Life Behind Bars Chapter 1

Life Behind Bars

(Everything you did and didn't want to know about the restaurant industry)

By Raymond DeGraw Jr.

To my wife, Kathy, for always believing in me no matter how crazy or harebrained my schemes seemed to be.  For always encouraging my want and desire to be a bartender, and for knowing that happiness is not a big house, a flashy car or a week in the islands every year.  Oh, yes, and for letting me retire in my mid-30’s!  I’ll make it up to you sooner or later!  I promise.

And to the “Original Five”, this is for you…

Chapter One

In the beginning…

College graduation had come and gone.  The backpacking trip through Europe to “find myself” had come to a quick end.  The final summer, before real life was slated to begin, was eroding ever so fast.  Each morning’s walk to the end of the driveway to get the morning paper had become a grim death march to the inevitable conclusion the classified ads held each day.  Like most college graduates, I had no idea of what the hell I wanted to do for a living.

I had spent five years working for the local newspaper, following in my father’s footsteps.  Dad was a well-respected and highly talented sports writer for the New York Daily News, who unfortunately died suddenly and before his time.  His pancreas had ruptured and he bled to death internally…only after exhausting the state of New Jerseys blood supply by using 56 pints of blood to stave off death as the doctors tried to figure out a way to save his life.  They did not.

Of course I got the job because of my departed father’s name and the loyalty of his friends who still remained in the business.  They felt sorry for me, and perhaps hoped the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.  I can tell you, not only did it fall far from the tree, it rolled down the hill, fell in a river and ended up a 100 miles down in the valley.  It created an animosity amongst my co-workers who had to crawl their way up the ladder, and they made no attempt to hide their feelings.  I simply was not a good sportswriter. 

When college had ended and my whirlwind tour through the European countryside was done and over with, they had no intention of hiring me full time; and quite frankly, I was tired of being the butt end of all the jokes around the office anyway.  So, I did what most English Majors with a Bachelor’s degree would do…I enrolled in a two week bartending course. Much to the chagrin of my family, my path towards a career slinging suds had begun.

The uproar this caused after spending five years with a “real job” while earning my degree was nothing short of spectacular.  So I had to sell it as a temporary measure to pay the bills and my college loans until I could find a proper career path.  My clever little ruse worked amongst the kinfolk, and although my search through the classified ads continued unabated, in truth I was scouring the ads for my first gig behind a bar.  

I quickly learned it was rare to see a help wanted ad for a bartender, and I would immediately call as soon as one popped up.  Problem was, nobody wanted to hire a bartender with no experience…and they really could care less that I went to a bartending school.  Confidence was certainly becoming an issue and mom was getting impatient with what seemed like a complete lack of effort in finding employment. 

So I took my lumps and sent my resume to a career counselor and was called almost immediately.  I suppose there weren’t too many 21-year-old kids out there with five years of experience as a newspaper reporter and a college degree all whilst running a semi-pro baseball team in his spare time.  For some reason, she was not all that impressed with my degree from the East Coast School of Bartending.

I sat and bullshitted my way through another one of life’s interviews and was offered a position selling advertising space for a local Yellow Pages outfit.  I was not excited from the get-go, but the potential earnings of 100-thousand a year (complete bullshit, of course) was a nice carrot to dangle in front of a naïve 20-something.  My sister Joanne was so proud of me that she took me out shopping and bought me four new suits which to this day my brother-in-law Brian is none the wiser.  

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Uncle Ray's Tricks of the Trade

Do your lemons and limes look a little slimy and you don't have time to cut new fruit? Give them a quick rinse in club soda. They'll look as fresh as the day you cut them...even if it was last week!

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Like the start of any job, we were ushered into a room with about a dozen other trainees and given a nice continental breakfast with coffee every morning (not sure if they do that anymore, it's been decades since I had an office job!).  After a quick round of introductions I quickly realized that I wasn’t alone.  Nobody else wanted to be there either, but we were all in the same sinking ship…out parents wanted us out, and wanted a return on their investment on sending us to college.  There was no way in hell they were going to let us putz around the house for another year.

As each day passed I grew more and more miserable, from the hour and a half sitting in traffic with the rest of the nine-to-fivers to wearing the shackles most of the world calls a suit.  I couldn’t take it, I hated every minute of it and I wanted out.  But I couldn’t let mom down, nor could I let my sister down, especially after sinking a few hundred dollars into suits I was destined to never wear.  

It was on the fourth day of training that I ended up becoming a bartender for the first time.  After another agonizing round of morning jumping jacks and chants about how great the company that hired us was, they had a super big surprise for us…the company’s one and only CEO!!  Whoop-ti-friggin-do!! They talked this guy up so much you would have though he was the second coming of Jesus Christ himself.

Pulling up in his flashy Mercedes, wearing a fitted suit complete with a pair of sunglasses and a Rolex watch (probably costing more than I could make in a year) he came to let us know that one day not too long ago, he was starting out just like us.  It was after a few pointless hours of filling our heads with mission statements, shifting paradigms, thinking outside the box, hitting the ground running and how hard work would make us a fortune when he said something that stood out amongst all the other bullshit he was droning on about...

“You people here were chosen as the very best.  We scoured hundreds of resumes and did dozens of interviews, and we felt that you guys right here in this group were the most talented and the most worthy.  So if you don’t feel like you just hit the lottery jackpot, then you just shouldn’t bother coming back tomorrow.”

As we continued on with the rest of our day, I reflected heavily on what the CEO had said to us.  “If you don’t feel like you just hit the lottery jackpot, then you just shouldn’t bother coming back tomorrow.”  I couldn’t get that out of my head no matter how hard I had tried.  I tried at lunch, but to no avail.  I tried during our smoke breaks, but no dice, I couldn’t shake it.  Sitting in a two hour traffic jam on the way home didn’t help the matter and a half a dozen beers after dinner didn’t do a damned thing either.

The next morning I dragged myself out of bed.  My roommates were all still fast asleep as they had partied the night away; I was the only one in the house with a nine-to-fiver.  All damned night I laid in bed with my eyes open, staring at the ceiling while I could hear games of darts being played in the living room.  Thud, thud, thud and a raucous cheer would follow! I could smell cigarettes and pot and could hear the laughter of all the girls and guys who had come over to hang out and party. 

In the morning, I trudged passed the ashtrays full of cigarette butts and the smell of stale beer that wafted in the air. There were about half a dozen people passed out on couches with a girl or two in their arms.  Wow, I missed a good one for sure.  I got in the car and sat through another hour of traffic listening to the radio and chain smoking cigarettes.  I sat in the parking lot for a good 15 minutes or so watching all my classmates walk by the car, all with a downtrodden look of absolute defeat in their eyes.  Is this what we went to college for?  To become one of the sheep?  Was it worth the money we could supposedly make? Fuck no, I wasn't buying in, I wasn't going to go though with it.

It was at that moment I made the decision that would set the course for the rest of my life.  I thought back to what the CEO had said, and damn it, I didn’t feel like I just won the lottery! I felt like I lost at the game of life.  This was not what I wanted.  I started my car, drove away and found a catering hall near home that happened hiring bartenders for weddings.  It was a frigging miracle. They were desperate, as a few of their guys had just quit.  I was hired, and put to work that very night.  My road towards being a bartender had officially begun.

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Uncle Ray's Tricks of the Trade

Frozen drinks slowing you down? Unplug the blender and say that it's broken...works like a charm every time!

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Thinking back, I can’t really remember when I first entertained the idea of being a barkeep.  As far back as I can recall, I kind of always wanted to do it.  I don’t know, maybe it started when my father would bring me to Uncle Harry’s liquor store and I would be dazzled by all the neon lights and as much beef jerky and candy that I could possibly consume. 

It was the kind of liquor store that had a few barstools at the register for the local drunks to pop a few down on the way home.  The men would sit and smoke cigars and drink whiskey while arguing who had the best shot at winning the pennant that year.  I loved it.  They all knew Uncle Harry by name, and no matter how many people came and went, he knew all of them.  He even knew the names of their wives and kids, where they worked, what they did for a living. It was amazing to me that somebody could know so many people and so many things.  Quite frankly, it hooked me.

There was also our annual family trip to the Tavern in Morris Plains, a picturesque little town in the middle of Northern New Jersey.  Growing up with four older sisters who were mostly all married at the time and being a one-income family, we didn’t go out to dinner much. So once a year, dad would scrimp and save, then bring out the whole lot of us. It was something we all eagerly looked forward to; it was an event. We would talk about it at dinner every night as the big day grew closer. We scoured over the menu which only had 10 choices. Steak, roast beef sandwich, a salad wedge and a couple of other things, I can't quite recall. You really didn't go to this place and not get a steak...ordering something different was probably a way to sniff out the Communists (after all, it was the 80's).

He loved everything about the Tavern, hands down. Starting with the famous 24-ounce Delmonico steaks (48-ounce if you were brave) to the even more famous 32oz beers, which nobody else poured back in those days. But what he really loved about the place was the owner, Arthur the Great. Arthur was a showman, and a bit of a con artist. But those go hand and hand really. He famously sold his steaks for 10 dollars a pop…which he claimed he would lose a dollar a steak, but it was worth it to see his customer’s smiles!  Total bullshit, but everybody ate it up (no pun intended).  The money was in the booze, he would say, and it was his bartenders who put him in the big house on top of the hill.

Dad idolized Arthur.  He was a self-made man, a poor Irish immigrant right off the boat who worked his way up from being a dishwasher to owning five of the state’s most prestigious and popular restaurants.  When Arthur entered the room, a quiet hush would take over and all heads turned.  He was a man to be respected, and looked up to.  His voice boomed, his laugh was contagious and when Arthur talked, everybody listened.  I wanted that to be me one day.  To be the life of the party, to be the man everybody wanted to be friends with.

Then, of course, there was always the television show Cheers.  Who, growing up in the 1980’s, didn’t watch that every Thursday night?  Dad even took me to Boston one weekend just to go to the Bull and Finch Pub which the show was based on. I loved watching the antics of Sam Malone, Cliff Clavin, Coach and later Woody. Of course there was also the lovable Norm who the crowd would serenade upon his entrance into the room. “NOOOOORRRRRMMMMM!”

There was a whole little world that existed right there in that little underground bar.  Like the song said, “you want to go where everybody knows your name.” No matter how much you hated your job, your boss or the problems you had at home you were welcome there with open arms. And for the brief time you sat and had a beer and a burger, you forgot about all the shit that was keeping you up at night. It was home.

The fond memories of all these moments in time drew me in. I wanted to be a part of it every night. I wanted to be that guy behind the bar that knew everybody. I wanted to be the one telling the joke that made the whole room laugh. I wanted to somehow know the answer to every question asked, to be the problem solver when something went awry...to be the fixer of everything broken. To be a go-to-guy, somebody to be trusted and looked up to. To the be the captain of the ship.

Of course over time, Uncle Harry died, then so did dad as you know…both before their times.  Arthur the Great turned out to be a complete douchebag who had people lining up at his grave to piss on it after he died.  Cheers soon ran its course and was dumped to make way for Seinfeld and the world was all of a sudden very different for me. I was an awkward teenager at this point trying to figure out this thing called life and what the hell I was supposed to do with it.

Everybody had anointed me the next great sportswriter after dad had died suddenly, sort of cementing my destiny for me without asking me what I thought.  It was okay though, since dad was my idol and growing up the son of a sportswriter was a pretty cool gig.  I got to meet professional athletes, sit in press boxes, and get access to locker rooms and autographs.  From what I remembered of that as a youngster, I thought why not?  So my dreams of tending bar, was lost and forgotten for the time being.

It wasn’t until I was walking passed a garage sale one afternoon when I saw it.  It was a thing of beauty.  A shining, metal bar sign for Michelob Beer which still hangs in my house to this day.  I don’t know why, but I just had to have it.  I immediately ran all the way back home, about a half mile, and scrounged the house for as much change as I could find.  I ran back and she was still there, glinting back at me in the sun.  “How much?” I asked with sweat pouring from my head and panting from the long run.  “Two bucks”, the home owner replied.  And just like that, it began.

Mom didn’t want me hanging it in the house.  I mean, I can’t blame her, what mother in her right mind would let a 13-year-old kid hang up a beer sign in his bedroom?  So I brought it down to the broken down barn in the back yard and hung it up.  To this day, I still don’t know what it was about that sign, but it created a monster and something inside of me woke up.  It must have reignited the flame I had as a youngster to be the man behind the bar running the show. It never left, it was always there, but like everything else, life sort of got in the way and steered me onto a different path. A path that wasn't my vision, but somebody else's.

After a night of having delusions of grandeur about turning the old barn into a slop house for delinquent teens, I gathered up my neighborhood pals and fellow thugs. I was eager to show them the sign I bought and tell them about my idea, and they dug it.  They were on my every word, they agreed with every thought I was spewing. It was a big idea, and everybody knew it. We were at that age where everything was changing and we needed direction...and the barn would provide it.

We began fixing the dilapidated old building in the backyard, an old horse barn that hadn't been touched in years. It was an eyesore and my mother hated it so she was glad to see us cleaning it up; albeit with a raised eyebrow to what we were really up to. We started by replacing the broken windows, rehanging the doors and building a bar along the wall. Those were the first steps on a path that would lead me through about a half a dozen watering holes and about 20 years of my life.

We grabbed anything that wasn't nailed down to make the place our very own.  My buddy Chris brought over six bar stools that his folks were getting ready to throw out.  Billy’s parents had invested in new carpets for their house, so we cut a piece from the old one big enough to fit the floor.  Wall to wall carpeting, fabulous! Frank’s dad was cleaning out the basement and gave us a couple of bar lights and mirrors he had stuffed away in a corner.  All of a sudden, after a little spit, polish and gumption, we had our own bar. Maybe, just maybe that’s where it truly all began. 

For as far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a bartender.