The Saturday Evening Post

My last post got me thinking about my bar. I wonder how all the folks are doing down there. A while back I had to call my ex (who now owns the bar) and since I don't have her home phone number I tried at the bar... "Hello, is T2 there?"... "Hold, on I'll check, who may I ask is calling?" the bartender says. "This is her ex", (a minute passes by) "No she isn't here, but I will tell her you called when she comes in." So then I remembered I had her cell phone number. I dial that... "Hello" one of my chefs answers her cell (obviously half in the bag as usual when he wasn't cooking, and half the time when he was) "Hey Dagoth, whats up, we're havin' a happy hump day party here, why don't you come on down and have a beer", "Well it's a little far for me to drive (about forty minutes) to go have a beer, besides you know I gave that up a long time ago. Hey is T2 there?" "Yeah sure...wait there's someone else that wants to talk to you" hmmm she must have left her cell on the bar...busted. They proceed to pass the phone around the bar giving everyone their chance to talk to me since I hadn't, at the time, seen any of them in about a year.

I do miss the old place sometimes; if I don't think about all the hours I put in there. Running a bar can be a whole lot of work; it wasn't unusual for me to put in twenty-hour days. I remember being the first one in, in the morning, and being the last one to leave at night. I remember Saturn-day nights working in the kitchen making an 18 gallon batch of our specialty soup, that we would package and freeze, while everyone else was out in the bar raising-the-roof to a local band. When I was done putting the soup away, I would help the bartender chase out the last of the, drunken, "hangers on" who were still begging to buy a six-pack after closing time. I would then help her clean up. After a band it was always a disaster. I would then lock up the place and begin my 40-minute drive home at 4 in the morning. Waving to the cops as I headed out of town, not worrying that they would pull me over, since they knew my vehicle and why I was out and about that late at night. I did once get pulled over by a state cop when I was most the way home, but only because he passed me going the other way, and came back after me because I hadn't put my low beams on when I passed him (I was half asleep by then).

Don't get me wrong it wasn't all work. We sure had some blowout parties in that place. We were the most happening place around on a Frigs-day night. That's when we would have Karaoke, which we provided for free, my wife was the KJ and we had our own equipment. All the other bars had bands, so they would raise their drink prices or charge a cover, which made the people flock to our place. I could tell when the band at the bar across the street would take a break because our bar would swell to bursting at the seams. In a small town with high unemployment, free entertainment and cheap beer goes over very well. My second-most senior bartender and I would be "running our asses off", playing "Twister" behind the bar to serve up the drinks to a crowd that would often grow to reach around 300 people. After about a year of that, we started scheduling a second bartender, which meant I didn't have to bartend as often, and could join in the revelry.

Sometimes I would walk up the street to another bar in town to see how they were doing (a common practice among bar owners). Quite often I would find 4 people in the bar (8 if you included the band members), my bar would have 200 people there, and we weren't paying anything for our entertainment, they were shelling out at least 250$ for the band, which I know had to hurt. After we were in there about six months, the bar across the street closed. They had opened their place up just about the same time we had opened ours. Everyone in town was saying that we put them out of business, but the truth is they didn't have a very good plan for opening a bar. The husband was a truck driver and he bought the bar so that his wife would have something to do while he was out on the road. These days if you're going to make it as a small business you better have a pretty good plan...

PS: As far as the name of this post goes, sorry I just couldn't resist...