The Service Bar

The Hard Rock Cafe service bar.  I spent a good part of the 1980s looking over this glassware during weekend dayshifts on W. 57th St. in NYC, as I slung burgers and pursued a career in acting and opera.  That’s me on the right with my fellow servers, Nadine and Caren, picking up a Bloody Mary from the service bartender, Lefty. I’m remembering Lefty this month because a year ago he took his final ride on his beloved motorcycle and left the world far too soon.
 
Lefty was called Lefty because he had one arm; the other was, quite simply, a hook. No fancy prosthetic, no mechanical bionic man stuff, just a hook.  And it was nothing short of amazing what he could do with one working arm … and a hook.  His real name was Bobby, and once you got to know him, you quickly forgot about his physical impairment and realized he, in no way, ever wanted or expected that you would treat him any differently from anyone else. The only time he ever voiced his frustration was when having one working arm and hand became the reason he couldn’t do exactly what he wanted – in the case of the HRC, it was most likely the fact that he couldn’t work the main bar – I think that always bothered him a little. 
 
Bobby was our service bartender on weekend day shifts and probably took this photo.  He was a comrade in uniform on those Saturday and Sundays when the HRC lined people up all the way down 57th Street and around the corner onto 7th Ave. He was one of the lynchpins of those days, and his service bar, tucked into a tiny cubby behind the center staircase next to the main bar, was the touchpoint of every server on the main floor who needed drinks for customers, a little gossip, a moment to vent or laugh or gripe or sometimes even burst into tears in pure frustration.  Bobby was right there for us, right there with us, earning his battle scars right alongside us.  A lynchpin of those weekend day shifts. We couldn’t have done it without him.  We wouldn’t have.

Saturday and Sunday mornings.  Put on the uniform, do the hair and makeup, run upstairs just in time for the morning staff meeting. And then it was a steady race to the finish - the first customers busted through the front doors at 11:00 and the shift was over at 6:00. It was an exhausting, wonderful, frantic battle fought alongside fellow servers, bussers, bartenders, managers, hosts, line-cooks, prep-cooks, dessert cooks, even merch guys, who had your back and ran your food and, when needed, reminded you there was life outside the madness.
 
We were, indeed, on the front lines back then - the magic of the original Hard Rock was alive and thriving unlike anything the city had seen in a very long time. I like to think we were the Studio 54 of the hamburger and shakes crowd, a place that was cool for families and even cooler for celebrities who would sneak up to the second floor by way of a secret elevator for late night cocktails. 
 
It was an equalizer, the HRC back then.  Everyone was there together in the madness - the customers and the staff alike. Love all, serve all, become one with the music, the crowds, the energy, the madness, the joy.  I once was on a payphone in the back of the house taking a sanity break, checking in with the outside world, and Robert DeNiro picked up the phone right next to me.  He asked me if I had any change, and I handed him a few quarters.  We nodded to each other and carried on with our conversations – he was inviting someone to his kid’s birthday party that was going on upstairs.  Equalizer.  Level playing field.  That’s what happened for those few hours on any given Saturday day shift.

All I know is that we ran ... and danced and served and griped and bitched and laughed and ate and drank and made coffee and filled ketchups and made lifelong friends on the front lines of those crazy early days of the HRC battle. This photo takes me back to that service bar, right back to the madness, back to the united front of Main Floor Saturdays and Sundays, back to the energy, the joy, the laughter and the exhaustion.  And Bobby was right there at the heart of it.  I’ll always see my fellow weekend servers just like they were in 1988, unable to conceive that any time has slipped by at all, that we’re kind of frozen in time, forever young, forever alive, forever dancing, forever loving, forever serving all.