{"id":5854,"date":"2023-05-16T08:05:50","date_gmt":"2023-05-16T06:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=5854"},"modified":"2023-05-17T22:39:46","modified_gmt":"2023-05-17T20:39:46","slug":"shut-up-and-drink","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=5854","title":{"rendered":"Shut Up and Drink"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In early spring of 1996, I went for a job interview at a restaurant pub opening in Oakland, Pittsburgh. Though freshly 21, I had been visiting the pubs in Oakland and beyond since about 4 years earlier on a series of fake IDs and inside men who\u2019d let me, a 5\u20196, 130 pound (well, until my sophomore year Cambrian explosion), peach faced fool walk through the door with a nod and an extended two-eyed wink.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oakland was rife with bars. Zelda\u2019s, CJ Barney\u2019s, Peter\u2019s Pub, in a pinch down the road there was Babylon and Denny\u2019s. The as-of-yet opened pub I walked up to on that afternoon had been another: Caleco\u2019s. A lean orange cartoon cat slinked up its narrow sign from at least 1992 to around 1994. We used to go there to see a friend\u2019s band and though they had a particular attachment to Rush that I could do without, I would go to support my friend the drummer, drink warm beer, and ogle the singer whose physical beauty made her Geddy Lee voice bearable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So as I walked into the restaurant, still in the far-off-sound-of-saw, plastic tarp, wooden beam, and sawdusty era of its reconstruction, I felt like an old timer. I was one of the ones who knew what things had been around before the things that were there now. I was greeted by a guy who looked like Ned Flanders \u2013 pushbroom mustache, light blue in-too-good-condition jeans, belt up to the nipples of his forest green golf shirt, glasses whose wide, circular rims pegged them as leftovers of a late 1980s fashion sense. (A decade later my wire rims would be pegged as a leftover of a mid-1990s fashion sense.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cVic. Hi.\u201d He told me about the place. \u201cA west coast bar food with a twist.\u201d Stuck out in my head \u2013 or it does now, since I heard or said it about 659 times in the following 3 years. As I tried to figure out what that meant, Vic caught me off-guard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTell me a funny story about yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I panicked and told him an embarrassing story of a graphic nature. Correction: the most<\/em> embarrassing story of a graphic nature. Vic stared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOK, you\u2019re hired. As long as you come back Wednesday and tell that story to Mike. He\u2019s one of the owners.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We were given T-shirts: Shocks and Struts<\/em> or Shut up and Drink.<\/em> The staff became instant friends. Like every bar on earth, characters became famous. Jimmie Kuhl. JC. Sam. Nikki. I\u2019d work there for about 6 months. You see, before I was the paragon of responsibility I am now, little things like \u2018showing up to work\u2019 used to be a problem, made worse by not informing anyone about it. These are called \u2018no call, no shows\u2019 and after three such of these occasions, I was let released into the wilds of working at other bars. This was like being kicked out of the Garden of Eden, with no west coast bar food and no twist. After a three year statute of limitations, I was hired back. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

History has told us of the importance of the pub in a sociological kind of way. The first pubs (called tabernae or taverns) popped up along the Roman road network to cater to travellers. They were places to offer drink, food, and company. Stories were told, news was shared, gossip was enjoyed. The Bubonic Plague gave rise to the British pub, which started in people\u2019s homes. The current day British pub still has all the hallmarks of this transition of home to pub \u2013 fireplaces, cozy chairs, intimate atmosphere, comfort food, throwdown fistfights three times a week, the police. Home. We about-to-be-Americans brought this overseas to the New World. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Pubs and saloons and taverns have been intimately connected to the development of America \u2013 along travel roads, in small towns and cities, they went out west with our manifest destiny. In America pubs have played a part in every step of American historical development: community, revolution, politics, assassination plots. Some of our best and worst ideas as Americans have been brewed in a bar. Which we can all attest to first hand. Who hasn\u2019t woken up in the morning after a big pub night saying aloud \u201cwhose bright idea was it to steal that llama?\u201d Who amongst us hasn\u2019t?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though we can look at \u201cthe pub\u201d and its sociological and historical importance, what we who frequent pubs remember is the feeling we have or had there. The buzz of walking in and being recognized by your bartender. The rush of seeing pals come in or of watching the ninth inning or the last two minutes of the fourth quarter on TV with 150 people, some of whom are friends, some of whom are friends for the next three minutes. There are names that mean nothing to anyone on earth except the people who used to go to the bar and they stick with us forever: Jimmie, Lonnie, JC, Tuner, J-Mac, Sake, Lonesome Joe Eliot, O\u2019Hara.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bar patrons talk to each other like veteran co-workers. Remember that time J-Mac set up the wine bottles for a bowling match? Remember when those Canadian medics were here for the hockey playoffs!? Never drank so much Canadian Club in my life. Are you in JC\u2019s 100 Beer Club? Yep. 10 times!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The feeling we get from those memories \u2013 whether we still live in the neighborhood or live 40, 50, or 4,319 miles away \u2013 is instantaneous. The only thing impossible to do is convey the full feeling to someone else. Fuel and Fuddle is a great pub. The only thing outnumbering the memories I have of the place are the memories I don\u2019t have of the place. It\u2019s closing this month, which is sad, but for now \u2013 shut up and drink.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In early spring of 1996, I went for a job interview at a restaurant pub opening in Oakland, Pittsburgh. Though freshly 21, I had been visiting the pubs in Oakland and beyond since about 4 years earlier on a series of fake IDs and inside men who\u2019d let me, a 5\u20196, 130 pound (well, until […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5855,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/damiengaleone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/fuel.jpg?fit=275%2C183&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1EvEu-1wq","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5854"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5858,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5854\/revisions\/5858"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}