I’m starting a regular bar shift after almost exactly ten years to the date of not having one. That fact is uninteresting. Every Jeff Bridges, Keanu Reeves, and even the incomparable Liam Neesons movie is about “an old guy, who uses old ways to be cool.” The genre is normally defined by something bad happening, a MacGuffin that requires one person and one person alone, or just someone looking to prove themselves, one last time. I’m none of that. I left tending bar on one of my favorite shifts ever.* I don’t really want to come back and “do things my way.” I think things are better the way they are now. I had a cocktail at Teardrop in PDX once, and told Tyler “I was working on a drink just like this in 2009 but the big difference is that your drink is good.” I really like tending bar and I want to do it again. This isn’t an Old Man Logan situation (see Fantastic Four #558 true believer, ‘nuff said!) this is my Falstaffian Era. You know Falstaff, fat, jolly, and having a gusto for life.
I thought I might grow into being a shrewd juniper tree but I ended up becoming more of a fancy Japanese bean bag chair. My life is comfortable, it’s been nice to ease into middle age without back and shoulder pain. And over the past ten years, I’ve done a lot of things, adequately. Or at least that’s the average of the events totaled. I’m sure I’ve had many more successes than failures but that’s not what I think on. I dwell on the people I let down, the emails not returned, and times when I wish I could have just stuck it out a little bit longer, and offered a better version of myself. On a late night in New Orleans, a friend who I’m sure doesn’t remember saying it (because it was a late night in NOLA), said “what happened to you? You were so good, what happened to you?” He was referring to me leaving tending bar and going into importing, sales, and brand ownership. And yes, my therapist has been told this story a few times. It hurt really bad. The only way I was able to get over it was by knowing that it was ok to try to succeed at new things. But it didn’t always succeed, oftentimes I was fine at best. That’s another reason it’s my Falstaffian Era, like Henry IV said to Falstaff: “I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers; how ill white hairs become a fool and jester.”
Maybe you are thinking right now “this guy just said he has a therapist,** why is he trying to get me to work for free?” I’m not asking for you to refute my self-critical feelings nor am I here to dazzle you with my comfort in being mediocrely irrelevant.*** I do however flatter myself to think I have an interesting point of view, barring that, I at least use obscenities in funny places, fuck. I’m starting up my old guy writing journey not to tell everyone how “I’m right and you’re wrong because in my day we just passed down institutional trauma and that was good enough for us.”**** I’m very much interested in the opposite. It’s my Falstaffian Era because I am jolly, but also, “how ill white hairs become a fool and jester,” is another way to say, “don’t cop out on learning, geezer.” I want to update my priors, challenge lazy reasoning, and learn from my peers all over again— I love my fellow bartenders and I always will. What priors do I want to update? I stopped caring about new bourbons and chasing rare bourbons ten years ago, that’s a lazy take that I need to defend or destroy, either way I further research is required. I’m suspicious of cocktails “needing” five ingredients and spiteful of those with six or more ingredients, and that’s a real “get off my lawn” sentiment. I know a lot of bars don’t use gendered language anymore and I think that’s cool. But I’ve never done that during service, will I sound like a tedious policy podcast if I do?
Let me be the first to say this is a flimsy premise for me to come back and have fun behind the bar again. This is more the reason to write about bars and hospitality again. The real and honest reason I’m back behind the bar is that I was inspired to get back behind the bar. My buddy Neil and I were supposed to do a scotch tasting at Macleod’s in Ballard but they were closed on Tuesdays so he got an appointment at TDO (The Doctor’s Office). Josh Ibañez was working behind the bar, he poured us fun stuff, hosted like a god, and made me a cocktail to match. I told my wife how much I loved visiting TDO and she informed me that she saw a posting on a website called The Facebook. So I got a babycakes one-day-a-week job.
I’ve since had my first shift. Cap Hill may have heard the rusty gears of some unknown machine from antiquity grind to life— that sound was actually me trying to remember how to stir a martini with my left hand. My left arm stirs a martini with the same skill an elephant paints: emotionally but poorly. My right-hand works fine, I’ve been making a martini for this exacting asshole who talks too much a couple of times a month for the past 20 years. For that guy, I stir a martini as if in the vacuum of space, frighteningly silent, and he loves his martini which I balance on a razor’s edge, but he takes the skill I use to make them for granted. How do I know?
Well, Of Course I Know Him. He's Me
Asymmetry aside, I think I’ll be able to remember how to do the physical aspects of the job. I was very happy to stumble through a training shift, and subsequent first shift and meet a couple of my new coworkers. The last thing I saw as I left my training shift was Dalila repackaging the 1984 prom jam, “We Belong,” by Pat Benatar into a flaming Spanish Coffee performance piece. When I told her how much I loved Pat Benatar, she didn’t even say “that’s nice, gramps.”
I do love bars, bartenders, and tending bar. I’ve always felt comfortable in bars. Legion are the unwritten rules of any particular bar but incredibly simple is the rule(s) for working in one: love people and take care of them. Those are really just the rules for life, but in a bar, you do it with a conversation, a good playlist, and a clean bathroom. I’ve forced many of my friends and family to watch the sketch from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life in which, shortly after a wafer-thin mint makes Mr. Creosote explode, a French waiter played by Eric Idle tells you his meaning of life. I’ll not ruin it for you here on the off chance you haven’t seen it but that anticlimax has very much defined the ethos of my life and why I’m overjoyed to tend bar again.
As for me? You want to know what I think? Let me show you something.
I do Sunday nights at TDO. Reservations are strongly encouraged.
So next week: How to Playlist
*My last shift at Rob Roy was a culmination of every skill I’d ever learned, every trick I’d mastered, and was the height of my personal comfort. Someone said, “I probably shouldn’t order a Cosmo,” I replied, “I’ll make you the best one you’ve ever had.” It was a cold night, a guest asked if I’d ever heard of a Blue Blazer and a minute later I was the publican pyromancer. Guests were on first dates, old folks were on date night and the playlist was equal parts oblique and cool. Late in the evening, a guest asked if champagne towers were real “only if you have six more friends.” They gathered a crew and we raised a tower. The coupes at Rob Roy are perfect for champagne.
**He recently retired, maybe I shouldn’t forward so many New Yorker cartoons
***If you haven’t tried it, mediocre irrelevance is pretty great, it’s one of my favorite things about aging. I’m fine or whatever but I get so much joy out of seeing success for other people. Getting comfy with not being the protagonist and wearing the “cozy sweater of rooting for others,” well I’ll just say I know why people like sports so much now.
****I can’t watch The Bear on Hulu even though I know it’s great