This column is a tribute to day bartenders everywhere.
Your typical day bar shift is a sentence. It is the working-on-the-side-of-the-road-picking-up-garbage-in-orange-vests of bar shifts. My brother calls it “Crossing the Desert,” because working the day shift is like an arduous trek across a wasteland. For the most part, the day bartender’s main task is to set up the bar for the night. The night is where there is life.
There is no joy in day bar. There’s no spicy Latin funk band to kindle the room, no giggling, perky women with racy shorts clinging to their buttocks, no mammalian mosaics with erect mammilla (Oh, momma!), no flashing lights or disco balls. . . There’s only a flickering television and a jukebox that hasn’t changed in 12 years.
There is no glory in day bar. Being a day bartender is like being that lonesome roadie, setting up the stage in an empty arena for the sold-out rock-and-roll show that night. You scrub the wells, polish the glasses, set up napkins, straws, and ashtrays. You cut fruit, wipe lipstick from wine glasses, count and stock the liquor inventory, clean the brass spigots, de-bleach the rags, scour the sinks, and fill the wells with endless buckets of ice.
Then there’s the horror of the cherry jar. Traumatic is the moment when you dip your hand into that icy, grotesque, chemical-smegma they keep in the industrial-sized cherry jar to ensure that the cherries survive the Apocalypse and last another 4,000 years. It’s a delightful mixture of sugar, formaldehyde, and the grime of a thousand infected hands that have dipped into that blood-red bog. I’m quite certain that ten years from now a scientist will discover that that syrup gives you hand cancer.
And while you perform your day duties, an occasional customer will step in. You soar with delight.
A customer!? Perhaps even a tip? Hallelujah! She’s lovely, too. Maybe we’ll chat. She will bat her eyes and say we’re meant for each other. I’ll toss my bar towel to the floor and book plane fare to Bali, away from this terrible place.
“What’ll you have?” you ask.
“An application,” she replies. “Do you have any jobs available?”
Your little heart is broken. The Bali-bound flight plummets to the earth and bursts into flame. You hand her an application and stifle your desire to scream, “Yes! This one! This job is available. You can have this job!” and never, ever look back.
To think that you once loved her.
Day bar is unsafe. There is no doorman to protect you. No employees to watch your back. You are alone. This is especially disturbing for female bartenders, when they have to kick Johnny the Seven-Foot-Meth-Head-Stalker-Biker-Barmaid-Raper out of the bar.
This is not meant to condemn all day customers — it’s just that the psychopaths wandering around outside seem attracted to the warmth of a neon sign, an open door, the clack of a pool table. And the voices they hear in the bar seem friendlier than the ones in their heads. Like the Vacuum Cleaner Lady, for example.
It was about 2pm and I was watching the L.A. riots on television. This woman walked in with a black, upright vacuum cleaner that was about as tall as she was. She sat at the bar and ordered a red wine. She said the vacuum cleaner had been a gift from her father. Then she asked if she could vacuum the bar. I thought about it for a moment, understanding that it was an odd request and that she was quite deranged — but I also recognized that the floor needed a quick pick-me-up.
So the woman went to work — with little success, as the appliance was not plugged in. She just smiled and vacuumed. Then she approached the dance floor and danced with the appliance: a sad, slow, romantic dance.
(I’ll have what she’s having)
Worst of all, there is no money in day bar. You barely make enough in tips to pay for lunch and gas. You hate how much money the night crew makes. This one woman who worked day bar didn’t want to use the normal tip jar — the empty, industrial-sized cherry jug — during her shift. It depressed her knowing how we filled that thing to the brim at night and she could barely cover the bottom of it. She hated, I mean really hated, to even look at the thing. She confided that it made her hate us — the night crew — too. I told her I was sorry, but that I had crossed many deserts myself and been as thirsty as she. I told her that someday she, too, would sling drinks on the Good Ship Lollipop booze cruise, where the movie stars and tycoons prefer to drink.
I bow to thee, day bartender.
