US Open Shut Case

I'm kinda like a girl DFW

Only one customer commented on my fugue state. Deep in one of our lines-so-long that the end blurs into the crowd, someone looked at me as I poured the vodka-lemonade mixture out of the tap and made an amused comment about our robotic speed and efficiency. I smiled. “The fugue state.”

I actually don’t know if I said it out loud – so goes the fugue state. The signature drink – a souvenir cup full of ice, pulled from the tap, magnetized pour of Chambord, melon balls – over and over, a perfect assembly line by my own hands. The fugue state is half the reason I’ve bartended or served for as long as I have, a shortcut for obliterating the anxious brain, if you can call getting a job and spending hours criss-crossing the five boroughs and working long shifts behind a bar a shortcut.

Bartending hasn’t been my regular job since King Mother, the lovely neighborhood wine bar where I had my last W-9 level of hospitality employment, closed in January of ‘24. When I worked a wedding via a mutual friend on Long Island last year, I realized that doing events was a good way to keep my pours steady and to make a little extra cashola on top of my lucrative career of freelance writing and editing. I started with a staffing company a few weeks later.

The US Open had lurked as a spectre ever since I started with the company. It was their crowning jewel in the miasma of lesser events, their flagship workhorse that convinced people it was worth it to clock in for the rest of the off season slog. People talked about it with both reverence and nostalgia – a bartender’s Obama Era. Reverence mostly for the money, but also for the experience itself. Some people even called it fun.

We were notified midsummer that everyone who wanted to work the Open would have to come in for a special interview in the Midtown office. Every shift was going to be 12 hours, and the company preferred people with open availability for the three week tournament. I did not have such availability, but I utilized my usual sunny disposition, pseudo professional enthusiasm, and jovial flexibility, offering up cute statements like “Well when those people get tired you can just slot me right in!” As I practiced French afterwards in Central Park, I felt pretty certain that I’d be working at least a few days.

The Day Of My First Shift felt both exhilarating and intimidating. Yes, I was scared. Sure, I’ve been working in restaurants and bars for a million years, but I also hate working. Each new job or gig is a new opportunity to get yelled at and have a bad relationship with a superior.

Luckily, things went smoothly once I checked in with my company and got inside the grounds. I was assigned to my station and introduced to the first set of what would turn out to be an ever-rotating cast of colleagues.

The first person I worked with ended up being my main “Friend” of the tournament, a Stephanie Germanotta-esque woman loosely in my age range. She started giving me the business as soon as a fellow coworker came by, asked for a bag of ice, and I acquiesced to his request.

“Don’t give anything away for free. Even to the other workers. Everything has to be an exchange. What can he give us?”

She and I quickly bonded when we realized we both live in the same micro-neighborhood in south Brooklyn, a place basically none of our peers even knew existed. We spent that first day going over every restaurant, bar, bodega, and grocery store we could think of, dissecting our opinions with a fine tooth comb as the twelve hour shift crept by.

It turned out that she was working literally every day of the tournament, first at the portable stands with me and later as a manager at a seafood establishment on the West side of the grounds. I told her that (in addition to my actual professional obligations,) I was too afraid to work every day because I’m a baby and need sleep. She looked me dead in the eye and said, “I’ll sleep when it’s over.”

We took our break together, wandering around the campus visiting her old friends and finding the hidden employee food tent. As we made our way back to our station, I grumbled upon seeing our reflection in a glassy wall, cargo shorts and blue polo shirts: “We look like zookeepers.”

She looked back at me: “Well, we are.”

🎾

Up until these weeks working the tournament, I truly knew nothing about tennis. My entire family loves the sport and keeps up with current matches in our family group chat, but I’d managed to absorb none of this information beyond the last names of, say like, the two most famous players at any given time.

Our family history with the sport goes beyond the garden variety spectator. I remember as a kid being told that my grandparents had only really ‘become old’ when they stopped making their weekly trek to the tennis courts, where, my aunt told me last month, they’d regularly whallop her and her basketball-playing husband when they were in their thirties. Both of my uncles played in high school, and one of them played for three years for the Coast Guard Academy.

So here I was, the black sheep of the tennis clan finally coming back to deliver something to my ancestors. Arthur Ashe from the inside.

Part of the reason I was so terrified coming into the US Open was my own checkered history with work. Though I always figure out ways to make money and pay my rent (sometimes barely…) most of my medium to long term job experiences (ok, the short ones as well,) have been suboptimal to the point of panic attacks, legalese-d quitting emails, and monthslong battles with owners and managers. You can read about it elsewhere.

A college friend was visiting the city in early August, and when I told her about the upcoming gig, she replied that her ex's parents would be there – the father apparently friends with a brother McEnroe, so they’d have a day ‘in the box with the McEnroes.’ To some this probably sounds absurd and/or impressive, but to my fellow New Yorkers, let’s be honest: live here long enough and everyone knows someone who has a spot in the McEnroe box – metaphorically speaking, at least.

I never got close to seeing a box, though I got to know the rest of the grounds like I was living there, which, in a sense, I was. We had an employee entrance where we’d skulk in every morning, have our badges scanned – I heard that if you tried to get in on a day you weren’t working, the scanner would refuse you. Then a quick run through the metal detector and bag check, and off to find your daily assignment.

But for the regular spectator, you walk down the boardwalk on the non-baseball side of the Mets Willets train stop all the way to its conclusion, then, turning right, you come to the general concourse entrance. I imagine that during high times it took a long time to get inside. On the left once you enter are two behemoth buildings compromising the Chase and Amex centers. Down the main thoroughfare, the second largest stadium, Louis Armstrong, is on your right, with a ground floor of stores: the flagship of the ‘US Open Essentials,’ plus Nike, Ralph Lauren, and Wilson.

Down the main thoroughfare, if you hang a quick left you’re in the Food Village, where hip New York fast casual fusion reigns: COQODAQ of the famous caviar chicken nugget, Pasta Ramen, Korilla, et al. Back on the straight thoroughfare, you find the flagship alcohol bar in a hut, followed by various portable drink stands, a Lavazza hut, a Moet Castle (just kidding, it’s just another hut, but this time white with a nicer awning,) and on the right a Heineken bar, a vaguely Latin-influenced restaurant, and an Aperol-themed indoor bar, or, as I called it, the Aperol House. From there you enter the main quad before entering Arthur Ashe Stadium.

Here, there are two full bars dubbed the “Baseline Bars,” another, smaller, US open Essentials store, an Eataly outpost, an Amex-helmed shop where you just scan your card and then take things, and a wide open space where grounds-pass holders without stadium tickets can watch a highlight reel of what’s happening in various stadiums on a screen that was apparently visible from a plane to LaGuardia. Under the screen is the entrance to Ashe, home of the flagship matches.

The first week of the US open is ‘fan week,’ where people can come to the grounds and watch practices (mostly) for free. For the workers, it was a good way to get our sea legs before the onslaught of the tournament writ large, though of course this meant less of the fabled money that was the main topic of bartenders discussion.

On my second day working, the weather did probably the worst thing that the weather could do when you’re bartending outside without a covering, which is rain intermittently but never hard enough to force us inside. So we ended up looking like a bunch of tragic wet dogs in standard issue trash bag ponchos, condemned to wait outside for the possibility of sun. The rain was persistent enough to stop the visitors from drinking, but not persistent enough to send them away entirely. We ended up being released from our poncho purgatory around 4 pm.

Between breaks and the rain release, I was able to gather a decent understanding of the grounds by the end of this second day. Outside of my general area, there’s the far West Grandstand, a bit of a redheaded stepchild now dwarfed by Ashe and Armstrong, surrounded by practice courts and a Lulu Lemon outpost with a claw machine attraction. This was also near my enemy, the part of the grounds with endless lines for the meager ‘free’ offerings of the various sponsors. A yogurt? A shot glass of zero-proof Heineken? Shoelaces? Any desire I might have had for a free anything was immediately replaced by secondhand embarrassment.

On opening day, that is, the end of fan week and the beginning of tournament proper, the vibe shift was apparent even from the 7 train. I ended up literally surrounded by a group of ten middle aged women, apparently doing the Open as a girls trip. They discussed the drinks they’d consumed that morning (Coffee, water, Diet Pepsi, mimosa,) and I overheard snippets like “You’re lucky I put on nipple covers.”

I also heard them discussing me, which I carefully ignored: “Look at her shirt. Let’s follow her to get our first Honey Deuce.” I knew I would lose them immediately upon exiting the train. They’d find the drink on their own.

I’m sure it would suck to work an event like this without having worked in hospitality, but that doesn’t mean that working in hospitality adequately prepares you for something of this nature. You know how they say the customer is always right? Well, not at the US Open! Can I have more ice? No. Another cup? No. Less vodka? No. We didn’t even have straws.

We certainly did not have drink carriers a la Starbucks, a joke I made over and over when explaining that it was two drinks per person within sight of the stand. Most people found this rule reasonable, the occasional chump sent from a faraway spot on the grounds to get a round of drinks for 3+ people found it heinous. Whatever. As was my refrain, “I don’t make the rules.”

My new friend’s words echoed as I learned the ropes: “Give them nothing. Stop. You’re being too nice. They’re just trying to get something from you. You don’t have it. Stop responding. Make them go away.”

On the spectators, my favorite outfits were always vintage Open and/or other tournament wear; but people predominantly wear athleisure and general casual attire, although the traditional preppy New England wear of yore is not, by any means, absent. I saw a non-zero number of “EVERYONE WATCHES WOMEN’S SPORTS” t-shirts, a statement that was, alas, somewhat disproven by the way the crowds left the larger stadiums after every marquee male match and left numerous open seats for the females.

I worked with the requisite career bartenders and performers, actors and more notably a ballet dancer, but also a hotel manager/cop, a tax accountant, a jewelry designer, and a home organizer to the stars. People were inquisitive about my writing, but I mostly tried to change the subject. There was a time when I liked to talk about writing while doing food and beverage work, but that time has passed. I’d rather hear about other people, or not talk at all.

Our supervisors were a team of green-shirted managers who apparently travel stadiums across the country to run various sporting events like the navy. They were mostly nice to me, though I heard tell of them getting in fights with my male colleagues. I also noticed that one who I'd talked to extensively on my first days introduced himself as though we’d never met before the first day I was wearing makeup. Lol.

Other than bartending itself, our days mostly consisted of waiting around for rushes or restocking our wares: cups, ice, and of course, melon balls.

A few real-life friends happened to come to the Open one night that the matches went late. When I was released from my stand, I went up to find them – there were plenty of empty seats, as the flagship men’s match was over. My friends had decided to hate Sabalenka, and were nonsensically cheering ‘PUT HER ON THE FLOOR’ at her opponent, which became a refrain in my brain for the rest of my working days.

Once I started to have fun and enjoy myself, I decided it was time to learn a little bit about tennis. This first manifested in asking one of my colleagues how the scores worked. We watched the big screen outside of Louis Armstrong during a match between Novak Djokovic and Learner Tien match, and he valiantly attempted to explain the series of 6s, 0s, threes, etc to me. I was not following. He said he was probably a bad explainer, and I said no, it’s me, I’m the bad listener/learner/understander. I decided to relieve him of this duty and made it a (mission) to learn in my spare time. These weeks were going to be all tennis anyway, why not commit in the brain and at the house?

In what will be a surprise to no one, I first turned to the tennis writings of David Foster Wallace. How could I not? Though I might now, after my several weeks of study, take some umbrage with the idea that he’s the ‘greatest tennis writer to ever live,’ (i.e., I imagine that the people who attempt to report on tennis for a living, with hundreds of articles in their pockets, aren’t thrilled that the oft-lauded greatest ever wrote a total of five articles on the subject,)

Jay Jennings commissioned DFW to report on the US open in 1995. He described the assignment as to ‘riff on the scene.’ What a dream! He also said: “editors were clamoring to have him riff on some scene or other on the basis of [his popular Illinois state fair essay]” ugh…imagine…editors clamoring to have you riff…

The resultant piece, “Democracy and Commerce at the US Open,” was described by Mary Plion for Vice as a “seminal man about court essay.” I would say I’d want this to be the seminal woman about court essay, but in reality I was not about court. I was behind a stand.

“The lure of the all-access media pass was the clincher and he agreed to do the story for much less than he could have commanded elsewhere,” Jennings said of the commission. I laughed, realizing that my employee credentials were my own sort of all access media pass, minus the player access and plus working for twelve hours. (I am purposefully avoiding the question of whether attending a sporting event as a media representative can be considered working in the same way that bartending is working. Sorry! Maybe next time!)

The staff badge served as a kind of invisibility cloak. Whereas a normal spectator would be called out for doing basically anything – walking in an incorrect entrance, having an incorrect ticket, etc, all I received was a nod or glazed over eyes. It helps that the Open has so many employees that there’s really no use trying to guess what any one person is doing. There are employees in uniforms and athleisure, street clothes and business casual.

DFW’s reporting included some color from around the city of average citizens suddenly caring about tennis, but I was mostly physically unable to gather any of my own. I survived by being strict: exercise classes allowed on days off, social visits not. When I broke the self-imposed rules, I paid in kind the next day, reinforcing the need for my rules in the first place.

The sponsors remain largely unchanged from Wallace’s days: Evian, Amex and Chase, Tiffany, JP Morgan, Emirates. There are a few new additions: Laroche Posay, IHG, Fage of my reviled free yogurt line.

In 1995 there was an Infiniti on a rotating stand, in 2015 it was three Mercedes, for me the vehicle of choice was a Cadillac. Several of my days, I was actually positioned directly across from the Cadillac, so I had a front row seat to watch people standing in an hour long line to, seemingly, take a picture with the emblem, post it on social media, and get a ten dollar gift card. They’d then bring the ten dollar gift card to our drink station, try to buy one, and be told our favorite word: “No.” The gift cards were only applicable to merchandise and non-alcoholic food and beverage. Sorry! Or maybe we never said sorry. Fugue state.

🎾

I never thought I’d care about sports, let alone write about them. As a youth, I verged on antagonism towards athletes as a group and sports as an enterprise. I grew up surrounded by suburban athletes who thought I was pathetic and weird, so my natural impulse was to hate them in return.

People thought I was pathetic because I was pathetic in gym class, and weird, because, well…if the shoe fits. It certainly didn’t help my case that I was obsessed with horses.

The specific illustrative memory I have as the root of my anger is in fifth grade. I remember the specificity because a couple of new girls had started at my elementary school in that final year, and they were all athletes of various stripes. We were nominally in the same orbit of friends, though they eventually would eclipse me as I descended into loserdom, but that was still to come, and thus had no bearing on this particular event becoming a seminal part of my personality. In the lunchroom, one of them told me that horseback riding wasn’t a sport, and we got into a fight about it. Yes, that was the root of a decade of derision towards athletes.

A begrudging respect developed towards the end of college. My best friend lived in a house with a bunch of lacrosse players who dated soccer bros. Unlike the athletes of my youth, these athletes thought I was funny and adopted me as a sort of mascot. As with many of the social hangups that I had developed in high school and had stripped away by the waves of friendships I had in college, I let my prejudice fall away and went in the other direction, i.e., being obsessed with my new friends and curious about the way their main activity influenced their personalities and our shared lifestyle (partying.)

Being at a D3 school, I realized that the athletes here weren’t really in for much, if any of, the glory that I'd always expected athletes to be striving for. No, my lacrosse girlies had no plans to play after college or pursue it as any sort of career. And yet, they went to the gym for two hours every morning and practiced for two hours at 4 pm every afternoon, meaning they couldn’t daydrink with us as the year rolled inexorably to a close. It’s a mark of my mindset at the time that abstaining from day drinking is what got me thinking about the dedication that being any kind of athlete requires.

We didn’t actually see the athletes themselves very often at the Open, of course; like the celebrities, they were basically hidden away in VIP areas.

On the other hand, The various ‘regulars’ of the grounds became familiar: the Polo-outfitted ball boys/girls (in some cases verging on ball adults) walking in little herds around the campus between matches, the aforementioned ‘green shirts’ of running stadiums like the navy fame, our bartenders-in-arms in their various alcohol sponsor shirts.

Players, though, we had to learn about from the big screen. As you may guess from me knowing nothing about tennis, I also knew next-to-nothing about the players, beyond the several last names I’d grown to recognize from my family’s commentary. The first match I watched, the one where my colleague tried to teach me about tennis scoring, was between Novak Djokovic and a 19-year-old, Learner Tien. I attached to Djokovic the way that a lost baby animal imprints on a nearby human. I love to see an old person show a young person who’s boss. I was further charmed when they kept showing his fucked up foot enlarged on TV.

I started to read up, fascinated by the narrative of the transition from the big three to the new two – with Novak caught in the middle. The last of the old guard, valiantly attempting to take out the new boys for one last job.

I have it easier than many women: I’ve never been desperate to have children. To worried friends, I cite egg freezing, adoption, checking out insurance plans, the number of couples end up doing IVF regardless, that New Yorkers have children later than anyone else in the country – I have a list. But, I get it, it would be easier if it just weren’t an issue, if I didn’t have to keep this list in my back pocket. This is the world we live in, our bodies age at the rate they do, professional athletes choose a career with a time clock and women still (for the moment) choose whether or not, and when, they want to be mothers.

Back to Djokovic. Apparently lots of people hate him! Fascinating. A self-professed hater, Scott Stossel nevertheless wrote: “What is perhaps most intimidating about Djokovic is the steeliness of his nerve. The ice water in his veins gets chillier as the stakes get higher: The more important the point, the more likely he is to win it.”

Djokovic is a stone cold weirdo. He believes he has a spiritual connection to wolves, drinks potions mixed by his team, and wears a patch made of nanocrystals. On more than one occasion, he has seemed to be down and out in a match, then been able to reverse his fortune after spending upwards of five minutes in the restroom, surely to the annoyance of everyone around him. I can relate, as this was my main method of surviving shifts at the beer bar where I worked in midtown for four years (also to the annoyance of everyone around me.)

Then there’s his world-historical backstory, literally spending his tween years hoping to survive nightly bombings in Belgrade, waking up in the morning to, what else, practice tennis: “We’d go to the site of the most recent attacks, figuring that if they bombed one place yesterday, they probably wouldn’t bomb it today.”

There’s no way to say what I would have thought about various aspects of tennis if I had gotten into them before this past month, but of one thing I’m sure: I would have always loved Djokovic. I love someone who is perceived as mean and who everyone hates. I aspire to be such a person, but alas everyone continually says that I'm actually very nice. Sigh. I also never gave up on Aaron Rodgers so … do with that what you will. I promise that I myself am vaccinated.

Obviously, considering that I became a fan last month and he’s been playing tennis for tens of years, I’m not the only fan of Djokovic, despite his drama. A group of fans asked at Wimbledon about him reported that ‘he’s the greatest, he’s cheeky, he’s endearing.’ A player who used to have a feud with him now reports that they have a “bromance.” He loves to do impressions of other players, and apparently they’re very good. He’s appreciated among his compatriots for lobbying for more money for lower ranked players on the tours, and he was the only player Naomi Osaka thanked when she “she controversially refused, on mental-health grounds, to do press conferences at the French Open in 2021.”

Dovetailing with my witnessing of a star aging out of his heyday, much of my tennis reading reflected on the final years of Federer’s career; writers marveling at watching a beloved athlete in the final hours of his prowess.

Writing on Federer a few years ago for Grantland, Brian Phillips said “The slow-motion euthanasia that time inflicts on athletic talent is, for me, the hardest thing to watch in sports” but for me, it’s fascinating. If we can get past the gut reaction gulp of oh no, he’s not as good as he used to be, what does it mean to get to witness the beginning, middle, and end of greatness?

From the same piece: “You don’t have to give up what you love simply because you’re told to. That what hurts you might also fulfill you, or even make you happy, because life is not simple. Even sports are not simple, unless you force them to be. [Federer] likes doing this. That’s the point.”

I like life. Even though I have so few of the things that traditionally make people happy: no relationship, no prospect of a family, no high paying job. I enjoy myself doing most of the things that fill my days: spending time with my dog, my friends, my apartment full of my items. I don’t mind my regular work, I love doing my own creative work, and sometimes I even find sublimity in the work that I do to fill in the gaps.

🎾

Somewhere in my sporadic iphone notes for this piece, I wrote, ‘I forgot that I am weak.’ But I don’t know why I wrote that, because it isn’t true at all. I did not forget. I remembered. I always remember. I think about it all the time. I was terrified before the Open started in no small part because I predicted that I would be exhausted. So my weakness when it was midway through was not a surprise, just a premonition come true.

We used to say at Hash House a go go, the last place where I worked anything close to shifts of this magnitude, “Just pick up the shift. If you're not making money you’re spending it.”

It’s so easy to spend money when you’re at home writing. Not so while bartending!

I had dinner at one of the restaurants on the campus after my last shift, but that was, for the most part, it. I thought about spending money a lot, eyeing the Aperol House or the Food Village, but by the time I was done with a shift, the pasta ramen or caviar chicken never seemed as beguiling as it had when I was trapped behind the booth.

🎾

B.J. Hollers said in his review of the DFW tennis book for the millions: What I miss most about competitive tennis is nothing. That’s how I feel about being young and wanting to be the best. Back when I rode horses, I was never the best in any meaningful larger sense, but I was sometimes the best in an arena, in a group, on a trail ride. When I wasn't, I was upset. I don’t blame myself – everyone was hyper competitive, it was part of the culture. But one of the greatest reliefs of adulthood is that I no longer care about being the best at anything. Sure, writing is competitive in its own way, but there are nooks and crannies for everyone.

The few times when I’ve ridden horses as an adult, I feel an audible release of pressure: my body remembers how high-stress it felt, and it’s thrilled to forget. Even in a yoga or pilates class, if I find myself looking at the other participants, I almost immediately remember, practically with a giggle: it doesn’t matter! It will never matter again!

I gather the satisfaction that I imagine competitive people get from competing in the exact nerdy ways you’d imagine: learning new facts, getting better at enduring things I don’t like, moving paragraphs around in an essay that’s finally starting to take shape. Beginning a temporary obsession with a hobby I’ve never given two thoughts to before. When I think about the possibility of never getting married or having children, I’m sad for various reasons, but I never think about not having enough to do. I could keep finding random interests to add to my docket for the rest of my life.

Being a professional athlete, is, I imagine, lonely. The degree to which your life differs from a normal persons’ life, the constant travel. But as the articles I studied point out again and again, tennis is its own beast – “It is very hard to go pro in any sport, and few sports are as isolating as tennis. On the court, there is nowhere to hide, no teammates to mask individual deficiencies,” Sam Riches wrote in a piece revisiting Michael Joyce, the star of another seminal DFW piece, The String Theory.

My days at the open reinforced my own obsession with solitude. Sure, I wasn’t alone, I was in a new foursome of coworkers every day and also surrounded by strangers, but I also … was. Bartending is its own exercise in isolation. Sure, I’m talking to people all day, but I’m also talking to no one, not in the way I talk to people when I’m being me out in the world. I’m relying on a script and a persona.

And then, when I got home, I had the perfect excuse to be alone. A neglected dog, a neglected apartment, neglected work, exhaustion. I started to think, maybe I should come up with excuses like this every few weeks. Being in control of your own time is a heady drug.

Conor Niland, in an excerpt from his book on slogging through the lower levels of tennis tournaments: “All serious tennis players – from gods such as Agassi to college players like I was at the time – have to grapple with isolation. For people who are comfortable with it, pro tennis can be a refuge: they find it behind a hotel door, with headphones on in a far-flung airport and, above all, inside the white lines of the court. The downside is that the victories are often private, too.”

🎾

After I’d passed a certain nadir in my fears coming true (exhausted, sore, dog angry at me,) I rounded a corner and the tennis grounds began to feel like a sort of home. I was happy on the days I wasn’t working, of course, because I was tired and tragic, but I was unhappy to be missing out on whatever was happening back on the campus that day, especially knowing that the days of its existence were dwindling. I could already picture the grounds laid bare from the behemoth of commerce and play, looking like it does for 49 weeks out of the year. I googled what happens there: regular people can rent the courts and take lessons! I quickly texted my cousins the news.

Returning to the grounds after an absence felt comforting. It had everything I needed – coffee, easy bathroom access, nobody yelling at me to get off my phone, black chests full of our supplies that made excellent benches. Work is hell, but work is also an encasement. Work is predictable. Work takes unnecessary variables out of the equation. Work is simple.

In Commerce, DFW wrote: “the Stadium is rising to applaud as Pete Sampras and the Australian Mark Philippoussis are coming out on court, as scheduled, to labor.” Labor day weekend, the players laboring, and the 7,000 employees.

I began to look at us as a type of athlete. I know, of course, that my exhaustion pales in comparison to that of a five hour match, but I don’t begrudge myself the comparison. They train for this! (I should have trained for this.)

In a certain light, (a flattering light to myself, of course,) the players and the workers have more in common than either do with the spectators. First of all, of course, they’re all working. The players may be playing, but it is their job. I see myself in the constant commentary on Novak needing breaks to have his muscles massaged. I see that when I tell my coworkers, I just don’t have it in me to do six days in a row anymore, or I haven’t done 12 hour shifts since I was 25. I would be remiss not to mention that every time I said this, someone gave me a weird look and said something along the lines of: that can’t have been that long ago! But it has – almost ten years. That I’m able to nurse an obsession with skincare and sleep enough to look like a baby is just luck.

I continued to find something to worry about in the hours before every shift, but it soon became apparent that this is more a vestige of my years in restaurants where something was always wrong (with the kitchen, with me, etc) than from anything to do with the job at hand. Cater-bartending has always had a sense of this simplicity: you clock in, you pour drinks, you leave, and there is rarely anything to think about once it’s done. I assumed this would be different; the level of scrutiny, the gravity of the event, but in fact it was less so. After the first day, I only saw my ‘boss’ in passing, though the structure was so stratified that it felt right to put quotation marks around boss. Other than the occasional reminder to only pour up to the white line or really load up on ice, criticism was all but absent.

I’ve found over the years that the higher level there is of criticism, the less successful an establishment probably is. The Open was no exception. Things work the way they work, they have worked for years, no reason to get ‘worked’ up about it. Some restaurants seem to believe that nitpicked service is a recipe for success, but in actuality, when a place is functioning well, the servers and their antics don’t really matter. Make it hard to mess it up. Make the money so good that messing up seems stupid. These things are all pretty simple, but I've encountered them only a few times: at Hash House a go go, and at the US Open.

Each successive day brought a new question whose answer was inevitably ‘no.’ In the second half of the tournament, our discussions about ice turned to discussions about cups. When the famous souvenir cups ran low, they were rounded up and relegated to the flagship drink stand, everyone else was forced to come up with increasingly elaborate excuses for why the cups had ceased to exist. Just kidding about being forced to come up with increasingly elaborate excuses, but that is how it felt at times.

I thought again about happiness, about what fulfills us. What are the spectators chasing? Who was happy to be here, and who was checking off the requisite box in the ‘year of New York events in social media.’

The cups made it easy to see the difference. Are you there to get the cup? Or are you there to enjoy the day? I could often tell before people even reached the stand. I called it cup face.

On maybe my third to last day, the bees descended. Perhaps it was the bar implements, sticky from only a cursory rinse at night. Or the Chambord. After one of my colleagues made a show of trapping the bee like a spider, I took it upon myself to become the Bee Rescuer, finding new materials every time I threw away a piece of cardboard to use as a hardback to a plastic cup. I’d walk the bees over near the employee entrance, let them loose in a tree. It was just another way of getting through the days.

A putrid scent began to linger over the portable drink stands. At one point a customer asked me if someone had puked in front of the stand. The smell not only persisted, but became stronger with each passing day. Other workers, stopping by to say hi, questioned how we could stand it. We shrugged. We were living in it.

The giant ice bags somehow became more fragile: the method of throwing them on the ground we’d been employing to break up the chunks was suddenly resulting in split bags and ice all over the ground. I’d use the errant ice to cool off my wrists.

As I watched workers walk past my stand as the crowds thinned out, I could see them hobbling in the same way I felt when I walked to the train at night, insoles be damned. When I was away from my station to pee or get water, and spectators asked me questions, I often knew the answers, whereas in the beginning I’d give what I hoped was a cute shrug and say something like, “all I know is my area!”

On my second to last day, I was walking through one of the restaurants to get to a lesser-trafficed bathroom when I heard someone call my full name. I thought, weird, plenty of people here know my first name but I doubt any of them have memorized my last name. I turned around. Lo and behold, an ex I dated six years ago. Of course.

We had a quick chat and promised to visit each other’s stations. It was at his restaurant where I had my final meal and we briefly caught up. There wasn’t much to say, though.

Everyone I told made a face of horror, but I didn’t really mind. He’s one of the good exes. A friend who met him back when we were dating asked how he looked. “Uh, haggard,” I said, “But it might have been the atmosphere.” I have a better relationship to the passage of time than most people I know, perhaps most notably my former self, but it happens nonetheless.

I was at home for the final Djokovic match. I watched the match that was the end of my new husband reenacted by Sim-like AI figures on my tv, from the couch. I had meant to make it to at least a local bar, but the days had caught up with me again and I decided it was better to save my money and not have drinks at 3 pm and not walk any distance. After the loss, I fell asleep immediately for four hours, waking only at 9 to eat ice cream and soup and watch tiktoks and read more articles for this essay.

In his introduction to DFW’s little tennis book, John Jeremiah Sullivan discusses the meditations on the possibility of an ‘evolutionary endpoint of tennis.’ This is the same fundamental question reflected in the commentary of the big three making way for a big two, especially amidst accusations that one of the big two players is, well, boring. (sorry Sinner fans!) Is there a possibility of an exciting future with players who rule over the court, not letting anyone else in? How can the game evolve when the current stars seem to have perfected the art? Is it worth watching if these same guys are going to keep doing the same things and winning the same matches, forevermore?

Sullivan then says: “What a marvelous subject, and figure, for a twenty-first-century novelist, a writer working in a form that is also (perpetually?) said to be at the end of its evolution, and an artist who similarly, when at his best, showed new ways forward.”

But time has passed, we know now: DFW was not the end of writing. No more than Sinner or Alcaraz will be the end of tennis.

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DFW ‘submitted’ that “tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding.” He cited the precise control, the speed, the ability to lob a mostly mental pursuit (geometry, physics, angles,) onto a kinesthetic one. Endurance is what sticks with me the most. It’s the underlying ingredient that I was missing when I rolled my eyes at sports as a youth, the thing that underpins every pursuit I keep my eye on now: yoga, swimming, writing, and, yes, bartending. I’m not a person who worries about the end of fiction, or the end of nonfiction. But if I were, I’d argue it a similar way. There will be lulls and periods of boredom but there will always be beauty, demanding art, and endurance. Are we here to judge, or are we here to participate? Are we here to play?

In the original String Theory essay, Michael Joyce tells Wallace that you can’t “be embittered by loss or contented by victory.” Even though competition is exactly what’s happening, he posits that if you get swept up in winning, you’ll be drowned by the disappointment of the interim: even after a huge win, you have to start back over with the drudgery the next day, and for many more days, until the next spectre of a possible win even looms. What stuck with me: “What you realize, is win or lose, it’s almost the same. It just keeps going.”

After a mostly pleasant spate of mid-tournament weather, we had one psychotic day of winds: my last, when the plastic cups we’d put on the Chambord to keep the bees away were blowing all over our station, and we spent as much time chasing errant supplies as we did pouring drinks. I think of DFW on the courts as a teen, able to manipulate the game because he was better at dealing with the weather than his less cerebral opponents. At the stand, we didn’t have a game of tennis to win, just a game of tennis to wait out and a bevy of supplies to protect from blowing away. The wind made it cold, but I didn’t mind. I was in the sunniest station that day, I was ready for the heat to be over.