I think I was 10. Maybe 12. There was this suburban country club my family belonged to. It wasn’t swanky, but it was nice enough, especially if you were the sort of kid who burned through hobbies like a junkie through smack balloons. There was a fishing lake, hiking trails, a pool, tennis courts, a weight room, an Asteroids machine, basketball goals, and a few pool tables, among countless other summer distractions. And at the far end of the main building⎯away from the frolicking hordes of sun-cooked, unsupervised preteens⎯there was a bar filled with parents.

It was an amazing bar. All dim and smoky and forbidden. The perfect blend of low lighting, dark wood, polished brass, leather and glass. I know all this because at one end, the area behind the bar itself took an abrupt 90-degree turn and shot through a pair of saloon doors into the gameroom, where it became a snack counter. From that vantage point, if a kid were to lean far enough over the counter, tilting his head just so and supporting his weight with the bottom of his ribcage, he could see into that bar. He couldn’t see everything, but he could see, you know, stuff. Bottles. All shapes and sizes and colors of bottles. He could see endlessly billowing smoke, the flicker of a 60-inch TV, and the northernmost third of a shuffleboard table salted in sawdust.

A kid could hear stuff, too. Like music. Not the kind the lifeguards played by the pool either. More like the kind playing in your dad’s car when he picked you up on weekends. And there was laughing. Lots of it. There was even some yelling. Sometimes it was angry yelling, but usually it was followed by more laughing. Basically, leaning over that snack counter, a kid could make out just enough to know that he wanted to see more.

That’s where I met Dan. Dan was the weeknight barman. He had a beard and looked exactly like Dan Fogelberg. Seriously. Exactly like Dan Fogelberg. Even I thought the resemblance was weird, and I didn’t know who Dan Fogelberg was.

On weeknights, there usually weren’t enough people around to justify staffing both a bartender and a snack bar attendant, so Dan pulled double-duty. He’d line up a round of Bombay tonics, Dewar’s rocks, and Bartles & Jaymes coolers on the parent side, and then he’d swing around the corner to the gameroom side to hang with us kids. About 95% of the time, “us kids” meant me.

He’d ask me about school, sports, my favorite albums. He’d listen to me lament Tigers basketball losses, or ruminate on how both bands were great, but that The Police were ultimately superior to Def Leppard, and The Cars were better than either of them. I told him about that time in kindergarten when I accidentally punched a girl in the face while fooling around, and about that other time when I fell into a hotel swimming pool at Disney World and was within mere seconds of death when I saw my dad’s arm come through the gin-clear water to yank me out.

Then a sing-songy voice would call Dan’s name and he’d disappear around the corner again, long enough to flip the caps off a few more Budweisers.

He showed me bar tricks. Not sucker tricks. The cool sciencey ones. Like the one where you balance a fork and a spoon on the outside of a pint glass using a toothpick, and then you set the toothpick on fire, and it burns to the edge of the glass and goes out. And then, it doesn’t fall off.

Years later I would spend one awesome/terrible decade behind bars of my own, hastily layering Russian Quaaludes and four-bottling¹ Long Island Teas for unappreciative college kids. All the time, I was eager to get back to the other end of the bar so I could hear the rest of a Vietnam story or rejoin the Greatest Switch Hitters of All-Time discussion with men twice my age. In those 10 years, I made an incalculable number of drinks, even experimented with a few of my own. But what I loved about bartending wasn’t the drink-making aspect. It was the conversation.

As an adult, over half of what I know and believe is a result of that decade I spent studying the poetry of human dialogue. When I was ten, I thought Dan The Weeknight Bartender was hanging out with me. In fact, it was the other way around. At the very least, he needed me as much as I needed him. He distracted me from my boredom, and I distracted him from the 20 drunk assholes in his bar.

Occasionally I’ll still show Dan’s bar trick to anybody interested enough to let me. I still don’t understand the physics of it. Maybe you can explain it to me. Remind me to show it to you sometime.

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Posted at 10:47am and tagged with: Introductions, JT,.