Q. You worked as a hotel bartender in the Pacific Northwest for years. What would you say makes bartenders especially good at picking up on their customers’ tics, subtleties, and indiscretions?
A. I would say it’s a prerequisite as you learn how to do the job well. So much of service work is about listening to people, but also anticipating their needs based on what you are observing. A good bartender is always observing a room to determine an appropriate order of operations. What needs to be done right now? What can wait? Which people are low on drinks and food? Which people appear ready to pay their tab and leave? Does that new customer who just walked in look like they need help? Does that person who just walked in look like they’re about to do something untoward? When you’re assessing stuff all the time, you develop a talent for noticing subtleties about behavior and quickly evaluating what you observe.
Q. Can you tell us about your favorite regular from when you were a bartender? What made them stand out?
A. So many favorites. But if I had to pick one, I’d say Bill. He was just a genuinely nice man who I actually became friends with outside of the typical customer/worker relationship, and that’s pretty rare. He came to my family events and to my band’s record release party. He was super kind, and he was well known and had a lot of people who loved him in the service industry in Seattle. Bill unfortunately passed away recently, I’m sorry to say. May he rest in peace.
Q. From your perspective as a fellow member of the service industry, how would you say your interactions with sex workers have changed over the years?
A. Since leaving the service industry, I certainly don’t encounter them in the same ways I used to when I worked in bars and restaurants. However, once in a while, I still observe sex workers doing their thing in the world. I would say that my perspective on them and what they do is just that I see them as human beings providing a service, which I think is a basic level of respect that is often absent in the common public perception and discourse.
Q. Your narrator in “The Unseen” gives some great examples of how the hotel and its bar staff did favors for and let certain interactions slide from sex workers, like Vee. What were some of the ways the sex workers you encountered gave back to the hotel and its staff? What were some of the ways they benefited the business in kind?
A. Vee and other regulars like her were really just genuinely kind people. Many of them also had other jobs working as bartenders, servers, hosts, etc., so they also understood our jobs on a level that your standard regular doesn’t, which means that they sympathized and were patient and also tipped very well. Having people around like that is such a blessing, particularly when things get really busy and customers can become impatient or rude.
What other working-class creative nonfiction examples helped you craft “The Unseen?” Or what memoirs/essays have you read recently that helped you develop the voice for your own work here?
A. I would say that I certainly draw from Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, though I am taking the perspective of the “front of the house” rather than the “back of the house.” Many of his insights about restaurant and bar culture were an inspiration to me, particularly when I was still in that life and working behind the bar. His book inspired me to write about my own experiences. Aside from that, I take inspiration stylistically from Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. He just has such an intentional but free-flowing sort of approach to telling his story from essay to essay, section to section in that book, and a lot of the essays that I’ve written about bartending and the service industry possess a similar mercuriality: they can often change tone, length, format, etc., depending on any specific thing.
