Nobody Bats a Thousand (3 page)

As I was cleaning up
Fatboy’s
mess, in through the door walked four emaciated youths in black leather jackets, T-shirts and jeans. All four wore heavy thick-soled boots, which seemed to have a mind of their own. The four, all with lush conditioned hair past their shoulders, tooled up to the bar in a firm horizontal line.

“Three
Beck’s
and a club soda,” their leader spoke.

“I need to see IDs from all of you.”

The leader sniffed, exchanged a quick small twisted smile with his pals,
and then
looked back at me. “We’re the band,” he said with a frustrated smirk I took as his way of showing me he almost forgave me for being
so
stupid.

“Great, I’m the bartender, you got IDs?”

They paused, then started sheepishly digging through their pockets, and I felt great that I had kept the red carpet stored in the closet and stopped them short. Ten years before I’d worked for nearly two years at the
Palace
, a four-hundred-seat club in San Francisco. There I learned that the true professionals, the well-known cats, the road warriors who had toured all over the world doing music for a living, were almost always po
lite, true gentlemen, but most of
the local rock star
wanna
bes  were
pompous jerks who seemed to think their lives were a big remake of
A Hard Day’s
Night
. They were egotistical
shitheads with a need to be set straight and pulled back to reality, almost as a civic duty, by working stiffs like myself.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I added insult by barely glancing at the driver’s licenses they had worked so hard to produce. “Okay, I got lots of club soda but if you really got your hearts set on Beck’s, the closest one is at the liquor store about a mile away.”

They agreed on three Coors.

“Eight-fifty.
”
I waited.

“Well, uh, JR said we’d have a free tab.”

“Well, uh, Junior
don’t
run this bar.”

They looked at each other and again starting rummaging through their pockets. The entire time Randy was staring at the kid standing next to him, checking out the kid’s light tinge of eye make-up, his nose ring, and
the
several earrings visible as he brushed back his hair. As soon as they had piled five crumbled singles on the bar, I scooped up the bills.  “That’ll do. I’ll give you band prices.” As I turned to the register I heard Randy speak to the kid next to him.

“You shore got
purty
hair.” Randy continued to stare.

Refusing to respond or even look at Randy, the kid picked up his bottle and escaped with his mates into the banquet room.

“Geez.
”
Randy shook his head. “If you’re
gonna
walk around looking like that you should at least have a sense of humor about it.”

“Good point.”

Although from behind the bar I couldn’t see much of the
dining
room, I could tell the dinner crowd was building by the waitress traffic into the bar. A few couples, the type of people you respond to but later don’t remember, came into the bar for a single cocktail either before or after dinner. Randy split but Fatboy was still hanging in there, as was Jane, the vamp sucking down straight vodka over ice bought by the three salesmen still grouped around her; all three
fueled up
but trying to act sober and discreet as they drooled over her body deluxe.

The sound check
in the banquet room had
been in progress
for awhile
before I noticed, because the noise wasn’t really
bad with the room’s doors shut, j
ust the bass rumbling the walls a bit, nothing Old Blue Eye’s, Garth, or Willie or Wayland couldn’t cover up with a little help from the volume control of the jukebox. It was then I became a little relieved and then a little annoyed. I figured we might now avoid the huge disaster I’d envisioned since I’d first heard of Little Al’s entrepreneurial scheme. But if so, then Little Al might get the notion to do this type of thing all the time, and the thought of having to constantly deal with a bunch of wet-nosed, weird, Generation X and
Why’ers
with two bucks in their pockets just did not appeal to me.

Little Al, dressed in a dark purple corduroy suit, sort of a hybrid game show host/low-class pimp look, came in with a tall, thick-necked, muscle-head who looked like he’d been lifting weights since the moment he left the womb.

Little Al went straight into the banquet room, and the muscle-head made a left turn and came up to me.

“JR said you had a stamp I could use to stamp hands.”

“The last time I saw that thing was pro
bably sometime in the late 90’s.
” I started digging through the junk drawer—broken sunglasses, a deck of cards, several chipped dice—I found a magic marker that still had some juice in it.

“Here, just make an X on their right hand, and I’ll know you checked them out.”

He pantomimed the action on himself.

“No, your other right hand,” I told him, though it really didn’t matter as I was not about to let this moron attempt to protect our liquor license. I planned to ID everyone after he did anyway.

At about eight-thirty Lee came in to help. He was our backup fill-in who had a full-time day job selling plumbing supplies, so whenever he got the chance to tend bar he came in spif
fed up, reeking of cologne
, excited and full of energy, vigor and wit, as if he were reporting not to a job but to an adventure, like the barman on the
Love Boat
. We weren’t busy, so I saw his appearance as a chance to take a break.

I went out and walked around the parking lot smoking a cigarette. There were small groups of kids here
and there, something you wouldn’t normally see around our building, dressed in their best or worst, depending on your point of view. There were a lot of strange haircuts and hair colors, enough pierced body parts that one might have thought some maniac had randomly attacked the crowd with a hydraulic nail gun, and a lot of tie-dye, the fashion statement that wouldn’t die. I was invisible to some and suspicious to others. Later, when these same kids were lined up in the small entry hall waiting to pay to get into the banquet room, I noticed most of them sneaking curious looks into the lounge, like tourists at the Smithsonian amazed by the past.

By nine-thirty, I could see the big windfall for the bar Little Al had predicted wasn’t going to happen. Later, when the banquet room was cleaned, the janitor found an amazing assortment of empty bottles of cheap liquor. Seeing that these kids were smart and sneaky enough to cut out the middleman helped restore some of my faith in the future of the world, but we sold a few drinks to some kids who looked twelve but were barely twenty-one, turning down a few requests for some exotically named cocktails neither Lee or I had ever heard of.

One
kid with a shaved
head and a lip ring asked me for a cocktail with a strange name that sounded more stupid than exotic. I looked at Lee. He just shrugged.

“What’s in it?” I asked the kid.

“I don’t know,
man,
but it
sure
gets you buzzed.”

“You want to drink something, but you have no idea what’s in it, what’s wrong with you pal?” I asked him, then after he walked away I thought about all the anonymous drugs we wolfed down in the sixties and seventies, working solely on trust and faith, and saw a correlation of raw stupidity I didn’t care to explore further.

Since we weren’t busy at all, instead of us both sitting on our hands, I left Lee to do his congenial thing with the few people hanging at the bar, and I stuck my head into the banquet room to check out the first band, which had started playing just before ten.  They were very young, and had skipped the sound check so I hadn’t seen or heard them before.

I’ve always felt that the only two original American art forms were jazz and channel surfing, so whatever these kids were doing, wherever they found it, they should give it back.  It was just noise. Shrill, pounding, harsh, offensive off-key noise, which made three-chord punk music sound sophisticated. I closed the banquet room doors, and mercifully this muffled them until they quit after about another half-hour. By this time the
dining
room was closed and cleared out, the lounge was nearly empty,
just
a few people coming and goin
g like any average Friday night.
Then
the headlining band I’d dealt with before made a grand entrance. They came through the front door into the banquet room and onto the stage to the delight of the fifty or sixty or so who had paid to hear them.

Their first song didn’t sound bad, but it was a little too loud, so I closed the doors again and went back behind the bar to do a little cleanup work to pass the time while I waited for all of this to end. Soon I noticed a little upsurge in the volume; soon after, pictures in the lounge on the wall next to the banquet room began to rattle, and progressively the music became louder and louder until Lee and I were yelling to communicate while standing next to each other. After a pause, probably a break between songs, the noise started again even louder, driving all the remaining customers from the lounge, and bringing Big Al racing from the kitchen into the bar.

“What the hell’s going on?” Big Al yelled at me.

“Ask your son,” I said. With that Big Al raced toward the banquet room, and I ran around the bar to join him just as he opened the double doors. A sharp wave of sound threw both of us back a step.

The midd
le of the room was one big
mosh
pit with all the tables and chairs pushed against the walls. Big Al looked left then right,
and then
waded towards the stage into the crowd where he randomly grabbed two
dancers by their collars. I grabbed a short kid by his shirt, and followed Big Al as he dragged his prey all the way outside. He tossed them into the parking lot where they landed, bounced, jumped up, and scrambled away as I pushed my surprised victim in their direction.

“There’s not
gonna
be any smash dancing in my place,” Big Al screamed. He hurried back inside. The music and crowd were still crazed and frantic. I think he saw the impracticality of carrying out everybody, one or two at a time, even though I never doubted his ability to do it. He yelled something I couldn’t hear at his son, then pushed him out of the way and motioned for the soundman to follow him outside.

“Why the h
ell is it so loud? Turn it down.
” Big Al actually seemed calm, but still had to yell to be heard.

“The drummer keeps getting louder, so the guitar players keep turning up their amps. I got them turned down to almost nothing on the board, but they’re controlling from the stage how loud everything is going through the PA. There’s nothing I can do.”

“Cut the power.”

“Man, I’m a professional. I do this for a living. I can’t just turn off a band.”

Big Al paused, looked at him, and seemed to fully understand. “But I can, right?”

The tall, thin soundm
an shrugged one shoulder and very slightly smiled.
He
seemed somewhat relieved. “The main switch is the button with the black tape over it, under the red light.”

Big Al went straight to the soundboard in the back corner of the room, hit the switch, and the room became one big freeze-frame. He turned to the panel of dimmer switches just behind him, quickly brought the lights up full,
then
yelled over murmurs of the crowd fighting the sudden glare. “SHOW’S OVER!
EVERYBODY OUT!”
He grabbed the muscle-headed bouncer by the shirt. “
You working
here?”

“
Yesss
, sir.”

“You make sure everybody splits. Don’t let anybody hang around in here or out in the parking lot, and if anybody gives you any shit you come tell me
,
and I’ll handle it.”

Big Al walked away, and I hung around helping the bouncer herd people out, all of them pissed off to some degree but none of them pissed off enough to downright challenge our authority. A few were brave enough to ask for their money back. That seemed fair to me, so I told them to wait outside while I went to look for Little Al.

I found him in the bar, confronting his dad, who was resting on a barstool, confronting a fresh cocktail.

“I got to pay the bands, the bouncer, and the soundman, and I’m three hundred dollars short, thanks to you,” Little Al yelled right into his father’s face.

“How did you plan to pay them if I had let the thing go on?” Big Al sounded as calm as if he’d been recently sedated.

“There would have been more people come. This type of crowd always comes late. You don’t know anything. Everything would have worked out fine if you wouldn’t have been so stupid and made me look stupid

” with a sudden, effortless lunge Big Al swung his big open palm squarely across the side of his son’s face, sending the adolescent through several feet of space, against a fragile table, off a plastic chair, and onto the floor.