I'm sitting at a corner table in a bar watching a man with a laptop bag still around his shoulder hitting on the bartender. He's cute, curly salt and pepper hair, dressed in one layer too many for the weather. The bartender is thickish with a pretty face and small breasts mashed into a tight black top.
Everyone wants to sleep with the bartender. How could you not be attracted to a person who appears in dark and drunken light, half a body floating indifferently through the murk, looking you straight in the eye and asking you what you want? Even when they're not attractive, they're always unaffected. There is nothing I could say to a bartender that hasn't been said already.
No pun, no insinuation of attraction, no trick of eye contact during an innocuous question. Bartenders are romantic sibyls; obscure Tina Turner's waiting for someone with a grin full of hope to step up and lie to them about how great things might be. They have nothing but time. This guy at the bar has been talking, making jokes, asking questions, putting on a show of being uninterested for more than half an hour. She smiles at him. She nods in acknowledgement, walking back and forth to customers, washing glasses and working the beer spouts. She smiles, and gives nothing.
He just paid his tab and left. "Thanks for the hospitality," he said, rising from the bar stool.
I tended bar one summer. I was nineteen; it was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at college. I got a job working in the tourist village in Yosemite. I lived in a tent cabin beside a parking lot, working split shifts all summer. 8AM until 2PM and then 5PM to Midnight. In the mornings I worked the cash register at the ice cream shop, and in the evenings I'd pour pitchers at the bar in the pizza parlor.
Most of the people I worked with were felons. At that time there was a recruitment program that offered employment in national parks to people recently released from prison. My roommate had just finished serving two years for beating another man with a tire iron. One of my neighbors had done five years for something relating to cocaine (he always demurred when I asked him for details). I cried while sitting on a log in the parking lot on my first day.
I spent the summer trying seduce H, a waitress in the pizza parlor. She was a puffy lipped brat from Orange County. She was bony and talked about ska and surfing all the time. I would watch her from behind the bar gliding through the small circular tables in the manufactured lodge where we worked. When she returned to the bar with her orders I would steal details of her face; the little fissures in her lips, the translucent freckles across her round cheeks.
I found out she had a boyfriend my last day in camp. I got drunk with my neighbors, the felons. We drank Southern Comfort and goaded another boy who had gone to my high school and had a learning disability into wrestling a bear cub in the parking lot. I had the first hangover of my life the next day.
I used to watch "The Pick-Up Artist" a couple of years ago. A lanky man in a puffy fur hat said the best way to pick up a bartender is to feign indifference. Lean against the bar with your back towards her and avoid eye contact as much as possible. Condescension about her position of servitude is advisable. "What do you have going for yourself besides looks?" he suggested to his pupils as an opening.
You can't pick up the bartender. The bartender doesn't exist. But if you keep your mouth shut and look them in the eye without flinching at the right time, they might want to pick up you. And the prize is waking up the next morning with someone completely new in bed next you. It might even be a felon.
Previous Posts:
Date Machine: Are You My Girlfriend Now?
PDA Machine: Making Out in a Bar
Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?
Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof
Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman
Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On
Sex Machine: Monogamy is for Losers
Sex Machine: I'm Not That Kind of Girl
Date Machine: Civil War and Sex on a Toliet
Date Machine: Living Like a Bachelor
Sex Machine: Chest Hair, or the Shaved Eunuch
Date Machine: Macho Voce, or Women Who Sound Like Men
Date Machine: Sex in the Office
Sex Machine: Lying Lovers; or the Padded Bra
Sex Machine: Premature Ejaculation