A decade ago, as a busy summer in New England was coming to a close and I approached my first fall as a new American, I started to wonder how I was going to fill my ever-shorter days with winter right around the corner. At the same time, I started to wonder how I’d refill my bank account in the wake of the aforementioned busy summer of beer festivals, out-of-town weddings and, well, more beer festivals.

On one hand, the idea of hibernating for the cold months was appealing. I had a great apartment, the comfiest couch I’ve ever sat on, and could easily have been content with waiting out the winter in the company of whatever series was hottest on Netflix in 2014. On the other, I’d just started to make some headway with friendships beyond the barroom, and staying indoors until March would have been counterproductive to the social life I didn’t have when I had arrived the previous December.

The conundrum was solved late one weekend night (over beers, of course) when the proprietor of a nearby cocktail bar mentioned they wanted to hire someone to tend bar on Sundays during Patriots games so they could take the day off to watch their own, out-of-state, team play. In spite of the fact that my prior bartending experience was “pouring beers into plastic cups at the Rugby World Cup” 11 years prior, I said I’d be up for the challenge if they thought I could be trained in the art of craft cocktails.

The learning curve was fairly steep but in time I found my groove and even, dare I say, became good at it. Bartending in a small town was the perfect way to earn a little extra cash as well as enjoy some low-stakes social interactions, do some professional networking and become a part of the tight-knit local community. What started as “Sundays at The Maine House” evolved into helping out with the occasional mid-week private party or college bar crawl, and ultimately I quit my salary-and-benefits job at the newspaper the following May to pour beers full-time over the summer.

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While I loved the opportunity to bullshit with folks on the clock and play a part in people’s lives, whether that be a special occasion or a case of “at least the day is over, I need a beer,” the main motivation for adding an extra day of work to my schedule was financial. I don’t know if I ever mentioned it in these pages, or whether you’ve heard, but the newspaper business isn’t exactly a lucrative one for those working in the trenches, and once I moved to South Florida the extra income went from “nice to have” to “absolutely critical if I want to make rent.”

I picked up another part-time role, this time at an “accessible fine-dining” establishment on Clematis Street in West Palm Beach. It was a wonderful concept and the food was phenomenal (not that I could afford to dine there; I’d hurriedly eat over the dish-pit trash can off plates whose bougie elderly owners sent back to the kitchen untouched), but it seemed to confuse the clientele, who were either wealthy Palm Beaches who expected white linens and starched servers, or locals looking for a 2-for-1 deal on beers and all-day-long happy hours.

I was working a 5am-2pm shift at the newspaper, after which I’d go home, get changed and head back downtown to work 5pm-10pm at the restaurant. I was tired as hell but I needed that extra hundred bucks a week more than I needed sleep. Man, to be 30 again.

When the spring of 2017 rolled around, my immigration journey came full circle when I got an offer I couldn’t refuse and moved back to Denver. The 65 percent salary increase made it feel like I’d won the lottery, but at the same time living ain’t cheap in Colorado. After spending the first eight or so months living somewhat above my means, I realized it was probably time to find a little extra income in the restaurant game again.

I had a very informal job interview over beers with my friend Mike, who happened to be the front-of-house manager at the bar directly across the street from my apartment, which went something like:

“What’s your availability?

“At least one weekend day, maybe the odd weeknight?”

“What are you looking for?”

“An extra hundred bucks a week would do the trick.”

“Oh. Well you’ll easily earn that. Come in on Saturday morning.”

The rest, as they say, was history. I spent the next two years working the Saturday brunch shift at Capitol Hill Tavern, and it was the perfect situation for my life as it was at the time. Work all week at the office, drink 50 beers Friday night, drag ass out of bed on Saturday morning, stagger down the street to open the restaurant, sip Guinness out of a coffee mug until 6pm, then stagger back up the street with a couple hundred bucks in cash in my pocket that largely went towards supplementing my growing sneaker collection.

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Finances aside, it was once again a terrific way to shake up the “I sit at a desk all week long staring at a computer” routine, let me socialize with the regulars as well as meeting some new friends of my own. I wish I’d kept a list of all the folks from Twitter who made their way to Cap Hill Tavern on a Saturday morning, but I have such fond memories of meeting so many of them for the first time when they greeted me with, “hey I’m [name] from the internet.”

But of course, life has a way of changing. Not sure if you guys remember what transpired in early 2020, but the world got kinda weird and unpredictable and then outright dangerous. What I didn’t mention about the bar was that its owner was the type of intellectual giant who makes a box of rocks look like a Rhodes Scholar. He was constantly accusing us of stealing from him, changed policies on a dime, wouldn’t pay out our credit card tips for weeks at a time, and was deeply inexperienced at running a restaurant.

At some point in late February, he started posting memes on the restaurant’s Facebook page about how we “had the cure for covid” and it’s “red wine” or “Tito’s” or whatever he wanted to push that day. I couldn’t hold my tongue or hide my contempt for the guy any longer, and I replied to the post with my disdain for the “joke” given people were dying in throngs around the world from this thing already.

Between that night and my next shift I realized that, with Alex just a few weeks away from giving birth, working six days a week as the parent of a newborn probably wasn’t going to fly, and that my time behind the bar was definitely coming to a close. The following Saturday morning, I arrived at work and went down to the office to greet the owner and get the bank bag for my shift. He started in with one of his usual lectures about ensuring we ring in every drink that everyone orders (we do that, Einstein) and then gave me some stammering explanation about how his wife, who had nothing to do with the running of the business, had written the Facebook posts I had taken umbrage to and how he’d “spoken with her.”

It was unfortunate timing that he brought it up, because what I’d actually gone down there to do was give my two weeks’ notice. After assuring him that it was due to pending parenthood and not dumbfuck ownership, we pinpointed a date for my last shift and that was that.

Now, I don’t quite know what “last shifts” look like in other parts of the country or the world, but the tradition as I understand it in this neighborhood was that you show up for your last shift, you have someone working with you, everybody does their damndest to get you drunk, and then you walk out with fat pockets full of farewell tips. With a baby on the way, I was obviously excited about the last part, because diapers ain’t cheap. You know where this is going, don’t you?

That was March 7, and my final shift was slated for March 21. The day after St. Patrick’s Day, a week after my office job had told us all to stay home indefinitely, the owner followed basically every other business in town and shut the bar due to the looming pandemic. I never worked at Cap Hill Tavern again.

That was more than four years ago, and I’ve been working from home basically ever since. I’ve probably been to the office 10 times total across the span of two different jobs. While this has obviously afforded me the priceless opportunity to be a full-time presence in the baby’s life, and saving approximately $20 million on childcare by virtue of somehow managing to work and parent simultaneously, it turns out that looking at spreadsheets at home for almost half a decade probably isn’t great for socialization or mental health or “getting out of the house.”

The thought of bartending again, both for social exposure and extra income, has lived rent-free in my head since we moved back to Denver in 2022. To nobody’s surprise, the cost of living in Colorado did not get any lower in that five-year span, but after having undergone back surgery three days before our return to the Centennial State, my options for a side gig were limited to “things I could do on my computer while laying on my stomach on the floor after the baby went to bed.”

Compounding this, at least in my eyes, was that the service industry felt like a different beast for the first couple years after the emergence of the pandemic. I can’t blame any career service professionals for walking away from the game, because going to work every day in an environment where you’re exposed to potentially contagious folks is bad enough without the consideration that most restaurants aren’t offering healthcare benefits or paid sick leave. Given I had a young child who was unable to be vaccinated until mid-2022, no extra cash was worth running the risk of getting her sick. But on the occasions Alex would tell me to get out of the house and go grab a beer at one of our local spots, all I could think of was “I want to be able to do this again, and I could bartend rings around some of these guys.”

The other hurdle, of course, was mental. Even once my body started to cooperate, the idea of getting a restaurant job again after four years was terrifying. Being the new guy? Awful. Re-learning drink recipes long relegated to the dusty reaches of my memory? No thank you. Wading into a place full of regulars who like their service a very particular way and having to be the guy who fucks up their experience? Nightmare-inducing. And you generally don’t get a service industry gig by sitting on LinkedIn clicking “apply” and uploading a resume, something I’m very good at. Nope. You gotta print those suckers out and go door to door, hat in hand, showing your vulnerability by asking a person face-to-face if you can exchange labor for compensation in their place of business.

I took the giant leap of having a handful of copies of my restaurant resume printed so I could eventually convince myself to leave the house and distribute them. In spite of this, I continued to scour LinkedIn and Indeed for industry jobs, applying online and of course never hearing back from any of them. All this did was drive me deeper into the imposter-syndrome hole of “I’m no longer cut out for this business and it’s probably time I accepted it.”

I don’t know what happened to the rest of them (I assume the kiddo ended up using them to draw on) but one solitary resume remained on my desk, begging and pleading with me to take it somewhere. Anywhere. I stood my ground, refusing to do something as bold as “give it to a business owner.” That’ll show ’em!

And then one day over the summer, as has happened on several occasions during this 11-year immigrant journey, everything just kinda…fell into place. Alex told me one morning that she’d seen a post in the neighborhood Facebook group where the owners of a local bar were on the lookout for a bartender for football Sundays and the occasional weeknight. Now where have I heard that before?

While the schedule and the venue were right up my alley (having stopped there for a cold Miller High Life or two on occasion over the past couple years), I still had to grow a pair and apply. That afternoon I finished work, put on jeans and a button-down shirt for the first time in God knows how long, grabbed the lone resume off my desk, and nervously drove down to the bar. I sat in the car blasting the AC to dry the sweat off my brow for a few minutes before approaching the bar, greeting the bartender on duty, and awkwardly explaining I was there to apply for the open position. She could probably tell I was nervous as hell and was very kind in response, taking my resume and encouraging me to email the owners to let them know I’d applied in person. I thanked her, hightailed it back to the car and sat there sweatily pecking out the recommended email.

I figured it’d come to nothing and that they would have more applicants than they knew what to do with. But the following day I got a text from one of the owners asking when I could come in to interview with them, and the day after that I found myself perched at a high-top at the rear of the room chatting with both owners. I thought it went well enough, but I also know never to read into anything job interview-related until the end of your first week of work, just to be sure. Compounding my uncertainty, I’d been all over the place earlier that day trying to line up a time to meet with them, with Alex at work and the kiddo at home with me. I thought it was an inauspicious start and that I was foreshadowing being a scheduling pain in the ass.

But a mere hour after we concluded our interview, I got another text asking me to come in for a trial shift that Sunday, and I got offered the job on the Monday morning. That was in late August, and by the end of September my Sunday shifts were in full swing. I went through all the nervous moments I had anticipated — being the new guy, re-learning cocktail recipes, getting into the groove with regulars — and came out unscathed. The owners, the rest of the staff and the clientele have all been incredibly welcoming, and it’s an extreme relief to come into a service business at the age of 39 and be surrounded by folks my own age rather than a younger generation of partiers.

Working for, and with, grown-ups who are reliable, communicative and helpful (as opposed to paranoid, cheap and unknowledgeable, like previous owners) has made me look forward to going to work, which is almost surreal given it means I’m back to working six days a week and I’m pushing 40. But it’s truly a great crew of people to be around, it gets me out of the house and back into a situation where I can bullshit with relative strangers, make jokes and have a good time, and I make a little money at the end of the day.

It all became official on a shift a couple weekends ago when I arrived on Sunday afternoon to open up and discovered I now have my own nameplate to put on display when I’m the bartender on duty.

“Bartender on duty” is wild by itself, 11 years after I started my first job pouring beers in Maine on Sunday afternoons. It’s funny how life comes full circle sometimes.