A Cautionary Tale...

... far be it from me to discuss things that might make people uneasy (oh yeah, I never do that, right?) but this is gonna be one of those nights...

Part of the way we learn is through stories, and of course being a bartender you get plenty of those. What follows is a cautionary tale, because if you're like I was when I started, unattached and looking to fuck and get fucked up the job definitely takes you places - dens of debauchery so to speak. Adventure strained through pure Nihilism gets you plenty of good times and great stories, but it can also get you dead.

After about two and a half years of only working Tues, Wed, Thurs I relented and started picking up weekend days to help my boss fill out her staffing problems. One thing you need to understand about this gig, nothing beats it as far as flexibility. Three days a week I worke and made more than I do now working forty plus. What's more, at the time I was in an occasionally touring band and would sometimes require an entire week off here and there. With a normal gig this would never work, but as a bartender there's almost always someone looking to pick up more hours. You'll usually owe them a favor, but it works out.

My boss, an older Italian woman who looked after me as if I was her own would always comply with my schedule, so I extended the same courtesy back to her, no matter how much it occasionally pained me to do so. This in and of itself is a lesson, a variation on the ages old golden rule.

Do unto others, right?

There were plenty of people I worked with that ran to the boss every week with schedule requests, but when it came time to give something back it was always a 'no'. None of those people ever developed the comfortable, dare I say it friendly relationship I had with my bosses and peers, so none of them stayed long. If you're in and out of gigs like this, you will miss the WHOLE FUCKING POINT. Every gig, whether bartender or bookseller, will be rough around the edges at first. But if you stick through it long enough you build yourself into the lives and thoughts of those around you and become a fixture - when shit goes down eyes naturally fall on the folks that are rough around the edges, especially if they've been that way for a while. Us fixtures, we become the folks they go to after the smoke has settled to help pick up the pieces. We're Johnny Unitas' haircut to Abe Simpson - you can set your watch by us.

Anyway, forgive the huge digression.

So in working weekends I became friends with another 'fixture' of the building, a guy we'll call Thurston. Thurston was the slick, lady killer that one-upped my schedule, working a mere two days a week behind the bar. We had known each other in a perfunctory fashion since I'd started but working together we became pretty good friends. It took a while for me to get used to the weekends as they were a completely different speed and a largely different clintele, but after my initial 'rough around the edges' period I was in.

Weekends the bar closed at proper bar time, 2AM, and afterward the staff often went out and hit the 4 and 5 AM bars in the area. This often led to hijinks, as included in our menagerie of sousitude were not only Thurston, myself and our waitresses, but also several of the middle-aged security guards and various other hangers on. The guys were, of course, all trying to get in the waitresses pants and this led to particularly interesting conversations when observing those older guys, but that's another story...

So one particular Saturday night we were short-handed and brutalized by the end of the night (two Irish Weddings' let out at 1AM + an unusually full bar at that time already) and some of us were ready to do some drinking. The party fractured off this particular evening and it ended up being just three of us: Thurston, myself and everybody's favorite crazy waitress Lacey.

Lacey was nuts: She hung out with a batallion of off-duty cops half the nights of the week and coke dealing bikers the other half. She loved booze, blow and casual sex and always got her way. I had partied with her before, we worked Tuesdays together on and off for about a year at this point, and it was a general rule of thumb if you went out with Lacey, you weren't coming home until the next day.

So I jump in Lacey's car and we follow Thurston to a 5 AM bar in his neighborhood a couple miles away in Marquette Park.
The bar was constantly referred to as ROMANTICA even though it had no discernable name or sign. Romantica was a 'club' where mostly Polish and Lithuanian immigrants congegrated for debauchery of all kinds. Let me tell you, even if we've advanced enough as a society to where a couple white kids can walk into a mostly black bar and not feel weird, we HAVE NOT yet reached the level where three non-Eastern Europeans can walk into an entirely Eastern European club and feel anything but intimidation. Not in Marquette Park on the Southside of Chicago at three in the morning at least.

I'd been here before - it was a lot of loud Euro-pop, bad dancing, open-chested guys with names like Dimitri, and fucked up, loose blonde women too young to be ruined but too old to not be hanging out in places like this. Thurston and Lacey were semi-regulars here; the five AM after work party wagon had a long history of ending Saturday nights at this place. I'd heard plenty of stories but my time here thus far had been short and experimental bursts and thus I'd not yet encountered any of the real 'character' of the place. This particular morning however seemed to have 'LONG HAUL' written all over it since we left work, so I saddled up to the bar with my friends and we started with beers and shots.

Thing is, when you're in the industry you get pulled into the ebb and flow of everyone else's machinations. A lot of these people are in the industry too and everyone gets to know who has money on them, who has drugs on them, etcetera. You have to stay abreast of all this but also removed enough to remain anonymous and a bit of a mystery.

After a few minutes two spots opened up at the bar and we managed to slip in relatively unscathed. Thurston and I both offered Lacey a seat but she was tweaking already and seemed to feel the perpetual need to move around and talk to people in the peripherary. Of course the people Lacey chose to talk to were the ones that looked to me better left alone.

At some point Lacey began complaining that she needed to score some more drugs. This did not, however prevent her from doing as she normally did when I was out with her and slip me a little bunched up wad of paper, within which I would of course find a small amount of Saturday night white to help me keep up. Lacey lived and partied in perpetual fear of stasis - if you were out with her and not as 'into it' as she was she went out of her way to 'get you there'. I'm no Gary Busey, but I'm no angel either. Free blow is free blow, and in another minute I hopped up to make my way to the bathroom. I knew there was a single, dilapidated stall there that had a long history of protecting drug use, and hopefully it would be free.

This is another pro/con of the industry: there are drugs EVERYWHERE. Nothing says you have to take advantage of this fact, but if you do, you have to hold it down - you commit two many 'oh why not''s and suddenly its ten years later and YOU'RE that burnt out close-talker at the 5 AM bar, leaning on anyone and everyone you can for just a little bit of companionship because everyone else in your life will have gotten sick of your shit by then. Dabble, yeah, but remember, always keep your front toe on the brakes and the word 'No' at the front of your tongue.

So now its fifteen minutes or so later and my I've got a nice, cool numb rubbing in from around the edges making all the ugly people (and the place is packed with them) seem a little less ugly. In my absence Thurston has been hitting on the bartender, a hot Lithuanian chick with enormous breasts fighting like mad to escape from her shirt. Lacey has befriended a couple of real greaseball looking motherfuckers - the kind of guys that make amateur porn in their mother's basements. They're eyeing her with the predator's gleam, completely unaware that it is Lacey who is sizing them up for her own ends. For my part I return to my beer, refreshed in my absence by Thurston's new friend.

After a while Lacey parades her two new friends over to us and begins discussing the possibility of 'making a deal'. Something about these guys make me less than confident about entering into any kind of transaction with them but Lacey seems assured. I can tell Thurston is uneasy with what's going on too, but as I watch the bartender he's been working on throw her arms around some big stooge who has just come in at the other side of the bar I also realize he's probably looking for a new way to end his night. We move into position for trouble.

Thurston steps in and starts talking to the guys and soon it becomes apparent that this thing, for better or worse is going down. The guys seem antsy to get us to go with them, probably due to the target signs their eyes are painting on Lacey.

'We'll party bro.' or some other such sleazy banality issues repeatedly from their mouths as they pat Thurston on the back and attempt to assuage our obvious reservations. By this time Lacey has consumed several more beers and probably an equal number of shots and she's just about ready to walk to the moon and back if it means blow will be involved so Thurston and I begin watching her more closely while trying to successfully navigate this bizarre drug deal we now seem locked into as if we'd signed Dimitri's chest with our own blood.

Finally the bar closes (Shit! Two hours went by that fast and we still don't have the stimulants yet? This is going to be one hell of a long night, the kind where you tape the fucking blinds down and try and pretend the sun hasn't come back up around from the other side of the world to ruin your fun) and we wind up in the middle of Pulaski Ave. arguing with these guys about how we're not coming with them. Things are looking shady and I'm reminded why you should always drive yourself into situation like these - so you can leave.

Culmination comes a few terse minutes later. We're now at the point where at least one of us doesn't care and the others have become increasingly unsure whether this is even going to happen. The greaseballs are hemming and hawing, we’re sitting in a parked car on Pulaski Ave. at 5 AM attempting a drug deal – this is the kind of situation where any sane person’s spider sense would be screaming ‘GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE’ but there’s this strange, expectant electricity in the air – its holding the three of us by the spine and drawing us in. That’s what happens when you see the nightly news with three youths gunned down in a bad part of town and everyone that knew them says things into the camera like ‘what were they thinking, they were so bright?’. That pull, that inertia is why good, smart people get mixed up in things they normally never would and then end up meeting icky and often abnormal endings. It’s the cold hard reality beneath the numbers and once you feel it the idea of being just another statistic will scare you more than the guy with the gun pointed at your head.

Anyone who’s been in a really sketchy situation will tell you about this feeling; it arises as your body recognizes danger or stupid behavior and fights against the inertia of the situation. Death is a black hole, and once you're locked onto its frequency it is almost impossible to pull clean. In a situation like this you have to let it run its course.

Lacey’s in the back of the car and we’re waiting for these two guys to return. My brain is screaming to leave and I’m pretty sure Thurston is there too, but Lacey is going on and on about getting fucked up and blah blah blah I’m too frightened to pay attention right now. Then suddenly I see the grease walking back up on the car, their hands not in sight. Lacey evidently sees this too because all of a sudden the crazy party vibe disappears from her voice and I hear something that really sends a chill rocketing down my spine. I hear fear in Lacey’s voice as she says, “Oh my god, something’s not right. Their gonna do something…” It's the way she says 'Oh my god' - it sounds like the scene in the movie where we're about to die.

It's not a good feeling, sitting helpless as events play out. We’ve missed our chance to leave and the two hairy-chested harbingers of the apocalypse are almost upon the car, there's not even enough time to ask ourselves how could this have gotten this out of hand?

Suddenly time slips into the improbably soup of Schrodinger’s cat – in 50% of the Universes out there we die with three simple gunshots and they take our money and maybe Lacey. Somehow, someway we careen out of these corridors and into the other 50%, where the grease walk right up to the window, hand Lacey the stuff, take their money and leave. A final offer to ‘party’ with them goes unacknowledged and before I know it we’re off in Thurston’s car to his apartment.

…….

So that’s the tale. The lesson is of course, don’t do drugs, but if you do, don’t do stupid things in sketchy parts of town to get them. Jeez, I look back on that and simply marvel at some of the absolutely ridiculous things I did because I got caught up in that industry vibe. You become a fixture and people want you around and they want to share things with you, experiences and drugs and their bed, and you’ve gotta keep your head on straight if you’re going to make it out alive. It’s the best gig in the world, but like I said before, you’ve got to work to keep it that way because after the ‘new car smell’ wears off the partying, if you haven’t left yourself an exit, your fucked.

Now go make some drinks.