Here's Your Sign

I was sitting on the patio with a number of my customers this afternoon when one of the gentleman decided to relay the story of a very stupid remark that he wife of a friend of his made recently. We had been talking about the stupid things that people say sometimes without thinking. In this particular story, the friend of his had been flying into some small airport in the west and as they were landing and rolling to a stop, a deer ran onto the runway and collided with the plane. The plane was stopped out on the runway and the passengers had to wait for transportation to take them into the terminal. While he was waiting for the bus to come and pick him up he decided to call his wife and tell her of the incident. He told her the plane ran into the deer and her response was to ask if the plane was on the ground at the time. Here's her sign, "STUPID". He told her no, they ran into santa on his sleigh running a test flight before christmas.

This reminded me of a bartender that worked for me a few years ago. Chrissy was not the sharpest knife in the drawer as this story will reveal. On the tragic afternoon of September 11, 2001, my wife and I were carrying a television set into the bar so that my customers could keep abreast of the changing news events of the day. Chrissy was at the bar when we arrived and upon seeing the television asked me if there was a football game that evening. I asked her if she had not heard the news of the day? "No", she replied stating that she had been at school all day and not heard the news. Wrong, along with not being very sharp, she also was given to story telling, bold faced lying, to be more correct. I immediately told her that two commercial jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center, a third crashed into the Pentagon and a forth crashed in western Pennsylvania. As an answer to this statement, complete with her large brown doe eyes, she asked innocently, "Was anyone hurt?" Jesus Christ! How stupid can you be. I retorted rather sarcastically, "No, everyone in New York got off the planes and took the elevators to the ground floor." I should have fired her on the spot for saying the dumbest thing that I have ever heard.

This same young dimwit used to use the tab sheets as a diary of sorts writing down all kinds of inappropriate stream of consciousness. She would write about how I was an asshole for not letting her take a Friday night off at the last minute for a date or how well endowed her lastest boyfriend was, or sometimes wasn't. She would write about how the other bartenders were jerks, when she knew, or should have known, that we all looked at the nightly tab sheets. Her best piece of literature however was when she wrote about getting up early on one morning and instead of eating and going to her classes or going to the gym to work out, she decided to go back to bed and masturbate for forty-five minutes. This gave the whole bar a pretty good chuckle. She was a real piece of work. Entertainment, in the form of stupid people are all around us, you just have to look, but you don't have to look too far.

Missing In Action

It is always funny and strange at the same time concerning how people flow in and out of the life of a bar. There will be customers that are as regular as a heart beat for a period of over four years. Then with no apparent reason, or motivation, they move on, sometimes never to be seen again. They did not give up drinking, they just move on to another bar, in one case, just three blocks down the street. Sometimes this can be good. At first you are worried that you have lost a good friend and valuable customer and then slowly it becomes evident that since a particular person left, all of a sudden, your business increases. I would like to send a thank you note but that would probably be rude, crude and socially unacceptable. There are those people that just up and leave for no apparent reason and then there are those that don't leave for good, they just come in so seldom that you think that they have. These MIA's are also the people that come in and act so friendly that they were probably your womb-mate, they are your best friend and think they are the best customer in the bar. A few weeks ago one the these funny occurances happened when this young gentleman came into the bar with some friends and acted as if he was my most regular customer. "Where is the swing that goes over the bar?" he asked as he had been telling his friends about this crazy swing that people could get in and swing out over the bar. We told him that it was up for one night and one night only, for Mardi Gras, 2003. Yeah, he is a real regular customer.

It even applies to people that used to come into my restaurant. My wife and I will run into them around town and they will comment on how good their last meal was a couple of weeks ago, how they couldn't wait to get back for another meal. We then have to sadly tell them that the restaurant closed in May of 2002. "No you didn't, we were just there", they would reply. Sorry, we know when we closed the restaurant, in fact no one has been in the building for over six months and it is up for sale. I know they leave the conversations thinking we are crazy because in their minds, they know that they were just there. The mind is a terrible thing to loose.