The Good Life
I always wanted to be a bartender. Blame Cheers. Blame Cocktail. Blame it on the night, or the fact that I’m at least a little genetically predisposed to alcoholism. But when I was a kid and I thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up, it wasn’t doctor or lawyer or salesman or singer (or arts administrator). I had no illusions that I would be a quarterback for the Patriots or anything like that. I dreamed instead of becoming a bartender. And I didn’t just want to work as a bartender. I wanted to be a bartender. A drink-slinging, advice-giving, big-tip-getting, up-all-night, chick magnet of a bartender. In my twenties, I got lucky.
My first gig was at a martini bar and jazz club called the Good Life, where I was trained by a master named Richard. Under Richard’s tutelage, I learned all kinds of skills. I learned the vital importance of preparation. I learned to keep moving and work with both hands. I learned how to count pours, and then how to do so in my head (as opposed to aloud, which apparently signifies a deep lack of intelligence).
I was too slow to be great. But I wasn’t terrible, and eventually I became sufficiently skilled to work the service bar. There, I spoke to no-one, stood mostly in one place, and made hundreds of drinks a night. Tickets came through and I just kept going and going until finally one day the wiring in my brain got it together and I didn’t have to think.
Drinks just started happening. Only then did I begin to grasp the potential beauty and essential goodness inherent in the ethic of service. “You don’t give a customer a drink,” Richard taught. “You serve it to them.” Some call it hospitality, and it is, but I’ve come to call it “the love,” because it goes much further than that. And once you get clued into it, it’s easy to get obsessed.
I see the love like that kid in that movie saw dead people. It’s what makes the difference between a martini that’s shaken or stirred by a bozo and one that’s prepared and placed before you by a master. More than that. The same holds true when a real bartender cracks you a beer or pours you a shot of butterscotch schnapps or a glass of fine wine. And it doesn’t matter if this drink is served in a bar, around a bonfire, or in a canoe, or just across the kitchen table.
It’s also what makes the difference between someone who can memorize a bunch of lines and a great actor who can actually embody a character and breathe life and death through those words. It’s what makes one company totally suck eggs to work at and another so great you wake up inspired to rock out every day. It’s what puts the soul into music. It’s what Josie puts in everything from her 1st prize meatballs to her split pea soup, and especially in those 200-word essays that win us things like month-long trips to southern France.
The love is what you’re left to cultivate once you get the basics down pat. Yes, John Lennon was wrong. Or else I’m misunderstanding his meaning. The love is not all we need. Not at all. The love on it’s own can be fun (tequila!), but you can’t live a good life on it. It’s like salt (and/or tequila!): necessary, but not sufficient.
I haven’t worked in a bar going on seven years now. Is that a long time or a short time? I’m not sure. Both, really. And I never did quite manage to get the chick magnet thing going on — though Josie did think it was sorta hot when we met in grad school in Montana that I worked weekends at a small-town saloon. What I hope is that as time goes by I will always retain the lessons I learned from Richard, the Good Life, and the thousands of drinks I’ve had the good fortune to concoct.
I hope I will always be a bartender at heart, and that I will continue to practice and get better every chance I get. So you better bet I don’t just give my daughter her sippy cup with her delicious dinner that mommy’s prepared. I serve her that thing. Straight up, dear reader. With so much of the love I sometimes even cry a little, to tell you the truth, and I can’t even begin to describe.
