[Nfbf-l] A Friday Night of Bartending, Without the Lights

[Alan Dicey]

Dear Friends,
During the last couple of years of my 25 years of Career employment, right 
before I took a Disability Pension, because I was "Legally Blind with RP,  I 
remember lots of fellow employees at my office, a large fortune 500 company 
Corporate Headquarters Office,  continuously asking me why I did not go to 
the Fridays "Happy Hour parties they had, well, almost every Friday" with 
the large crowd that went.
Well, I tried to go a few times, and it turned  out  to be a perfect night 
mare!
The article below is very good, and the author speaks of the darkness in a 
bar, or lounge, however, I did not see anything written  about the loud 
music, which of course makes being Blind even worse, as you simply have 
nothing then.
With Best Regards,
God Bless,
Alan
Plantation, Florida


A Friday Night of Bartending, Without the Lights
By NICOLE C. KEAR
APRIL 26, 2014
It took me an hour to decide what to wear to my first shift at the Village 
Idiot.
I knew that the clothes should be tight, and I knew, too, what specific 
strain of sexy was called for - namely, the "I know jujitsu so don't get too 
handsy" variety.
It was the summer of 1999. I was 22 and had been acting Off Off Broadway 
since I graduated from college and moved back to my native New York, so 
there was no shortage of possibilities in my closet. I settled on an 
electric blue tank top with a roller-derby logo on the front and faux 
snakeskin pants. I stuck a few butterfly clips in my hair and was nearly 
ready. The thing that stumped me was the footwear.
I'd seen the bartenders dancing atop the bar when I dropped off my résumé on 
a weekend afternoon, and every single one of them was in heels. There was no 
substitute for the sound that heels made striking the wood, or the look of a 
leg set on tiptoes.
This made it hard for me to pass over the pumps in my closet in favor of the 
steel-toe Doc Martens, but I did. Bartending blind would be hard enough in 
flats.
I was 19 when I learned I had retinitis pigmentosa , a degenerative disease 
that was starting to wipe out my nighttime and peripheral vision. The 
diagnosis came at a fortunate time, the doctor said, because I hadn't yet 
settled on a career. "You probably don't want to be a heart surgeon or a jet 
pilot," he clarified. He didn't say a thing about bartending in the 
meatpacking district.
The Village Idiot was an urban saloon, complete with $5 pitchers, 
wagon-wheel décor and bras dangling from the ceiling. Part of the reason 
that the joint was mobbed come Friday night was that you could get 
obliterated for under $20.
But the big draw was the bartenders. Wearing midriff-baring tanks and "Dukes 
of Hazzard" short shorts, the 20-something women behind the bar could 
outdrink linebackers, slamming down shot after shot with defiance, pausing 
only to light someone's drink on fire.
Then there was the dancing on the bar, which started up whenever the fancy 
struck, and each and every time someone played "The Devil Went Down to 
Georgia."
When I got the chance to join this band of barkeeps, I was thrilled. First, 
I needed the money. Performing Shakespeare in junkyards on Stanton Street 
was edifying but not lucrative, and in order to pay expenses, including my 
share of the rent in a railroad apartment in Brooklyn, I was working a slew 
of part-time gigs. One was bartending four nights a week at Brewsky's, a 
beer bar in the East Village.
I liked working at Brewsky's; it was so small and the clientele so tame that 
I could work alone and keep all the tips. But there wasn't much to keep; the 
closest that Brewsky's got to crowded was on weekend nights for an hour or 
two. I could easily make double the tips at the Idiot, and I figured that I 
could earn enough in two or three shifts to cover rent and expenses.
But apart from the money, I was excited that I'd been deemed tough enough, 
hot enough and capable enough to command a stretch of its infamous bar. My 
vision loss had been gradual in the three years since my diagnosis and, for 
the most part, I didn't look impaired. Yet my vision was at its absolute 
worst in low light, where my night blindness and tunnel vision conspired to 
make accidents unavoidable. (After I reached 30, the disease began to attack 
my central vision, clouding it over with cataracts, erasing depth perception 
and bringing on color blindness.)
There'd been minor but frequent mishaps at Brewsky's - twisting an ankle 
when I missed a stair, knocking over glasses, struggling to find the light 
switch in the bathroom.
I had a moment's hesitation before accepting the trial shift at the Idiot, 
but I reminded myself that everyone knocks over a glass from time to time.
So as I laced up my Doc Martens for my first night, I thought I'd be able to 
handle a little dancing on the bar. My step was steady at 4 p.m. as I walked 
in; to my great relief, the bar was flooded with sunlight. I was greeted by 
the manager for my "training," which consisted of one piece of information 
and one piece of advice: "The girls pool tips" and "Don't say no when a 
customer buys you a drink."
Presumably ready, I was put behind the bar with the three other longhaired 
girls on duty. They barely bothered to look in my direction. There was no 
"Hey, I'm Georgia, but they call me Peach," the way I'd imagined. My smiles 
were met with stares that clearly said: "This isn't Hooters. Stop acting 
like a moron."
The merciful summer sun lingered, and I managed competently enough so long 
as it kept the bar bright. But when it set, about 8:30 p.m., two unfortunate 
circumstances unfolded simultaneously: The mass of customers tripled, and 
darkness moved in.
The dark I see is different from other people's dark; it has a few extra 
layers.
If I had to guess, I'd speculate that it's what other people would see if 
they wore sunglasses at night. Because I have tunnel vision to contend with, 
too, it takes me a long time to discern objects in dim places, and details 
are wiped out.
The darker it is, the less I can see. And the Idiot was much darker than 
Brewsky's, where patrons needed to read the labels on their $10 beers. The 
Idiot's was a kind of dark reserved for establishments that rely on 
customers who make really bad decisions.
The challenges I faced were myriad. First, I had to remember how you made a 
Redheaded Slut or a Screaming Orgasm. Then I had to struggle to read the 
labels on the bottles I could only guess that I needed. Finding the face 
that ordered a particular drink five minutes ago, among the horde of sweaty 
faces, was tough, too.
The big problem, though, wasn't how I was making my drinks but how I was 
interfering with the other girls making theirs. Every time I turned around, 
I'd bump into somebody's elbow or shoulder or face - and, occasionally, I'd 
jostle the bottle or tray of drinks she was holding. I was stunned by the 
speed and accuracy with which these women poured drinks; it was as if they 
had eight arms each, like Hindu goddesses - and these arms darted in and out 
of the black holes of my peripheral vision, making it impossible for me to 
avoid a collision. That was when the bartenders started talking to me: "What 
the hell - you blind?"
It was a rhetorical question, of course, and didn't really warrant the 
hysterical laugh I gave in a desperate attempt to show that I got the joke 
and understood how ridiculous it would be for a blind person to tend bar at 
one of New York's busiest hot spots on a Friday night.
By 10 p.m., I tried to do as little as possible while looking as if I were 
very busy. I wiped the counter with great purpose, in tiny circles so as not 
to knock over nearby glasses and beer cans. Every time I sneaked over to the 
one well-lit corner of the bar to check my watch, I nearly burst into tears. 
The hours were not passing.
The silver lining of my incompetence was that I lost the privilege of 
dancing on the bar. If I could break a half-dozen glasses with my feet on 
the ground, imagine what damage I'd do up there.
It was my first, and last, shift. Nobody ever fired me. They just never 
called again.
Which came as an enormous relief, though not without a certain sting. I'd 
found another occupation to add to the list of those not recommended for the 
blind, or soon-to-be blind, and I had the distinct feeling that I'd stumble 
upon a few more before the lights went out.
On the bright side, I hadn't broken a single limb. Which meant I could make 
it to my next shift at Brewsky's, where the drunks were polite, the pitfalls 
familiar, and the lighting just the right kind of dark.
NICOLE C. KEAR is author of the forthcoming memoir "Now I See You" (St. 
Martin's Press).
A version of this article appears in print on April 27, 2014, on page BU8 of 
the New York edition with the headline: A Friday Night, Without the Lights.
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