The Beginning

My bartending career started innocently enough. It was 1983, I was a laid off steelworker, like many Pittsburghers of the time, collecting unemployment compensation and wondering how to earn a living now that the mills were all closing down. I was married, had an 8 month old son, and had no education beyond high school.

During a previous, temporary lay-off, and on my fathers advice, I had gone to the Pittsburgh Bartending Institute, thinking that I could at least make a few bucks under the table until I found a "real" job.

My first stop behind bars was at a former "Eat 'n Park" restaurant that a local grocer was converting into a bar/restaurant. It's kind of ironic in that this same "Eat n' Park" was the very first place that I had worked while still in high school. I was hired as a car hop then, and lasted all of two weeks. Hey, how could they have possibly expected a jack off like me to work a Friday evening when there was a football game to go to?? That was a night to grab a quart of Iron City, drive around getting shit faced, then go to the game to cheer on the "Bridgers".

After the game, it was off to the local Catholic high school for the weekly dance, usually featuring B. E. Taylor and "The Establishment", and the always ill fated school boy attempts at picking up Catholic girls.

The second go 'round in the new incarnation of this restaurant would play out much the same way. Being a new place, The Inn was creating a bit of a buzz around town. The holiday season was coming up and they were supposed to be opening for New Year's Eve. I had applied for the bartending job, but had heard nothing from the son of the grocer who was going to be running the show. He wanted, like a lot of bar owners, a good looking young girl, with certain assets, behind his bar, and I certainly wasn't that, but I was fresh out of bartending school and I wasn't going to be denied. I had heard through my uncle, the state legislator in our district, that the opening of the Inn was being delayed because they hadn't secured their L.C.B. licencing yet. Well, a few phone calls and a couple of weeks later, and there I was, on New Year's Eve, opening a new bar on my first gig as a bartender.

It wasn't to last long though. The boss at the new place never did like that I had pulled strings to pressure him to hire me and besides that, he had to fill out forms every week, reporting my income from bartending to the unemployment office. They would deduct any wages I earned as a bartender from the compensation I was receiving from being laid off from the mill. Phil was quickly tiring of the extra paperwork and I was becoming disgruntled myself, because I was finding out that his bar was nothing more than a place for him and his father and brothers to go and get drunk for free and hit on any young women that came through the door. Through the years it has become quite clear that this is one of the perks of being a bar owner and is quite a common practice.

One afternoon when I was arriving for work, he was just opening the mail with the unemployment forms in it. He bitched at me about what a pain in the ass it was and said that he was really sorry that he had hired me in the first place. I told him I was sorry he felt that way, but since he was so put out by it all, why didn't he just fire me..., so he did. I got the last laugh though because he then became responsible for paying part of my unemployment compensation. He tried to deny my benefits, saying that I had quit, but they held a hearing and I won the case.

So much for a successful first attempt at being a bartender.