It was the best of times, it was the worst. You think I don’t know where that comes from but I know a lot of stuff. Everyone knows that line. And no, my name is not a nickname. My father’s sense of humor. He thought he was a funny guy. I actually like the name. Just not having his last name. But what can you do?
It was mostly the best, the bartending gig I mean. Tuesday through Saturdays, over 400 bucks a week and tips. Around twenty or twenty-five cash on both weekend nights usually.
Sometimes Stevie would come out from his office when it was really busy and put down a shot glass and tell us to do a three-count pour. He barked orders at everyone and then retreated back his office. We would over-pour the rest of the night.
My old man drank rye and cokes. Nasty stuff, I thought. After the diabetes got figured out, he drank rye and diet cokes. Really nasty.
Tuesdays through Thursdays I worked prep to get in some extra hours and every Tuesday this old dude I knew would come in and sit at the bar and drink five g’n’ts and leave me a five-dollar tip. Never said anything. Not hello, not goodbye, not how are you doing. Didn’t matter to me, but it bothered some of the girls. Especially Molly the cashier.
Molly was Stevie’s kid sister, which is sort of why I got fired. She was just a sophomore in college. Couldn’t even order a drink yet.
Tuesdays were lousy for tips but busier than hell because it was half-price night if you had on a frat or sorority t-shirt or sweatshirt. The sorority girls—it was mostly girls on Tuesdays—would order ice cream drinks like Golden Cadillacs that nobody would ever want and we could only make two at a time and then we had to clean out the blender. A table of eight would tie up one of the bartenders for ten minutes which is a lifetime and aggravating as hell.
They kept ordering that crap and never left tips. The good news was that by nine or so you could short-pour and they would never know. Sometimes we wouldn’t even bother with liquor and if they complained, we told them their taste buds were shot for the night.
Wednesday night was fight night. Really it was Blast Nite—3 for one, which really brought out the frats. Place was packed with guys with six bucks in their pockets which would buy eighteen shots of liquor. They ordered the Coffin of Death—yep, in a coffin shaped glass. Six bucks, six shots of liquor times three. Three for one.
There would always be a fight by nine o’clock. Sometimes the bartenders had to go out and help the bouncer before the cops came. We all took sixteen-inch maglites with us, but we mostly just pushed and pulled our way into the crowd. Not that I didn’t want to clock more than a few of them.
And there would always be two or three or sometimes four guys that would pass out and the bouncer would have to deal with the carcasses.
The girls that came on Wednesday nights were almost always drinking Long Island or Texas Teas. Three of those and they would be so stupid you could tell them there was an elevator at the back of the bar that led down to the subway. The drunk ones were all glassy-eyed, but a few of the hard cores just looked like tough old gals maybe fifty-years old. In their twenties.
On summer nights when it was really hot and steamy, the kids would make it out to the curb and vomit on each other. Beat cops if they were around would arrest them for drunk and disorderly. Bad for the tourist scene, kids puking like that.
But I always had cash in my pocket.
One night one of the rookie bartenders trying to move fast smashed a glass into the ice and cut his hand all up. Personally, I didn’t care about the blood so much, but Stevie came out and went nuts about the broken glass and we had to empty out the ice bin, then sponge dry it so there was no chance of even a sliver.
This was around eight o’clock or so on a Saturday night. Not good. On weekend nights the three of us fixed drinks without a break from six to around eleven as fast as we could. Emptying the ice bin in the middle of all that? That was the worst.
Molly was really sweet and sometimes after work we would go a Waffle House across the river and put a couple bucks in the jukebox. I would have a ham and cheese omelet with grits and a side of bacon and Molly would get an order of whole wheat toast. Every time she ordered wheat toast. That killed me.
When Stevie wasn’t around, I would fix Molly a White Russian. She loved them. She would lean across the bar and kiss me on the cheek and then go over the cashier’s cage to get ready for the night.
I remember another afternoon when a guy came in with slicked back hair and wearing a purple shirt and wearing a silver i.d. bracelet on each wrist, which I thought was pretty weird. He asked for a margarita on the rocks and after he drank it he said it was the smoothest he ever had. He gave me a fifteen-dollar tip and asked me to come work for him at a new bar he was going to open over in West End. I took the money but told him no. He didn’t fuss about it, just said if I change my mind. I think he was pretty much full of it.
My dad shot himself out in the greenhouse. Bad enough, but worse, he was out there for almost two days because he was living alone. The neighbor lady who lived next door to him for twenty years thought it was funny that he didn’t pick up his morning paper or the weekly shopper from the driveway but his car was still there. She called the cops. Not funny funny, but weird funny. I was glad Mom left him when she did.
When I asked Stevie about cutting back my hours, not coming in for prep time, he acted like I was telling him his dog drowned or something. He kept telling me that everybody else would screw it up and stuff wouldn’t get done.
Trust me, I thought, it’s not that tough.
Molly and I started dating and Stevie seemed cool with it for a while, but after a few months we starting talking about moving in together and he got bitchier with us by the day it seemed.
Then one Saturday night, Stevie went home early with a stomach virus and left me in charge of shutting the place down. It was a really busy night, and it took us until nearly four to get the place back together. Everyone else was gone but Molly and me, and after a few drinks we started getting pretty hot and heavy on a table and then Stevie came in from the back and there we were going at it.
He came back for gold cigarette lighter that his platoon gave him when their deployment ended. He started screaming at Molly and told me not to walk through the bar door ever again. I thought he might want to rough me up a bit, but that was about the worst of it. He was out the door before we were.
Now that was the worst. I mean, who comes back for a damn lighter? Ladson 2013
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