The Bitchiest Block in Boozeville

"What's a Coastie?", a song by a couple UW students, is stirring up controversy and a good discussion of the issue is to be up at Dane 101.

In light of this, I pulled out an article from a zine called Temp Slave written by a former co-worker of mine named Ann. We worked together at The Towers, the private dorm which was and remains home to many people referred to as "coasties". To the best of my memory, my tenure there ended just as the term was gaining currency but it is the likes Ann describes that I think of when I hear "coastie". While I cannot vouch for everything in this article, I swear on that old Towers t-shirt in my closet that says "Serving students, not stereotypes" that much of this is true. What I cannot verify generally doesn't sound out of character for the place.

Linguists take note: she doesn't use the term "coastie".

The Bitchiest Block in Boozeville!

The Towers? I got fifty bucks for the guy who drives a truckload of fertilizer through that den of delusion. Were I a touch more touched, I'd think the Towers---Madison's famous $600 a month private dorm, where rich out-of-staters (mostly from Lawng Iyyyyland) store their demented spawn---was some sort of Nazi plot to turn all the local service sector employees into raging anti-semites. But Nazis would at least have enough taste not to do the same thing in POWDER BLUE AND FUCKING MAUVE. Ugh! No, it's just one more example of the inconsiderate clamor that money and a martyr complex can make when filtered through the wah-wah pedal of human satire.

So why'd I piss away two years of my life working in their cafeteria for five bucks an hour? Well, guided by the magical invisible hand of the free market system, the "Towahs" and I found each other to be the perfect marriage: me and my big mouth had a hard time holding down jobs, while the clientele and their big mouths were desperate for servants (actually, they referred to us as "the help"). How desperate? Well, when I got so drunk at the employee Christmas party that I fell off my chair, vomited all over the dining hall, and had to be carted off to the drunk tank in a squad car (nearly getting the Towers finded [sic] for serving alcohol to a teenager), they didn't even think of firing me. They sent me to a psychiatrist! When I flipped out one day and stuck my head out the dishroom window and screamed, "I hate you! I hate you ALL" over and over until I nearly passed out---you guessed it, back to the shrink, who talked to me for 45 minutes and then gave me a prescription for Zoloft. Frighteningly enough, it turned me into a perfect employee---temporarily. Too bad it wouldn't let me sleep for a week. I went further into Bat-Shit Land and they still wouldn't can me.

Working at the Towers was an amazing study in, er, cultural differences. Where I grew up, in central Wisconsin, the upper-class was a bunch of cranberry farmers and, I mean, it's a bit hard to get on your high horse when you drive a fucking tractor for a living. Yeah, yea, I know that anyone who reads TS! On a regular basis knows we're all a bunch of cannibalist serial killers (incidentally, I went to school with a kid who made the twenty-minute drive once a year to collect a jar of dirt from Ed Gein's grave) but still, most Wisconsinites make some sort of effort to treat service workers like human beings. On Long Island, apparently, they've developed single purpose bioroids for use as maids and butlers.

I also found a bit of blueblood self-mythologizing to be true: they ARE more thenthitive than the wetht of us. Running out of tomatoes at the salad bar was occasion for a mob panic and stampede. They'd burst into tears at the drop of a filet mignon---I saw a girl cry bitterly because we were out of fucking ice cream sprinkles. A green haired "punk" from the suburbs of Illinois pitched a fit because we were serving "cheap ass" chicken cordon bleu. These pathetic fuckers are wound so tight that anything can spoil their day.

I personally induced sobbing on two glorious occasions. The first was when a kid accidentally sent the notes for his "really fucking tough" economics test into the dishroom. Upon returning them to him, I remarked that I'd learned everything on his note cards in my junior year of high school. Tuff guy. The second time was when they let me work on the serving line (the fools) and some guy tried to butt into the front of the line and get me to serve him before everybody else who'd been waiting because he was so, very, very, busy.

"No," I said.
"Whyyyy?" he whined.
"Because, you're not SPECIAL."

After listening to him bitch my manager out for twenty minutes, she told me, "Ann, from now on I don't think you should do anything but wash dishes." I couldn't have agreed with her more.

Oddly enough, most of the residents spent an incredible amount of time carping about how oppressed they were, in one form or another. Some of them felt unloved because they weren't the richest bitch on their floor; others felt put down by the Man because nobody understood their undying devotion to some godawful hippie band. Most of the girls were feminists, and took women's studies classes to improve their self-esteem. I suppose they needed it since they appeared to spend the rest of their time getting tit lifts, and flirting with their fathers (creepy creepy creepy).

Now these splinter groups received a certain amount of sympathy from the other sufferers, but the one tragedy they all struggled with (and bitched about constantly) was religious oppression. The atheists were certain everybody was out to lecture and dogmatize them to death, so they sermonized them into submission first. The Christian brats felt outnumbered by the Jews, so when there were more giant tacky driedels [sic] then Santa Clauses on the walls one holiday season, they took the opportunity to shower the building manager with protest letters. They probably could've saved themselves some embarrassment if they'd left the goy ghetto long enough to find out that Hannukah was three weeks earlier than Christmas that year, and the management planned to tear down all the Jewish crap and put up Christian crap when the first stupid holiday was over. I think the only ones who kept their traps shut were the Asian exchange students, but that's only because they were too busy holding up the hot food line by yelling at the servers, who often gave them the wrong entrees because their method of ordering food was to point at the pans and grunt. Money can't buy ya language skills.

It can't buy a sense of irony either---I fondly remember listening to the Jewish kid go on about how no one could understand their deep-soul oppression while I cleaned up the mounds of food and paper they dumped on the floor while they ate. I remember thinking, well, I have some German blood; maybe this is some kind of karma---but then again the Nazis offed a shitload of Catholics too, and my whole family is Catholic. But then AGAIN why bother debating them over something that happened in Germany before any of us were even born? I guess ranting and raving about the horrible things a bunch of evil bastards did in some other country a half-century ago take our minds off things like, oh…well, KITTEN, ya been to Harlem lately??? When the Black Moslims came to town to speak, the residents carried on so, you would've thought angry young men in bowties had the building surrounded with tanks. I thought it was hilarious, but the poor Jewish kids I worked with were embarrassed out of their minds.

Like I said, the girls were all "feminists", but when they weren't directly angling for husbands, they were busy baiting their hooks with the dubious worm of anorexia. I never knew there were so many foods that could be replaced with fat-free polymers. All of them were certain that if they ate a molecule of fat, they'd become weather balloons, but they had no idea what "fat" actually was. I was amazed by the daily onslaught of moronic, obsessive queries. "Is there any grease in those french fries?" "Is that vegetarian pot roast?" "Are you sure the frozen yoghurt is fat-free? It says it is but I don't believe it." One girl actually claimed that she couldn't eat any fatty acids because she had a "pre-ulcerous condition. "Really?" I said, munching on a French fry. "I hear ya sister---I HAVE AN ACTUAL ULCER."

They're also exercise freaks, but gawd forbid they go outside where the locals might touch them, so right next to the cafeteria they have a mini-gym where they fight for hours over who's next on the Stairmaster. One day when I was relaxing outside the kitchen after my shift, a girl in Spandex came up to me and demanded, with almost hysterical suspicion, whether I lived there. I said no, so she went up to the desk and had them lock the exercise room door so only people with Tower room keys could get in (oh, yeah honey, after I involuntarily get more exercise than I need in a week, I'm gonna come in and steal your hamster wheel).

Oddly enough, most of them still have really fat asses---probably because, no matter where in town you work, you can't get away from them because they're ALWAYS going out to eat. And they're always giving each other a hard time about their diets ("You're going to get SO FAT if you eat that! Giggle).

Shortly before I quit, as I was standing there watching two of them claw at each other over the last "special" bagel, I found myself having the most perverse thought: "Boy, I'm sure lucky I'm not rich." Ahhhhh…hatred purged of envy. You couldn't get a purer rush in the Dallas Cowboys' locker room.