Ghosts in the Bar

I’m not a terribly big believer in the supernatural. Sure I think there are things that I don’t understand, I’ve seen my mother speak in tongues with a level of conviction that I couldn’t possibly fake, yet I’m still particularly unsure as to where I stand on the issue of ghosts. Especially because as a waitresses you get in the habit of seeing certain people every day, of being semi familiar with them, and then one day they just stop coming in. Does it stand to reason then that they might end up at their favorite watering hole for a time?

 While travelling through Thailand I got all sorts of advice for dealing with ghosts, it’s a nation where everybody has a spirit house for their dead ancestors and they put out snacks for them every day—which is why the stray cats seem to do so well I suspect. When talking to a girlfriend about what was customary to do when you saw a ghost she told me, “Oh you just take all your clothes off.”

“Sorry?”

“Yeah, I was in the jungle a while ago and I saw an old man ghost. I just ripped off all my clothes and he left.”

“Really…” I could not imagine how making oneself more vulnerable in a situation like that could help, but I wasn’t about to press the subject.

When you work in a bar, especially when you work in a bar during the day, you get to see a whole lot of people on their last legs. A procession of sometimes less-than-friendly alcoholics parading through with one foot in the grave, and it makes you very aware of your own mortality and that someday you might be the aged nun with Parkinson’s that wanders in every once in a while for a shot of Five Star whiskey because you think it helps with the shakes.

I remember some of them very well. Like the elderly man with diabetes who’d come in, order a white wine, play some songs about flowers on his ukulele, tell me he liked my boots almost as much as the legs that were attached to them, and then proceed to urinate on his chair before someone either drove him home or shuffled him into a cab. Word was that he’d broken his hip getting into the bath on Easter weekend and had had stayed there, half frozen for three days until someone had come to check on him, rising from the water like some ukulele-playing Lazarus; though diabetes got him about a year later.

I remember so well the bartender that I always worked with on those nights and the way we’d argue about who was going to take the chair the ukulele player had been sitting on out back. Though I’m sure I even bothered to broach the subject, since I always ended up losing. Once we’d taken the thing into the kitchen intending to hose it down, but there seemed something terribly unsanitary about rinsing urine onto the floor of a food preparation area—the cooks got mad enough when we used to kitchen mop to clean up vomit.

We’d end up leaving the chairs out by the dumpster and in the morning they were always gone. They were heavy wooden things that I imagine anyone walking through an alley might think to grab; until of course you got it home and the smell started to rise from the thing like a ghost in itself.

And there was another old man who’d come in and order a sandwich we didn’t have, arguing with whoever ended up serving him until some sort of deal could be struck up with the kitchen. The elderly man would then drink until he was even more unpleasant and proceed to not tip. I came to see his visits like a sort of penance for something I’d done, like a type of bad karma bellying up to the bar. Then one day he fell of his stool and left. And then an hour or so later he came in to retrieve the shoe that had fallen off that he’d failed to notice on his walk home, though it was winter. A week after that he stopped coming in.

One of the other waitresses had said she’d had a feeling it was coming and that she regretted not starting some sort of death betting pool. I couldn’t imagine it even though I really hadn’t liked the guy—all of us sitting around at the end of shift doing up our cash outs as she called out, “Who had Walter down for October?”—no one feeling particularly bad about it, even though it struck me as playing dice with the Grim Reaper.  

And then there were the couples that lost their spouses and decided to do a sort of wake in the bar, everyone signing a jersey that would be buried or some other sad article. I remember a few of these impromptu wakes, and one woman in particular because she was in her sixties and hadn’t yet given up cocaine, sometimes turning up in the bar with a nose that made her look like an animal that had gotten into a bag of flour.

There’s nothing sadder than balloons for dead person. And it’s hard not to wonder about the validity of all this. About supposedly celebrating someone’s life over a pint when it was the three or four pints a day that probably helped shuffle them into an early grave and you can’t help but feel like Dr. Kevorkian. Maybe you are just doing your job, but after a while it starts to feel a bit wrong. Like maybe you’re helping to fill the bar with ghosts, and maybe there’s a reason that every night when you shut off the lights you feel like there’s something there, something angry with you, the smell of urine suddenly and inexplicably rising into your nose.