I’ve been a morning person ever since I stopped waiting tables. Even then, I was still a morning person, but sometimes spent extra time in bed feeling guilty, unless I was hung over or just too exhausted to get up.
Sundays were one of my favorite days when I lived in Brooklyn. I’d work on Bleecker Street on Saturday nights tending to ‘bridge and tunnelers,’ borough folk, and a few locals who’d take their spots at the bar. The staff was all women, we’d wear mini-skirts (the only dress code) of various types and styles, and service those who came to hear quiet notables play Jazz piano. We’d sit near the customers sometimes, and could wait tables with cigarettes hanging out of our mouths. I loved it there. I wore a sensible polka-dotted mini, being as I was a country-bumpkin with thick eyebrows and nervous smoking habit.
Photo courtesy of Carolyn K. The corner of Bleecker & LaGuardia place.
Late Saturday nights, the newsstand on Sullivan (or was it MacDougal?) Street would get their shipment of the Sunday New York Times. I’d get out of work around 4:00am, take a short walk to get one of the first copies released and headed home.
Sunday mornings, I’d sit up in bed, smoking and and ashing out on the stove top just over the half-wall from my bedroom, reading the paper and feeling cultured and smart. My Brooklyn apartment was tiny and my bed was built up high on milkcrates to be at the level of the wall. I’d drink “southern pecan” coffee from the middle-eastern market on Atlantic Avenue. I didn’t pressure myself to make art on Sundays.
This was part of my life in the city. I loved it, until I was lonely. After my job ended, I walked and walked and walked, visited libraries and listened to Bach and WNYC. The best Sundays, when I worked “slinging hash and beer” as Tom O’Brien said, I went back into work at noon to reconstitute “New York’s Corner of Walk and Don’t Walk.” The smell of stale beer and frat boy barf was pretty strong on Bleecker Street, but hoses and street sweepers were out and the morning staff was receiving liquor shipments and generally making the place decent again. Dean would receive our liquor shipment and stash it through the bulkhead and behind a locked cage. Dean was rough and funny. She was uncomfortable with the rest of us “show girls” up top.
Yeah, Sundays were great. We’d set up while listening to America, or maybe some Jazz Standards would play, and we’d laugh and giggle and let non-customers use the bathroom, sometimes…
