Way Stations for Transitory Souls
A good bar serves its neighborhood in both deliberate and accidental ways. We’re the meeting places for celebratory drinks and solitary rituals just as often as we are the places to wait out a storm—the way stations between wherever you’ve been and wherever you’re going. Like any other public space, we get all kinds passing through—some of them looking for something else, whether it’s coffee or money or a bathroom—but to every one of these transitory souls, a good bartender presents the same welcoming, unchanging face.
It’s about noon when in walk two regulars of the deliberate kind—a couple who work at a corner table every Sunday on an extracurricular project, leaving their young children home with a babysitter so that they can spend an uninterrupted five or six hours on what’s become their passion: a documentary film about a little-known Black nationalist group called The East, immortalized in Wikipedia in four sparse paragraphs. The group operated in Bed Stuy around the same time as the Black Panthers, but offered a different path: daycare for kids, art classes for adults, even a coop food store and jazz club. On the more commercial end of our co-working couple’s interests is the Black-Owned Brooklyn Business gift guide they’re hoping to publish in time for Christmas. Paul Robeson performing Othello was on the record player when they came in, and we’d been regaling our daughter about his impressive background. They enjoy a charcuterie plate and drink their Rosé in company with our family, all day long.
At nearly closing time, a customer of the more accidental type comes in. She’s been here once or twice since she lives in one of the apartments above the bar, but has never stayed long. This time she almost knocks on the open door the way a neighbor might when stopping by to borrow the proverbial cup of sugar. She’s unmasked, and a sharp observer would notice she’s wearing slippers and correctly deduce she’s locked herself out. What better place to wait out your exile than in the company of a good bartender? By the time her spare keys arrive via Uber (who knew keys could be sole passengers?), her laundry will be done, so she settles in with a glass of wine and a personal pizza while we go about the business of shutting down for the night. Perhaps inspired by the presence of my daughter rollerskating through the room, she recounts one of her most embarrassing moments as a mother. (Let’s just say the story involves an exploding diaper, a plane trip, and the luck that only fathers seem to have in staying clean.) We share a laugh and see her to the door when her Uber drives up. Perhaps next time she’ll come on purpose.
Never having worked in the hospitality industry before, what’s new to me on these Sundays at the Tasting Room is the feeling that all of these people are walking into our living room. They squeak across the floors we’ve swept, spread out their belongings on the tables we’ve polished, and play out a part of their lives—whether deliberately or accidentally—right before our eyes. Well, most of them do anyway. A few months ago Josh told me about a man who came in, appeared to look around with the intent of buying something, and then asked to use the bathroom. He took quite a long time in there, and finally emerged wearing in his long hair several of the peacock feathers we’d displayed in a tall green vase that sits on the supply cabinet. The bartender did a double-take, but didn’t say a word, and let the man walk out with his new headdress. As a writer—and perhaps as a bar owner, too—I have to say it’s these accidental moments that I live for.
