When I got a job at a diner, Mother confiscated my first paycheck, dragged me to the bank, and opened a savings account in both our names. For two years of high school and two of community college, I lived at home and waited tables in addition to classes. Each week she whisked my $1.25-an-hour pay into that account. I hated her for it.
My tips, however, were mine to do with as I wished. Diners mostly left nickels and dimes. Finding a dollar bill on a table was a thrill. I frittered this money away on clothes, magazines, and entertainment.
When I was ready to leave for a university to complete my degree, I received an academic scholarship that covered tuition, but I would need to pay for books and living expenses myself. Even working various part-time jobs for up to thirty-eight hours a week, I couldn’t earn enough, no matter how frugal I was. The balance in that savings account Mother had made me open covered the difference. I loved her for it.
I became the first in my family to graduate from college, then went on to get a master’s degree. I’m now retired after teaching for thirty years. I still wonder if she knew about my tips.
A.R.
Everett, Washington
I thought very little about what it would mean to put my phone number as the tip line on the missing-person flyer; it was just the simplest choice, and we generally agreed the flyer should be created quickly, as time was of the essence if we wanted to find our relative. We distributed fifteen hundred copies within a five-mile radius of where she’d last been seen. The story made its way across social media, and the local news did a piece on it. Two days in, my phone number had already traveled far and wide.
Many callers assumed I was her mother. There was no point in correcting them, so I just listened to what they said: She’d stopped at a house to use the bathroom, and a kind person had let her in. A former police dispatcher had seen her in a mall parking lot. One woman told me to go “toward the fire,” because the fire was where we’d find her. A gruff-voiced person told me they were certain they’d seen her; when asked to describe who we were looking for, they mumbled something about a reward.
The final tip came from a woman who was at a Little League game in a park in Oakland, California. She was standing across from my relative when she called. I pleaded with the woman calling to take a photo and not let her out of her sight. The photo came shortly after: there she was, holding a paper plate at a tamale cart, a blue surgical mask on her face, shoulders covered in a coarse gray safety blanket.
Anisha Desai
El Cerrito, California
Growing up in a small town in Ohio, I took on a paper route at the age of twelve and began making about five dollars a week. One cold Christmas Eve I was knocking on doors to collect subscription money. It was traditional for subscribers to tip during the holidays.
With my bag full of papers slung across my body, I carefully made my way up an icy walk to a double-wide. The guy who answered my knock looked like he’d been sleeping off a hangover. I told him he owed fifty-seven cents. He gave me sixty—then stood there waiting for his change.
I took the gloves from my half-frozen fingers and fished around in my pocket while he waited. I could find only two pennies, which I put in his hand. After we stood in silence a few moments, I told him that, sadly, I didn’t have the third penny. He thought for a minute, then said, “That’s OK, kid. Merry Christmas!” and slammed the door.
After that, his newspaper found its way into the bushes or onto the roof.
Patrick Tehan
Cincinnati, Ohio
The summer after my freshman year in college, I returned to the sleepy beach town of Half Moon Bay, California, to live with my dad and his new wife. I didn’t think I could go back to school in rural Minnesota; it was so different from California, and since my mom had died two summers prior, I’d struggled to fit in anywhere. I got a job waiting tables at a French bistro, planning to save up enough to study abroad through the local community college.
Near the end of that summer I served my biggest party yet—about fifteen people who were celebrating with pricey wine and extravagant orders. Their bill included an 18 percent gratuity, standard on all parties of six or more, but they also gave me an additional hundred-dollar tip. As we closed out for the night, my boss told me the hundred was an error; the customers must not have known we’d already included the tip. She kept the extra money. I didn’t fight back, but I also didn’t return for my next shift, or ever again.
I did make it abroad that fall, where I experienced some food insecurity and occasionally thought of that hundred dollars. More than anything, the encounter shaped how I saw bosses. I’ve been a union worker for the past dozen years, walking picket lines and organizing my workplaces. I’m not a natural leader, but I get fired up when taking action against an employer.
I recently googled the café where I worked (closed) and my old boss, who died last year. I’m sure she never gave a second thought to that tip she stole, but I wish she knew I’m making exploitation difficult for every boss I can.
Molly O’Meara
Minneapolis, Minnesota
I started stripping in my twenties for many reasons: To take myself up on a dare. To get a closer look at a strong social taboo. To prove to myself I was physically desirable. To share intimacy with people without having sex with them. To get paid.
I danced on and off for three years. I expected the other dancers would be intimidating, territorial, and cold. I wasn’t entirely wrong, but they surprised me by more often being funny and generous. I spent many slow nights in the dressing room, swapping stories and strategies with them.
I never was amazing at pole tricks, but I had some admirers, and on my best nights I could clear a thousand dollars. One of my favorite memories was glancing at myself in a full-length mirror, looking sexy and confident in the dim red light, as bills accrued around my body.
I’m now a middle-aged mom who wears overalls with her kid’s boogers on them. When I manage to coax my sexuality out after a day of making snacks and changing diapers, I remember the best tips I ever got at the club were not from the men, but from another stripper, Starlight, on my first night:
1. Move very, very slow.
2. Always point your toes.
3. Toilet paper crumbs glow under the black lights, so use baby wipes after bathroom visits.
Luckily I’ve still got plenty of those around.
Name Withheld
While shopping in a bargain store, sorting through a bin of three-dollar clothing, I got a call from a number with an Atlanta area code. I abandoned my cart and ran to the dressing room, where it was quieter. The job offer was the best I could’ve hoped for as a recent college graduate. I mumbled an excited yes, hung up, and left without buying anything. Maybe soon I could afford something full price.
With the fifty-week-per-year travel schedule at my new job, I mastered the ability to fall asleep before takeoff and wake as the wheels touched down. The sixteen-hour days blurred together, and I became two people. One wore stilettos while flouncing through the streets of Manhattan or digging the team’s rental car out of four feet of snow in Michigan. The second wore flip-flops while drinking discount wine with her boyfriend on their apartment balcony in Atlanta.
As Christmas approached, an admin cautioned me against bringing my boyfriend to the holiday party. I told her we’d been together for years; he’d moved with me to Atlanta to start a new life together.
“Look,” she said. “You could pass for white and something. People don’t know what your race is. They see you, and they let you in. If you bring your Black boyfriend with dreadlocks, no matter what he means to you, you’ll wear your otherness from then on.”
My stomach tightened as I considered the advice of this Black woman who’d been with the firm many years. What could her intentions have been other than to help?
My boyfriend was fine not to go. Socializing with a bunch of people he didn’t know wasn’t his idea of a great Saturday night. Maybe the decision hurt him, but we made it together. As a young woman trying to get ahead in the corporate world, I left half of myself at home and stepped into the twinkling lights of the holiday party in my $500 shoes. Twenty years later, I still reflect on the price I paid.
Sabrina Sahib
Huntsville, Alabama
Fourteen years ago at the restaurant where I worked, two young men came in, sat at one of my tables, and ordered burgers and beer.
“How’s everything tasting?” I asked after they’d gotten their meals.
“Food is good. What happened?” one of them asked, eyeing my swollen cheek.
“Oh, this?” I chuckled. “It’s nothing. Got my wisdom teeth out this morning.”
“And you’re working?” the other said, raising his eyebrows.
“Got to pay rent,” I replied, curling up one side of my mouth with difficulty. I’d learned that if I smiled, people pried less. They saw a sociable college cheerleader excelling in her studies, but no one knew what was happening on the inside. These two didn’t want to hear that I hadn’t taken any pain medication so I could drive two hours to work. “Anything else I can get you guys?”
“Another round and then the check.”
I returned to the bar, filled two icy mugs, and dropped them at their table. After they left, I piled their dishes on one hand and grabbed the black check folder with the other. Behind the bar I slid the dishes into the bins and flipped the folder open. My eyes widened at the three-figure tip inside.
Little did they know how much they’d helped me. My father had recently lost his job and become guardian of two toddlers, so he no longer had the means to help me with rent or tuition. Meanwhile I was trying to ride the waves of a new autoimmune diagnosis, and I had no health insurance to cover the expensive medication. Looking down at what they’d left me, I knew I’d get through that month.
Claire Wells
Lake Stevens, Washington
I used to work as a deckhand on a private fishing charter out of Seward, Alaska. We’d take ten strangers in search of halibut, salmon, or lingcod, passing fog-enshrouded cliffs in Resurrection Bay and sometimes fishing near pods of orcas that circled the boat in shallow water. At the end of each day, the captain and I would count our tips and split them fifty-fifty—unless one of us called “pockets.” This declaration was a bet that you’d received more. If the other accepted the bet, whoever had the most took everything.
For much of the summer I was too tired to gamble. My hands were cut, my body and mind exhausted. I also endured weekly hazing from another captain who stole my knives and reels, stuffed my mattress in a closet with dirty fishing gear, threatened to orchestrate fights between me and rival deckhands, and accused me of sabotaging a diesel engine to get a few days off—a tragedy that set the owner back an entire season’s profits.
Despite these headwinds I loved the job, and its sublime moments when a halibut the size of a barn door was on the end of a customer’s line, and the customer just couldn’t wait to get back to the dock to tell his dad. After one such day, feeling full of gusto and cash, I called “pockets.”
“You sure?” the captain asked.
“Hell yeah, I’m sure.” I’d collected $600 in tips that day, by far my record. He agreed, and I watched in disbelief as he counted out $740 from his own pocket. Gutted, I handed mine over. He said, “See you tomorrow. Have fun cleaning the boat.”
Byron Rath
Durham, North Carolina
My family used to go for pie and coffee at a twenty-four-hour truck stop just down the road from our house in Arkansas. I got a job there when I was thirteen. Too young to work legally, I was paid under the table to wash dishes, make sweet tea, slice pies, and perform other odd tasks to help the waitresses, whom I watched closely and found glamorous: the way they swept around the room with a coffeepot and responded to the male customers with just the right amount of sass. I didn’t have their grace, but I thought if I could master it, I could do anything. Sometimes, if I was especially helpful, they’d pull a few crumpled, greasy bills from their aprons to supplement my earnings with their tips.
Later in life I worked my way through college as a server. I made good money but eventually found myself disgusted by what that required. Women often tipped well enough if you were simply efficient, but getting a good tip from a man meant doing what I now understood those Arkansas ladies had been doing: using sexually infused charm to make him think I liked him.
Julie Moronuki
Ronan, Montana
In 1980 I was an impressionable college student who’d go to lectures by visiting scholars anytime a teacher recommended them. One day a professor announced that an Argentine author I’d never heard of was giving a talk, and I decided to go.
The hall was packed, but somehow I found a seat just a few rows from the front. After the introduction, an old man in a gray suit came out onstage. He used a cane and appeared to be blind. “Call me Borges,” he said in a small roar that seemed to charm the audience. I liked him immediately.
At the end of his lecture a moderator asked if anyone had any questions. Normally I wouldn’t embarrass myself, but something made me stand up and ask: “How does one become a writer?” At this point, being a writer was not something I’d imagined, but a single hour listening to Borges had kindled a fire in me.
I imagine he could hear the inexperience behind my question. He replied, as if giving me a blessing, “One must read.”
Only years later did I read one of his stories and realize Jorge Luis Borges’s legendary stature. Had I known how important he was, I might never have dared ask his advice.
Cynthia Adam Prochaska
Pasadena, California
Several years ago I got a gig playing a wedding reception at a catering hall. Ten of us worked hard for five hours, performing great music. As we packed up at the end of the gig, I saw the father of the bride hand the bandleader a wad of cash. When the bandleader returned to the bandstand, I said, “Great, we got a tip.”
“Yeah, but it’s so small I wouldn’t know how to split it.”
Puzzled, I finished packing up my gear. When I was about to leave, the bandleader palmed me twenty dollars and said, “Here. Don’t tell anyone.”
Driving home, I weighed my options. Though I’d taken the money, I didn’t want to be beholden to his conditions. I didn’t know what to do.
A night’s sleep granted clarity. I put the twenty dollars in an envelope addressed to the bandleader, along with a note that read, “If the other musicians have not shared in the tip, then I don’t want any of it either.”
He’s never asked me to work for him again.
Ken Rizzo
New York, New York
I used to waitress a lot. I married ketchup and mustard bottles, and salt and pepper shakers. I refilled sugar ramekins, rolled napkins, and hit a thousand coffee filters against my thigh to separate them. And everywhere I went, I paid for things with ones.
As a single mom I saved for months to afford a weeklong road trip to New Mexico the summer before my son started kindergarten. I’d shove the ones I got in tips into an old Folgers can. “How many bucks we got today, Mommy?” he’d ask. We’d count together, the musty smell of money and coffee on our fingers.
On that road trip we rolled down the windows and let the desert sage and heat fill the cab of our truck. We ate gas station snacks and drank Big Gulps with extra ice. We hiked Red Rocks, accepted sandwiches from a woman behind the desk of our motel, and got giant ice-cream cones from the only shop in Jerome, Arizona. My son waved at truck drivers and hung his sticky fingers out the window, making loop-de-loops with his hand in the wind.
Later I waited tables and worked at a coffee shop while attending community college. I would open the coffee shop at 3:45 AM, mop the floor, wipe the tables, and get the brewers going. I smiled when customers asked if I was stupid or complained that their cappuccino wasn’t dry enough or their white chocolate mocha was 180 degrees and not 185. I’d take those dollar bills, too, and stuff them in the same coffee can—but they never stayed there for long. We needed them.
Jessica Danger
San Clemente, California
I once worked as a chef on a yacht in Alaska. It was gratifying to see the beauty of unspoiled nature, but at the end of a long season I was ready to go home. I packed my bag, including a nice stash of tip money that I’d earmarked for a trip to India the following month.
I’d been home only a few days when I noticed my beloved orange tabby, Cracker, slinking around the backyard, not responding to my calls. A neighbor and I took him to the vet, where they said Cracker had a shattered back leg. The surgery to repair it would be expensive; the alternative would be to put Cracker down. He was only a year old. The vet encouraged me to choose the surgery.
As a yogi who’d taken a vow to preserve life, I couldn’t let Cracker die. I gathered all my tip money and returned to the vet. It was a complicated procedure, and my cat spent three days there before I could bring him home.
For three months after that Cracker meowed incessantly from his crate, but he healed beautifully. Fourteen years later, he’s purring like a kitten while lying in a sunbeam on the floor, that long-ago tip money well spent.
Stacey Williams
Winthrop, Washington
When asked if I have children, I usually say, “We’ve tried for years, and it hasn’t been in the cards.”
The inquisitor often forges ahead with “You know what you should do?”
For the first few years I’d listen with a glimmer of hope that somehow this stranger was the key to unlocking infertility. I don’t any longer. Occasionally women will explain the ovulation window and how, after learning to track it, they got pregnant right away. Others share foods to eat or supplements to take: “I ate bananas daily for six months straight.” “Geritol, it’s a miracle vitamin.” “Keep your feet warm during your ovulation window.”
A surprising number of people who have no experience with adoption jump directly to recommending it. Once, a relative suggested I book an expensive, nonrefundable trip as a sort of Murphy’s Law method, guaranteeing I’d get pregnant and wouldn’t be able to go. By far the most common tip is “Just relax.” This one stings. It suggests I’m to blame. If only I took deep breaths or a nap or a beach vacation—all of which I’ve tried—this dark period would have ended years ago.
Strangers usually end with “Keep trying. It will all be worth it when you hold your bundle of joy.” Or: “There really is nothing like being a parent.” These statements assume my only option is to continue this journey—that there’s no point at which my diminishing physical and mental health should be weighed against the diminishing possibility of parenthood.
To make infertility bearable, I repeat my mantras: “I am valuable with or without children. I choose to have a full life no matter what comes.”
Emily R.
Mississippi
When my three regular online Scrabble opponents weren’t making moves often enough, I started accepting the random challenges at the bottom of my screen. Eventually I stumbled across a woman who was neither a bot nor a scammer—just another addict like me.
I tried to keep my competitiveness in check, but losing to her over and over got under my skin. I initially ascribed it to a lucky streak: she always seemed to draw the crucial blank tiles. Though I waited for our luck to even out, it never did. I might win a game or two, but then she’d beat me nine in a row, frequently playing “bingos”—words that used all seven letters, resulting in fifty-point bonuses.
We developed a nice rapport in the chat feature, often engaging in good-natured trash talk. A few months ago, however, she made a perplexing comment. After playing a bingo to cement an unlikely comeback win, she mentioned she’d used the binoculars “boost” to come up with the unusual word. “But it was worth it!” she wrote with a grinning emoji.
I had no idea what the “boost” was. She explained that if you click on the binoculars icon, it highlights in green the spaces for all possible words, given the letters in your rack. The highest-scoring space highlights in purple. All you have to do is try every letter combination in the purple space until you hit on a word that the computer accepts.
She was incredulous that I wasn’t aware such a tool existed and had assumed that, like her, I’d been using it all along. Maybe she wasn’t the better player after all, she said. Although I had no intention of clicking on the binoculars, I assured her she had every right to use whatever tools the game made available.
The specter of the binoculars hung over our games, though. Every time she played a bingo, I wondered if she’d found it on her own—though I never asked or even insinuated. Then, one game, she admitted she’d used the binoculars to win. “It doesn’t really count,” she lamented.
We soon transitioned to a version of the game without any so-called boosts. Finally we would meet on a level playing field. It’s been three months, and she still kicks my ass.
Scott Fleming
Eugene, Oregon
When I got a job serving lunch at the Hyatt Regency in San Franciso, they warned me not to expect the same tips I’d made working nights in other places. In the late 1970s people usually tipped 10 percent at dinner, but not as generously during midday. Still, I liked serving tourists and suburban families in town to shop.
Businessmen from nearby banks and high-rises sometimes held lunch meetings at the Hyatt and lingered to drink, network, and negotiate deals. Those who left early would leave money on the table for their share of the tab. Whoever left last would often pay with a credit card and scoop up most of the cash.
Around that time the US Mint began producing a dollar coin honoring suffragist Susan B. Anthony. I heard all about the hassle these coins caused. Not only were vending machines spitting them back, but they were often confused with quarters because they were only slightly bigger.
When asked what I thought of the new coins, I’d smile and say they were cool. This mostly brought jeers and remarks about the diminutive “chick change,” to which I’d shrug. To the men who wanted to hear more, I’d say that, thanks to Anthony, I could vote. I would tell them that this early feminist icon had been pulled from public school when her radical Quaker father learned girls wouldn’t be taught long division. She collected antislavery petitions and, in her fifties, was arrested after casting a vote illegally.
In exchange for these facts, the businessmen would sometimes empty their pockets of “Sue’s bits,” and whoever paid the final check usually left them scattered on the table.
Marie-Elise Wheatwind
Portland, Oregon
Growing up, I didn’t hear from my mother about how to get a boy to like me, fun ways to style my hair, or how to remove grass stains from white pants. So I found it curious when, in her nineties, she started mailing me newspaper clippings full of do’s, don’ts, and how-to’s. “Fight back against identity theft!” one headline screamed. “Rake safely!” another warned. I was instructed to zap zits the right way, check my tire treads, and avoid gastrointestinal distress—ironically tucked into an envelope with “Go ahead, eat chocolate; no guilt necessary!”
When I called her, the first thing she’d ask was “Did you get my envelope?” I’d tell her yes, a bit hastily, before stuffing the clippings under a pile of papers. I never had the heart to ask her to stop sending them.
Eventually I wondered: Was this her way of trying to cram in everything she never told me? I mostly rolled my eyes, but after a while, picturing my mother with her scissors and the Daily News, I began to think of these articles as signs that she cared.
She passed away eight years ago. The yellowed clippings are long gone. Now I’m the one sharing tips with my grown daughter through email, text, and direct messages. I like to think it takes some time before they end up in the digital trash. Or maybe they’ll float in the Cloud, available forever.
Tina Lincer
Loudonville, New York
Trying to earn enough money to return to college and support my baby daughter, I took a job at a steak house where the waitresses wore white cowboy boots, orange plastic cowboy vests, and short skirts with white plastic fringe. (It was 1970.) When the hostess showed customers to their tables, she’d shoot her cap pistol and announce the name of the “cowgirl” who was serving them.
My cowgirl name was Marcia Dillon, a nod to Gunsmoke’s Marshal Dillon. One day two men came in at the end of lunch service, when everyone was eager to get home. None of the waitresses wanted to serve them. They looked dirty and ratty, like they probably didn’t have enough money to tip. I offered to do it so the others could leave. The men ordered a couple of burgers with fries and chatted amiably with me. When they paid their bill, they included a twenty-dollar tip—more than twice the cost of their order.
Those men were more than their appearance, just as I was more than a girl in an orange plastic getup.
Marcia Belcheir
Boise, Idaho
At eleven years old, my father worked for the super of the five-story walk-up next to his family’s apartment in the Bronx. For twenty-five cents a week he mopped, took out the garbage, and, during the winter, shoveled ashes from the furnace. My father would give his pay to my grandmother, who would, depending on the family’s finances, give him a nickel to spend as he pleased. This was back when movies cost a nickel.
I was eleven when I first heard this story, and my older brothers were twelve and thirteen. Immediately after telling the tale, our parents dropped a bombshell: We would now be required to hand over 25 percent of whatever we earned to “the house,” noting this was generous compared to our father’s arrangement.
Even though I was too young to legally work at the time, I had a job delivering the New York Daily News. I immediately objected, protesting that my older brothers hadn’t had to sacrifice when they were eleven, so I shouldn’t have to either. My father, never one to be cowed by reason, said he’d made a mistake by not starting earlier with my brothers. The new requirement would take effect immediately.
A few years later I inherited a job my oldest brother had just left, helping deliver and assemble dinette sets for a furniture store. The salary was twenty dollars a day plus the tips my hippie supervisor shared with me. I went home that day with forty dollars in my pocket and turned over the requisite 25 percent to my mom.
That night after dinner, my brother cornered me and snarled, “Why’d you give ’em ten bucks?” It turned out he wasn’t declaring his tips.
William Fitzpatrick
Brooklyn, New York
When my husband and I found out we were having a baby, everyone gave us advice: Don’t tell anyone until later. Tell your mom now—she’s going to be so excited! You should have been on the wait list for a day care before you even started trying to get pregnant. Stay home with the kid—it’s what’s best. Dad should read to your tummy so the baby will recognize his voice. Don’t nag your husband; he’s not a dad until the baby’s born. Read up on circumcision; don’t just do what you think is socially acceptable.
We’ve learned to tune it out, but I have a feeling that, in a couple of years, we’ll happily share some tips of our own.
Grace Wood
Durango, Colorado
A scoop of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream costs $4.95—or, at least, it did when I worked there as a teenager in 2016. If you wanted a waffle cone, it was a dollar extra.
The waffle-cone presses sat on the counter in front of the customers—a brilliant business strategy, since almost everyone commented on how good they smelled. I upsold the hell out of them because if the customer paid with a five-dollar bill, an order of $4.95 left them only a nickel to tip, but if it was $5.95 and they paid with a ten or a twenty, their change would include a few one-dollar bills. Nobody wants to be the asshole who tips a nickel after you hand them a few bills.
I got that job so I wouldn’t have to ask my divorced parents for money. I went to school with some of the wealthiest kids in Portland, Oregon, many of whom carried their parents’ credit cards. My mother gave my sister and me each a monthly fifty-dollar allowance—chump change to my friends. That was all we had for shopping, eating out, and illegally buying alcohol.
One disorienting part of having divorced parents is how you live part-time at each house. My mom worked to cover the cost of our food, clothes, and extracurriculars like dance or soccer, but my dad had virtually no income for about seven years after the divorce. Instead of getting a job, he applied to graduate school for nursing. I assume his parents paid for it. After a year, he decided he didn’t like it and went to school for marriage and family counseling instead, graduating just before I turned seventeen.
My mom’s house had a stocked fridge and a full pantry. At my dad’s I had to learn to cook beans and rice if I wanted to eat. If I wanted to hang out with friends, I invited them over while I was at my mom’s. Every time I asked my dad for something, he fired off a bunch of questions and implied I didn’t really need whatever it was. Eventually I stopped asking. Making my own money was the only way I could live with him without resenting him.
I’ve thought about confessing my feelings to my dad, but I never have. He runs a private therapy practice now, and I handle his client billing and file insurance claims. He pays me more than he should and occasionally offers me money for no reason. I know he’s trying to make up for the years of financial instability, even though he’s never apologized. I take the money when he gives it.
Name Withheld
Having been fired from my last restaurant job after consistently showing up to work stoned, I became convinced that, as an artist hippie weirdo with a shaved head and thrift-store clothes, I’d never hold down a job. I spent days wallowing in despair, and strongly considered ending my life.
My best friend and I stumbled into the storefront of a spa after responding to a classified ad. We were immediately immersed in an innocuous-looking lobby with Enya soaring in the background and vanilla-scented candles on display. The boss sat us down and explained we could make up to two grand in cash per week giving light-touch massages while wearing lingerie. Naive and financially desperate, we took the jobs on the spot and laughed later at the inconceivable notion of making that much money in a week. Neither of us had ever given a massage before.
Clients would enter the lobby, Sade crooning in the background, and the women on shift would present themselves to be chosen. Clients would pay for their service at the door; we’d be given half of the door fee, and the rest of our income would come from tips.
On my first day I made several hundred dollars in cash. My very first client was a Middle Eastern businessman who glided in wearing a suit, had a hard-edged, stressed-out personality, and transformed into a big baby, naked and convulsing in my hands, after demanding a happy ending. It didn’t take us long to realize we’d landed in a brothel. I called it the Phallus Palace.
My eight months at the Phallus Palace were among the most difficult I’ve experienced in all my years in the sex work industry. The clients routinely pressured the women who worked there to see what more they could extract from us: offering tips to get the women to bend, seeing if they’d be willing to give more than happy endings. Many clients were entitled, pushy, borderline abusive, and frequently didn’t respect boundaries. But the money I made there changed my life. I went from destitute to a baller, practically overnight.
I grew my hair out and could buy nice things, but was still a bohemian at heart: sitting in the corner reading Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and Martín Prechtel and dreaming of going on a spiritual pilgrimage. So after I saved up a nest egg, I left the Midwest forever and rediscovered myself in the forests, mountains, and rivers of the Pacific Northwest.
Jade Nectar
Oregon
I met Alex in middle school. She was naive, wild, and promiscuous. I was just naive. Both of us were broke.
When we learned about French acrylic nails, we searched desperately for money to get ours done: in couch cushions, her abusive father’s wallet, her dying mother’s pocketbook. After ten minutes we’d scrounged up thirty-two dollars, enough to cover two manicures.
Alex turned to me. “I don’t have a tip.”
I rubbed the pockets of my jeans, knowing I had no money. “Neither do I.”
We walked to the woods beside the freeway, where teenagers hung out, to look for more. Next to a broken condom and some dog shit, I noticed a porno DVD, and I studied the explicit cover intently, more focused on the DVD than on finding money.
Alex found a total of eighty-five cents, and we walked to the nail salon. After we paid, she threw the change on the counter, and we bolted for the door. I went home and thought about that DVD I’d left in the woods. I knew about masturbation and engaged in it frequently, but that night I learned something new: don’t masturbate with acrylic nails.
Amanda Cartigiano
Rio Rancho, New Mexico
More than twenty years ago I moved from New York City to Maine, where I met my partner, Paul, who makes a living buying and selling country antiques. Early in our relationship he came up with the idea of making Christmas wreaths to sell. We’d have to go “tipping,” he said.
We drove for miles on rutted logging roads into the woods of northern Maine, where we cut and collected the tips of evergreen boughs. They had to be balsam or cedar or white pine, never spruce, as it’s prickly and dries too fast.
I remember the misery of that first expedition: tramping over rugged terrain in the bitter cold, the winter sun hovering just above the horizon. Afraid I’d get lost, I left piles of branches to guide my way back. The woods were thick except where logging had created open spaces, at the edges of which we found full, healthy greenery. After a time I began to think of these open spaces as secret, magic rooms.
Tipping expeditions were a yearly tradition that I came to embrace. I laid my share on an old shower curtain, then tied it up and hoisted it over my shoulder. We filled Paul’s van with the fragrant boughs. Some years the branches were white and lacy with snow. Others it was raining, or the trees were covered with ice. Ironically the most difficult year was when it was sunny and in the fifties, and we sweated as we worked.
Paul makes nearly two hundred wreaths a year. Some he sells to buyers as far away as Texas or the West Coast. I like to think of the branches we collect arriving in their various destinations, bringing holiday cheer.
George H. Jones
Waldoboro, Maine
My regulars, Terry and Kelly, sit at the end of the counter during my early-morning shifts at Otto’s Shipwreck, a trolley-car-turned-diner on Main Street. I don’t start work as early as the clammers and fishermen, who are the first to arrive, but early enough for it to be relatively quiet, the Bunn coffee maker gurgling and the bacon popping.
Some mornings Otto and I bicker. Nobody’s quicker with a sharp retort to a fifty-year-old man’s grumblings than a seventeen-year-old girl. Terry and Kelly laugh. They think I’m a firecracker, popping like the bacon.
I usually work the counter; chatting with regulars is part of the job. My best friends wait tables, and Jen cooks, along with Otto or his sons. Davey or Bubba or Paul are the dish dogs. We all come in hungover and sometimes run to puke in the tiny bathroom. When I’m crying over a breakup, my friends hang a check over the grill that reads, “Dawn S. sucks big hairy rigor mortis moose cock,” to make me feel better. There are often pregnancy scares to talk about, and college admissions. Before prom, we all drive to the diner and have our pictures taken with Otto.
Weekend mornings are a mad rush. Families of five cram into the wooden booths, and the boating family in their Top-Siders and polo shirts ask us to dab the grease off their burgers; we do it, but with deep and abiding disdain.
Terry and Kelly often ask about my life, my grades, everything. They’ve become stand-ins for my absent father. On my eighteenth birthday they give me a pearl-and-gold necklace from the local jeweler. I’ve never received a piece of jewelry like this. I hug them and thank them and put it on.
Dish dog Paul disapproves. In the back, he tells me, “That’s weird. You can’t accept that. You gotta give it back.”
I won’t. It’s the best tip I ever got.
P.K.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
