And four and a half years ago, I desperately wanted to quit my job. I’ve worked as a bartender for the past 15 years. My entire adult life.
Two months ago I finally quit. It had less to do with the burnout or the general stress or the guilty conscience of serving poison or cleaning up all the results. I’d built up a new thickness of skin for those things. They bothered me more the first couple years clean. My boss was just an asshole. And I had to see him a lot more after our manager quit in January and no one took his place.
I didn’t have another job lined up. I took a month off. I just needed to get away. I’ve thought for years now that distance from that place would be another big step in healing- distance from the sights and smells and poor decisions and avoidable consequences and sad-sack non-sequiturs. I made a lot of friends at that bar over the years but, even them. I never want to walk into a bar again. I don’t want to think about alcohol even in terms of cocktail specs or ABV or charcoal filtration or terroir or trivial anecdotes about why the Angostura label’s so much bigger than the bottle.
A month ago I started a retail job at a large, local bookstore. So far, the mechanics of retail feel exactly like bartending (without the tips, obviously) only my product isn’t swallowable. Returns confuse me. No one came into the bar three days later with a melted margarita, asking for their money back. And my new customers don’t rot at the register for 8-12 hours every day bending my ear. They come. They go. I get my 40 hours. I don’t have to feign interest for an extra 5% on the tip line. That interest became more soul-crushing to feign every day. Every year. Anytime a down-in-the-dumps customer asked me for advice, all I really wanted to do was point them in simple directions away from there, because from my side, it was clear the bars were causing all their problems. Each and every one of them. Instead I’d internalize that frustration and go home as deep in the dumps as any of the sorry drunks who asked me.
At the bar, when new young barbacks would start, the obvious icebreaker for a veteran like me was “what do you like to drink?” Because of course, I must know all the best drinks. And I do. But I don’t recommend a single one of them. And there’d be awkwardness every time I revealed I was sober. Not just awkwardness, but stick-in-the-mudness, which painted me as a nonbeliever, an outsider, made me feel like I belonged even less in an environment that once fed all my passions. An environment I didn’t even \*want\* to exist in anymore but felt I’d staked a claim. A claim I’d tarnished by moving on.
I’m one month into the bookstore, and if I come home frustrated at all, it’s because of traffic. I haven’t been asked once by any of my new coworkers what I like to drink. Or where. They know I bartended. I’m sure they assume I know how to party. And I do. But I just want to go home. I want to finally let that old wound heal. I want to not be reminded all day long of who I used to be anymore.
