Yes, it’s possible to miss the drama

I received an email from a reader about last week’s column. “I love reading your Sunday columns, but this week reminded me of bad, old times. Of course, I guess that is part of why I read you. I was one of the managers for a bar/restaurant. I had never worked in a bar. But I had spent many years in residential treatment working with severally disturbed teens. It really wasn’t all that different.

“I was only the closing manager. I had nothing to do with the hiring and firing. Once I had to block a bartender from jumping into a domestic issue where the woman (whom he knew) was doing just fine getting the guy out the door. Another time, I realized another bartender had a gun and the owner told me he thought that was a good idea (this was in a hotel), and then that bartender had an early out, got drunk, went up to a room with someone, had a good time and got more drunk, left the room, forgot where it was and left his pack (which probably had the gun in it) with a few hundred dollars in the room. When I got the call from the front desk that he was on the second floor pounding on a door and yelling, well, that was crisis management, and I knew about that. Anyway, thanks for unleashing the memories.”

The restaurant and bar business is not for everyone. And some of the people who know that are still in it anyway. There is a saying, “It’s never the same day in the restaurant business.” And as someone who has done it for years, I can attest to that. It is never boring. Not for me or anyone who has done it.

After receiving this letter, I thought I would share my own good, bad and ugly moments.

• The good: All the regular customers. They come and they go, but after three decades in the business, I have several groupings from several places of employ. I still enjoy music from many of the bands who played at the clubs I worked at, and thanks to online media, I have stayed in touch with many of them. I also now know some people whose children’s children were brought into the restaurant where I work in preCOVID days. Some I’ve known through three or four bars and restaurants, and I count many of them as my best friends.

• The bad: At a bar meeting at 10 a.m. I sat next to another bartender. An exchange of idiom followed. “How’s it going?” “Can’t complain.” The meeting went along as usual — do this, don’t do that, etc. At the end, the manager asked the bartender sitting next to me to stay. Apparently, the night before, the bartender had clocked out early, stolen a bottle of tequila, drank it, took off his pants and then punched the manager while the manager was trying to put him into a taxicab. Not nine hours later, he was sitting next to me saying, “Can’t complain.” Ten hours later, he was singing a different tune.

• The ugly: The nightclub I had worked at for several years had been sold without any notice to the employees. One of its selling points was the longevity of staff. That soon changed. If it wasn’t the owner’s son trying to date all the cocktail waitresses or the “rehiring and retraining” process that weeded them out, then it was the first Ladies Night promotion that did it.

The sight of watching the 60-something divorced owner and his 20-something son stripping down to leopard-spotted speedos and then grinding half-naked into the startled faces of a meager crowd was more than I could handle. A year later, the club, which had been a fixture for 15 years, sold again, and then again, ending its entertainment run as a nondescript office building.

All of which leaves me with these thoughts:

• “Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don’t have,” wrote the late Anthony Bourdain.

• “I hate this place, people are always gossiping,” remarked a bartender I knew who had just been suspended for “unprofessional behavior.”

• “Watch this!” said the son of a restaurant and bar owner two minutes before taking his pants off, which was a minute later than his father.

• In the restaurant and bar business, it can really be the good, the bad and the ugly. But truth be told, I sure do miss all of it.

Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and

II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart. net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com.