Oregon Humanities

After the Lunch Rush

Has a job ever changed your life completely by accident? I started tending bar on the day shift at a locally owned Italian restaurant in Fort Collins, Colorado, famous for its $4.95 all-you-can-eat homemade spaghetti and bread. Our lunch rush typically petered out by one o’clock. By one-thirty, on a good day, the bar was empty. My writer friend Erik, a recovering alcoholic, would drive down, and we’d watch the Cubs on WGN. On a really good day—no, there were no really good days.

Cables End languished on the outskirts of suburban sprawl, hemmed in by car dealerships, several gated communities, a condominium complex, a post office, a bank, a feed store, a breakfast joint, and an arrow-straight, stoplight-choked, six-lane state highway. What few customers the bar attracted between lunch and dinner were invariably out of work, with nowhere else to go. How long, you knew they were thinking, before I’m hungry enough again to order another refill of pasta?

Our afternoon clientele was exclusively male. Mostly they talked about whatever images flickered on the muted TV mounted over the cigarette machine. Often enough, in conspiratorial tones, they told me about old girlfriends, monologues that inevitably winnowed into cold, angry silences—my signal to make believe something needed checking in the kitchen.
The bar-top proper formed a half circle, fifteen stools around its perimeter. You were trapped back there, between the taps and one or two lonely drinkers who selected barstools like urinals, leaving plenty of empty seats on either side so as not to encourage the idea that they sought the company of other men.

Come a time, I’d earn a night shift. Changing kegs, running food, pouring drinks more complicated than draft beer. With so many customers to serve, the passing of work hours would no longer depend on the elocutionary skills of clinically depressed layabouts. With tenure, someday I would stop working lunches. All I needed was patience and possibly for one of the night bartenders to die.

Until then, what to do? No man comes to a bar in order to hear the bartender talk. Not, in any case, when that bartender was me. Neither did they come to Cables End to meet women, because women rarely crossed our threshold until evening. (One exception: The room was so dark, particularly in the farthest reach of tables in back and so reliably empty on weekday afternoons, that it served as a regular destination for philandering husbands and wives, who would order one drink apiece and then proceed to ignore their drinks and make out.) But it wasn’t simply alcohol that attracted daytime customers. Beer costs less in a supermarket, and my tips proved beyond a doubt that these regulars were a fanatically spendthrift bunch.

There was Richard, who chain-smoked Winston Menthols and Winston Reds, one and then the other, back and forth, always two packs open beside his ashtray. And Steve with his shaved head, tattoos, and vicious laughter. Steve scared me. He seemed at any moment capable of erupting in a spray of semiautomatic gunfire. So that we could never shut him off for fear of driving, he made a point of walking the mile from his trailer. These were lonely men, desperate to escape the confines of their minds. But they lacked the necessary tools of articulation. They didn’t even know where to start.

One dull afternoon, a potential solution presented itself: What if I asked them good questions?

What led these men into a dark, empty bar on gorgeous Colorado afternoons? And how could I avoid a similar fate? You don’t ask so bluntly, of course. Some nuance would be called for, but I thought it just might work. An inquiry born of mind-numbing boredom and a fright-filled curiosity about drunk strangers with whom I spent more time than many of my closest friends—it began merely as this act of self-preservation. Who knew it would become my vocation?

Bartending lasted just a few years, but it’s how I learned to make people talk productively, to get them telling stories. Standing face-to-face with these men I didn’t know taught me how to interview. Practice bred confidence. Soon enough, along came opportunity.

Everybody has stories to tell. We’re all just waiting for the right someone to take an interest—or someone, it might be anyone, to take an interest in the right way.

About Dave Weich

Dave Weich has interviewed more than two hundred authors and artists for publication. He serves on the editorial advisory board of Oregon Humanities magazine.

13 November 2009 | Posted by Dave Weich in Inside O. Hm. New Ideas
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