Most local folks in these parts live today while thankfully leaving behind or only looking forward from what used to be–running through their drinks while running in their places, silently cheering themselves on as they cross the finish line that means they never again have to live who they once were.
I used to own… I [...]
“People actually drink at 7:30 in the morning?” asks a friend who works in an office far, far away from here.
“Oh my God, seriously, you have business at that hour?” asks another from another city.
“They must be complete and total alcoholics,” frowns another who lives close by.
Yes.
Yes.
Probably. Maybe. Actually, I don’t know.
Because just when [...]
A restaurant god exists somewhere out there, I am convinced, for the sole purpose of sending in a wonderful guest just when you despair that human beings are at their most hideous when they go out to dine.
She came in exactly at five o’clock when we opened, pausing at the bar to chat with another [...]
“What color are these tablecloths?”
Um, beige?
“No, the actual color. You know, like “Sandy Pebble” or some other real name of a color. I need to tell my sister’s decorator the color so she can get her carpet in this exact shade. It’s just what she’s been looking for!”
Well, um….
“Maybe you could ask someone who [...]
Her hair curled in frizzy clumps as it flew away in the soggy tropical air. His pale face glistened with a combination of sweat and grease as he struggled not to notice how stifling the soggy tropical air felt on his Minnesota skin.
Her glasses slipped down her nose. He pushed damp bangs off his forehead. [...]
On the night when the bar fight broke out, on the same day when an older regular customer had gotten popped for a DUI, and when, before that, a co-worker had quite suddenly walked out, leaving me to either face another 7,000 doubles or try yet again to plug the holes in the dam with [...]
A friend who is the GM of a high-end, perennially busy and very popular restaurant, once confided to me how he secretly worries that one day he will open for dinner service and not one guest will walk through the door.
“You’re joking, right?” I teased him at the time. Please.
“Not really,” he said. “Obviously I [...]
I don’t like having kids in my bar. Ever.
My bar is not a family place, not by any stretch. On the rare evening when a child is in tow, I frown a little. Why would anyone bring a kid to a bar that doesn’t pretend to be anything but a bar? But on those evenings, [...]
The other evening, one patron complained about having had chest pains all day, this as he asked for another beer and puffed on his 5th smoke in less than half an hour.
“You should get your wife to take you to the ER, right now!” I told him, shocked, then really concerned when I noticed his [...]
This may come as a shock to some, but people have been known to move to the Keys to hide from their previous lives. They don rubber flip flops and wrinkled T-shirts and and grow long, gray ponytails or dispense with highlights and blow-dried styles, and then they assume the escape to paradise is complete. [...]