the night-ghasts are back

Out from the swirling vortex of a dozen conversations, of dishes being rushed in every direction and dumped unceremoniously behind swinging kitchen doors, of the food runner's signal-bell, of crushing streams from soda fountains: one thought asserts itself abruptly, and it's that table 63 doesn't have their vodka-cranberry -- and you jerk yourself awake so hard you fall out of bed.

I'm not the only server who's spent their first few months of serving having nightmares about being "in the weeds" -- so far behind that you don't know what's going on anymore, or how to fix it. In the waking world it's a truly awful feeling, one that motivates you to blame everyone but yourself for forcing you into this position -- even though the truth is, you already know if you had done just one thing differently, you could have held it together and kept everything coming in orderly fashion. And that's what the night-ghasts are for: your mind hasn't yet tired of trying to find what that one thing was it could have done differently. It's still trying to work it out, while the rest of you is sleeping.

Moreover, you spend all your time serving, so it's not like you have any sort of "life" to be the substance of normal dreams.

My nightmares stopped several weeks ago. I returned to dreams of shorelines and long hallways and unlikely conversations. But in the past few days, they returned; and I know exactly the reason why.

The Green Iguana has decided to throw me behind the bar for two shifts a week. I'm excited; I'm also terrified. I know exactly where everything is in my bar on the boat, and I know exactly where it's back-stocked in the hold if I run out. But if there's an organizing principle to the speed wells at the Green Iguana, I haven't caught on yet. Further, it's entirely unfair that I'm used to whipping a beer bottle opener out of my uniform dress slacks and stuffing it away without a moment's thought when the pockets on my jeans are cut entirely differently and moreover I have sudden recourse to back pockets.

The short version is, I need to teach myself to move all over again, and I need to figure out where everything is, and fast.

It's not that I'm worried about what the other bartenders will think of me. For example, when one of them, Scott, asked about my training day and I told him I couldn't find anything and I was slow and I felt bad, he assured me I would get better and that it didn't matter: Jamie had been there for years, and he was still slow and didn't have any excuse at all. Jamie promptly came around the corner and told him to shut the f*** up, of course.

No, I'm worried about the other servers, and somehow I'm worried about people I haven't even met yet. I'm worried about all the folks who wanted to be in line for the bar jobs, or who wanted to walk in and apply for them, that management could have put on as bartenders and didn't, who are going to watch me drop a gin bottle here and tear a cork in half there and wander around in frantic search of blue curacao and get behind in my drink tickets and just in general make a big, wasteful mess of things. Of course it's enough to give me nightmares.