From "Bedtime Stories for Bartenders and Addicts"

Always put the bulk of the tips in your boot.
Keep thirty-five dollars in your pocket for mugging money.

Got my back against the wall. Again. Sitting on the little wooden bench underneath the Tavern On Jane sign. After my Friday night bartending shift. Tavern is on the corner of Jane Street and Eighth Avenue in The West Village. But the door is on Eighth, not Jane. So, technically, it’s Tavern On Eighth Avenue. But it’s still called Tavern On Jane, and nobody seems to get lost. I’ve got my steel-toed work boots on, ASCAP t-shirt, jeans and my pork pie hat, and on the bench next to me is my black leather satchel full of my CDs-I sold two tonight-and the chicken hand roll the kitchen makes me for my breakfast. I eat it watching Jack Hanna’s “Into The Wild” when I get home to Brooklyn. The rain has stopped, but the July humidity makes everything kind of lizardy. I’m having a cigarette and decompressing from a pretty hectic night. Six deep at the bar after a Bogmen concert at The Nokia. All the musicians and their girlfriends came in, elbowing their way through the lawyers and drug dealers, sea monsters, beauty queens, regulars, tourists, cops and firemen, balloon animals, computer programmers, Siberian ice drummers, painters, mooks, insurance salesman, belly dancers. We get celebrities all the time in there, too. Movie and TV stars mostly. I never recognize them. It’s this thing I have. Can’t do movies. Can’t sit still long enough. I talked to Drew Barrymore for two hours one night and had no idea who she was. I evidently served Mike Meyers a vodka and cranberry juice and I guess I walked a ridiculously intoxicated Kiefer Sutherland to a cab. But, I’m proud to say, I did recognize Danny DeVito. And I remember meeting Sandy Koufax.

A typical conversation in that busy, loud place is like the one I had tonight with Headphone Pete and Frankie The Twitch:

Pete: “I had a shark skin suit.”

Frankie: “Shark fin soup?”

Pete: “No, shark skin suit!”

Me: “What kind of tie do you wear with shark fin soup?”

Pete and Frankie: “What?”

So I got all these lunatics clamoring for a drink in the candle light, nearly climbing over the mahogany in their three fifty five am enthusiasm to get a last shot or pint of lager down. And it’s just me there. The brass has gone home long ago, as have the Ecuadorian, Dominican and Mexican cooks and busboys, and the tattooed waitresses. Me and Drunky McDrunkerson’s army hollering over the crackling iPod playing The Clash. Running back and forth like a monkey, pounding the register. They get their last rounds, I count the money the house made, stuff the money from the tip cup into my right front pocket, hide the metal and ripped plastic boxes of the Tavern cash downstairs in the basement liquor room under a dirty apron and then back up to escort the pie-eyed stragglers out onto the street. Diego, the porter, locks the door behind me-they don’t give me keys. The bow-legged crowd wiggles and winds into the crazy, mixed up byways of The Village or they charge precariously into uptown traffic to hail the yellow cabs or the cruising gypsy livery cars. I sit and smoke, spacing out and notice a lone star over the ancient four and five story apartment houses on the right, and then there’s Chelsea and The Empire State Building, dark now, up the road to my left. Birds sing. Motorcycles race. Daily News trucks, bread trucks and screeching monster garbage trucks, yellow hazard lights flashing. Stretch limos. A lot of “Off Duty” lights on the cabs coming down the avenue at this hour. Around five am is shift change time and some are finished for the night or the lights are off because they don’t want to deal with the stoned, drunk, crazy zombies bouncing off the historical landscape. And if there is a working cab, they can still fib and tell people like me that their shift is over and they can’t go to Brooklyn. They know if they go to that forbidden land, they’ll never get a fare back to Manhattan. I observe the downtown shrapnel; the cartoon stew that cooks here in the wee hours. Shirtless gay men wearing pink eye shadow dancing down the sidewalk singing “Rock The Boat”. Underage puppies from Jersey stumbling and vomiting their way to The Path train. Model types, bombed, falling off their four inch spikes, migrating from the trendy Meat Packing District in their short shiny skirts and designer spaghetti strap tops, attempting to negotiate the cobblestones in search of an after hours party. The moon is big and fat and hangs low and heavy over these trees, these streetlamps, these transvestite hookers stoned on appletinis:

“How you doin’?” she says to me.

“Couldn’t be different,” I say.

“Got a extra cigarette?”

She’s black, shaped like Winston Churchill, with a giant red Afro wiggy thing on, enormous tits, bright orange lipstick and a tight brown clingy strapless dress.

“It’s your lucky night, girl,” I reply. “I got one here I was just gonna throw away.” And I give her a Marlboro and light it for her with my zippo, nearly setting her hair ablaze in a chemical fire.

“You want a date, sugar?” she asks.

“No, thanks. I’m late for an argument as it is. Don’t fall off the sidewalk, now.” And she teeters off, all two hundred seventy five pounds of her, across Jane.

Time to head for home. I cross a bike lane with concrete dividers, Mayor Bloomberg’s invention to trip fucked up people and make parking in this congested area even more impossible, to the other side of the street to wait for a cab that will take me across the bridge. An SUV the size of a submarine pulls up at the light. It’s got its windows open and I can smell the pot. The sound system is cranked to door-bending decibels, blasting “Reggae Got Soul” by Toots and The Maytals. Heads with dreads bob up and down and I remember The Bullfrog.

He played harmonica on that track. And although we were from Milwaukee, he is credited on the album as “Chicago Steve”: his real name was Steve Weist, but Chicago was better known for the blues and harp playing than Milwaukee. (Although, Milwaukee’s pretty damn good. Listen to Jim Liban.) Steve loved reggae, and to everyone’s confusion, even spoke like a Rasta Man for a period of time. If we were killing an evening and I asked him what he wanted to do, he would come out with something like “I and I, bruddah, we go to Babeelon, mahn! Rasta fa rye, bumbleclot”.