Newport Beach, California turned out to be the right town at the wrong time.
That’s how he sized it up. A fetching place but for now, not for him. Maybe a bit too crowded. That was his problem, not the town’s. Dodging crowds was simply a matter of getting up early.
Over breakfast at Cappy’s he told himself he could always come back to Newport Beach when he was a bit more flush.
He’d done a good job saving money down in Laguna. He still had all of what he’d won in Reno.
And he had enjoyed the year off from bartending. Painting the motel down there, he had enjoyed working outdoors but now he was ready to tend bar again.
He knew that some establishments didn’t care how skilled their bartenders were, which left a dwindling number of establishments that did. He knew there were still hotel food and beverage directors who appreciated the value of a talented bartender.
On the phone a few days before, he’d been interviewed by a hotel food and beverage director in LA. When the woman asked him what made the difference between a good bartender and a great one, he told her there were two things.
One was how to handle a conversation with a guest. How to season a conversation with the right amount of empathy and silence to sidestep obsequiousness. How to know when to make an all but imperceptible nod of the head or a slight squint.
Conversations took work. There were diversions to be planted and delicacies to be sprinkled.
He told her that to mix the ingredients for a conversation was not unlike mixing a cocktail. The correct measurements only took you so far.
The art lay elsewhere. Little things such as knowing how to disengage from one guest to attend to another, and then to return and seamlessly continue the strand of a broken conversation.
Then she asked about the other thing.
He told her it was a combination of attentiveness and anticipation. Attentiveness that let you pirouette, so you could look a guest in the eye at the same time you surveyed the length of the bar.
She told him to come up and see her because they needed somebody like him.
Northbound traffic out of Newport Beach, California heading toward the 405 was surprisingly light.
