I am enjoying a well deserved day of lounging about after a marathon gig at the biggest New Year's Eve party in the South. It's Atlanta's answer to New York City's Big Apple Ball Drop. It's called The Peach Drop. We're clever like that. I understand the one in NYC is an exquisite affair of Waterford crystal. Ours is an 800 pound plastic peach that looks like a big butt.
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| checking for hemorrhoids |
Anyway, I didn't see the peach drop. All I saw was the biggest rowdy mob of drunk people outside of Times Square, but I personally believe our crowd was drunker than theirs because in New York city a beer costs $28 and we were slinging it for $5 a pop. For a tallboy. So you do the math. That is a veritable Niagara Falls of alcohol and I was pouring that hooch as if my life depended on it, which judging from the demeanor of that crowd it very well may have. If you are a bartender, try to imagine the busiest you have ever ever been, then double that and sustain it for seven hours. According the the press releases from The Peach Drop, average turnout is 180,000 per year. That is not to say I served drinks to 180,000 people, just the ones who were resourceful and determined enough to claw their way to the bar. They literally drank us out of stock. At the end of the night all we had left was a couple of bottles of Red Stripe Light (which I didn't know existed) and three bottles of tomato flavoured vodka (why does that even exist?). I have never seen such a thirsty horde. The amazing thing is that for such chaos, everyone for the most part was genial. It only started to get ugly after the Peach dropped at midnight and we started to run out of liquor. Then the crowd got a bit nasty. I only had to put my
Bitch Hat on once when a really sloshed sorority sister did the inevitable, "I saw you make those vodka Redbulls and you barely put any vodka in them." If you tend bar you are well acquainted with this phenomenon. The shitfaced crave the liquor like Gollum with his 'Precious'.
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| "what's Jager Bombs, Precious?" |
I leaned in close so as to be heard clearly over the roar of the mob and declared, "You can take them or FUCKING leave them."
Abashed, she conferred briefly with her drunk ass gaggle of sisters and then took the drinks, with nothing but a meek,"Thank you, ma'am."
That's right. You're welcome.
So everyone came out in one piece, I'm sure a lot of babies were made and many a snookered white boy woke up without a wallet. I made buckets of cash and still got to kiss my fella at midnight.
Epilogue:
At the end of the night while entering tips for a Sisyphian pile of charge slips that if you could stack them would have been literally a
foot high something occurred to me. I still can't fully process it and the more I think about it the deeper and more textured my sadness becomes: During the busiest night of the year for the drunkest crowd ever that partied later than I would have thought possible I realised those charge slips contained less mathematical errors than my checkout on a standard Tuesday night at the Fajita Factory. Not one of them among
hundreds had mysterious chicken scratch on them where the person had to carry any numbers to work out their total for payment. The full extent of how ignorant our clientele actually are is beginning to dawn on me.
Happy New Year to you all, and here's to better fortunes...
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