Somewhere around midnight one of my Thursday night regulars came in and asked me how my night was going. I told him I thought there must be a full moon or something because everyone was being really weird. It was only when he asked me if they were weirder than the week before or the week before that that I realized that every single Thursday night people are weird. It is the night all the freaks come out.
The night started out normal enough. Busier than it has been this summer but nothing crazy. The usual suspects were there, drinking their usual drinks, hanging out with their usual friends, running up their usual tabs. There was one girl there who I had never seen before who insisted on waving me down (a definite no, no) and ordering from me when my back was turned and then getting insulted when I told her that if I was not facing forward, I was probably not listening to her. Anyway, she wasn’t weird she was just an asshole. The actual weirdness didn’t start until sometime around 11.
So there I was at around 11, minding my own business, not paying too much attention to the slowly escalating argument in the booth at the front of the bar when all of a sudden, yelling! There was a guy in a red and white striped t-shirt, practically standing on his toes as he tried to get in the face of one of our (much taller) regular customers, well call him Kevin. He said something about it not being all in good fun. Well, here we go. I decided that since I tend to stoke the fire rather than put it out, I would let my coworker handle it — hopefully she could get the yelling to stop and figure out what had started it in the first place. A few minutes later she came back behind the bar and told me, through uncontrollable giggles, what she had found out: the fight had started over some pockets.
As I am sure many of you know, it can be very difficult to get a straight story out of someone who is really drunk. They get the order of events all wrong, they sometimes forget the initial question halfway through answering it, they crack nonsensical jokes that are side-splitting to them but make absolutely no sense to anyone else. After about 45 minutes, I managed to piece the pocket fiasco together. There are still some holes but here is what I managed to find out. A group of friends were outside the bar smoking cigarettes and talking. Kevin, who didn’t know this group and was also outside smoking decided to strike up conversation with them. Somehow, and I am still unclear as to how this happened, they decided that it would be really funny to “collectively rip the pocket off of Kevin’s t-shirt.” I don’t really know how people go about collectively ripping someone else’s pocket off, but there you have it. I actually think that probably it was only one person who ripped the pocket but the girl who told me the story decided she was not a snitch and thought that if they all did it then no one would be held responsible. In reality, I didn’t really give a shit who ripped the pocket, I just thought it was ridiculous and knew I would want to write a blog about it. So fast forward about 1/2 hour later, Kevin walked over to one of the guys in this group and decided to exact revenge on behalf of his wounded t-shirt. He reached across the table and ripped the pocket off this other guy’s shirt. The problem with this plan was two-fold. First, the guy whose shirt he ripped was not actually present during the original incident and second, this guy had a bad temper and no sense of humor. Hence the yelling. Initially, my coworker managed to diffuse the situation but, drunk people being drunk people, Kevin decided that the best plan of action was to continue to mock bad temper guy for the rest of the evening. It wasn’t until I informed Kevin that bad temper guy also had no sense of humor and that’s why he was getting so mad that Kevin finally backed off. Either that or he got distracted by his on-going attempts to unclog the toilet in the men’s bathroom.
Kevin spent a good 1/3 of the night in the men’s bathroom trying to plunge the toilet. We kept telling him to just leave it, that we would take care of it, but he was a man on a mission. The best thing about it was that every time someone opened the door to the men’s room, you would get a glimpse of Kevin standing there, plunger in hand, paper towels all over the floor, defeated look on his face as he stared into the bowl. We concluded that the toilet required a snake. Kevin would not be swayed from his mission.
But that’s not all! Sometime after the pocket period, but during the toilet bowl period, some of our other Thursday night regulars came in. They work nearby and come in after they finish up their shifts, sometime between 1:30 and 2. Most of them are easy, low key and fun to talk to but one of them is a little bit of a creech so I try to never go out from behind the bar for fear I might be blind-sided by an unwanted hug. So there I was, hiding behind the bar, when my coworker and I noticed this rather odd smell. We saw the creech standing there with a recently-extinguished match. But the smell wasn’t from a match but something much stronger, much stinkier. And then we were told that the creech decided to light a potato chip on fire to “demonstrate how much oil is in each individual chip.” I told him that maybe next time he could teach his science lessons outside the bar.
So, that’s basically what happened. I will leave you all with this one last piece of advice. Probably don’t get into a debate with someone at 4:45 in the morning about whether Judaism is only a religion, or a religion and en ethnicity. Especially when that person is driving you home and has a concealed carry permit.
franklyrebekah 