Twenty-One and Done!

When a girl walks in trying to tell you that it’s her twenty-first birthday, but is talking out of the side of her mouth like she’s had a mild stroke, there are two options to consider. One, get her a glass of water and refuse her service, trying to explain to her that she’s had too much to drink OR two, make her what she thinks is a drink, get her some food and watch the show. Well, I was bored and needed some cheap entertainment, so number two it was! At first I thought she was a stripper that had just walked off the job by the looks of her outfit and the small platoon of young boys following her around, but no, it was just her birthday dress. At one point she took out a couple of stools and almost fell over someone at the table, but all that happened was some giggling and her ass popped out of the ridiculously short dress. When she got up to leave, after scarfing down some chicken strips and Red Bull, all the boys gathered around her trying to figure out where the party was going next. She looked like a quarterback in a huddle with all of them hawking over her, hanging on every slurred word, then off they went. Oh, to be twenty-one again, aside from the lack of hangovers, you can have it, but it sure is fun to watch.

Play Ball!

The old baseball rule three strikes and you’re out seems to be a guideline in a lot of situations like asking someone out on a date, catching gonorrhea from your partner, and screwing up at the bar. Strike one, getting cut off, leaving the bar, to go out and drink somewhere else then come back to pass out on the back patio, resulting in a thirty-day suspension from the bar. Strike two, after getting cut off, proceed to tell your server to fuck off, resulting in yet another thirty-day suspension. Strike three, after being allowed back in the bar on a one drink limit, having one beer, then leaving the bar, only to come back drunk with a drink from another bar. And you are out of here! You know what they say, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches can be shoved up your ass, but that’s just a waste of a good sandwich. I’m not sure how that applies to this story, but I’m sure if you think hard enough you can figure it out.

Hey Baby!

Another busy night, and a new batch of stupidity stewing away at the old watering hole. Amongst the usual tomfoolery, you know, people getting cut off, people trying to start fights and trying to bring in their own drinks, one person stood out above them all. At 11:30pm a young woman came walking into the bar with a baby in a car seat. Now, I have worked in bars for over twenty years and this might be a new first for me. My co-workers stopped her to see what was going on and I hear a voice through the crowd yelling “Hey! Do we allow babies in the bar?” to which I promptly replied “Fuck no!” and came over to see if there was indeed a baby in the bar, and I’ll be damned if there wasn’t indeed a baby in the bar. Her excuse was that she was just looking for someone. Well, I’m sorry, obviously this is your first time bringing an infant into a house of ill repute. You’ll need to leave your baby with the homeless people out front, or the “daycare service” as we call it, if you are wanting to bring your baby downtown for a drink after 9:00pm like the rest of the responsible parents. I’m just kidding of course, homeless people charge too much, leaving them in your car is free! (Seriously, just kidding!)

It’s Science Not Magic

Special requests come up from time to time and some of them are reasonable and some are not, then there are the impossible ones. Last night an early twenty’s young girl came in and asked for a drink, everything in the drink was something I could make, the way she asked for it to be made was not however, and it sounded gross. She wanted a vodka and water with a grenadine float. Now, I’m no genius, but it is an impossibility to float grenadine on either of the other two ingredients in that drink. The conversation went something like this. She asked for the drink and I said “Well, I would like to make that drink for you but the grenadine will be on the bottom of the glass because it can’t float on the top.” She says, in a nice snotty voice “Oh yes it will! I do it all the time!” I said “The only way that the grenadine will be on the top of that drink is if you are standing on your head.” So I proved it to her and her boyfriend just laughed and she went off in a huff to the bathroom. We had a nice chuckle, needless to say they didn’t hang out very long. Some people just have to learn that it’s okay to be wrong sometimes, it makes life a lot less complicated, trust me, I know from experience.

Altered State From Out of State

You know that feeling that you get when things are going along pretty well, but in the back of your mind something seems amiss? You can’t quite pinpoint it, but your gut is trying to communicate to your brain that it needs to prepare itself for some impending doom but the old brain box is having none of it, cruising along with blind ignorance and then you look up and there it is. A disheveled slurring drunk asking for not one but three beers, and you don’t even let him finish his sentence. After I explained that it was in the best interest of the bar, and probably himself as well, that I would not be giving him any more drinks for the night, he looked perplexed. Then he perks up and says “Hell man, I ain’t even falling down or nothin! I guess I ain’t in Montana anymore!”  I proceeded to explain that it’s not a personal issue, and he’d be welcome to come back tomorrow and try his luck again. Then, not five minutes later, his female companion came in to get a beer and could hardly stand up, falling backwards into the bar a couple of times before she was whisked away by drunken Romeo. Oh, young oblivious drunken love, at least I can be comforted in the fact that they may have been to drunk to make ugly cousin babies, just maybe. 

Time to Go!

When you are all of five foot nothing and weigh about one hundred and twenty pounds you should drop the scowling gangster-wanna-be attitude, put your ten-gallon trucker hat on straight and pull up your pants. You look ridiculous. Then, when you try to pay for your drink with your drivers license like an idiot and we take said drink away, don’t get all puffed up like you are going to be some badass or something. Simply get down off of the step stool and walk away with whatever shred of dignity you have left, unless you pawned it off to buy that cool oversized watch, or maybe it’s just a normal sized watch that looks huge on your tiny little wrist. Either way, please drag your sorry ass out and go someplace that thinks whatever it is that you are trying to be is cool, because I can assure you, that place is not here.

Of Ranch and Pride

Usually, toward the end of a fun filled debaucherous evening, the mind and stomach start to wander towards some sort of sustenance to lessen the blow of the impending hangover. The need to gorge one’s self on some sort of comfort type food could stem from a subconscious survival override mechanism or possibly it’s just a continuation of an evening of reckless gluttony. Either way, the urges are real and when the tantalizing smells of the deep fryer hit your nose, there is no stopping the feast of goodness that is about to make your life complete. Now, having seen this story play out every night that I work you see how some people go about handling themselves in this situation. Some order food to share with the rest of their party, some people graze off of their friend’s plates while others take a different approach. It’s kind of like a starving dog at their food bowl, do not put your hand in there or you might be pulling back a bloody stump. There was just such a ravenous eating machine in last night that, after having devoured their food in record setting time, proceeded to wipe the last of the ranch dressing out of the container with her finger and lick it all up with a very satisfied glow about them. I guess sometimes you just have to relish every last moment, knowing that soon the evening will be over and a new day will be waiting to greet you with a head throbbing, gut wrenching reminder of all the fun you had. Cheers to you ranch dressing licker, may your liver rebound quickly! 

A Study in Genetics

Have you ever noticed the later you get into the evening the uglier the people in the bar get? It’s a pretty common thing and rather easily explained. The good looking people are out earlier and either with the person they are going home with already or have hooked up with someone and left at a reasonable hour. Now as the ranks get thinned out throughout the night you are left with less good looking people and through natural selection, the uglys are left behind at the bar. As they get more intoxicated they start realizing that if they stand a chance at hooking up they must lower their standards and take what they can get. Now, I see it all the time and it’s not cool, I mean, with all these ugly drunk people having sex, the likelihood of them getting knocked up increases while at the same time, the other reality of the situation is that the kid will be less smart, because of all the brain cells destroyed getting drunk, and ugly because both donors are. I’m not saying this is always the case, but more often than not this is what I see happening at two in the morning.


It’s the post-holiday slowdown at the bar which is a great time to catch up with some of the regulars that I haven’t seen for a while. As I was greeting a couple of said regulars and asking them what they would like to relax with after a not so busy shift, I was interrupted by a voice off to the side yelling “Caribou!” I cringed a little inside and looked that way, sure enough, it was a tweaker. You see, for some reason, people that come into the bar all methed out like to order drinks with over proofed rum in them, like a Caribou Lou, even though they have no intention of actually drinking them (or tipping on them). At any rate I had other customers to attend to that had been waiting on me before she came in, so I finished my orders and was about to get to her and cut her off for being rude, and high, and gross but my co-worker beat me to the punch. She simply carded the spun out individual, whom did not have an I.D. on her and refused her service. Simple, that was that, end of story, or so one might think. Nope Tweakerella comes back into the bar and proceeds to inform us that she used to be a bartender and it was rude of us not to check her I.D. right away because she just wasted her time standing around waiting to be denied service. Yup, sorry, there’s two minutes of your life you’ll never see again, I’m sure you could have used that time to do something important like write a book, solve world hunger or, more than likely, find some more meth.

PDA Please Go Away

Ah, public displays of affection, it is a sacred act by two people telling each other “Hey! We think we’re hot together and want to share it with the world! We don’t care who sees it and how much it grosses everyone out that can see it! In fact, I am going to shove my hand down the pants of my make out partner and let him grab some boob just to show how secure we are!” And then it started getting gross. Yes, not only did it continue, but got even weirder, there were two girls and a dude that were going at it, right in the middle of the bar. Now, before we get some sexy erotic notion in our heads about two hot buxom beauties going at it with some hunky model type guy like in the “movies”, we have to remember, it is one in the morning and we are in a dimly lit dive bar. Said Dude is a bearded thirty something with the physique of a beer chugging, pizza plowing nacho noshing couch potato, while the ladies in this tale of woe are right along the same diet plan as their man. If you do the math, like I can’t keep myself from doing, we are looking at the flesh equivalent of five normal people, or twenty howler monkeys, that are about to get it on! Now, I’m not here to judge, oh, who am I kidding, I’m judging and I have to say, this ranks right up there on my ewww-o-meter at about an eight. I just hope they wear some kind of protection, and I don’t mean condoms, I mean helmets and pads. And Dude might want to hang an air freshener around his neck in case a sealed foul air pocket releases in the throes of all the nasty love making. Truly a sight to behold was this P.D.A. and unfortunately, I can’t hit myself hard enough in the head to knock the image out. Thanks you ugly jerks, thanks a ton. Yes, pun intended.