dream - 1oo224: hell is serving shrimp rolls at a gay bar

Wake up sharing a bed with friends & strangers.  A rough night, if the tempest-tossed sheets are any evidence.  One runs off immediately complaining that they have to go to the doc to have their vertigo checked.  The guy to my left is perusing some old-ish X-Men comix by Whilce Portacio, centennial issues straining their staples.  (Just like Paul Pope used to do, I think.)  Am vaguely annoyed with myself for wanting to fix the bindings because my library is already brimming with duplicates.  

 

Whatever.  I have to get to work.

Some dive, apparently.  The main bar is out back, a lengthy, narrow cattlerun where the icebins keep getting pulled out.  Oaks grown in along the fenced-in yard, their roots buckling the ground.  There are three or four bartenders in an olympic obstacle course which requires literally one entire minute to dash from entrance to end.  A nightmare scenario where all the patrons are smoking and everyone's a catty jackass.

At first I'm in the dark kitchen, prepping shrimp rolls-- which were repugnant, processed into a paste more resembling applesauce than shrimp, and the rolls I'm schmearing the paste into are of some sort of fried dough; the pastries are like bad pottery, bottlenecked & impractical to fill  --and then I'm serving, which means multiple runs down to the farthest end where the party is.  A party of nothing but bitches in preppy clothing, and every one of them eyeballing me, making crude passes.

I duck all this expertly, of course; I've been doing this sort of thing my entire life.  Deflecting verbal parries the whole way.  Your basic crowd of ignorant schmucks; no-one is interesting or attractive.  Clouds of acrid smoke and vulgar innuendo.  On my fourth run, find the slumming girlfriend of some patron has climbed atop the counter and sits there, legs to either side of a bin she's pulled so far from beneath the railing that it obstructs the entire row, idly smoking & flicking ash into the ice.  Rather than address the impropriety or try to move the bin I crawl beneath.

I'm not tipped well enough to acknowledge these creeps.

As I'm about to escape back into the kitchen yet another bartender has come on shift, his beefy bulk blocking my way.  The dolt is wearing a latex Trump mask with wispy platinum blonde hair and a 2024 campaign tee.  "Hell," I murmer, straining to maneuver past the idiot...