choreographed hip-hop routines, organized panel discussions on censorship, played chess, rode beach cruisers and road bikes, worked part time teaching dance and cleaning houses, while not at the same time, but with the same veracity; took surfing trips, read the newspaper, didn’t own a television, loved Stevie Wonder, played the guitar, hoped to take up the harmonica, directed school plays, ran marathons, made chocolate chip cookies, drank coffee from a French press, worked as a professional laundress, and whose first paying job was dancing as Clumsy Smurf.

I thought these stories showed who I was, captured my character. Like my “I was a defective Hooters waitress” story.

When I was nineteen I lived at the beach for a summer. I started out working retail in a surf shop, where I spent most of my paycheck buying clothes with my twenty-five percent discount. I needed extra cash, so in the mornings I taught swimming lessons to local kids at the Harrison Hall Hotel Pool on Fifteenth Street. Even though most mornings I was hungover, I loved being around kids. Somehow it righted all of my wrongs and nightly drunkenness. I served my penance every morning lugging kickboards and lifejackets on the bus down sixty ocean blocks.

The swim lessons check would be worth it, but I wouldn’t see that until the end of August and I needed money. Where could I get a job that would guarantee moneyâ€"good money? And then I saw it, from the bus window along Coastal Highwayâ€"the wise owl and the orange lettering called to me.

I didn’t take the job to find a boyfriend, but I often used my stint at Hooters as a ploy in my dating strategy. If I really liked a guy, telling the Hooters story would always get me pointsâ€"at least that’s what I thought. The Hooters story worked on several levelsâ€"number one being, the guy I’d be telling the story to would have to picture me in a Hooters costume. That’s what it was to meâ€"a costume.

My first day on the job they put me on hula hoop duty. An experienced Hooters girl took me outside along Coastal Highway and handed me a hula hoop. I stepped insideâ€"the hula hoop wavering at my waist as whizzing cars slowed at the signâ€"and spun. The hoop dropped to the ground. I bent down and picked it up again. I whirled it around for a quick second before it rattled on the concrete. I looked up and saw Buffy or Bambi or Barbie, her hips churning, swirling three hoops at a time, two around her waist and one around her neck. That was the last time I had hula hoop duty.

When I punched in orders at the waitress station, a machine printed out a ticket I had to send into the kitchen through one of many zip lines that ran over the heads of customers chugging draft beers and gobbling hot wings. Waitresses had to climb on a platform, reach up and attach the ticket to a clamp and with a push, fling the order along the line and into the kitchen. All the other waitresses zinged in their orders. My tickets got stuck midstream. The hostess had to call over the manager to move my ticket along with the pole they used to crank open the upstairs windows.

Then I’d tell the story about the time I waited on a table full of thirteen-year-old boys. “Can you take a picture with us?” One of them asked after they paid the bill. I posed in front of the restaurant with the boys in braces and baseball hats. One of them waved the Polaroid at me,

“You wanna see the picture?” I couldn’t look at it. I didn’t want to see the girl in the picture. It wasn’t me.

That was my last night at Hooters.

So here this guy would hear the story of my double life. Teaching swimming lessons by day, waitressing at Hooters by night. He’d get the image of me in the short orange shorts and the tight tank top tied up in the back and laughâ€"not about me in the costumeâ€"but about the hula hooping and the ticket sending, and then maybe he’d run home and tell his friends he was dating a Hooters waitress, but he wouldn’t think I was trashy because I was only nineteen when I worked there and he knew that I was ashamed of it. He may have even thought that endearing.

Then, I’d tell him how I’d still made it a point to learn how to hula hoop and then prove it to him when he’d come back to my apartment and see the hula hoop I kept behind the door of my bedroom. He’d be pissed when I’d tell him that I’d lost the costume. Actually, I think my mother probably burned it when I moved back home and she went to clean my room and found it shoved in the back of one of my dresser drawers.

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