For about six weeks in the summer of 1980, I worked as a cocktail waitress in the Club Candalejas, a salsa (music) bar in Hollywood, California. I had worked as a waitress before, but this was my first time in the dog-eat-dog world of a bona fide cocktail lounge. Nobody had their own station: we all competed to sell drinks, and the owners kept score. I was usually last, because if somebody shoved me out of the way I tended to stay shoved.

The two ladies I remember most clearly were Ruby and Kelly. Ruby had the advantage of being the only native Spanish speaker on the crew. She was also the one most likely to hip check me if I started moving towards a table she wanted. The other was Kelly, who was born in Iran and whose name was actually Cleopatra. The English accent was on account of having been raised in England. She was not afraid of Ruby.

I knew no Spanish at all, and 99% of the customers didn’t speak English. I don’t know if they could speak English; I just know that they didn’t. They wore beautiful clothes and danced without smiling. I learned to announce drink prices by memorizing the numbers one through ten, as well as twenty-five, fifty, and seventy-five. I also learned some lingo so I could take orders. The drink names generally needed no translation, but phrases like “on the rocks” (with ice) and “straight up” or just “up” (no ice) were important to recognize.

There were two live bands, and they would take turns playing. The music was beyond loud. I was spending the summer at my aunt and uncle’s house, and my uncle was a pilot. He gave me some earplugs of the type worn by small-plane pilots, and for that I am grateful, as I don’t say “Huh? What?” these days as much as I might otherwise.

One time I waited on an elegant lady sitting by herself who spoke to me in English. She told me the drink she wanted, and then said, “Light it up.” I had heard this phrase before. It means to hold a lighter to the surface of a drink, so you can catch it on fire and have a little bit of a light show. The ambient noise was prodigious as always, so I asked for clarification.

“Light it up?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied. “I would light it up.”

That seemed an odd way to express it, but I did as she asked. The bartender poured her drink and lit it on fire. I started towards her table. Of course, I got jostled, and the flaming liquid spilled down the side and stem of the glass. By the time I got to her table, half my tray was on fire.

She stared at me. “What did you do to it?”

I stammered, “You said to light it up.”

She stared at me some more. “I said, ‘I would like it up.”

My despair must have been palpable because she relented enough to help me put the fire out. As I tried to slink away, the way dogs do when they’ve been laughed at, she caught my eye and gave me a small nod and a smile. If this had been another time and place, she might have said, “Stay in school.”