My family used to go for pie and coffee at a twenty-four-hour truck stop just down the road from our house in Arkansas. I got a job there when I was thirteen. Too young to work legally, I was paid under the table to wash dishes, make sweet tea, slice pies, and perform other odd tasks to help the waitresses, whom I watched closely and found glamorous: the way they swept around the room with a coffeepot and responded to the male customers with just the right amount of sass. I didn’t have their grace, but I thought if I could master it, I could do anything. Sometimes, if I was especially helpful, they’d pull a few crumpled, greasy bills from their aprons to supplement my earnings with their tips.
Later in life I worked my way through college as a server. I made good money but eventually found myself disgusted by what that required. Women often tipped well enough if you were simply efficient, but getting a good tip from a man meant doing what I now understood those Arkansas ladies had been doing: using sexually infused charm to make him think I liked him. {read}