My Bar Customer
My Bar Customer
A short memoir.
January 2011.
Providence, Rhode Island. United States.
“Hi! How you doin?”
I greet my first bar customer while placing the menu in front of him and a glass napkin to put his first drink on.
“Hard day.”
“Do you know what you want to drink yet? Or do you need a minute?”
“Double vodka cranberry please.”
It’s still daylight.
“Anything to eat?”
“Nope.”
I leave him to make his drink. I know what customer I’m dealing with.
When I come back, I place the drink on his napkin, and I do what I do best from behind the bar–make him feel better.
“It’s okay you know. The hard days. Without the hard days, you will not have good days. If every day is a good day, it will lose its charm after a while. When I have a bad moment, I try my best to make peace with it quickly. Because whether I like it or not, the bad moment is there to stay. It’s not going anywhere. I learned that the sooner I get over it, the sooner my good moment will come.” I give him a free smile to finish.
His face changes from seeing the light on my face.
A person’s emotion is like a sponge, it absorbs whatever it is being fed. If I feed his misery by supporting it, he will be even more miserable. But if I feed it positivity, he will see positive to it. IF, he wants to see it. I know some people who think they don’t deserve positivity.
“Sure… That’s a good way of looking at it.”
I keep him on a conversation since he’s my only bar customer this afternoon. We talk about him, we talk about me; he tells me he was a bartender when he was about my age in San Francisco, and that got me nervous, wondering if I had made his 2-ingredient drink correctly.
His name is Jeff, and he’s a family man with a wife and two kids; he runs a sustainable business that comfortably supports his living means. He tells me how his life evolved from bartending, to a job offer that lead him to where he is now.
The story about me starts when he questions my tattoo. I tell him it’s a long story–but in short, I’m sort of traveling, passing by here momentarily to work and earn enough money for my next leg. The 4 tattooed symbols represent the 4 places I had gone in this journey.
“I want to let you in something and I want you to remember this well.”
I tense up as he turns serious.
“After years of bartending, I successfully paid off my school loan. And I also saved enough money to go traveling. It was my dream to see the world.
“Don’t get me wrong… I love my life now. I love my wife–we have beautiful children together, and I would not trade them for anything else in the world.”
He pauses. And as he pauses, I see two things in his eyes. Passion and sadness.
“But there was a point in my life, when I had to choose between my dream and my future security. A job offer came through that was difficult to turn down, and I thought my dream could wait.”
Passion left his eyes, and now there’s only sadness. Like his mirror, I grow sad with him.
“My dream never happened. The choice I made snowballed into the life that I have now, and I can’t leave in the middle of it.
“To this day, I still wonder what my life would be like if I chose my dream.”
I don’t know what to say to him.
“As I said, I would not change a thing. I’m a blessed man. But if I could do it all over again, I would choose my dream.”
I just nod.
I don’t know what to say. I somewhat understand what he’s saying, but not fully. After all, I cannot understand what I haven’t lived. I’m not even sure if I know what my dreams are.
Perhaps, leaving me the reminder for the future is precisely his intention.
“How old are you?” he asks.
“24.”
“You’re still so young. You have plenty of time.”
He takes a manly sip of his drink.
“Boyfriend?”
“No.”
“And you have no one holding you back.”
He is going against every cultural belief of what life should be back home. Back home, we don’t have plenty of time. A lot of my friends, including myself in the old life, many of us were in a rat race against time to establish a fruitful career–while simultaneously keeping an eye for a potential life partner to share that fruition with.
“Trust me. You have time.”
I nod at his advise.
“Do not sacrifice your dreams.”
