This Isn’t the Library at All

There are times that I forget how much I dislike going to the bar and find myself there, a rude awakening sure to follow as I recall how much I don’t care for other people’s public drunkenness (my own is perfectly fine) or the pleasure of watching strangers yell at each other. It’s like having thirty people break into your living room and then trying to figure out how best to enjoy yourself around the carnage. When I was getting paid to do it I could stand it, now it’s just trying to ignore watching grown women vomit into their handbags without the pleasure of being able to short-pour their next drink.

Most of my twenties were spent slinging drinks, my Fridays and Saturdays taken up by parties of frat boys, poorly planned bachelor parties and my exhausted face wondering why I was even bothering to try to enlighten to the teenager in front of me as to why the ID they’d passed me was so obviously fake. When you spend your life around drunks it becomes a very real mussing to wonder why you spend any time with people at all.

The first time you fish a napkin out of a glass and realize it got stuffed in there to cover up vomit is also the first time you briefly lose your faith in humanity. I used to find my job very similar to babysitting, except when looking after a ten year old you generally don’t have to explain to them why they can’t do coke on the premises. Slowing down liquor service is nothing more than a time out, except that the person before you can vote, drive, and legally marry the woman they’ll be backhanding in the back parking lot later. It’s all very deeply depressing.

I think it’s because of this that I’ve become a homebody. Sure, I’ll attend a kitchen party, but why would I sign up for being around strangers in a strange place, where I can’t sleep if I get too drunk? I had patience once upon a time, but it seems I’ve left it somewhere, and I don’t really care. Spend enough time as a waitress and suddenly it’s no concern of yours if anyone likes you, and you secretly begin to prefer it if most of them don’t.

Now dragging me to the bar is like taking your pet to the vet—I need to be tricked. Friends have commented that I’m often absent from some get-together or another, but I find myself coming up with excuses so transparent that they’re laughable. Now I just claim to be watching the entire collection of the recorded Nuremburg trials and I’m done with it. It became too confusing to remember what family member I said was sick or dying as a means of begging off, my entire family tree seeming like a collection of Lazarus-like figures constantly coming back from some obscure disease. Going to the bar has become my adult equivalent of skipping class.   

Now it seems that all I can offer is this: come over, we’ll drink until we can’t see anymore and we’ll do this with no one else watching you fall down my front steps. And at the end of the night, don’t stress yourself at all, because you really can sleep here.