Meet Allie

"I asked Leslie if she was f---ing Jason," was the first thing that assaulted my ears as I walked into work last weekend. Allie couldn't resist the gossip. Or the drama. I wasn't surprised she was the one to ask Leslie. In some ways, you had to respect the courage. In others you had to cringe because it was Allie.

Allie is what they call a full-timer. Someone who became a permanent waitress at the fresh young age of 16, right after she dropped out of school, and just a year before she got pregnant, married her boyfriend, and resigned herself to a full-time life of waiting tables. Some decisions were her own. Other things that happened were the result of some unfortunate fate. Her boyfriend turned out to be a deadbeat who stole her tips from her as she was sleeping, and then snuck out to buy drugs, and slept the days away, "caring" for their child, while she worked doubles to make ends meet.

But that was decades ago. And Allie was now a hardened forty-year-old, who looked about 15 years older. Her latest boyfriend (whom she sometimes referred to as her husband - we weren't quite sure which he was -- or maybe she had both.) was a professional workingman's compensation angler. He would work somewhere just long enough to get just hurt enough so that he could sue for disability. He was decent at this trick, but also liked to supplement his income with a few odd scams here and there. His most famous one was having Allie call her waitress friends and ask them to deposit checks in their bank accounts, and give Allie the cash, claiming she and Brad didn't have their own bank accounts.

Besides questionable financial habits, Allie and her boyfriend also had a fondness for prescription pain killers. So much so, that when Allie heard that Gina , another waitress, had called in sick because she slipped a disk, Allie went to visit her the next day and beg for a couple pills because she, too, had slipped a disk, and didn't have the insurance to go to a doctor to get treated.

Gina was so surprised to see Allie, and was caught so off guard, that she did give her a couple pills. That was all the encouragement Allie needed, because for the next week, she must have called Gina four more times to ask for more. Gina cut her off after the first visit, and finally stopped answering her phone altogether. Apparently, Allie was still getting her stash from some other connection, because one night last month, she was so doped up while working, that two waitresses had to hold her up, dab her forehead with cold compresses, and do all her work for her, hoping that Jason wouldn't notice she was spending an awful lot of time in the back room.

Yes, even though Allie drove them all crazy, the camaraderie of the women at Brady's overcomes the judgement and disgust that we all often have for Allie. We know she's had a tough life -- and it started with those first mistakes in her teenage years. Since then, she has had one more child of her own, and married into being a mother of 3 more. She tells stories about them -- each one sadder and more heart-tugging than the next. One's missing at war in Iraq, one ran away, the other is getting kicked out of high school. Oh, and add to those miserable details the fact that she has had 3 different kinds of cancer, is now married to (or girlfriend of) a disabled man ("He's not THAT disabled" she never hesitates to share with us), and living with her "in-laws," and one can't help but feel terrible for Allie.

But wait. She fooled me with all of these sob stories when I was one weekend into my first month at Brady's. Since then I have come to know that the "soldier in Iraq" is a mechanic on an Army Base in South Carolina; the "run-away" is in boarding school in Connecticut, and the one flunking out of high school is actually a normal, well-adjusted teenager (as normal as one can be as a by-product of Allie). And no, she has never had cancer of any sort.

And now I don't believe her when she tells me she is 5 months pregnant; is leaving her husband after the holidays; or is depressed because her mother-in-law passed away last night in her arms. Because, she will then turn around, tell Rodrigo, the very proper waiter, as she grabs him from behind, that she loves his "Italian ass" and that she is so horny because she hasn't had "any ass" whatsoever in 9 months. Allie, in a nutshell.

So when it was she telling me that she had confronted Leslie about the rumored affair with Jason, I didn't know what to say. Really, I try not to talk to her at all, as I do not want to be associated with that kind of crazy. But she was dying to talk, so, making sure that Chris, the bar back was there to overhear the whole thing, so that later, when she changes her story, he can corroborate, I did what every other waitress (or patron) tries so hard to avoid -- I engaged her in conversation. Must be the bartender in me.