I work in a bar. I’m not a bartender, I’m a bar-back, which is like being an intern. I’m also an actual intern, at an office, in the city. But that’s for the future, for experience. This is for now, for the money. The bartenders call me “NFG”—“New Fuckin’ Guy.” It’s mostly a term of endearment, except for when it isn’t.

The duties of the bar-back: Wash the glasses; refill the ice; get wine and beer and liquor from the basement; change the kegs. At any given point during the busiest parts of a night at work, two or more of these things needs to be have already been done.

Sometimes, if I’m lucky and all the bartenders are busy and there isn’t a manager around, they let me pour someone a beer. This is always very exciting. I’m not allowed to handle the money, cash or card, because that would be way too much responsibility for a 23-year-old. The bartenders themselves always take care of payment. They take the order, place it, ask me to pop a Budweiser for Tony or pull a Coors for Don and move on to the next thing.

On busy nights I don’t stop moving for about five hours. The next two to three are spent restocking and cleaning up. I walk out the door with cash in my pocket. I’m supposed to get a paycheck as well but the bartenders told me I’ll never see it. I don’t even know what my hourly wage is supposed to be. On really busy nights I can make as much as 130, even 140 bucks, handed to me as a wad of cash as I walk out the door after sharing a beer or three. Not bad for a seven hour shift, more or less.

The bar is attached to a restaurant, the kind of place that, though the walls are more window than wall, never gets any brighter than it is at four o’clock in the afternoon, even in the summertime. Everything is the heavy, dull brown of fake wood. Servers come from the restaurant side and wait impatiently for drinks to be made and don’t say thank you when the bartenders mix six mojitos in as many minutes. (The only thing the bartenders hate more than the servers is making mojitos.)

The bar itself is a long, narrow rectangle with a single point of egress in the middle of one of its longer sides. Standing behind any bar, one has the feeling of being on stage, the center of attention. Everyone is, after all, looking at you. Or, at least, their stools are originally oriented in your direction. But working behind the bar you realize that you are not really on stage at all, that despite your inescapably public position, you are in fact utterly invisible, and bar-backs doubly so. (“Can you make me a drink?” “Sorry, no, let me just grab—” “Well then you’re just taking up space back there, aren’t you?”)

Standing behind the bar, washing glasses, invisible, I hear a lot of talk. A lot of ignorant talk. Obama is a Muslim. Obama was born in Kenya. Derogatory things about women. Derogatory things about minorities. These are times I wish to be on the other side of the bar—to start a discourse, to say no, you’re wrong. To say anything. It’s an extremely difficult task of keeping all of that to myself. What a privilege it is to be able to speak your mind. What a privilege to be able to say, “You are not only wrong but also ignorant and offensive.” What a privilege it is to be able to say what one is thinking without fear of reprisal—of losing your job.

But I’m new. I have it easy. You would not believe the amount of disdain bartenders hold towards their customers. The bartenders are all at least 10 years older than me, and they’ve all been working in restaurants and bars for at least that long. Ten years is a long time to not be able to tell someone who drops the N-bomb to get the fuck out.

Twice I’ve been told to smile more by customers. (The bartenders don’t care if I smile.) The first time was a pair of little old ladies who first asked me my name. “Brendan O’Connor,” I said. They were pleased with that response because they had thought that I’d looked Irish. I smiled at that and they cackled and cooed even more and said, “There’s that Irishman’s smile! You should smile more!” (It’s hard to be disdainful towards little old ladies with an eye for the Hibernian.)

The second time someone told me to smile more was on Thanksgiving Day, about halfway through the 12-hour shift I got conned into working. (Easier, then.) I made $180.

Everything is run through computers at this bar. Food orders, drink orders, everything. The system is clunky and old and, to my web 2.0 sensibilities, quite offensive. There is a screensaver with the name of the bar bouncing around a black background. It never touches the sides.

When the computers crash, which they sometimes do, nobody can place an order or pay for anything. Not by card, not by cash—the registers are all locked up, it’s all integrated into the computers. When the system does eventually come back online, any order that was still open at the time of the crash is lost and will need to be re-entered, usually after confirmation with the customer about what was ordered. Used to the computers, the bartenders never remember. The longer the computers are shutdown, the more reedy and frantic the tone of people’s voices looking to pay their bills gets. In this moment of chaos, even with the knowledge of what a pain-in-the-ass it is going to be to figure everything out once the computers are back up and running, I can hear a distinct sense of pleasure in the bartender’s response to the litany of can-we-get-the-check requests: “No.” I keep washing glasses.

Down the street there’s a small place where they do everything by hand. There are no computers, no crashes. Someone writes down your burger-and-a-Long-Island order—it’s always a burger-and-a-Long-Island—on a piece of paper and it gets passed around, and 10 minutes later you hand over your 13 bucks and everybody’s happy. I know I am.

Brendan O’Connor lives in New York.

In this installment of “What Would You Do,” a case of found money.

Back when my ex-boyfriend and I were poor students, we were out at a bar one night and found an envelope full of money on the floor. We opened it and found $1,200.

It was cash, not a wallet, so there was no name or card we could look at to find the owner. It was unmarked with no identifying features. We felt like we couldn’t just hand it into the bartender (we didn’t trust it would make it back to the right person, and thought he might keep it). So we decided to just stay there until close and see if someone came by who seemed to be looking for something lost.

No one came back, and we treated ourselves to a weekend in Montreal, but I still feel guilty when I walk past that bar. — A.

It’s a classic question isn’t it? What would you do if you found a large sum of money in a public place? My first instinct would be to give it to the bar owner, and my second instinct would be to turn it into the police and file a report, because if the money is unclaimed after a certain time period (30 days? 90 days?), the police gives it to you, right? (This man found a bag filled with $140,000 in it, and turned it into the police. It turned out to be a bag lost by Brinks Armored truck drivers. He was given a $2,000 reward for his good deed.) I’ve found $20 and smaller bills on the street and kept those, but I couldn’t in good conscious keep what could possibly be someone’s rent money or cash deposit for something important. I know it would be crushing for me if I lost that amount of money.

Email me your WWYD experiences to me with “WWYD” in the subject line. See previous installments. Photo: On the white line

After work yesteday, I walked a few blocks, thinking about what I wanted to do. Never an easy question for me, but now even harder, because what I want to do is almost always something that I can’t do, because of funds.

What I really wanted to do yesterday was what I’ve done plenty of times: I would have taken myself out to dinner. I would have found a place where I could sit outside and sip on a beer and read my book. I would have ordered a salad with beets and walnuts and goat cheese or pears and parmesan and arugula. Or I’d get the lentil burger, with fries. (One lucky thing about moving to New York right when I also gave up my credit cards is that I haven’t had the chance to fall in love with all the restaurants in my neighborhood. I can imagine what it’d be like to sit in them, but I haven’t sat in them. Most of my restaurant and bar fantasies are across the country.) 

I think these little daydreams are so persvasive because, just months ago, they are exactly what I would have done! I would sip on my beer and read my book, my shoulders relaxing, my phone put away. When the waiter came to ask if I’d like another beer, I’d pause for moment—knowing that the answer should be no, knowing that one was a treat but two was a stretch—but then I’d say, yes. I wanted one and why should I deny myself one, really. Six dollars is nothing. I would think about how nothing really matters, but in the good way. That I can’t really afford this beer doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I can pay for it now, and worry about it later. Would I like the same? I’d like the same.

But that was before, when I had credit cards. That’s where all my money went, really. Getting off of work or out of bed and thinking: What do I want to do? And having the answer be, sit in a pretty place, eat good food, drink good drinks, talk with friends, read a book. Of course these things are all still options for me, and I still do them. But I used to be able to buy atmosphere and experience and food and drink at any moment, and now I can’t.

The replacement I’ve found doesn’t last as long, and still involves using money to buy some moments of happiness, which I suppose is my drug. But I’m okay with that, for now, and I will be until I realize that I’m spending all of my money on ice cream or that none of my clothes fit anymore. Yesterday I didn’t buy dinner and drinks. Instead I left work and walked to the gelato cafe and bought a single scoop of stracciatella ($2.75) to eat on my walk. I made it last all the way home.

Dear Money-Challenged Person,
I have no money, and everyone keeps telling me that I have to stop going to bars with my friends. Do I really have to stop going to bars? Because I kind of like it. HELP.

Before you cross the threshold to any bar, please consider: Will you feel better about yourself tomorrow if you enter this bar with your friends, or will you feel better if you go home right now and administer your daily lashes for being broke and bad with money?

(The bar, is the answer to that.)

Staying home to mope about your lack of funds does not help you, and it does not help your bottom line. Has anyone ever charmed a would-be benefactor while at home watching Doctor Who? No. Has anyone ever met the future-CTO of their sick startup while reading Mary Higgins Clark books in bed? Also, no.

So, it’s settled: It’s okay that you’re at the bar. It’s good for your body and soul. But, let’s do this right. What has worked for me (what has worked for me twice), is to know before I even enter a drinking establishment what my plan is.

For example! Last night, I had a $10 bill in my wallet, and so the plan was pretty easy: I would use this $10 bill to buy a $7 cocktail and leave a $1 tip, and then after I finished my drink, I would go home. (Going home after one drink is an advanced move, but you can do it. Say: “I’ve had so much fun but I also have so much work to do, so I must run.”) (This is easiest if you actually do have work to do.) (So maybe start a novel.) (Or a blog.) (Or reconsider your personal definition of work to include going to watching Law & Order marathons.) (Or maybe even get a second job.)

But! Curveball! What if your friend tells you to stay and wants to buy you a drink! Should you say that you’d love to, but you really have to get home to your lashings? Do you shake your head and run away? No! You do not! You say: “That’s so generous, thank you so much, but I can’t afford to reciprocate right now.” Your friend will say: “I know. I read your blog” (Or something similar), and they will buy it for you anyway. Let them! Say thank you. Drink your gifted drink. And then get out of that bar. Two drinks is the danger zone for being at a bar while being a money-challenged person. Get out before it’s too late.

Early January
Kim lives in London. I last saw her in September, when I visited her for a week, but I haven’t talked to her in ages. I miss her. I should call her. (I don’t know how to call her. A phone card? A landline? My dad has turned international calling off on my phone — he who pays the bills makes the rules, right? Right.) I should write her an email. No, emails are so boring. I know: I’ll write her a letter.

I should write more letters. Why don’t I write more letters? I like writing (not “writing,” but actually writing like, actually writing words down with a pen — my favorite part of school was recopying notes to make them perfect). I like textile things. I love making people happy. I want this letter to be special. I’ll use stationary.

This striped stationary that I bought specifically to write a thank you note (written, unsent) for a dinner party that I attended last month is only appropriate for short notes. And this stationary that I bought specifically to write a thank you note (also written, unsent) for a job interview is too boring. I need to get some new stationary. I’ll put that on the to-do list (I don’t have a to-do list).

I need a to-do list. How have I been getting by with only a constantly open .txt file on my computer? Physical paper and a pen is what I need. I’ll go to Jack’s 99 cents store and get one.

The notepad selection here is horrible. Where is the college-ruled paper?! It’s all wide-ruled and terrible! I guess I’ll just buy this pad of blank paper. It will be versatile. Also: could double as stationary. But only in a pinch. My friends deserve the real stuff.

I need a little indie paper shop, maybe one that does its own letterpress. I should look into this (I don’t look into this).

Mid-February
It’s a Wednesday night and I’m housesitting in a new neighborhood, and I’m going to go have a relaxing drink by myself at the little bar on the corner. This is the best bar. Great atmosphere. Super lovely. Too lovely to ruin with the bright blue glow of an iPhone. What to do? Eavesdrop? Chat with bartender? Make friends?

I KNOW. I’LL WRITE MY LETTER TO KIM.

I am putting pen to paper and writing this letter. It’s kind of a great letter! I should write letters in bars all the time! This must be the secret, to writing letters: bars. I order another drink, and have a chat with the bartender. I go back to the letter to update Kim with a transcript of my conversation with the bartender (“Do you own this bar?” “No.”) This is a great letter. I tell Kim in the letter: “This is a great letter.”

Later I tell Kim in the letter:
“You probably already know this because of the disintegration of my handwriting, but I’m drunk and going to bed! To be continued!”

When I should have said:
“And this concludes the letter.”

The unfinished letter goes into my purse.

Early-March
Kim’s letter has been in my bag for ages. It is now torn and crumpled and also water stained from either coffee or rain or beer. Unsendable, basically. I’m a failure at letters.

I need to finish this letter, then recopy this letter, then send this letter. How to make myself do it? Accountability, obviously!

From: Logan
To: Kim
Subject: (no subject)

hi kim
i wrote you letter the other day but i havent sent it – it’s a lovely
little letter. you’ll like it. I’ll send it today!
love, logan

From: Kim
To: Logan
Subject: (no subject)
can’t wait for your letter. make sure you mail it!
xx

Mid-March
Didn’t send the letter, obviously. Haven’t even finished  letter. All details of life have changed since originally wrote letter. Maybe will just send original letter, but with update? No, will rewrite some parts. I will do it tonight. At a bar, as motivation. Letters in bars. So cool.

I write the letter. I finish the letter. I put the letter in an envelope. I look up Kim’s address on my phone, and then address the letter. IT IS ON.

And then: I have the addressed envelope with letter inside hanging around in purse for … days? Weeks? Why haven’t I sent it? So many reasons. Never see a post office, and if did, it would surely be terrible and filled with lines and people and sadness. Also, how much does it cost to send a letter to London? What if I wait in line forever, and then it’s $100 to send this letter? (If I ever actually make it to the post office, I’d pay whatever they asked me to pay, who am I even KIDDING.)

Today
Letter still in bag. I’m never going to send it, am I (no, I don’t think I am).

Photo Credit: flickr/lizasperling

I have a drinking problem.

Not in that jokey-jokey, I-wouldn’t-call-my-drinking-every-day-”a problem” way. Quite the opposite, actually. Like that “every day” part, that’s no joke. It’s often heavily, and before noon on weekends. That’s not why it’s a problem, though. And it’s not a problem based on obvious actualities. Like the frequent 24-hour hangovers, the unsafe hook-ups, the avoidable physical altercations, the weight gain, the lost jobs, the arrest and conviction, the detainments, or the immediate family member currently serving a stint for DUIs and our multi-generational history of alcohol abuse.

For some self-hating reason, I consider those issues to be simply part and partial to good training for a heavy drinker, like building stamina and endurance for a marathon, or practicing how to correctly fall in judo. All jokes aside, it’s actually a bit depressing. I know. Truly heavy drinking usually is. My dad ran a halfway house. I’ve seen what real drinking does to people. It’s actually nothing like a marathon. It’s more like suicide, or trying to do judo while drunk. Rather, I know I have a drinking problem because my bank account has a drinking problem. It’s there in black-n-white. I try not to look at it, always declining to print a paper receipt because it’s quite, well, sobering.

Last month, I made about $500 dollars, about $250 of which went toward booze. Around the same time last year, I was making about $1,800. I spent about half of that income on alcohol, too. No matter what my expenses, I’m somehow manage to blow the rest of it on drinking. The precision of booze-buying  vs. other necessities is actually kind of impressive, although not as impressive as the $600 I just spent in a 72-hour period, most of which was spent in a poorly-lit room.

I currently have $63.17 to my name and despite just losing my job — our family-owned newspaper went the way of many family-owned newspapers — and no foreseeable income, my last purchase was beer. Two sixers of High Life to be precise. In fact, I’m getting drunk as I write this.

This lack of money and income should be a cause for concern. Like most problem drinkers, though, I may be in denial (ignoring for a moment, of course, this here widening gyre of Wallacian self-reflective analysis, to which the author himself was susceptible, along with alcohol abuse). My continuous problems with both money and booze began at the same time, so I long ago dismissed any debate about causality vs. correlation as both trifling and beside the point.

You see, the great thing about being an 18-year-old sahib traveling alone in Tibet and Nepal is that you drink with impunity and anyone will take your white dollars — the restaurants, the liquor stores, the Kathmandu whore houses, even the dry-state black markets. Unfortunately, that’s also the worst thing — anyone will take your white dollars, including thieving whites. I strongly suspect it was the crazy Russian girl, who first conned her way into my room — “to split” the cost — before gobbling up all my diarrhea pills behind my back because she thought they were fun drugs and later said she was pregnant when I asked her to leave me be.

The whole story is hi-larious.

Suffice it to say that just as I was about to pay for a beach-side beer in Goa, India, I found myself without both passport and money. All of it. Gone. I’m pretty sure it was that commie who stole my shit. What’s worse, I was piss drunk, and it’s doubtful any of it would have happened had I been sober. The incident still bugs me. At the moment of “oh shit”-ness, I was drinking with a nice, old Aussie (he was about 24). When we couldn’t find my must-haves, that drunk geezer did a couple things I’ll never forget. First, he gave me a lotta rupees for a bus back to the consulate in Bombay. Then he bought a few more rounds.

And that’s been the general tenor of life for the past eight years.

Being poor and/or in the hole is quite educational. Not in that
I-have-student-loans-because-I-got-a-liberal-arts-degree-instead-of-a-free-library-card-and-still-live-in-the-big-city kind of way. I mean, genuinely poor and in the hole. Like having to ask friends for money to get through next month’s rent in that slum house with its dual-use sink/shitter of which the garbage disposal is broken. Or quickly memorizing area codes so you recognize and avoid bill collectors calling because of an uninsured ambulance ride. Or not being able to afford either a phone or insurance. Or helping to solicit funds for your friend’s procedure because the only thing she could possibly afford are booze,”all natural supplements” and other drastic self-inducing abortion remedies.

Mind you, these examples are purely hypothetical.

What’s not hypothetical is all the petty borrowing I’ve done, usually because I couldn’t balance either my checkbook or my drinking. Like the $500 dollars I still owe a friend four years later. I know I’m going to hit him back just as soon as that big freelance check comes in. Sometimes, I feel slightly guilty for not settling that debt. Other times, I remember how I thoughtlessly got in his passenger seat while he drunkenly drove around the city one night. He’d just had a very ugly fight with his girlfriend and was trying to “cool off.” I’d preferred he’d die with an equally wasted friend than perhaps died alone. Anyway, at 70 m.p.h. downtown D.C. is surprisingly beautiful.

Then there’s the friend who just paid me back the $200 I gave him years ago. I first met him at the local bowling alley. It was a drug deal. Since our first meeting, he’s been kicked out of at least three bars, caused thousands of dollars in property damage and broken his foot by … well, no one’s quite sure; blacking out can have that effect. We lived together once and he smashed our mirror with his fist, although to be fair, that was long after I’d shot arrows into the living room walls, “Hunger Games” style. After all the booze, we barely had enough for food, let alone rent. That hasn’t changed much. I’d trust him with my life. I never once asked about the money, not even when we using our paychecks’ last few dollars on booze. After he gave me the cash, I immediately bought us a few rounds.

Asking to borrow money is a very personal interaction. It can be humiliating. And humbling. And it’s often haunted by a stigma. Call it begging if you want, because that’s essentially what it is. When I get asked, it’s often a similar situation and I’m pretty sure I can see my friends’ pride getting stuck at the base of their sternohyoid. That’s why, as opposed to parents or payday loaners or the officemates, our lot tends to ask one another for a dime or two.

You can ask one of those healthy friends who’s got money and is, at best, a “social” drinker. But the feeling of mutual understanding is nonexist. One of you has the upper, moral (and perhaps steady) hand. Reformed drunks can be great. Often, they know exactly where you’re coming from and because they’re not spending every night drinking their income, they have plenty of cash-on-hand. Just watch out for the baptised-in-firewater born-againer. They’ll drive you to the bottle faster than anything.

Maybe my friends are not problem drinkers, I certainly wouldn’t want to insult them by labelling them as such over their objections. But almost every person I’ve borrowed significant funds from — and vice versa — has been on the wrong-end of substance self-control, at one time or another. Some may call this “justifying.” I prefer to call it camaraderie. Or, maybe, shame-raderie.

We’re smart. Nothing like that old drunk on the corner who’s been forced into AA and doesn’t even know what “Sub Pop Records” is. We’re all in our mid-twenties, drinking heavily and coming of age during the recession. We all feel as if we’re teetering on some troubling lines. Or, at least, I do. None of us is really a disease-model “alcoholic” and we all get jobs, however menial, when we need them. Still, it could go either way in the near future. I’m somewhat fearful of those very real possibilities. While facing those realities, I’d love nothing more than to clasp the hands of my fellow strugglers, except we’re all holding our drinks.

So instead, I’m comforted by the fact that when struggling financially because of my own self-destructive behavior (shoot, I’m not gonna to just stop) I know to whom I can turn for help — others in the same boat. It’s like what Wavy Gravy said: “… You’re sinking but you reach down to help somebody who’s sinking worse than you are. And everybody gets high.” Granted, he was technically talking about acid, but you get the point.

And I certainly hope my friends understand this exchange is a two-way street. After all, when we loan each other cash, it’s not like the person is some unrelatable stranger. We know each other’s habits. All of them. In the long run, we’re all “good for it.” And anyway, it’s not like any of us can really hide. We know where to find one another most nights of the week.

Jeff Winkler lives in Arkansas. He’ll humbly accept a proffered drink, if you insist. Photo Credit: Flickr/crizzirc