I’ve only been fired 3 times in my life. That may sound like an odd flex and that is because it is. I might have been fired a couple more times but I was barely sneaky enough to stay out of HR’s way.
I was fired from my first job under very shady and embarrassing circumstances which I’m not ready to divulge quite yet. It’s not the time.
The second time I was fired, it was 1987 or 1988. I had begun working as a typesetter, something I was grossly unqualified to do. Somehow I talked my way into the job at a small family-owned printing shop in Burbank. I had no fucking clue what I was doing, no matter how repetitively the owner, a humorless older lady, attempted to pound proper typesetting into my head. I made the same mistakes and it was clear I was not catching on. I was taking all her time and being 100% unproductive. One Friday, after I had finished my workday filled with flailing errors, she asked me to come into another room. She walked to a drawer and pulled out an envelope with my paycheck. The final one. She handed it to me and I forget her words, but the message was clear: I was fired. The job had become torturous because of my seamless ineptitude. It is a horrible position to be in when you perform badly and can’t comprehend what it is you’re supposed to do, day in, day out. It is very stressful and I was un-guiltily relieved to lose the job. I had just purchased a new 1988 Honda CRX Si but I was not worried. I’m not a worrier and despite my predicament, I jumped on the 134 that Friday evening, giddy and relieved. I sped home like a new man.
I was fired the third time in October 1991. After my firing from the printing business, I was able to quickly find a clerical job in the entertainment industry which I would work in until a week-and-a-half ago. After 3 years at the clerical job, I accepted an offer with more pay at another company, also in the entertainment industry. I was hired in a supervisory role and once again, the experience I’d gained during my previous 3 years did nothing to prepare me. I was an incomprehensible mess. I didn’t understand the process and mistakes spawned new mistakes, a nightmarish state of exponentially-growing misery. I made mistakes that proved costly as my co-workers were asked to put in extra work in order to fix them. In a clear sign that my head was on the chopping block, some of my porous work had caused extra work due to urgent accounting deadlines, and my manager created a spectacle by making everyone come in on a Saturday so we could fix my fucked up shit. It was an obvious political move to prep the path for my termination.
I despised my manager, which didn’t help matters. I did not like the job or most of the people and one Friday (the official day of terminations), she called me into her office and handed me a letter. She sat there smugly and made me read it in front of her. It was a severance letter and I smiled after reading it and told her I was expecting this. I played it off like I didn’t give two shits, which I didn’t (I did give one shit, though) and she seemed pleasantly surprised as it’s possible she anticipated that I might put up more of a fight. Like my failed typesetting job, my reaction to losing the job was “what, me worry?”
For 7 unemployed months, I didn’t worry. On the contrary. I leeched off unemployment insurance and whatever money I had saved up. I looked for work, at least the minimal amount required by California’s EDD, and in the spirit of mental health maintenance, I partied frequently while playing handball a few mornings each week with my friend Joe. I had begun drinking Kern’s Nectar from a can and deluded myself that I was being healthy. Joe was not working during the week or during the day, I forget which, so we had lots of free time. We played handball, went to bars, hung out with friends, smoked pot in the Enchanted Forest off Lake Avenue, and overall led unproductive lives of leisure.
During a desperate moment that winter, I enrolled in a bartending school. It was one of those that was advertised during the daytime television hours when unemployed slackers sought some passive entertainment after they had tired of sleeping. The class was at an old office building in downtown and all the students were unemployed and existentially unmotivated, like me. We all seemed to float in a foggy limbo of unrealized, lethargic dreams. We were in that netherworld where you’re too young to give up, but too old to pretend there’s a chance you can reclaim your dwindling youth.
The vocational school was generous enough to supply us a book of drink recipes and our “lab” was a large room filled with shelves lined with dyed water that mimicked popular liquors. In the class, we learned to mix drinks and memorize recipes, to time our pours so that we added an ounce or ounce-and-a-half by feel (though many chains employed nozzles that were idiot proof and poured an ounce automatically).
FYI, this was not the art of bartending, it was “mixology,” an overly fanciful label that was printed boastfully on the paper certificate we received upon completion of the class. Over the span of a few weeks, we learned to make an Old-Fashioned, a Grasshopper, a Tom Collins, and a host of other drinks that were archaic, even by 1992 standards. We wanted to work in trendy, happening bars where we’d be making Blow Jobs, Monkey Farts, or Sex On The Beaches for younger, more generous customers. We wanted to avoid bars where Tequila Sunrises or gin and tonics were the standard. We wanted to serve club-goers in short skirts, not retired neighborhood drunks who were recessing into the folds of worn bar stools.
Upon graduation, my exclusive mixology degree in hand, I began hitting up every bar in town, not an entirely unfamiliar route for me, except now I was dropping off résumés. I left my boozy cred at bars, taverns, restaurants, dance clubs, bowling alleys, dives, and received no responses. I was saddened that my hard-earned certificate was not cultivating the demand I hoped. It’s obvious now, but then I was a 27-year-old child very unsteeped in the ways of the world. I didn’t understand that bars wanted bartenders, not dorky graduates from Mixology University who could only cite book smarts, not barsmarts which were the only ones that counted when you were servicing drinking customers.
I persisted and one day I answered a newspaper ad for a restaurant bartender in early May, dropping my résumé off in the dingy bar.
The Rodney King riots were very fresh in our collective mind and Los Angeles’ racial embers were still smoldering when I walked into the restaurant in La Puente, named Le Chalet Basque. A woman with a thick French accent had called me a couple of days before in response to my résumé. I had heard of Basques and knew they were from a region between Spain and France, but this is all I knew. We set up a time for me to come in and talk to her. When I entered the restaurant in the middle of the day, I felt disoriented since the bar was very dark and claustrophobic like a cave, in contrast to the bright May sunshine outside. By the time my eyes adjusted, the lady I spoke with, Danielle, greeted me. The bar was empty and a television behind the bar was playing the very same daytime television that enlisted me to the glamorous world of mixology. Danielle took me to her office in the back room near the ice machine and the liquor stock. She was a very plain, European woman who wore unsexy restaurant polyester slacks. She was serious and distracted by the cigarette in her mouth and her voice had a very French lilt. Her hair was short but tall.
She looked at my résumé through cigarette smoke and I handed her my certificate of mixology, proudly, may I say. She asked if I had bartended before (NO), or had operated a cash register before (NO). My work history was purely clerical. I had never worked with the public, other than high school when I was on the library staff during the lunch hour (I don’t remember if I was shameless enough to cite this so-called experience). I had never even touched a cash register. I was a quiet guy whose sole bar experience was the other side of the bar. I was not impressed with myself and I sure didn’t expect Danielle to be impressed.
“When can you start?” she asked.
I didn’t see that coming. I was going to be a bartender!
(Excuse me…mixologist)
My heart raced as I told her I was ready immediately. We planned for me to start the following Monday.
I fretted all weekend because this was a radical career change I never seriously anticipated. I was realizing this bartender shtick was a very unserious ploy on my part to add some excitement to an excruciating process. I was bored, I was young, and I did not expect to bartend. And now this serious woman with a French accent called my bluff and on Monday, I would begin a new adventure.
I was nervous and when Monday morning arrived, I took the Pomona Freeway to the restaurant and backed into a spot in the rear of the parking lot. I was anxious about what this new job would be like. I had spent the weekend memorizing the drink recipes filed away in an index card file I had begun compiling. I even made cards for drinks I didn’t learn in class because I wanted to be ready for any request. I took my modest shit seriously.
I locked the car and carried my recipe file into the restaurant. I was greeted by Danielle as well as her brother, “Pampi,” who had not been part of the hiring process. He ran the bar and was a co-owner with his sister. He was a thin, older man with shades of gray, streaky hair. He was as serious as his sister. He wore tapered pants and a button-up shirt that screamed office attire, circa 1976. There was nothing fancy about Pampi, even his demeanor which was serious and wry. He spent the beginning of my shift “on-boarding” me, showing me where all the bar essentials were located. A few old men filtered into the bar, morning drinkers. They studied me like a zoo animal. I was less than half their age and I was a quiet, emotional retard. A couple of them were nice enough, another was quiet and stewed at me, and another was Danielle’s husband, Steven, as I would learn. He had a round face with very angry arched eyebrows that made it look like he was raising them angrily at you. He ordered a scotch and soda, the first drink I mixed at Le Chalet Basque. I felt so out of place. I was accustomed to keyboards and file cabinets, not cynical strangers who handed me cash for booze at these ungodly morning hours.
Steve oozed unfriendliness and stand-offishness. My first instinct was dislike. He struck me as argumentative based purely on his voice tone and body language. He hunched over the bar like a disgruntled veteran of the bar wars. I handed him his drink and he asked if I had bartended before. I told him no and I slipped into job interview mode. I told him I was looking forward to learning more and his face scrunched, as if he snorted, but he didn’t snort.
“Yeah, that shouldn’t be too hard. Any monkey can do this job,” he said dismissively.