The Final Friday: 11/24/06.
There are nights when the gods look down on you and decree
that tonight will go by like an express train. You will turn around twice and
the door will be closed and everyone upstairs will be smoking. Ideas will pour
out of your pen so thick and fast that your hand will cramp up. Every time you
drain your pint it will be filled to the brim when you pick it up again. And
you will feel that you can do everything right and always have and always will.
Then there are nights when the gods look down on you and laugh, and decree that
tonight nothing that you want to happen will happen quite the way you want. You
will say brilliant things that no one will remember in the morning, including
you. You will ride the conversation like a wave and never wipe out until you
make that one remark too many, and people start asking for their checks. You
will write brilliant things in your notebook that are laughably stupid when you
look at them in the morning. And then there are nights when the gods look down
on you and decree that tonight will crawl by like an arthritic snail. You will
look at your watch, write for an hour, and when you look at your watch again it
will be five minutes later. Every pint you drink will put a mile between you
and everyone else at the bar, until by the end of the night only somebody
looking through a telescope can see you. Every couple at the bar is there to
remind you of how lonely you are; every word you write reminds you of all the
plays you’ve written that no one wants to produce, and all the plays you
haven’t written yet which will also never be produced, if you ever live long
enough to write them all in the first place, so why bother? Every conversation
will remind you of how stupid people get when they drink too much, and how
smart you are to be out drinking with them. Not. Every look you get from
everyone will have a footnote that says “God, when will this lonely old fart
ever just act his fucking age and stop pretending to be 30?” And you will feel
like you can do nothing right, and never did, and never will. Dave’s last shift
as the upstairs bartender? For me, it was all of those nights wrapped up into
one.
The temperature is in the high fifties as I walk into the
Pine around ten to six. Kenny and Sarah are manning the downstairs bar; Sarah
lets me go upstairs early, and as Dave hears the door open he yells down “Who’s
coming UP?” After Wednesday night, the only response I can give is “Hollow
Leg!”
Upstairs, Jynah, Melissa and Eric are waiting tables, and
Trish is already at the bar with Elijah and Norm, one of the downstairs
regulars. Norm is asking Trish her age. When she tells him, he shakes his head.
NORM: You’re so young.
TRISH: No I’m not.
DAVE: Yes she is.
ME: She’s so young you can’t date
her—you can only adopt her.
Dave serves me the first shot of the night at 6:15, just
before my steak dinner arrives. I’m going to miss these steaks almost as much
as I’m going to miss the people; and I suppose one day I’ll even miss Ketel
Mike leaning over and saying “Ordering something different, I see,” every time
I dig into one. And since anything is possible, I figure this will probably be
the same day my play about 9/11 wins the Tony.
As I scarf down the red meat, British Mike comes in and sits
next to Trish, and Elijah tells downstairs regular stories.
ELIJAH: You ever meet Artie? Artie’s a
trip. He comes in with his wife, but some mornings what he does is, while she’s
getting herself ready, he’ll come in a half an hour ahead of her and have a
drink on his own. Then he’ll leave and come back ten minutes later with his
wife on his arm, and you have to act like you’re seeing him for the first time.
British Mike leaves at 7:30 to the second verse of
“Discovering Japan,” after delivering the first of three word-for-word
Thanksgiving apologies which I will hear before Monday: “I apologize for
leaving so early yesterday, but I’m sorry, I simply could not sit through three
football games in a row. Two was bad enough.” I don’t have the heart to tell
him that he could have stayed, since the third game was on the new NFL channel,
which isn’t carried by Time Warner, and all Dave did for the rest of the night
was channel surf looking for something interesting.
Dave’s Social Life
ME: So how’s Meghan?
DAVE: We had the talk last night.
ME: “The talk.”
DAVE: We’re taking a break at my
urging.
Dave’s been seeing Meghan off and on (mostly on) since New
Year’s Eve of 04/05, when he worked up stairs and the only customers he had
were me, Meghan, and a small group of downstairs regulars who were Bruce and Hampton’s
closest friends. Meghan had been chasing Dave for months, I had been bugging
him to call her, and he had yet to pick up the phone, so the poor girl was
forced to take matters in her own hands on New Year’s Eve, and at the stroke of
midnight she planted a kiss on him that would have raised the dead. And that
was it for the next two years. He’d never say she was his girlfriend, because
she wanted more out of the relationship than he did, and saying “girlfriend”
might actually be admitting that he was giving her some of what she wanted. And
when he started pulling away, she stuck it out, hoping as women always do that
the guy she sees in him will win out over the guy he acts like. But how many
times does that ever happen? And don’t we all become emotional suicide bombers
when someone believes the best of us? It’s like living up to someone’s good
opinion of you is a pair of handcuffs, and the only way to get free is to break
them. Because sometimes the only way you can declare yourself in total control
of your life is to mess it up every now and then. Or as an old friend of mine
used to say, “Sometimes I have to do something incredibly stupid just so I can
look at myself in the mirror.” So I guess I’ll never see Meghan again, which is
a shame, because she’s smart, committed and passionate, and souls like that are
few and far between.
At 7:45 there are 5 people at the bar and seven tables full.
Not the crowd I was expecting for Dave’s last night. But
then a lot of people don’t know it’s Dave’s last night. A lot of people don’t
even know the place is closing, so in many ways tonight is the usual slow
aggravating Friday night which has been the upstairs norm ever since the
smoking ban went into effect. Don’t ever let anybody tell someone in the saloon
industry that the smoking ban was a good thing. Most of the pre-ban regulars
dropped off the face of the earth when that hit, and they haven’t been seen
since.
MISSING POST-SMOKING-BAN REGULARS
FRED:
He got into it with Ketel Mike over the Mets 3 weeks ago and hasn’t been in
since.
MANJARI:
Hasn’t been in since I poured her into a cab on Valentine’s Day.
CORA
LEE: Either out dodging the cops on her bicycle or out dodging the cops at
an anti-war rally.
DJ:
Sick at home with gastrointestinal crap.
At 8 PM on the dot, Dave has cut Jynah and sent her home.
Jynah is pissed because she thinks that Dave doesn’t like her. The truth is, no
one likes her. The kitchen staff refer to her as Jurassic Park, the wait staff
can’t stand her, and the bartenders agree that she’s the worst waitress ever.
She doesn’t help her case by asking for a staff shot at 7 on the dot. “I’ll
give you a staff shot at 10 PM and not before,” Dave says. But by then she’s
long gone.
All conversation stops as the lionesses stop stalking and
one of them starts attacking, chasing down her prey, jumping on his back, and
sinking his teeth into his butt.
DAVE: What is she doing?
TRISH: It looks like she’s eating his
ass.
ME: Actually she’s trying to snap his
spine. If she can break his back, she’ll paralyze his hind legs and when that
happens, when he’s immobilized, that’s when the rest of them will attack him.
TRISH: [Beat.] So, Robert Altman died,
huh?
Then there are nights when people you haven’t seen in ages
show up, and it’s like picking up the thread of an old conversation. This is
one of those nights: Samara, who used to work at The Strip House, and her
actress friend Oh THAT Amanda come in at 8:08 and park themselves in the far
corner. Sixty seconds later Dave has poured shots for them and the rest of the
bar.
SAMARA: We were somewhere else first,
we decided spur of the moment to come here.
ME: Oh, so we’re getting sloppy
seconds.
OH THAT AMANDA: Who says you’re
getting anything?
ME: I think I’m in love.
SAMARA: I knew I should have worn my
cleavage top.
Neither one of them have any idea that the place is closing,
which just bears out my theory that the Pine is going to go out, not with a bang,
but a whimper.
SAMARA: I’m going to miss this place.
Poor Richie. I started out thinking that Richie was a prick, and then two years
later I fell in love with him. You know, I spent six 21st birthdays
here, they kept throwing me parties until I really turned 21, and when I did,
on my real 21st birthday? They let me drink for free. They said,
this year, it’s all on us.
Then Samara, who is now a schoolteacher, talks about her
job, talks about how much she loves her kids, and talks about how much she likes
Oh THAT Amanda, who is a Yale Theatre Grad: “She’s an actress, so you have to
take her with a grain of salt, because sometimes when she’s out, all she does
is play a part. She treats it like rehearsal. Playing a particular role.
Sometimes I catch her doing it with me, and I call her on it every single time.
Then she’s herself again. I think I’m the only person she’s herself with.”
At 8:20 Ethan and his friend Al sit down, and Ethan and Dave
reminisce about the first night Ethan was up here, when he and Princess (aka
Kylie) were breaking up. They were sitting in the corner just where OT Amanda
and Samara are now, and we watched it all go down. Kylie hasn’t been back much
over the last two years, but Ethan comes in whenever he can.
Around 9:15, Samara and Oh THAT Amanda leave for cigarettes,
and don’t come back for about half an hour. This is the perfect opportunity to
fill Trish in on who they are, and what they’re famous for.
THINGS SAMARA IS FAMOUS FOR
1.
Sucking face with boy toys in the upstairs corral.
2.
Being your best friend on Tuesday night.
3.
Cutting you dead on Wednesday.
4.
Being your best friend on Thursday.
5.
Wearing cleavage tops.
THINGS OH THAT AMANDA IS FAMOUS FOR
1.
Hooking up with guys too drunk to know better.
2.
Hooking up with guys who just happen to be there.
3.
Saying “I don’t even know him” when her hook-up is arrested by
the cops for possession.
4.
Swearing on her mother’s grave that she’s genuine and honest.
5.
Yalien, which means she gets theatre jobs because of her
college connections, not her talent.
TRISH: So they’re both a little wild?
ME: Honey? “A little wild” calls them
up for crazy lessons.
At five of ten, I go out for a candy run. When Kenny and
Sarah see me heading for the door with my coat on, their jaws drop so far they
get splinters in their chins. “You’re leaving?” Kenny cries. I shake my head.
“I’m making a candy run.” I’m at the corner of University and 13th
when I realize I should have said “I’m checking the tires,” just for old time’s
sake. Ten minutes later I’m back with a bag of Dove milk chocolate for the
downstairs and a Dove dark chocolate for the upstairs. When I drop off the
downstairs bag, Aaron looks at me like I’m psychotic and points to Glynnis.
“She made you get that?” Glynnis shakes her head: “He got this on his own.
Matt’s the best.” And because it’s one of those nights, I’m thinking to myself:
“The best old guy at the upstairs bar? The best non-famous writer who drinks
too much? The best regular with the same last name as an ex-bartender?”
Samara and Oh THAT Amanda are back when I get upstairs, and
OT Amanda is all over Ethan because they have a Yale connection. I start to
take notes on their conversation but they’re both so obviously playing each
other that I can’t bring myself to record their deathless prose for posterity.
And besides, I’m so smashed I can’t even read my own handwriting. So I put the
top back on my pen, close the notebook, and start eating candy, which is
something else I’m the best at. And I keep eating for the next 20 minutes,
while Dave gives Elijah shit about being a bad bartender. I immediately open my
pen and notebook and take down the first sentence of what turns into an
incredibly long and embarrassing monologue.
DAVE: They didn’t do right by you. If I
had trained you, one of the first things I would have done is blah blah blah
I’m all drunk and reaming you a new one blah blah blah because I am taking out my anger at the closing on you and I can’t stop talking blah blah blah and I know
everything.
And even though Elijah knows that Dave is totally tequila-fucked right now, you can see that Dave’s tirade is hitting him hard. His last night
upstairs with his favorite bartender, and what is that favorite bartender
doing? Chewing his ass like a lioness trying to take down a wildebeest. I lean
in and say the magic words (“It's the Patron talking, not the poltroon.”) but it doesn’t
help. All Elijah can think is: “This is the guy who has never gotten a regular
downstairs bartender shift in five years, and he’s giving ME advice?”
The upstairs finally closes at midnight, and it totally
feels like 2 AM. James is up, promising to return tomorrow for the final night
(but he never shows). Everyone who’s addicted is smoking cigarettes, and I go
downstairs and park myself in a stool by the service area. Bernie is there, and
after a few minutes Samara comes down and sits next to Esma. Two pints later,
Ethan comes down with Oh THAT Amanda. They’re going somewhere else for drinks
and invite me along. I decline politely because (a) I am sick to death of being
the singleton and (b) this is a marathon, not a sprint. I bid them goodbye and
glace at Sarah, who is trying to do the books but every time she starts in on
them someone slides next to her and starts talking or tickling her or sticking
his tongue in her ear.
Somehow I pry myself away from the endless round of people
preventing Sarah from getting out of here before like noon tomorrow, and head
back upstairs one last time before I leave. It’s quiet. Almost all the lights
are off. Dave is done with the books. He’s just sitting there, looking around.
DAVE: I’m glad you’re up here with me.
ME: You owned this bar, Dave.
DAVE: From you it’s good to hear. Kenny
said the same thing about an hour ago.
ME: Yeah . . .
DAVE: You were a big part of this bar
too, y’know. I can’t tell you how many times people would ask me, Is Matt coming
in? Where’s Matt tonight?
ME: Well, tonight? Matt’s here.
Then the two of us stand in front of the bar, and look up
at the wooden face of Pan, and listen to the perfect song as we thank him and bid him farewell.
Alcohol” Guinness (8) Jameson (6) Patron (6)
Copyright 2016 Matthew J Wells
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