I Climbed Up Barstool Mountain

Thoughts on Bars

The other night at a local bar, one that’s been in the neighborhood for a hundred years, the bartenders filled a one rocks glass with seltzer and grenadine and another with soda and placed them at the end of the bar, passively reserving those seats. Fake drinks for the win, no one in a bar respects glasses of water, and no one knows that more than a bartender. These were the best seats in the house, the cap at the end of the bar, the ones I call the Muppets Balcony, where the entire room is there for your view, your soap opera, your stories, you can be Statler, Waldorf or both, to your heart’s content, and you’re somewhat protected by the general fray of the public.

Best seats in the house.

The couple that showed up were regulars, friends of both bartenders, who were older and had worked at this bar for a long time. I like a bartender without a headshot, one who isn’t going to tell me how he met the winemaker at harvest last spring (this bar serves Beringer), or that their take on a cocktail is something to care about. I believe that we, the people, are supposed to impress bartenders, not the other way around. My favorite bartender in this category is Ken Ellis, from the Rainbo Club in Chicago. Anytime he acknowledged my existence and served me in a timely manner, I silently cheered.

So when this bartender, the one who told me just five minutes earlier that the kitchen was closed for a party, took food orders for his friends, the ones with the perfect seats at the end of the bar, I didn’t feel slighted. Membership has its privileges, and these folks were card-carrying constituents.

Those two drinks, the placeholders, they reminded me of the last makaria I attended. A makaria is the ‘mercy meal’ after the funeral in the Greek Orthodox Church. Two years ago, in May, my Uncle Connie passed, a peaceful, expected death, then 9 days later, my aunt, Theitsa¹ Tini died, another peaceful, expected death. The funerals were held at the small chapel at the cemetery rather then the cathedral on Howard Street in Baltimore.

Only Father Dean spoke to the dead at the funerals, the makaria is for the family and friends to eulogize. I don’t make the rules, it *is* called Greek Orthodox. It felt like a lot of loss in a period of so much death and fear. I understand now, as I understood then, that there is a dearth of peaceful deaths in our world. For Theitsa Tini’s makaria, my cousins chose a restaurant their friend Jay managed. Jay used to bartend for my father at Souris’ Saloon in the early 1980s, when Theitsa Tini lived above the bar with her mother, my Yia-Yia.

My dad Bobby, my Yia-Yia, my Theitsa Vangie and Uncle Connie, and a tiny dog.

Jay set a table for the family in the corner, place settings for the dead. Each seat had a menu, and a drink. Theitsa Tini liked pink wine (this bar also served Beringer), Theitsa Jo drank Dewar’s with soda and Uncle Connie, Heineken. Uncle Compie, whose marriage to Theitsa Tini fell apart after the tragic deaths of their son Michael from leukemia and daughter Molli from SIDS just 13 months later, Compie had a Nattie Boh, the beer of Baltimore. For Bobby, my father, a Crown Royal and a cigar in an ashtray. The table was set, waiting for them.

I felt the presence of everyone at this table to the point where I didn’t want to leave it. Also, for the record, not everyone at this table was a big drinker, these were just their drinks. There’s a difference.

Does it make me an alcoholic if I say this was one of the most beautiful, peaceful things I have seen in recent memory?² It cut to the quick, a five top of ghosts, my version of the hokey idea that people meet up in heaven, a place I don’t believe in. The very notion of this table was cinematic, that you know who’s in the room by what drink is on the table, a beautiful tell. It got me, and I think of Jay, the manager of this restaurant who came in to personally cook the meal for all forty of us on this sad day. He was mourning too, his grief set the table for these people he knew so well that decades later he remembered their drinks.

Growing up, my sisters and I went to the store after school, the store was what my family, the three generations of relatives whose lives revolved around it and in it, called our family’s bar. A babysitter, a relative, a bartender, any or all of the above, would gather us from school and take us to Souris’ to pass time while our mother ended her work day at Towson State University. We wiled away the afternoon hours playing Space Shuttle pinball, Donkey Kong and Frogger, washing rocks glasses, doing homework in our Yia-Yia’s booth and spending time with the regulars having a few drinks after work. A barfly is a barfly is a barfly, regardless of age. 

What can I say, I do my best work in bars. A table will do, a booth is a dream and a bar stool is my own private office. I fucking love a bar stool. I can clear my thoughts without the demands of home, a place that wants things from me that do not come naturally to me…keeping house, whatever that means, folding and organizing clothes, cleaning the refrigerator, pretending to alphabetizing records, wondering why I’m not a minimalist, changing my entire life to become a entirely different person. Housekeeping, it’s not for me.

My mind clears when I enter a bar, especially when the sun is still out, it’s ingrained in me. I pull out a notebook, sometimes a clipboard, some other papers and a sharpie or pen or both and get to work. The piles of papers and books tend to keep the people away, it’s not a social call. I’ve written countless menus, scribbled fragments, organized my day, my week, my month, my year, my years, figured out finances, dreamt and failed, all on the back of free restaurant postcards and in little notebooks. I wrote the outline of a book on the back of the Commodore’s drink menu, enumerating its recipes to meet the contract. How many dishes have I written and hashed out, some realized, some unfulfilled, on a graphic card of considerable weight with the business’ own pen? Countless. Another thing I need to organize if I was home, all my brilliant ideas scrawled on borrowed and stolen paper.

1. Greek for ‘aunt.’

2. It’s a rhetorical question, no need to answer.