At the pub, on a late Sunday night, there is a table seated with people who work here. They probably chugged a V mid-shift to get through post-break sleepiness, or their hangover from yesterday, or maybe their manager has given them coke. So they’ll be up for a while. As more people clock off, the group grows and grows. And so, more jugs and rounds arrive at the table. One free pint of Reschs becomes three jugs of seltzer and maybe kick ons. Now they’re smoking imported cigarettes and huffing highlighter-coloured vapes on their coworker’s roof. They’re on WhatsApp organising a bag, they didn’t need to get out the $350 cash because they can pool their tip money.
Working at a bar is gruelling and exhausting — and restating that becomes addictive. Tomorrow, they have reason to be exhausted and a license to complain; it’s a thankless task to finish at 4am. To clean up vomit, kick someone out, deal with angry customers, make cocktails for the eighth hour in a row. And their nine-to-five friends express disbelief at the hours; “how do you get enough sleep”?
They’ve all got their vices, or at least, their post-work habits are well on the way to becoming vices. Because when you’re getting smashed by a dinner rush or a four-person-deep bar, you need to relax somehow. The new starter will soon be living on a diet of beer and cigarettes. You drink with your coworkers, you drink at work, you work while you drink. While not all pubs are ‘wet’, these bartenders could be taking Lyrica or another substance on shift. Hospitality workers become hospo heads everywhere.
It’s competitive. Who can delete the most beers? Pop the most caps? Stay up the latest? Be the most hungover the next day and get through their shift? There’s no problem, because everyone’s having a good time.
The coworkers become friends quickly. Because they spend so much time together. Because the inconsistent and late hours and weekend shifts mean they don’t see their regular working friends. Because they can’t help but build camaraderie in those circumstances. Amidst insecure work, insane busy-ness, you begin to either hate or love the people around you. But mostly, they become friends because you can have a good time drinking with anyone.
Staffies don’t really seem like a place for people in relationships. And that’s probably why they all end up fucking each other. On the corner of the table, there’s a couple just talking to each other. She likes him, you can tell. Her body is turned to him, and he’s just looking at her. He likes her as well, but he has to get drunk to talk to her properly. And the other two over there, sitting beside each other, they’ve slept together. And he is conscious of gossip and people finding out, so she can’t tell her friends. Every time she goes to work, she has to pull beers, stack glasses and scrape plates next to someone who she’s slept beside and won’t acknowledge it.
The boys tell stories of their sexual escapades. One bloke recalls when he was so horny he ended up eating “a chick’s” ass on his front lawn. The same guy shows younger coworkers homemade pornography—of him and a regular. A dude talks about how he was seeing this girl who he had “the best fucks” with, but “she’s a nutter”. Beer-fuelled chats about romantic lives become rants about “bitches”. One guy tells a story of underage drinking and running from the cops, the punchline being his “chubby” girlfriend lagging behind. These stories are told for the ‘boys’, and only occasionally in front of the ‘girls’.
The culture is parasitic. At a different venue, the new general manager asks who is sleeping with whom on one of his first shifts. A new starter is accosted by a bartender asking her if she’s fucking the manager. “Fuck titties” is written on the wall of the manager’s office.
And the women learn to manage themselves. They’ve learnt who to sit next to while drinking, so as not to get certain people leaning into them, or ‘accidentally’ touching their boobs. They’ve got a group chat with just women, and to new women, they advise which coworkers to avoid. One worker is known to be a rapist. Another coworker pressures his female coworkers to go home with him. Another forced someone to kiss him. And while the boys know about it, they rarely take on the labour of doing anything about it. And the women can’t fight every time. But all the men, no matter their sober feminist proclamations, misread kindness and chattiness as flirting. And sometimes this world seeps into their minds, and the women become competitive with each other for the scant resource of male attention.
Despite realisations of chauvinism, toxicity, and substance abuse, they’ll get nostalgic at some point about it. They’ll remember when they badly rolled cigarettes in someone’s backyard, while inside, people were snorting coke off a blue Kmart plate, and the sun was slowly rising above the terraces. They’ll remember the nights of utter excess and depravity that happened all too often one summer. When they fell off a stool in the smoking area, or into a bush walking home at 4am. When they, misguidedly, picked a fight with the coked-up rostering manager (who only has the job to pay off his motorbike). When they pissed over a balcony wall, and into a street. When they went out until 9am and went straight to their opening shift.
They’ll reminisce on these nights – only the ones they can remember through someone’s Digicam photography. They won’t remember how they got home, when they were head down in a toilet bowl, or when the party ended.
They’re still sitting at the table. They’re probably about to get kicked out; it’s a badge of honour to be ATL’d (asked to leave). Come back tomorrow, they’ll serve you a pint with manufactured joviality and tired eyes. And soon, they’ll peter out, either by choice (the hedonism gets boring) or firing (the only way the addicted leave) and a new group will form.
Yeah the boys. None of it passes the pub test.