Life Behind Bars Chapter 5

Chapter Five

Zanzibar!

It seems silly to me now as I think back to it...you know, “throwing” away my "so-called" career and a college degree.  I can’t even imagine what friends and family thought, let alone my poor mother.  She was always there for me though, and let me just kind of figure things out on my own.  I was the fifth kid in the family and the only boy; all my other sisters had moved out of the house and become successful in one way or another with families of their own.

She had let me smoke and drink and womanize; she let me run a bar in the backyard; she let me come and go as I pleased until I was finally able to figure it out.  And although she would attempt to push me from time to time, she never got down on me ever.  This was especially the case when I told her that all I wanted to do was be a bartender.  Somehow she knew, she always knew.  I was an extrovert, I liked being the center of attention and I loved to be the host with the most.  I lived life on the edge of destruction and brought my body to the limits of what it could take.

I had a wooden leg as she would lament, being a mere five-foot-six I could outdrink people three times my size with relative ease.  Nobody seemed to know where all of this came from.  Neither of my parents drank, other than a glass of wine on Christmas, so nobody quite knew where my love of booze came from, or why in the world I was so determined to be a bartender of all things.  Again, seems so silly to me now after all these years. I can’t imagine what people thought of me when I made the big move. They probably thought I was nuts to be honest!

I had put my two week notice in at the office and told nobody at home.  I didn’t want to give anybody a chance to talk me out of it.  On Sunday night before I went to bed I left a note on the kitchen counter for my mother not to wake me up.  I wrote that I had quit my job to pursue my true dream and not to worry.  It was the way we did things at my house.  We didn’t sit down and talk things out, we left notes.  It was a product of having a father that worked nights.  If dad wasn’t around to tear us a new one, he left a note for you.  And it continued that way after he died.  If you were on the shit list, you found a note waiting for you.

Oh, how I dreaded seeing those notes!  I can recall quite a few times coming home at three in the morning and seeing one taped to my door.  So, for once I had returned the favor.  Mom said nothing that morning when I woke up, she knew how absolutely miserable I was.  She had never seen me so alone and bitterly sad with the way my life was turning out.  When she saw how happy I was on the weekends when I would be coming and going from the bar, she had seen a light reignited in my soul.  They say a mother knows best, and mom certainly knew I had chosen the correct path.  

She even defended me tooth and nail to my sisters who were aghast at the career path I had chosen.  Perhaps she was the first in the family to realize I wasn’t going to be the second coming of my father.  As cool as it would have been to follow in his footsteps and be a sportswriter jet setting around the country and hanging out with celebrities, I just wasn’t any good at it!  Bartending on the other hand, that I was good at, damned good.

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Things you never wanted to know

Today's soup is yesterday's kitchen scraps and tender bits of meat that are about to make a turn for the worse...or failing that, fell on the floor. Would you like some peppercorns with that? Tell me when to stop.

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As the weeks went on, I was honing my craft.  I was getting better and better as each shift wore on.  Learning from the old-timers all the tricks of the trade; old bar etiquette, all the customer’s little quirks, dealing with cranky waitresses, ill-tempered cooks and clueless owners.  I absolutely loved every minute of it.  Every shift provided its own unique difficulties and on the spot troubleshooting. I learned to juggle it all and come out smelling like roses.  

For the first time in my life, I actually enjoyed going to work.  I would show up an hour before my shift to get my free shift meal and get a feel for the crowd.  Angry Dave shook his head, “why in god’s name would you get here early and eat this shit food?”  I would smile and tell him how much I just loved being there.  He would look down at the ground and laugh, keeping a smirk on his face…perhaps he saw himself as a young man when he saw my enthusiasm, or maybe he got a kick out of how much I enjoyed something he had come to hate with a passion.

Although I was having the time of my life, money was starting to become in issue.  Before I quit my day job I had purchased a new car.  And living at mom’s house wasn’t free, she charged me rent.  Add that to 25,000 dollars of school and credit card debt, and I was starting to feel the pinch and perhaps regretting my decision about pissing away three years as a payroll clerk and five years as a local sports writer.

I took any shift that opened up, but it was rare.  Although most of the people I worked with hated being in the business, nobody was in a hurry to leave.  They had found a nice little home with good easy money and were able to push aside their trepidations when they pocketed a couple hundred smackers by shift’s end.  Which really is the reason so many people get caught up in the business and sometimes stay too long…or never leave.

It was at this time that one of the part-time waitresses had suggested that I apply for unemployment.  Since I had quit my job, I didn’t think that was possible so I never bothered…that’s when I got one of the greatest pieces of advice anybody had ever given me.  She looked me straight in the face and said, “What’s the worst they can say?  No?”  While the notion of collecting unemployment while working part-time and being the one that walked away from a job seemed yucky to me, I was desperate.  So, the next day I applied and amazingly enough, I got it.

The only stipulation was that I had to claim the money I made at the bar, which would be subtracted from the allotment they awarded me. 

Things went great for a couple of months, until the powers that be over at my old job got wind I had started collecting.  They immediately contested the claim, and the state had cut me off and scheduled a hearing…if I lost, I would not only lose the unemployment, but I would have to pay it all back.  Unfortunately, every dime I had gotten had gone to paying bills and paying off debt.  Quite frankly I was up shits creek without a paddle.

A few months prior to all this happening, I had taken advantage of a program they had started at the office.  I was so terribly depressed I had decided to visit a shrink free of charge provided by the company.  After a half a dozen sessions of talking about family and friends, my childhood, my relationships and work the doctor came up with the ultimate conclusion:  Everything in my life was just fine except for one thing…work. 

The doctor had listened to all my stories about building cubicle walls in front of windows, sitting in hours of traffic, getting paid squat, being treated like dog shit on the bottom of my supervisor’s shoes and came up with what I already knew…working in an office was killing me.

She was kind enough to write a letter and send it to the state, but they said it wasn’t enough and I still had to plead my case with my ex-employer pleading theirs. 

The day had come and I dialed in.  I had pages of notes about everything I had gone through with them.  I had my doctor’s note that basically said I wasn’t mentally fit to work there anymore.  After spending about 15 minutes on the phone with the unemployment officer, it was time for the ass wipes at my old job to call in.  We patiently waited, and waited, and waited…but there was no call.  Annoyed at being made to wait, the unemployment officer was so ticked off that she awarded me six additional months of pay from the state, as long as I deducted my earnings from the bar.

“How dare they make me wait!” she exclaimed over the phone.  “Normally, kid, I wouldn’t have believed a word you said.  But any business that can’t follow simple directions and call me on time deserves what they get.  Enjoy your summer!” 

As she hung up her phone, I sat in disbelief.  I jumped for joy and celebrated with a smoke and a beer at nine in the morning. Not only did I not have to pay back the state, but I had defeated my old office job one last time!  I got the last laugh and now had six months to continue getting better and to find more shifts.  Getting additional money from the state was the icing on the cake.  This brief wonderful time would come to be knowns as “The Summer of Ray”, and usher in the most lucrative, fun, successful time of my entire work life and career.

I now truly knew what it felt like to be retired.  I never had the need for an alarm clock; do you have any idea what that feels like?  It was a throwback to the summers of my childhood, waking up with nature and not with a blood curdling siren, or the sound of an ill tuned radio station buzzing in my ear.  I awoke every morning to the sweet chirping of birds outside my window and the smell of the sweet summer air. 

During the week I would work in the yard, digging gardens and rebuilding the old stone walls that once marked the borders of the old farm our neighborhood was built on.  I would take breaks and sit on the giant boulder behind the barn, smoking cigarettes and sipping on iced cold beers and lemonades.  There was a giant spider that spun the most intricate of webs on a nearby tree that I would admire each day.  He would keep busy and make works of art whether or not there was a fly to eat.

On rainy days I would spend my afternoons in the barn listening to old Pink Floyd albums and restoring the old girl back to her original glory.  It was as if I were an old man making his basement into a man cave to escape his wife and children in a vain attempt to recapture his youth and innocence.  There were no plans to start throwing parties again, after all everybody had moved on and were too hip and cool to spend their time drinking in a barn in an old buddy’s backyard.  I couldn’t blame them, they had careers and fiancés and apartments of their own.  I was just a spider, spinning a web, whether there was a fly to eat or not.  I couldn’t be more at peace.

As the summer wore on, the stone walls were finished, the barn was finished and the gardens were without a weed.  My debts had vanished and I actually had a savings account to speak of.  From time to time I would hear from my old co-workers still imprisoned in their cubes.  They would visit to find me shirtless and in great shape, skimming the bugs off the still waters of my mother's crystal blue pool.  They could not believe they were hanging out with the same person.  It was consistently noted how happy and at peace I had become.  People at the bar started to realize the change as well.  Always shaking their collective heads at the twenty-five year old retiree as they would call me.

The summer breeze slowly turned into the fall as the maple trees that shaded the barn soon turned a brilliant orange and yellow.  The cover went on the pool, much to the chagrin of my beloved golden retriever Lucy who spent her whole summers fetching tennis balls in the cool blue waters.  The summer of Ray was slowly coming to an end.  Bar shifts were still hard to come by and the unemployment benefits I had won due to corporate red tape and bungling were soon coming to an end.

With debts paid and nothing to do, my annual winter depression soon started to creep its way into my psyche.  It was time to buckle up and find myself another job and maybe think about finally starting to go out on my own, for real this time.  As great as the summer of Ray had been, I knew it was my last hoorah.  I couldn’t live with mom forever, and god knows if I ever wanted to find a girl, it was imperative that I picked up and moved on.

I had established one thing, and that was that I knew I wanted to spend my life tending bar.  It’s not too often a person discovers what he or she wants to do for a living.  Some people go their whole lives trying to figure that out. Before you know it, it’s time to retire and reflect back on all the years you missed out on sitting in a square cube. Whittling the time away until it’s time to collect your government check and take you blood pressure pills to stave off death as long as humanly possible.

I had it all figured out, and managed to do so by my mid-to-late-twenties.  I just needed to find the shifts.  And wouldn’t you know it…like all things in my life, my next bar found me.