Low life
Woo Woos and woe
Jeremy Clarke
For my birthday treat, we started off at a trendy cocktail bar in Covent Garden. We were there bang on opening time. Were we eating, said the babe standing just inside the door? Certainly not, we said. Downstairs then, she said, and down we went. A flight of stairs, a short corridor, a scruffy door without a handle. I pushed it open to reveal quite a smart little gaff. Half a dozen square tables around a horseshoe bar. Pink, mauve and orange fluorescent lighting. Lots of chrome. A DJ standing self-consciously behind his mixing deck. And a cocktail waiter writhing in agony on the stripped-pine floor.
Two employees were bending over him. 'Get up! Get up!' they hissed. 'We've got customers!' Then one of them marched across the room and blocked our view of the prone waiter with his body, which was well suited to the purpose. He must have been the manager or something. His sly face was decorated with a large golden earring. 'Are you with the private party'?' he blurted out as if it was the first thing that came into his head. No, we said. He glanced back over his shoulder at his stricken waiter then he looked back at me. He was trying to decide, I think, whether I was the type of person who might strongly object to a waiter lying on the floor. I had a Stanley Gibbons carrier bag, a razor-nicked chin, and I was wearing two coats. He decided to risk it. 'OK, OK.' he said. 'Sit here.' Then he pointed two fingers, pistollike, at the DJ, and said, 'Music!'
While we took off our coats and perused the drinks card, he and the other employee, who turned out to be the barman, tried to man-handle the waiter on to his feet. This to loud trumpets of a soul-funk intro. But the poor waiter was like a rag-doll. Every time they managed to get him more or less upright, his legs would buckle and down he'd go in a heap again. His face was deathly grey. He must have been in considerable pain because now he was writhing in agony and flailing his head from side to side.
A waiter lying on the floor is one thing, but a waiter writhing in agony is quite another. They gave up trying to stand him upright and unceremoniously dragged him by his collar across the smooth wooden floor and into the gentlemen's lavatory. Shortly afterwards, the barman reappeared, took my order (two Woo Woos) and got mixing. It was Happy Hour, he said, so all cocktails were half price.
The Woo Woos (lime, vodka, peach schnapps, cranberry juice) were fantastic. So were the Cosmopolitans. We were on frozen Daiquiris when the manager emerged from the lavatory with the waiter draped over his shoulder. He lowered him gently into a seat at the far end of the room. There were no other customers as yet. The soul was too loud for effortless talk. My friend and I sat sipping our frozen Daiquiris and contemplated our incapacitated waiter, hanging sideways off his chair, a picture of helpless agony.
The source of his suffering was hard to fathom. There was no blood. Nothing seemed to be broken. What could be the cause of such distress? Burst appendix? Adulterated narcotics? Ricin attack? Every so often the manager would go over and put his face close to the waiter's and speak very earnestly to him. The poor waiter could manage only an occasional syllable in return. Then the manager would go across and confer earnestly with the barman. 'Trouble?' I shouted to him when he came by our table. He paused, closed his eyes for two seconds, and moved on.
When the two green-jacketed paramedics bustled in we were on Screaming Orgasms. (We managed to order these with less than a minute of Happy Hour to go.) The paramedics didn't examine the waiter; they just took him away via the fire escape, accompanied by the thrilling raucous trumpets of a James Brown number. With an arm round both paramedics' shoulders, the waiter could just about walk.
The manager went with them. I took the opportunity afforded by the absence of the manager to lean over the bar and ask the barman what had happened. He glanced nervously in the direction of the door. Just before we came in, he said, the waiter, the manager and himself had been play fighting in the bar. They had got a bit carried away and the barman had punched the waiter, whose name was Elvis, in the testicles, and burst one. For my birthday, I'd been sipping cocktails and looking at a man with a burst testicle.
Nobody was injured in the seedy basement bar at the Africa centre, where we went next, I'm glad to say.
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