A bartender sees a lot of shit, both figuratively and sometimes literally. You should see the "biohazard kit" I put together, for when the bathroom is out of order. You’d be impressed. You’d also be impressed with the crazy people I deal with. Here are a few stories...
My bar used to have one of those internet jukeboxes. I’m not sure if you know what fresh hell it takes to work with one of these things. The drunk people pick the music and set the vibe for the bar and it’s usually terrible—correction, ALWAYS terrible. They pull pranks, like putting in a bunch of garbage to make their friends laugh, while you just have to sit in the trenches and live in it. Paying customers get up and leave, because they’ve heard Sublime for the third time in a row. They’ll pump it full of money—just like every other drunk person in the bar—and demand their money back when they don’t hear their song in two minutes, as they are taking their Jager shots. Guess who has to listen to all that trash for the rest of the night, after they leave? I’ve never wanted to beat any object with a baseball bat more, until I met this thing. Screeching voices, terrible music, me tethered behind a bar while sober, dealing with it on top of everything else...fun.
This man started showing up and I had never seen him before. He would exclusively (and, only) play the song "Grandma Got Ran Over by a Reindeer." On a loop. Now, when I talk about this jukebox, I should mention that it is LOUD. For the customer’s buck, it absolutely blares about two times the volume of how we play the house music. Imagine that, as far as atmosphere and vibe in the business (as well as your own damned sanity). We eventually pulled him aside and confronted him. We explained to him that we couldn’t descend into this drainage swirl of madness, day after day. He could not understand what the problem was. He said it was his favorite song, that it was very special to him and reminded him of his deceased grandmother. Yep, you read that right. That’s when the battle began.
Reindeer guy was not going down easy. He came back every day and played the hell out of that song. Sometimes, upwards of 20 times in a row. We would ask him to stop it and he said it was his right to play whatever he wanted. He wasn’t wrong. With that cursed object in the bar, you CAN play anything you want. If I had to make a list of any song I never want to hear again, that would be on the short list—perhaps number one on that list. This grandma will run your ass over with a reindeer. Oh, and he was a pain in the ass, too. He would come up to the bar constantly, while I was serving other customers and try to talk to me about the song. He would stand on the bar furniture, sing and hold court about how this was the greatest song in the world. When we 86’d him, he verbally fought me on it. He couldn’t understand why he couldn’t just listen to his song. The implement was there. I tried to explain why, but it fell on deaf ears. Later, I mentioned him to a bartender friend working at The Florida Room. They had one of those same jukeboxes. They knew exactly who I was talking about and they 86’d him for the same exact thing. Apparently, Christmas time is here...all over North Portland.
One of the things that keeps Portland weird is our policy on nakedness. We have wonderful, female-positive strip clubs and a big naked bike ride. Being nude here is not illegal. If you want to sunbathe in your birthday suit on your lawn, you can! If you want to walk around with no shirt on, you can! It’s a weird, gray area of this city that outsiders and newcomers don’t understand.
I was working one night. We had a DJ playing. That was not normal for our bar. To describe the bar’s vibe, imagine a dive with a bow tie on. Not dirty, not fancy. Most customers were either blue collar or service industry. The DJ playing was 57 years old. He has good taste in music, don’t get me wrong. And, he brought in a significant crowd. Fantastic for me, slinging simple drinks like wine and beers. Dream shift...at first. The thing about the older crowd is they do have money to spend, but they have a lower alcohol tolerance. Things got weird, quickly. There were a bunch of over-50-year olds dancing their asses off all around my bar and grinding on each other. I mean, I was there for it, but it was getting out of hand. Broken glasses, lost items, me worrying about slips and falls. I’ll spare you the details of the bathroom situation.
Among all this chaos, I’m still bartending to my usual regulars, who are looking on in wonder. News flash—bar regulars do not like special events in their watering hole. Hell, they get mad when one of us swaps our schedule and there’s a different one of us pouring their beer on a Tuesday. So, there I am, trying to placate my cranky regulars among a massive dance party that they are pissed about. Suddenly, one of my customers whips them out.
A woman dancing in the crowd takes her top off and begins doing a drunken cha cha with no shirt or bra. I mean, she looked great. Seriously. Enviable boobs. The problem for me, is I have to work a busy shift and make sure that the naked woman is protected. Liability. Also, safety. She was definitely living her best life at that moment and she was the dancing queen. My male regulars were running their creepy eyes all over her. You know, the same ones they’d been running over me for years. So, what is one to do? I let her do it. I wanted to take my top off too, in solidarity, honestly.
She ended up meeting another silver fox on the dance floor and they hit it off. By "hit it off," they shoved their glasses onto the floor off the table top and made out on it. She, still topless, while many looked on. I just let it fly. At that point in my life, I was single and I just wanted to join the party. Instead, I had to go clean puke out of the bathroom and run a rack of dishes.
