A Tip
I earned an extra quarter tip once as a carhop
at the Whataburger in Tampa, Florida, because I wasn’t wearing a bra. It was
1969, and a quarter was about what you would expect to get from a lone guy in a
pickup, so this would be doubling my money.
I was getting ready to drop out of college, which would mean the end of parental support, and this job was part of my long-range plan, which didn’t go too far past the actual dropping out. Anyway, the Revolution was coming when we wouldn’t need too much money or college degrees, and I imagined myself living simply in a big house in the piney woods along the Hillsborough River with other groovy friends after I got out of the dorm.
The guy was a
fairly average Gulf Coast redneck customer, a working man, I could tell by the
putty on his hands. His truck was neither noticeably bad nor nice. We had all
types of folks at the Whataburger—rednecks, stoned-out hippies with the
munchies, tourists, families with dirty kids and families with clean ones. In
my three weeks at the drive-in, I had already learned that the best tippers
were those from up north and that the hippies tended to forget.
I was getting ready to drop out of college, which would mean the end of parental support, and this job was part of my long-range plan, which didn’t go too far past the actual dropping out. Anyway, the Revolution was coming when we wouldn’t need too much money or college degrees, and I imagined myself living simply in a big house in the piney woods along the Hillsborough River with other groovy friends after I got out of the dorm.
This guy looked
kind of older, like thirty, but he didn’t try to chat me up so I’d linger at his
window. I had also learned that chatting up was part of the tipping scene—as
long as there was no hot food waiting to be picked up, which made the old
people who owned the place and did the cooking ring the pick-up bell like mad.
I could feel the
guy staring at me morosely as I went back and forth in front of his car, taking
orders, delivering food, hooking the scratched aluminum trays onto partly
rolled-up windows. I sensed the subtle creep vibes coming from his truck,
something you can’t quite put your finger on but that a young woman learns to
pick up. Just the same, I had been a cheerleader so I knew how to move in front
of an audience.
The rule was that
you paid for your food as soon as it was delivered, so I would only have to go
back once more to get his tray. As I reached for it, I saw the quarter on the
green rubber-net mat and a second one he was holding up between his thumb and
forefinger. “I’ll give you an extra quarter,” he said, watching my face, “if
you tell me you’re not wearing a bra.”
Of course I wasn’t.
I was a hippie with my mass of frizzy hair pulled back into a ponytail and held
by a rubber band, and, frankly, even though I was nineteen, I barely needed
one. I was a liberated chick out on her own in the world – free, heedless,
naïve. I wore cut-off blue jeans, the fraying edges high on my thighs. I can’t
remember what I was wearing for a shirt, but he must have been trying to figure
it out as he watched me. Or maybe he knew and wanted to let me know he did.
“Well, are you?”
he repeated, not letting go of my eyes. “Are you going to tell me?”
“I’m not,” I said.
He didn’t pick up
on the nuance of the reply and tossed the coin onto the tray as I pulled it
away. The quarter, solid silver as some still were in those days, made a little
bounce on the mat and hit the aluminum edge, not with a nice clean clink but
with a hollow, flat clang. As the hot-food bell rang aggressively and I hurried
to answer it, the taste of metal sat on my tongue.
