Most drink orders are unassuming. Spend enough time working behind a bar and even the most peculiar requests for the most obscure concoction won’t distress you in the least. Yet drinks that have props, and the people who use them, definitely raises a brow.
“Vodka-Sprite, no fruit,” my then employer instructed me as an ostentatious octogenarian slowly stepped up to my bar. “Here is a living legend,” the boss told me. The old man clearly relished the attention. He smiled as he extended a limp-wristed hand toward me and I smiled back. I remember his skin felt soft.
This was Tillie, “The dirty old bitch from Chicago,” he said while pulling out handfuls of costume jewelry from a ziplock bag. Once all his gaudy rings were in place on his fingers, he then produced a fiber optic coaster that flashed different colors when you set a glass on it (I brought it home to fix it for him once). He removed the blue straw from the drink I had just given him and replaced it with a plastic penis. “Do you like my dick?” he asked. As I moved in closer to examine these favors, which he had with him every time he came in, his scent assaulted my nostrils. Sweet and pungent in powder, the assailing aroma extended around him in a fifty-foot radius, he was wearing perfume. That was the last time I ever referred to him as “him.” Then she ordered another drink.
At eighty-something years old this lady liked her liquor. I attempted to go drink for drink with her once, but after a few hours my head started to sway. When I could no longer bare the weight of my own arms, and started offering oral sex to everyone around me, Tillie grabbed me by the hand and said, “You’ve had enough, Bitch.” The bar staff escorted me out, and I remember briefly looking back to Tillie. She sat erect in her stool, seemingly un-phased by the booze, still tossing back vodka-sprites as though they were lemonade in June. She was over 50 years my senior.
In between sips she’d share stories of her 1950s female-impersonator fame to anyone who would listen. And she had pictures to show off too. I think the bar she performed at was called Chesterfield’s. I don’t remember. There was something about the mafia, dry cleaning and jail time, but I’m not sure. It’s funny -- I’ve heard the story dozens of times in the last year and I’m still not sure of the particulars. I guess at some point I just stopped listening. It’s not that I didn’t like Tillie. Everyone did. Ms. Foozie once flailed out her fingers and wrists, bedazzled with bogus bobbles, and offered up, “Tillie, anyone you want.” The old lady had no shame. She took the biggest ring on Foozie’s finger and dumped it in her ziplock bag. She demanded attention and had no reservations in sharing her true feelings about anyone (Once she told a bar employee that she didn’t like her -- not because she was a girl -- but because she wasn’t a pretty girl). Yet even the people she’d piss off would still respect her as we are apt to do with our elders. But I was trying to make a living.
Tillie couldn’t afford to tip generously. So I would often leave her sitting alone at the bar, with her penis straw and flashing coaster flashing, affording my services to other customers. I would get back to her whenever I could. If she got loud or needy with me I’d just tell her to, “Settle down!” adding, “Grandma!”
To which she retorted, “F*ck you bitch! You wish you could make it as long as I have!”
Truth is I can’t even imagine it.
Though her tales spoke only of dignity and good times, her boisterous attitude and pride still couldn’t hide the social stigma, the need of discretion, secrecy and shame that being gay in the 50s carried with it. I wonder had it not be for people like Tillie, demanding deference, being publicly open with who they are and putting on a pair pumps to trailblaze down the path toward equal rights, would we be free to do so now? Would there be gay bars for me to work in? Would there be websites for me to write for? Maybe. Maybe not. Who is to say for sure? But one day I would talk to her about it. One day I would bring her copies of the pictures I took of her on Halloween -- wearing a new gown with her white hair all did, ornamented with fake jewels and using orange balls as breasts that somehow stayed firmly in place -- and say, “Thanks.” I would catch her when I wasn’t working, before she got drunk, and say, “For what it’s worth, thank you for enduring so much prejudice back then so I don’t have to today.” Still, I have yet to get those pictures made.
I reminded myself to get to it around Thanksgiving. A few weeks ago I thought, well maybe after X-mas. New Years, for sure.
Perhaps it’s a sign of the times or maybe just an innate human flaw, but we tend to take it for granted when we wake up in the morning. We think opportunities will come again; we can afford to put things off and that’s just not true. Tillie will never get to see the pictures I took of her and her friend on her last Halloween and I will likely never learn her full name.
So I offer this photograph now, though even in a spiritual sense I doubt she’ll ever see them. She hated computers. But for what it’s worth, here you go you dirty old bitch.
And thanks.
Written by Jason P. Freeman
“Vodka-Sprite, no fruit,” my then employer instructed me as an ostentatious octogenarian slowly stepped up to my bar. “Here is a living legend,” the boss told me. The old man clearly relished the attention. He smiled as he extended a limp-wristed hand toward me and I smiled back. I remember his skin felt soft.
This was Tillie, “The dirty old bitch from Chicago,” he said while pulling out handfuls of costume jewelry from a ziplock bag. Once all his gaudy rings were in place on his fingers, he then produced a fiber optic coaster that flashed different colors when you set a glass on it (I brought it home to fix it for him once). He removed the blue straw from the drink I had just given him and replaced it with a plastic penis. “Do you like my dick?” he asked. As I moved in closer to examine these favors, which he had with him every time he came in, his scent assaulted my nostrils. Sweet and pungent in powder, the assailing aroma extended around him in a fifty-foot radius, he was wearing perfume. That was the last time I ever referred to him as “him.” Then she ordered another drink.
At eighty-something years old this lady liked her liquor. I attempted to go drink for drink with her once, but after a few hours my head started to sway. When I could no longer bare the weight of my own arms, and started offering oral sex to everyone around me, Tillie grabbed me by the hand and said, “You’ve had enough, Bitch.” The bar staff escorted me out, and I remember briefly looking back to Tillie. She sat erect in her stool, seemingly un-phased by the booze, still tossing back vodka-sprites as though they were lemonade in June. She was over 50 years my senior.
In between sips she’d share stories of her 1950s female-impersonator fame to anyone who would listen. And she had pictures to show off too. I think the bar she performed at was called Chesterfield’s. I don’t remember. There was something about the mafia, dry cleaning and jail time, but I’m not sure. It’s funny -- I’ve heard the story dozens of times in the last year and I’m still not sure of the particulars. I guess at some point I just stopped listening. It’s not that I didn’t like Tillie. Everyone did. Ms. Foozie once flailed out her fingers and wrists, bedazzled with bogus bobbles, and offered up, “Tillie, anyone you want.” The old lady had no shame. She took the biggest ring on Foozie’s finger and dumped it in her ziplock bag. She demanded attention and had no reservations in sharing her true feelings about anyone (Once she told a bar employee that she didn’t like her -- not because she was a girl -- but because she wasn’t a pretty girl). Yet even the people she’d piss off would still respect her as we are apt to do with our elders. But I was trying to make a living.
Tillie couldn’t afford to tip generously. So I would often leave her sitting alone at the bar, with her penis straw and flashing coaster flashing, affording my services to other customers. I would get back to her whenever I could. If she got loud or needy with me I’d just tell her to, “Settle down!” adding, “Grandma!”
To which she retorted, “F*ck you bitch! You wish you could make it as long as I have!”
Truth is I can’t even imagine it.
Though her tales spoke only of dignity and good times, her boisterous attitude and pride still couldn’t hide the social stigma, the need of discretion, secrecy and shame that being gay in the 50s carried with it. I wonder had it not be for people like Tillie, demanding deference, being publicly open with who they are and putting on a pair pumps to trailblaze down the path toward equal rights, would we be free to do so now? Would there be gay bars for me to work in? Would there be websites for me to write for? Maybe. Maybe not. Who is to say for sure? But one day I would talk to her about it. One day I would bring her copies of the pictures I took of her on Halloween -- wearing a new gown with her white hair all did, ornamented with fake jewels and using orange balls as breasts that somehow stayed firmly in place -- and say, “Thanks.” I would catch her when I wasn’t working, before she got drunk, and say, “For what it’s worth, thank you for enduring so much prejudice back then so I don’t have to today.” Still, I have yet to get those pictures made.
I reminded myself to get to it around Thanksgiving. A few weeks ago I thought, well maybe after X-mas. New Years, for sure.
Perhaps it’s a sign of the times or maybe just an innate human flaw, but we tend to take it for granted when we wake up in the morning. We think opportunities will come again; we can afford to put things off and that’s just not true. Tillie will never get to see the pictures I took of her and her friend on her last Halloween and I will likely never learn her full name.
So I offer this photograph now, though even in a spiritual sense I doubt she’ll ever see them. She hated computers. But for what it’s worth, here you go you dirty old bitch.
And thanks.
Written by Jason P. Freeman
