Poor tips, terrible, infantile music, or lights that flashed hot and mad and drove lancets of pain through your head. But she supposed it was the heart of the place more than anything else. She was only a waitress, but that did not justify that she worked in a strip joint. The night groaned on, waning. She performed her duties as if recently summoned from the crypt. Running tabs, dumping out heaped ashtrays, clearing empties away by the armful. She’d done it a million times in the past, waiting on derelicts in this derelict place; it was routine now. When it got busy, the din often rose to crush her, a maelstrom of noise—she couldn’t think. Faces melted into lumps of sameness, drinking, smoking, staring without expression. She felt her force of life being wrested out and wasted as she hurried back and forth, night after night, toting beer and an apron heavy with change. Sometimes she would work her tables for hours and not even know it, days and weeks passing slowly as grueling dreams.
