I get to work and upstairs at the wine bar it is as reported, 59 degrees inside, a cold winter evening outside.  Things are fine and warm downstairs in the main dining room, but upstairs the radiators have not been working, even though the thermostat is turned up beyond 85.  I take my coat off in the basement and attend to the problem, slipping in around an extra table stored near the ice machine, squeezing in through a door, to a tiny red button tucked away in the boiler room, nested between two sautered wire ends.  One almost needs a pencil tip to get to it.  I push on it, it clicks in, and the furnace immediately kicks in with a whoosh, gas fire, rising warm air.  Okay.  We have heat.

It's Jazz Night again, and despite the frigid air and icy sidewalks we are going to be busy tonight.  It will take a while, anyway, for the room to warm up.

Later, after we open, the boss comes in, stepping rapidly up the stairs.  Did you turn the heat on?  Did you check the thermostat?  (Not even hello.)  Yeah, I've only worked here ten years.  I tell him I pushed the little button.  You shouldn't have to do that, he replies.  He touches a pipe.  The heat is working now, I say, leaving it at that.  Ten minutes later, as a song on the bossa nova Pandora channel is winding down quietly into a fade, he turns up the sound system, so that the next song is blaring.   Vanessa comes over, 'it's too loud.'

Later on an old friend shows up, in from out of town visiting with pregnant wife.  The waitress has found a seat for them tucked back in the wine room.  Meanwhile, the bar has filled up, the boss's wife and her girlfriend have sat at the bar for dinner, the dining room is full, and two other groups of friends have just arrived, people I will have to chat with at a certain point.  He, old friend, was kind enough to sent me a postcard recently, the scene a French bistrot out in Denver.  "Oh, man, Ted, you'd love the place.  We had the onion soup."



In a way, I'm more clever than J.D. Salinger.  My coming of age school story never made me famous.  I can hide in plain sight, a bartender trying to get through a long night.  Just that it leaves me too tired to write somedays.  It leaves me feeling disgusted, or tired at least, with something, feeling fed up.  Perhaps it is essentially the same disagreement Salinger might have had, that basically most people love the world too much.  I can understand why he wouldn't have wanted any biographer coming knocking, any journalist, wanting a story to sell, a pitch for his own magazine and the ad commerce within.  A tiresome cult of personality hanging about him in every attempt to explain him, all tied back to the same system of judgment, of belonging, or not, to a tribe.

People come in, cling to me, to the extent that they find my reserved self useful to their purposes, to leave with a feeling of marking their territory, of having spoken intelligently off the cuff.  That is what they see in me, the sometimes jolly bartender.  "When did we see you last?"  Nothing to be bitter about, just life, just people trying to have conversation.  Conversations that will have to enter into, before they can be dispensed with, the egos we all carry around, not that there's anything completely finally wrong with that.  Just that it gets tiresome.  As Jesus found his disciples tiresome for their lack of faith.