Life Behind Bars Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Another Bump in the Road

When growing up, my father and I loved watching Cheers together on Thursday nights.  Seems a bit odd to think my dad would be promoting a show about drinking, loneliness and alcoholism, but it really wasn’t about that.  It was all about the characters and their individual stories and what made this group of loveable losers find each other in the dank basement bar amongst the brownstones of Boston.

It showed us that despite what we were, or what we were to become, there would always be flaws in our lives.  There would always be that unreachable dream that made us so miserable it would keep us up at night.  From the retired baseball player turned bar owner, to the know-it-all mailman, to the waitress making a quick buck while trying to get back on her feet, to the lovable fat man at the end of the bar doing his best to escape his overbearing wife. Every person had their reasons for being there.

It is at times unbearable getting through a day when depression is knocking at your door…for me it was working in an office.  I certainly was never a morning person, so getting up with the sun and sitting in an hour of traffic every morning was like sticking myself in the eyes with hot burning coals.  My cubicle was next to the window, staring out at a highway with used car lots on either side. Picturesque! Yes, somehow, I was roped back into office life and I couldn’t have been more miserable with what my life had become.

Before I had been exiled back into a cube, I had landed a job working at a hotel/wedding hall.  After a few glorious months of crafting my art and becoming skilled at pouring the perfect pint, I was offered the position of lobby bartender.  I was on top of the world, as crazy as that sounds, and if it wasn’t for that extra beer my life would have gone in a very different direction.  That fateful mug of frosty awesomeness came after a wedding from hell. It was one of the toughest events I ever had to endure...filled with white trash hillbillies who were doing their best to test the staff for the entire event.  After getting through five hours of the most god awful wedding reception I had ever been witness to, we rolled the bars back into the store room and began to take inventory and count tips.

It had been customary to drink a beer and smoke cigarettes whilst counting our spoils, and our old boss would actually encourage it.  He was a great guy, a Czech immigrant who had escaped communism. He had snuck through checkpoints, crossed borders, somehow found his way into East Germany and pole vaulted over the Berlin Wall, finding freedom in the west. He eventually immigrated the United States, all to become the head food and beverage manager of a local hotel in buttfuck New Jersey.  What a country, he would say! But all kidding aside, he believed a happy worker was a productive worker.  Unfortunately, the hotel chain did not agree, and he was fired.  As were the rest of us barkeeps when we were all caught in the liquor room drinking after a tough night on the wedding floor.

One beer turned into two, then three then four. Before you knew it, a little impromptu swaray in the liquor room had begun. Cigarettes lit, beer bottles being popped and our voices getting louder. The girl at the front desk must have been confused when she turned the corner to investigate and found the bar empty. She walked through the door of the liquor room to find us all having a grand old time. With a look of shock on her face, and not knowing what the hell to do, she took two steps backwards, turned around and ran to back to the front desk to rat us out.

I never even got to work my first shift as the lobby bartender.  As luck would have it, corporate had just recently established an 800 number that went directly to the brain trust.  Our hotel manager had her hands tied.  Two weeks into the spring wedding season and she had to fire her whole crew of bartenders.  She had said if it were up to her she would have scolded us good, taken away a few shifts as punishment and we’d be back in business.  No dice once the corporate heads had their way.

In the midst of this chaos, I had the brilliant idea of going down to the Jersey shore and becoming a bartender for the summer.  I grabbed the girl I was dating (who also happened to get fired that fateful night) and rented a place sight on seen and slapped it on the credit card.  What was six grand I thought?  I’ll make that in two weeks down here!  A month later, I was bartending private parties for rich assholes on the northern end of Long Beach Island.  It wasn’t enough money to even buy groceries.  So I got a job at a fish market gutting fish and cutting filets for rich assholes from New York City who were down on holiday.  It was awful!

In the mornings I would take the oysters that came in off the barges from Long Island Sound and power wash them until they looked as if they were picked fresh from the pristine shoreline. Before I got to them, they were covered in two inches of rust, being that they grew them on artificial reefs made out of old sunken ships and other trash from Manhattan they had nowhere else to dump.  To this day I absolutely refuse to eat them! Honestly, for the love of all things holy, don't eat shellfish.

I would spread them over a dirty metal grate on the floor where I had seen cockroaches and mice just minutes earlier and power-washed the rust and garbage off of them.  Then I’d pack them up in buckets of shaved ice, bring them to the front where tourists would have them shucked in front of them and suckle them down with whiskey and beer chasers…all the while paying about three bucks a pop for them.  In a way it made me chuckle, because most of these ass wipes were just as bad as the morons you saw on the Jersey Shore show.  Watching them shovel slime ridden garbage of their own creation down their throats and paying top dollar for it made my day.

At night before we closed up shop, we had to empty the entire 100-foot glass display case on the market side of the raw bar.  Every day, an inch worth of putrid fish droppings and oils and a horribleness I can’t quite explain would collect in the bottom of the fridge and it was up to us to get it out.  The only way to do it was to climb in and scoop it out with plastic cups and into a five-gallon bucket.  Then we had to wipe it all down with bleach to sanitize everything for the next day’s catch.  The last step was to take vinegar and old newspapers to wipe the inside of the glass for that storeroom shine.

On my last day of employment a co-worker of mine and I were in the case together finishing up and I began to laugh uncontrollably.  He looked at me with disgust and asked what could possibly be so funny?  My reply was short, sweet and to the point. 

“In our lives, we will never sink lower than this moment here.  Everything from this point on is up!” 

He curled his lip, and raised his eyebrows for a moment to process what I had said.  After a brief pause, he too began to laugh uncontrollably.  We climbed out of the case, done with our daily horribleness, and both quit. Fuck it, we thought...the job was awful, the owner was a douche and coming home covered in fish guts every night for minimum wage was horseshit. There was only two weeks left of the summer season anyways, so off we went.

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Things You Never Wanted to Know

The "catch of the day" is never the catch of the day. It was caught two weeks ago off the coast of Peru. It's already made several people sick and the owner is taking a bath on it. Have you ever wondered why it's usually blackened with Cajun spices and cooked to death?

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The girl I had brought down became a horrible pain-in-the-ass.  It had been weeks since we had slept with each other and days since we had even talked.  I can't say I blame her, I stunk like rotting fish every day. Even a good solid hour in the outdoor shower wasn't taking that stink away. I told her to enjoy her last two weeks at the shore, and I made my way home.  Once again, my adventures bartending took a brief pause so I could readjust my life and give this “real job” thing another chance.

I bounced around a few places, dangling my precious bachelor’s degree in the faces of any prospective interviewer who wanted to see what this journeyman was all about.  I tried teaching in an afterschool program and was summarily fired for having the gumption of playing dodgeball and kickball!  There were victims and losers in those games, what was I thinking?  No wonder you millennial types are so fucked up!  You never learned how to lose, or how to be a victim and rise above it!  But that’s a whole other topic of discussion we’ll dive into later.

I suffered through working at a gym as a maintenance man, I developed photos at a one hour photo joint, I worked with a contractor doing kitchens and bathrooms…you name it, I’ve worked it.  I even folded clothes in the stockroom at a Macy’s at two in the morning when the trucks came in after hours.  It was daunting, but I was living on my own and I needed to pay the rent.

It was at this time I had met an old high school crush, the lovely Lisa.  We were having a grand old time as people often do at the start of a new relationship.  But after a month or so she started getting on my ass about having a real job, and she didn’t want to hear that I had a few leads for some bar shifts and some local watering holes.  She no longer wanted to date a loser going from job to job, working late night shifts, or pushing pilsner.  She wanted a man with a future.

“I can’t keep telling the people I work with that the guy I’m dating is bouncing around from job to job, or picking up bar shifts at reception halls.  If you want to keep dating me, you have to go out and get a real job.”

Well, there it was, the lovely Lisa laid down the gauntlet.  What was I to do?  It was a story book romance.  She wanted nothing to do with me in high school and college, and now here was my chance to land her hook line and sinker.  All I had to do to keep her from running off to another guy with a cushy job was to land one myself. 

I spent hours every day in my apartment scouring the help wanted ads and running through line after line of job postings on the internet.  After a few weeks, she had seen enough, I was going nowhere.  So I started to become a little less picky with who and what I was sending my resume to.  I was at my wits end, and I sent out the last of my resumes to some horrific low paying jobs in finance and payroll companies.

After clicking send and staring at the ceiling for an hour or so, I answered a newspaper ad where a local bar was looking for new bartenders. I called and the owner said to come right in.  I knew the Lovely Lisa wouldn't like it, but I needed money, so she would have to deal. As I was walking out the door, the phone rang.  God, the universe, the lovely Lisa and my family must have all teamed up for this divine intervention! They were not were not going to put up with my bullshit any longer!

Another head hunter had found my resume and wanted to talk. After a good hour on the phone of regurgitating corporate mantra and biting my tongue, I managed to "impress" my way for a face to face interview.  Doing what I always did best, bullshitting my way through it all, I weaseled my way through all three interviews and landed a job as a payroll clerk for a national payroll company. 

Not what I had envisioned as a youngster when jobs like shortstop for the Yankees, being an astronaut for Nasa, becoming a sportswriter or even the ultimate pipe dream of being a successful novelist where still all on the table.  But it was something, and it wasn’t too late to salvage that relationship with the lovely Lisa.

Like all corporate jobs, they droned on and on about mission statements, how the founder and CEO of the company was the second coming of Christ and how lucky we were to be in on the ground floor...yada yada yada.  The work was as exciting as watching ice melt in an empty cocktail glass.  I immediately dreaded this decision.  Lisa, unimpressed from my stellar 22,000 dollar a year position, moved on to bigger and brighter things, and I was stuck.  No longer able to afford my apartment I had to move back home.  My old room taken up by one of my mother’s friends renting out space, I was subject to living in the basement.

So there I was, a 25-year-old Generation Xer living in his mother’s basement.  I was quite the catch! I had no girlfriend and a job I hated with all my guts.  Day in and day out people would call and scream at me because their paychecks were wrong, even though it wasn’t even me who screwed them up.  After a while, I just didn’t care anymore.  Yes, I’ll fix that.  Yes, that was my fault.  Yes, a monkey could do my job.  Yes, it feels great to be a stupid moron.  Thank you.

The best complaints came the day of a blackout in New York City when the mayor closed the bridges and tunnels to all incoming traffic so pedestrians could use them to walk home.  It was a Friday, and the paychecks were stuck in Fort Lee, NJ unable to cross the bridges.  Customers would not accept this excuse.  I told them to call the Mayor, and was written up for being inappropriate with my response.

Two years into the gig I was still living at home, but now making a whopping 24,000 dollars a year, which in New Jersey is like making minimum wage at best.   I hadn’t had a girlfriend in all that time, not even a frigging one night stand.  I was in my mid-to-late 20’s and on a two year dry spell.  It was a hell I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

The year was 2004, the Yankees just blew a three-games-to-none lead against the Boston Redsox to lose the American league pennant, the NHL cancelled its season due to a labor strike and George W. Bush won reelection…and I still lived in mom’s basement, did I forget to mention that?!  I finally knew what it was like to be miserable and depressed, which is when I found my little Irish pub.

Every day sitting through traffic I passed this quaint little neighborhood joint and I kept telling myself, “I have to stop in there one of these days.” I can remember it was snowing, so I had been stuck in a two hour traffic jam and had traveled a grand total of three miles.  Finally I had had enough and pulled into the parking lot.  I immediately fell in love with the place.  It literally was Cheers.  I sat at the bar, had a burger and fries and a few brews and just listened to all the wonderful conversations of the regulars.  I wanted in.

It began to be a regular stop for a while…just once a week mind you, I wasn’t making all that much money.  And then, one day, the hiring sign was out and I snuck down there at lunch to fill out an application.  I didn’t think I had a chance.  After all, most of my experience as a bartender was in reception halls and I hadn’t poured a beer or made a cocktail in almost two years.  But, like any gig in the industry, it’s all about timing. Later that day the phone at my desk rang and it was the bartender I had talked to earlier in the day. 

“You still interested in that bartending job,” he asked. 

“Of course, when do you want me to come in and interview,” I ignorantly replied.

“Interview?  What kind of job do you think this is?  Just fucking get in here by 5:30, I need somebody behind the bar tonight to help Dave.  Shift ends at 2:30, you in or not?”

Taken back by the offer, I immediately replied, “YES!” and thus, my career in bartending began. For real this time! I had found my home. I stood up and did a little jig at my desk.  My supervisor looked at me like I was nuts, and she saw something she had never seen me do; smile! I knew if this gig worked out, that it would be the beginning of the end of my days of working in an office. 

I had avoided bartending because my family thought it was beneath me.  I had avoided bartending because the tail I was chasing wasn’t impressed or too thrilled to be dating a bartender.  I had avoided bartending because as the son of a famous sportswriter, I was destined to be his heir apparent.  I was supposed to rise from the ashes of his tragic death and become the next great sports writer…it just wasn’t meant to be.

It took a long time for people to accept that I wasn’t going to be dad, even myself. But maybe dad saw something in me all those years back when we visited Uncle Harry’s liquor store, or when we would sit down on a Thursday and tune into watch Sam Malone’s latest antics on Cheers.  Or even when we had lunch at the Bull and Finch Pub in Boston when we went up there for a father-son weekend. We marveled at how the show was created when a television producer sat at the bar and couldn’t stop laughing at the conversations that surrounded her. Some dads took their sons to the arcade in the mall, mine took me to see Cheers.

I had avoided my destiny for way too long.  And all it took was two or three years of absolute misery, loneliness and failure to find my home.  It was the pain and suffering that lead me through those doors, like so many of the other lost souls that keep the barstools warm. There is no greater feeling than finding people who share the same suffering...as sad as that sounds. I was in a room of my peers, except I wasn’t giving up and sitting with them, I was behind the bar trying to keep them all from jumping off a bridge.  I had found a way to escape my cubicle.  No longer would I sit in a cube, now I was going to stand in one.  

Twelve years prior to this moment I had turned a barn in my mother’s back yard into a fully operational speakeasy for underage drinkers.  It took over a decade of failure and distractions to realize that a dingy dark room and the smell of stale beer and lit cigarettes was where I belonged.  It was where I felt at home, where I was on the top of my game, the cock of the walk.  Now that I realized this was home, I was back and full of pith and vinegar.  There was only one thing left to do, quit my day job.