Rebecca Tiger

Word Count 538

Maison Bourbon in New Orleans, 1992. I was new. Farina, the seasoned cocktail waitress, taught me how to flirt for tips, spill drinks on asshole customers, divert the advances of our troll-like manager without getting fired, and escape out the back if cops raided the place. I lasted four months. She might still be there.

Farina was moving away from beautiful, but she had a ritual. All the jazz musicians new to town had to fuck her. Including my boyfriend, Tim, a sousaphone player. “What choice did I have?” Platinum blonde and glamorous, she wore blue-green contacts that made her look like a Persian Marilyn Munroe. When I met her, things were fading, like an apartment that looks lovely, the sunlight streaming in, but then you see the stains on the ceiling from water damage, decades of dirt caked into the floorboards. “She’s my friend!” I halfheartedly chided Tim. I understood her allure.

Farina drank a lot and smoked too much. One night, she showed up at Snug Harbor with two younger men, customers she met at work, to see our friend Brian play guitar. One had his arms around her, his hand cupping her left breast, while she kissed the other, their tongues intertwined serpents. The waitress brought shots of Jägermeister to the table. Just one block outside of the French Quarter, talented musicians perform in the soft light of this club, unlike the old drunk guys in stained polyester tuxes playing “When the Saints Go Marching in” to the hurricane-sodden tourists we served. Farina vomited on the high round table in the balcony. She tried to kiss her companions, but they had moved away from her, their show over. Farina was disoriented; she forgot to grab hold of something solid when she still could. Her dark brown roots are showing through the bleached hair that frizzes, no longer curling.

Farina managed to captivate, even in her decline. One night, a handsome French jazz cornetist with black wavy hair and an aquiline nose sat in with the band. He fell in love with Farina, who explained to me in a whisper as if it were a secret: “He’s a sweetheart, but I’m not the dating type, ya’ know?” On Thanksgiving, double pay almost making up for the Europeans who neither celebrate the day nor tip, the handsome cornetist walked in with a bouquet and a wide grin to pick Farina up for their dinner reservation at Commander’s Palace. Farina blushed at the sight of the roses as she sat down next to him at the bar. Her hands shook slightly as she put a cigarette to her mouth, which he immediately lit.

A voracious reader, Farina spent every break sitting at the bar with a novel in one hand and a cigarette in the other. During a lull in our shift, Farina told me that she had once applied to a writing program in Iowa. She wanted to write a novel about life on Bourbon Street. She was offered a scholarship, which she decided against: “Who needs school when you have real life?” I think Farina stopped writing, though I’m not certain; I can find no traces of her.

Rebecca teaches sociology at Middlebury College and in jails in Vermont. She's written a book and articles about drug policy, addiction and celebrity. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Bending Genres, BULL, Emerge Literary, Mom Egg Review, Peatsmoke, Tiny Molecules and Zig Zag Lit. She divides her time between Vermont and the Lower East Side of NYC and spends a month every summer in Athens and Crete studying Modern Greek and staring at the sea.