There’s a point in all our lives (at least I hope) where we look at what we’re doing and wonder what the hell happened. How did I get here? What twisted path led me to Santa Monica? A rich stew of regret and wonder, of awe and bewilderment. I’m just a dumbass kid from Vermont who took the most roundabout way to the west coast. Like all the prospectors of yore who came out here looking for gold in them thar hills, I too came in search of my own fame and fortune as a writer and ended up behind a bar. A living cliche.

I often wonder to myself, am I going to die back here? Be that grey haired old guy everyone is polite to while my shaking, arthritic, giant varicose veined, liver spotted hands stir their martini? As time goes on and I inevitably get older, I have been seeing the age gap widen between me and the new hires. The waiters are getting younger and younger. Pre-pandemic they were all in their early and mid thirties, now they hover around the mid twenties, two generations below me. Even my trusty proteges, Angel and Denise, are under thirty and constantly reminding me of things I forgot. To them I’m some doddering old fool who may as well be building cocktails while surrounded by the gleaming stainless steel protection of my walker as I shuffle around the mini bar at the nursing home.

This is what happens when the night starts out slow, when we’re left with too much time to contemplate our existences. A good friend of mine texted me earlier in the week asking if I would reserve four seats at the bar for 8:00. Jesus. Big ask. At first I cursed him silently, but as the clock continued to tick and the bar and lounge area remained vacant, I thought to myself, “Ok, not too much of a big deal after all.” Yes, the restaurant has been a little slow during the last couple of weeks. I blame the atrocious weather as well as the ever present covid debacle, inflation, all of it. Yet, this particular Friday I had that weird feeling. The old calcified bones of so many services with their inbuilt sixth sense began to tingle around seven o’clock. The bar remained without a soul. A ghost town. I placed four settings and glasses down.

Then of course, the deluge came, as it always does, at 7:30. The lounge filled first, then the people who were refused tables started coming to the bar and sitting at the reserved seats. Despite the sweet embrace of common sense, I did not turn them away. Then the cocktails came. Wave after wave. Angel disappeared into the maelstrom of the lounge. Before I knew it, it was 8:00. My friends showed, we had squeezed another bar seat in for them, propped between two other couples. I had no time to come around like a proper host and give them hugs and kisses. I was officially in the weeds, cursing myself for the new additions and not being as familiar with the specs, kicking myself for not having some sort of punch on the menu or more stirred cocktails to alleviate all the shaken drinks.

I did my best, fake smiling through the whole chaotic mess. No time now to pontificate on my life and whether or not they would bury me under the earthen floor beneath the tiles or scatter my ashes into the ice machine. I joked that if I had a heart attack behind the bar, Angel, out of duty, would simply step over my quivering, still warm body, and finish building the drinks, before the flashing lights of the ambulance arrived. I barely heard what my friends said to me. I knew what they liked. I made them two easy drinks I could make blindfolded. The other two wanted a vodka martini and the other, of course, said she wanted something between the two, an amalgam of a boulevardier and a paper plane. What madness was this? My mind whirled. From the depths came an American Medicine, I have no idea why. A Penicillin with bourbon and a spritz of absinthe over the top. “Tastes just like what I asked for,” she said, and I wondered if she had been smoking fentanyl before they came in. No matter. The people who love what you do because they can’t do it, will always love even your mediocrity.

Lord Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, they ordered appetizers first and then no main courses. Once they finished, we had to order fire two chickens, a steak, and a lamb. I could almost hear Chef’s eyeballs twitching back there as that ticket rolled in. His blood pressure shooting to the stratosphere. Thinking of his massive, stark white, pink scarred, baseball mitts wrapped around my neck and squeezing tighter, tighter while chanting the mantra “Complete tickets, motherfucker!” Over and over until I whimpered out, “Yes, Chef!”