After my job at the Fairgrounds ended, I was hungry- it was probably the only time in my life I was actually malnourished, living almost entirely on beans, rice, candy and booze. My two housemates were both using their feminine wiles to stay fed, getting men to take them out for dinner, but they couldn’t always bring along a friend, and I just wasn’t comfortable playing that game. Renee’s favorite trick was to pretend to be French and giggle and smile a lot as men from other places bought her drinks and food.
I don’t know where Renee found Snake, but surely a name like that should have been some kind of a warning. Snake had just gotten out of “The Pen” and was re-opening his dive on Rampart St, known as the “Golden Slipper”, complete with a yellow neon high-heeled shoe spinning around on the roof. He needed a barmaid and cook; I could sort of cook and was his girlfriend’s friend, so he hired me. He showed me how the fryer worked, and I mostly hoped that no one ordered any food.
My duties weren’t limited to the bar- one night we “catered” a private party, which meant mixing drinks and opening bottles and lighting cigarettes in someone’s basement in the suburbs while the men gambled. Renee and I even got to blow on the men’s cards for good luck.
Snake was a crook and a tyrant and I lasted about two weeks before we got in a huge argument and I stormed out in a huff. But I learned an important lesson from that job: to avoid starvation, work where the food is. One of our regulars tended bar himself at a busy restaurant on the opposite end of the Quarter, and he let me use him as a reference, so something good came of it. Like Scarlett said, I would never be hungry again.
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