“Oh, you’re in school, that’s why you’re always reading,” one of my customers said to me a few months ago. “I only read when I’m in jail.”
I’ve been bartending for five years now. Primarily at small, neighborhood dives throughout South Brooklyn. Usually while holding a more normative day job as well—I worked at a letterpress for two years and I’m currently working at a bookstore—but bars have been the constant.
According to a 2015 study from Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, about 40 percent of American undergraduates work at least 30 hours a week while in school and about 25 percent work full-time. Considering the skyrocketing costs of college tuition that’s no surprise, but in a city as expensive as New York students are often forced to go to great lengths to reconcile their work schedule with class.
In a lot of ways, working at bars is great. When I graduate next year I will owe my degree in large part to my motley assortment of regulars. It’s fast money, and if you’re working forty or fifty hours a week and going to school full-time, it allows you to pretend you have a social life because your friends can hang out with you during your shift. But, depending on where you’re working, it can also be incredibly draining.
You get yelled at, you get grabbed and you work for tips so your livelihood is dependent on the whims of drunk people. The New York State tipped minimum wage went up this year to $7.50 from $5, but if you work at a small place that pays off the books, you make a shift pay, colloquially known as ‘shit pay.’ That’s generally about $40 a night. If business is good, you can walk away with $200 after an eight to 12 hour shift. If business is decent, $100. If it’s bad $60.
The way service workers make money has always been a contentious topic. Many are in favor of tipping—arguing that despite its potential votility they make more overall than they would working for an hourly wage. On the customer end, there’s never been a shortage of truly awful young men who believe that if servers are paid a normal, hourly wage they will no longer perform their jobs efficiently. This logic rests on the assumption that servers are inherently lazy and the only way to ensure good service is to essentially hold employees hostage to their customers. Regardless of whether or not tipping should be eliminated entirely, it often sets up an uncomfortable, if not downright exploitative, environment for women and people of color.
Marissa Baca, a senior at Parsons studying Communication Design, worked the two P.M. to 12 A.M. shift at Norbert’s Pizza in Bushwick for three years. “Working with a tip jar was always a gamble,” Baca said. “I would notice that sometimes we would get more tips if I walked into the front more so they saw a woman was making the food. Some people would steal our tip jar and we had to start drilling it into the counter.”
According to Mother Jones, tipping grew in popularity in the mid-1800s because restaurateurs and rail operators looking to cut costs figured they could hire freed slaves to work for tips. Shockingly, it’s still not a particularly reliable source of income. “One time my friend came to visit me at work and she was tripping on mushrooms so she tipped me a fifty,” Baca said. “My coworker and I didn’t know she did it so we were thrilled, but then I got a text [from her] the next day and had to give the fifty back.”
One customer once left me a rusted, gallon-sized can of cheddar cheese sauce as a tip and another tried to pay in fake jewelry. It’s those nights that can really get to you, especially at the end of the month when your rent check is riding on some lunatic who just walked in and ordered a “top shelf” Long Island Iced Tea. In theory you’re there to serve drinks, but in practice you’re there to babysit a crowd of grown men.
The hours can be particularly difficult. Some places will let you close up at two in the morning if no one’s around, but others have a hard close at four, even if that means you’re sitting in there with two guys for the last couple of hours wasting electricity. If you work at a place that expects you to run after hours, every once in awhile that means you’re getting home at around six or seven in the morning and it’s usually not worth it to go to sleep. Even if you set four alarms you’ll sleep through all of them.
I stopped working those shifts because you’re basically just killing yourself at that point and it’s impossible to get any schoolwork done. In the early hours between work and school, you’re in a strange, altered state that’s not exactly conducive to critical thought. I’ve tried writing papers in those hours, but when I read them later they make no sense and I sound somewhat unhinged. “Why are you talking about ISIS here?” One teacher wrote in the margin of an essay I turned in a few years ago. I have no idea why I was talking about ISIS. My schedule’s gotten better over the years, but often times working the night shift leaves you stumbling through your education half-conscious.
Alexandra Antoniou, a sophomore at Eugene Lang studying Journalism and Design, worked the night shift at Brooklyn Bridge Garden Bar in DUMBO as a server and a barback until the restaurant shut down for the Winter in early November.
“I wanted to quit working there once the semester started in the Fall, but I really needed the money,” Antoniou said. She would work until two thirty or three in the morning and then commute about 40 minutes home to her mother’s house. “When I was working during school I was honestly so exhausted. Sometimes I just wouldn’t do my work. Other times, I’d do it and then wake up for school and be a zombie in class and barely participate. Or I would sleep through my alarm completely and miss my morning classes,” Antoniou said.
Baca stopped working at Norbert’s for similar reasons. “When I worked [there] that’s all I focused on,” she said. “My life was consumed by my job. I would sometimes have to take a couple days off to catch up on homework.”
Humans aren’t meant to be nocturnal and health risks of working the night shift are legion and pretty frightening. Unable to adapt, many people develop some form of Shift Work Disorder, a sleep disorder whose symptoms basically turn you into sort of a jerk, the National Sleep Foundation says. Difficulty concentrating, insomnia, fatigue, irritability, depression and difficulty with personal relationships are all things that go along with this.
“When I would serve, it would be a nightmare,” Antoniou said. “Running around to about 15 tables at a time. Health-wise, I think it was really just sleep deprivation and lack of food. [Working] for sometimes eight hours at a time without really being able to eat is a lot on the body.”
Especially in cities like New York, you need night workers to keep everything running and employers are often reluctant to look too hard into the health consequences. Long-term night shift workers were shown to have considerably debilitated memory and their brains had aged about 6.5 years faster than those who work during the day, Occupational & Environmental Medicine said in 2014. Luckily, cognitive functions returned to normal after about five years of a day job.
Certain people adapt very well though. Carolyn Widmer is in her final year as a BAFA student studying Fine Arts and Literature. She works at Roberta’s Pizza in Bushwick as a back waiter, and although her shift usually ends between 1:30 and 2:00 A.M., she said it made her more efficient.
“It gives me a more concrete sense of time management,” Widmer said. “When I was in school and didn’t have a restaurant job it felt like I had all the time in the world to take on my assignments and that leads to procrastinating for me. I’ve always been a weird night owl who loves to sleep in, so restaurant work is pretty suitable for my schedule.”
Regardless of your health or how you adapt to your schedule, the hours you have keep working nights can put your safety at risk. I had a gun pulled on me my first year bartending for yelling at a customer to stop smoking inside.
I’ve had bottles thrown at me, one guy threatened to light me on fire because he was drinking White Russians and he drank all the milk, and one woman straight up punched me in the face because the only beer we had was Heineken.
“Customers forget that the people behind the counters are actual humans with feelings and lives,” Baca said. “I feel like we tend to get a little abused by customers. Especially being a woman pizza chef in Brooklyn, I received a lot of discrimination and sexual harassment. I would always request to never be in the shop alone past a certain time.”
There is a certain beauty to the night shift though, despite all the bullshit that comes with it. You operate in a liminal space and when you get off of work between four and five in the morning the city is at its quietest. A few summers ago I was in the habit of sneaking onto the roof of a bar I used to work in my neighborhood on my way home. I’d sit there eating breakfast, listening to the drunks mill about downstairs while the sun came up over Manhattan and the pigeons did these huge swoops across the sky.