My Brilliant Careers: Bartending School

The basic bartending course was two weeks long and you could take it in the day or the evening. The content of the two weeks was staggered between the day and evening courses, so that if you really wanted to, you could take the day and evening classes and get your bartending certificate in one week. They had a term for this. On the first day of class the instructor took a survey, “how many of you are signed up for the two week course?” Everyone but me and my friend Sarah raised their hands. “And how many of you are psychos from hell?” Sarah and I were the only psychos from hell.

The owner of the school was Lisa. Lisa was short and skinny and probably weighed 98 pounds, ten percent of which was nails, make-up and attitude. I could bench press her, but I would not want to meet up with her in a dark alley. Lisa had a big presence and were she not a bartender or a bartending instructor I’m quite sure she would have been a morning radio shock jock. Lisa did all the radio commercials for the school and she had one of those voices that was perfect for radio and not quite right for real life. After years of hearing the ads for the school, hearing her in person for the first time made my brain hurt. Kind of like when I’m at the same function as Joe Pollack and I overhear him talking and subconsciously feel this urge to change the station or adjust the volume on reality. I imagine this is what a first date with Casey Kasem would be like.
Lisa’s little brother DJ worked at the school. He was 19-years-old and had the kind of innate charm and self confidence that people twice his age spent thousands of dollars on self help products to learn how to fake. He was one of those people who never tried to be funny but everything he said was effortlessly frickin’ hilarious. People like me who try very hard to be funny secretly hate people like him. At 19 he’d probably forgotten more about alcohol than most people on a waiting list for a liver transplant would ever know.

Sarah and I did not fit in with the other students and pretty much kept to ourselves. I was the only black person and Sarah was the only woman except for Mandy and Mandy was less of a woman than an amalgamation of census data of what men wanted in a woman. The only other person in our class who sticks out in my memory was a guy with an artificial leg who looked like Bill Paxton that I will affectionately refer to as Bill Pegston.
Mandy was everything her name implies: blond, blue-eyed with a tan that completely cut the sun out of its piece of the action. She was a body builder but not in that ultra-ripped, veiny way. She looked like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model with more biceps and hamstrings. Her breasts were improbably perky and completely unaffected by earth’s gravitational pull. Bill Pegston mentioned to her that one of his Army health benefits was that the military would pay for $4,000 worth of plastic surgery a year. She immediately asked him what work he’d had done. Bill, a little taken aback, told her he hadn’t had anything done because he felt he hadn’t needed anything done. I could see that this information fried Mandy’s servers. Someone turning down free, annual cosmetic surgery for four years simply did not compute to her. Somewhere around here Sarah told me that Mandy had breast implants and it all made sense somehow.

We didn’t work with real alcohol. We had liquor bottles filled with water and food coloring or paint. To get your bartending certificate you had to pass a test where you made 20 drinks in under 8 minutes. An instructor would read from a random list of drinks and watch you make them. If you managed to get them all done in 8 minutes without dropping a bottle, spilling a drink or otherwise making a complete mess of the bar, the instruction would then survey the drinks and with Zen like wisdom tell you all the ingredients you got wrong. I think you had to make 15 right to pass or something.

I never passed this test. I got my bartending certificate for volunteering to work a charity concert at the St. Louis Zoo when Lisa was short on bodies. The headlining band for this concert – and I’m not making this up: Air Supply. There are two things I remember about that night:

1. One of the other bartenders had a girlfriend who was getting her PhD in Psychology. As part of her dissertation she had gotten one of the last interviews with the recently executed John Wayne Gacy.

2. We had to walk behind the stage to restock the beer and each time I did, I threw up devil signs with both my hands and in my most guttural, death-metal voice, screamed “AIR SUPPLY!”