Before the First Fist Flies
By Thomas L. Vaultonburg
My first job as a bartender was at the age of four, at the Cave Inn in Byron, Illinois. This is a story I rarely tell, because when I do people generally assume I'm joking. I'm not joking. I was four years old, and on certain evenings my father would finish his shift at Quality Metal Finishing and come home to collect my mother for a night of drinking. Since my brother and I were too young to be left home alone, we went along. The Cave Inn was a small dive bar on Byron's main street. The owner at the time was a man named Ray, and everyone thought it was just about the funniest thing in the world to see a four-year-old boy standing behind the bar setting up drinks for the customers. So that's what I did. I got behind the bar and set up drinks, and the adults laughed, and everybody had a wonderful time. Or at least that's how I remember the adults seeing it.
At home, I was also employed in the beverage service industry, although my duties were considerably less glamorous. Mostly I retrieved an apparently inexhaustible supply of Pabst Blue Ribbon from the refrigerator. If carrying beer to adults qualifies as bartending, I had already established a fairly respectable résumé before entering kindergarten. I was also, in a manner of speaking, the bouncer.
My parents had married in their teens, and I was born shortly thereafter. This was during the closing years of the Vietnam War, and our house was frequently filled with music, alcohol, and young people. They were all very young, I realize now. Much younger than I am today, and in some ways younger than I ever felt I was allowed to be. Some were Midwestern shitkickers from the lower working class. Others were young men who had returned from Vietnam. They worked hard, drank hard, listened to country music, and occasionally settled their differences in ways that didn't involve a great deal of conversation. Surprisingly, considering the era, I don't remember illicit drugs being part of the picture. These were not hippies sitting around smoking marijuana and discussing the meaning of life. Think of Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee." The drug of choice was alcohol, specifically beer, and nobody needed anything more exotic to get themselves into trouble. There was plenty of trouble to be had.
Violence was never some distant possibility that existed in another neighborhood or another kind of household. It was an ordinary feature of the environment, something that could materialize with very little warning. A conversation could change direction. Someone could say the wrong thing. A joke could stop being funny. A person who had been laughing thirty seconds earlier could suddenly become dangerous. I learned to recognize these transitions at an extraordinarily young age. I learned to watch people, to listen to the inflection of their voices, to notice changes in posture and expression, to recognize the moment when an interaction was moving toward something nobody was going to enjoy. Sometimes I could tell someone was about to become violent before that person seemed to know it himself. This was not a hobby. It was not an intellectual exercise in human psychology. It was a survival skill. If I couldn't recognize what was about to happen, somebody might get hurt. Sometimes that somebody might be me. I don't know that I would have survived my childhood without developing those abilities. I certainly wouldn't have survived it in the same way.
By the time I reached adolescence, I had made a fairly sensible decision about alcohol. I wasn't interested. I'd seen enough of what it did to people to conclude that there were better ways to spend my time. For a while, I managed to stay away from it. Then, in my late twenties, my mother died of pancreatic cancer. Around the same time, my first serious relationship ended, bringing the first stage of my adult life to a close. I found myself approaching thirty, working for a company delivering refrigerators for Sears, and wondering what exactly I'd been doing with my life. It seemed to me that I'd lived a rather dull existence.
The crew I worked with liked to go to a local bar called The Scoreboard, where they played something called NTN Trivia. This was an electronic trivia game played in bars, and my coworkers knew I had an unusually large collection of useless information stored in my head. They convinced me to come along one evening and put some of it to use. My mother had just died. My relationship was over. I didn't have a great many compelling reasons not to drink. So I started drinking. That summer, the company I was working for fired me for writing a book of poetry. That's another story, and one I won't attempt to explain here, except to say that it happened. That weekend I was at The Scoreboard when the manager asked if I wanted to bartend. I said yes. And just like that, nearly twenty-five years after my first shift at the Cave Inn, I was back behind a bar.
For much of the next fifteen years, there were very few nights when I wasn't in a bar somewhere, either working or drinking. Sometimes both. I worked in strip clubs, country clubs, fine dining establishments, sports bars, and dive bars. I tended bar, bounced, and spent an enormous amount of time observing people engaged in the ancient human enterprise of making fools of themselves. And I discovered that I was exceptionally good at the business. Not necessarily because I was the strongest person in the room or the most intimidating. I wasn't particularly interested in fighting people. What I possessed was something much more useful. I could tell when a fight was going to happen long before anyone threw a punch. In fact, I came to believe that if a punch had been thrown, I'd already failed at my job.
People have a peculiar understanding of what makes a good bouncer. They imagine some enormous man standing at the door waiting for an opportunity to throw somebody through a window. Patrick Swayze's character Dalton in Road House is a much better approximation of the philosophy, if not necessarily the reality, of the profession. The point isn't to win fights. The point is to prevent them. You lose control of a room long before the first fist flies. There are warnings, little shifts in behavior, challenges to authority, confrontations that begin as jokes, people testing how much they can get away with. If you're paying attention, you can recognize these things and intervene before the situation becomes physical. If you're waiting for somebody to throw a punch, you've waited too long. And if you allow the room to deteriorate to that point, you've failed utterly.
I was good at recognizing those moments because I'd spent my childhood recognizing them. The people drinking in front of me were not particularly mysterious. I'd known versions of them since I was four years old. I understood their behavior, their insecurities, their sudden changes in temperament, and the peculiar relationship between alcohol and the human ego. I'd been studying drunks long before I became one.
There was another aspect of my life that was developing alongside all this. I'd been in love with the written word since childhood, and poetry in particular. At some point I discovered Charles Bukowski, whose work seemed to possess a plainspoken honesty that corresponded almost exactly to my own understanding of human behavior. Bukowski wrote about drunks, losers, barrooms, desperation, sex, cruelty, humiliation, and the countless small indignities people inflict upon themselves and one another. There wasn't much sentimentality in his work, and that appealed to me. He didn't seem interested in pretending people were better than they were. Like a great many small press poets of that period, I became overly influenced by Bukowski. I imitated his style, his cynicism, his apparent indifference to conventional literary refinement. Looking back, this seems almost comically unnecessary.
I didn't need to imitate Charles Bukowski. I was living in Charles Bukowski's world every night. There was one important difference, however. Bukowski was usually the drunk being thrown out of the bar. I was the bartender or bouncer throwing Bukowski out. I occupied the other side of the transaction. I watched the spectacle from behind the counter, from the doorway, from the position of the person who had to clean up the mess after everybody else had finished enjoying themselves. I saw the same desperation, the same absurdity, the same miserable little dramas, but I was responsible for making sure nobody got killed before closing time. There is a difference between romanticizing the degradation of human behavior and being the person who has to deal with it.
During those years I wrote two books, Flesh Wounds and Submerged Structure. They are cynical, pessimistic collections of poetry, filled with observations about the less attractive aspects of human existence. At the time, I thought I was writing with a kind of brutal honesty. I wasn't interested in making people look good. I wasn't interested in redemption or uplifting conclusions. I wrote about what I saw. And what I saw was frequently ugly. The strange thing is that I rarely had to invent anything. The material presented itself night after night. Human beings supplied an apparently limitless collection of examples of cruelty, stupidity, selfishness, loneliness, and self-destruction. All I had to do was pay attention and write things down. I had spent my childhood learning to pay attention. By the time I was writing those books, I had become very good at it.
I don't particularly enjoy looking at Flesh Wounds or Submerged Structure today. In fact, I find them deeply unpleasant. They remind me of a period of my life I don't especially care to revisit, and of an understanding of human nature I would sometimes prefer not to possess. I can recognize the Bukowski influence now, and I can recognize the limitations of my own perspective. Cynicism can become a habit, just as drinking can. Spend enough time looking for the worst in people and you will certainly find it. But that doesn't mean what I wrote was dishonest. Those books are records of a particular time in my life, and of the things I witnessed while living it. They aren't necessarily the books I would write today, and they don't necessarily represent the entirety of what I believe about people. They represent what I knew then. And I knew it firsthand.
I began my education in human behavior at four years old, standing behind the bar at the Cave Inn while adults laughed at the novelty of a child serving drinks. I continued that education in a house where violence could emerge from an ordinary evening without much warning. And I eventually returned to the same world as an adult, where the ability to recognize impending violence became one of the most valuable professional skills I possessed. There is nothing particularly romantic about any of this. I sometimes wonder what I might have written if I'd grown up in a different environment, or if I'd spent those fifteen years doing something other than watching people drink themselves into trouble. Perhaps the poems would have been more optimistic. Perhaps I would have developed a more generous understanding of human nature. Perhaps I would have written better books. I don't know.
What I do know is that I never had the luxury of regarding violence as an abstraction. It was something I encountered in the environment around me, something I learned to recognize, anticipate, and, when I finally had some authority over my surroundings, occasionally prevent. I didn't learn those things from books. And although I don't much like reading the books I wrote as a result, I won't apologize for them.
I earned every word.
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