Salad Days

I once worked in a jazz club in Berkeley, a dark, dirty, hole-in-the-wall down on Shattuck Avenue.  My shift usually started at the end of happy hour. Happy hour; now there’s an oxymoron. The same sad drunks showed up every day at 4:00 o’clock on the dot, ordered a shot with a beer back and kept ordering until the stroke of 6:00 when they crawled back to whatever SRO hole they had crawled out of.  They didn't looked happy to me.

Start of the shift, I wash glasses, haul tubs of ice from the machine in the back. Cut lemons and limes into wedges, fish olives and maraschino cherries out of gallon jugs with a long handled spoon, and fill up the bar caddies. I almost never need to refill the cocktail onions because who drinks a goddamned Gibson anyway? Nasty. Fill up the straws, long and short, and twist stacks of bar napkins into spirals, an old cocktail waitress trick. It makes it easier to grab one napkin at a time, plus it just looks cool. Get my bank from the bartender, a nasty old queen. He ran a tight ship and never took shit from anybody except his worthless alcoholic boyfriend who cadged drinks off him all night long.  My final task is to light the candles in their red, round, knobby glass candle holders, the kind you see everywhere. Ceremonial, almost solemn, I carry the flickering flames around the room and reverently place one on each table.

I place a candle before a lonely old drunk as if giving a benediction; he just keeps nursing his drink. Place another before a whispering couple, their chairs pulled close, bodies touching. They look up and try to order, but I make them wait until I finish my ritual of placing a candle on each wobbly round table. Then and only then do I commence slinging drinks.

Some nights the place is packed, people overflowing out onto the sidewalk and gathered around the open door. Some nights it's deserted. A couple of drunks at the bar; a working girl and her client negotiating a transaction in the corner; five musicians on the nod playing a slow, sleepy cover of  All Blues.

The sea, the sky, the you and I

Sea and sky and you and I all blue

All shades, all hues, all blue

Last call and the band packs up. The guitar player asks if I want to go back to his place for a drink, but I laugh him off.  Always the damn guitar player. I wash the glasses, wipe the tables, blow out the candles and count my tips. Some nights, I don't even make enough to cover cab fare. The bus quits running at midnight and it's a long walk back to Oakland. Dark as a dungeon, fog rolling in off the Bay, I pull my Army Navy Surplus Store pea coat tight around me and stride the dark streets, trying to project an aura of toughness. My boots click on the wet sidewalks. I console myself down the long blocks with thoughts of Jack London, imagining him walking the same streets in the same fog wearing the same pea coat. Me and Jack, two broke-ass, desolate angels just trying to get home.

A band of old-timers played every Friday and always packed the place. Those old boys could play. The alto sax player, a garrulous, beret-wearing beatnik, chatted me me up every week. He occasionally grabbed my ass, but always in a friendly way. At his age, he was like a dog chasing a car; if he had caught me, he wouldn’t have known what to do with me. But, good lord, that man could blow. Him wailing, the crowd shouting, banging the bar, stomping the floor and me navigating the madness with a drink tray held high over my head.  People always bought him drinks and he never turned them down. After he had a few, he might drop a name, Coltrane, Cannonball Adderly. What did I know? It was all the same to me, more's the pity.  “Back in my salad days…” he would say. That always struck my ear.  Salad days?

And so I pondered as Jack and I walked through the fog darkness, Miles Davis echoing in my head. All shades, all hues, all blue.