(In the 1970s, I was still in my twenties and tending bar at The Lark Tavern in Albany, NY. I also volunteered one overnight each week at a neighborhood hotline and crisis center, Refer Switchboard, half a block from The Lark.

This true story about a struggling young customer named Danny was originally posted on this blog in a slightly different form in 2011.)

Meanwhile, as life rolled on at The Lark and at my apartment, New York State was caught in a severe financial crisis. In the struggle to cut budgets, someone had an idea to save a lot of money on mental health. They decided to move thousands of patients out of the psychiatric hospitals, placing them instead in local, less expensive group homes.

I’d heard about the plan from volunteering on the hotlines and never thought it would affect me. Then late one afternoon, one of the newly-released patients walked into The Lark Tavern. On a slow day, a quiet young man had plopped himself down at the end by the window. He lifted his hand for service, neatly dressed with an easy-going, goofy smile.

We’d all just been told a little about him. When he walked in, a counselor from Refer Switchboard happened to be sitting at the bar, and he said the kid’s name was Danny and that he had grown up in a mental hospital. Danny’s family sent him there when he was five years old because they couldn’t handle his strange behavior. For the next twenty years, his world was a row of hospital beds and the nurses’ station with a slick tile floor beneath his state-issued slippers. Now he had been released.

“It’s called deinstitutionalization,” the counselor explained as we watched Danny settle onto an empty stool. “New York is moving most of the patients to group homes, so they’ll be housed in nearby communities.” Bartending beside me, Kate asked, “Does the plan include warning all the local pubs?”

Heading down to the young man, I thought about his recent transition. I pictured them dropping him off at the group home with the car motor still running and someone saying, “There you go, Danny!” As the car door swung shut behind him, suddenly he was in the wider world. He might have stood on the front stoop and looked around, grinning. For the first time, Danny lived in a house, on a street, in a neighborhood. Each day he stepped off the stoop, there were endless possibilities. He could walk down whatever street he liked and stop anyplace he liked. On this day, he had walked into The Lark Tavern, sat down and ordered a beer, probably for the first time ever.

“I’d like a cold one!” he told me with a big smile, and then he added, “. . . my name is Danny!” I stood behind the bar. He was an overgrown kid whose only concept of what bars are like had been pieced together from watching the hospital TV. I had to think about it for a moment.

“Danny,” I asked, “should you be drinking? How about a Coke instead?”

The Lark Tavern’s interior back then

On sunny days, a bar feels so much like home. The large front window filled the place with light as Danny played a few old tunes on the jukebox. He scooped up a basketful of peanuts from the tin washtub and sat at the bar with shells scattered around him, grinning and on top of the world. “I’ll have another one!” he said, pushing his soda glass forward.

We always had a few customers at the bar in the afternoons, regulars mostly. Danny began stopping in every day. He was neatly dressed, pleasant with the staff, and the regulars barely gave him a second look after a while. They probably saw him as the quiet sort, a bit odd, but that was his business. He sat alone, but whenever one of the bartenders came over, he’d give us a quick smile and blurt out, “How are you today?” We knew he felt excited just to be allowed to stay.

The days went by, and Danny began to talk with the customers. At first, we were concerned because we’d have to ask him to leave if he made people uncomfortable. As it turned out, he was surprisingly at ease, commenting about the weather, about something on the TV, or how the New York Yankees were doing. Small differences might stop people from talking in the outside world, but it doesn’t take much to get along inside a pub. “I like Thurman Munson,” Danny said to someone watching the televised baseball game beside him. The man agreed while Danny sat beaming. He was a regular guy now, talking about everyday stuff in a bar. “I’ll be right back,” Danny said when he got up to go to the men’s room. He gestured to his barstool, making sure I would save it for him. He had found his spot.

Then he started to take an interest in the women. I should have seen it coming. It’s a different conversation, talking with a woman in a bar. Most of the women couldn’t be bothered with Danny, and they let him know. They didn’t respond or looked the other way. One girl swiveled in her seat, turning her back on him while he was talking as though something else had her attention. Danny realized it was a lost cause and quietly got up. “I didn’t mean to trouble you,” he said, returning to his barstool.

One afternoon, a new woman came into the bar, and she seemed somewhat friendly toward Danny. She gave him a casual nod as he introduced himself, and when he sat beside her, she appeared attentive and listened to what he had to say. Danny told her he liked her dress. He got her to laugh a few times. “Wait, I’ve got another one!” Danny said, and they talked for almost an hour. A few days later, they sat together again and this went on for several weeks. They’d sit and chat when at the bar, and Danny eventually told me they planned to meet somewhere for lunch.

“That’s great, Danny,” I said, although I wondered if it was the best idea. If you stepped back and noticed him, he was a good-looking guy—but he’d grown up in a mental hospital. He didn’t have a job.

By now, we knew that the woman worked as a receptionist in the downtown government offices. She was a reserved, early-thirties brunette, pretty in a way. She sat with her drink and Danny had his Coke, and it made you wonder, “What’s the story there?” When the two of them left early on a weekend afternoon, one of the new waitresses suggested they were probably having sex. “Maybe Danny is a good lover,” she said, and somebody called out, “Yeah, right!”

“He might be really hung,” the waitress said, and the entire place burst into laughter.

Evidently, they had a good lunch because they continued to meet at The Lark, talking about whatever they’d just seen on the bar’s TV. Sometimes when they left together, Danny struggled to keep the smile off his face. After a while, I wondered if I should say something to her. She had to know about Danny and the hospital, but to bring it up, so she kept it in mind. Social life can be chancy in a bar. I remember a Refer counselor once brought a client into The Lark; she handed him a Coke and introduced her “friend” to the other customers. Maybe she wanted the man to feel more comfortable in public places. This must have looked like the perfect spot to practice. “As long as you stay with him,” I thought.

But Danny and the woman from the government offices appeared to get along well, and their contact did Danny a world of good. Maybe it was the sex if they were having sex. He was definitely more relaxed, more confident now, and he’d order his Coke as though he really belonged. All the staff liked him, and he had a friend for the afternoons spent in the neighborhood bar. For him, it was fall days, football games on the TV, and an individual basket filled with peanuts in the shell. Danny was at the jukebox when Kate said, “He’s hung his life on The Lark Tavern like a coat on a hook.”

As the days continued to pass, however, we noticed a gradual change in Danny. It’s hard to describe, but there were small things—a difference in how he acted or how he sat on his stool. He’d turn to her with his hands in his lap and almost a pleading expression. Everyone might feel that way sometime, but they usually don’t show it in a bar. In those moments, Danny didn’t seem old enough to be in here.

The woman had been patient at first, but clearly something was changing. Now they’d face each other in what looked like arguments. Their voices remained too low to be heard, but her gestures were stern, choppy. And sometimes, she would stare at him hard without saying anything. Finally one afternoon, she stood up in the middle of their conversation. “You have to leave all that behind you, Danny,” she said, picking up her purse and jacket. “You have to stop living in the past.” Then she left. We never saw her again.

“She and I will have to wait for a while,” Danny explained a couple of days later why she hadn’t been stopping by. “She’s very busy with her work right now.” All the staff knew the relationship was over.

Danny tried to talk with other women, but they silently ignored him or sometimes stood up and took another seat. So he sat with his hands wrapped around a glass of Coke. “Danny,” I said, standing across the bar from him, “maybe it would be better not to mention the hospital right away.”

“What else am I going to talk about?” he looked straight at me. “That’s who I am. It’s all I’ve got.”

A week later, Danny sat by himself, not talking with anyone. The staff paid attention to him whenever we walked by, asking how things were going with the usual cheerfulness. But he didn’t smile. I wanted to do something, but what? He stayed in his spot, with an empty stool on either side, alone in the crowd. At one point, he got up to go to the men’s room. When he didn’t return for a while, I knocked on the bathroom door. “Danny,” I said, knocking, “Danny, are you in there?” With no response, I twisted the doorknob, knocking harder. “Danny, what’s going on, pal? Are you OK?”

When pounding on the door didn’t bring an answer, one of the regulars came over and Kate ran out from behind the bar. Someone grabbed a hammer and a screwdriver, and we popped the bolts from the hinges, pulling the door out of its frame.

Danny sat alone on the bathroom floor next to the sink with his back against the wall, his shirt unbuttoned and pulled out. Blood was splattered everywhere. He sat in a small puddle of it. With his shirt sleeve soaked and arms loose at his sides, a razor blade had fallen on the tile near an open hand. At first, he didn’t move at all, but then he lifted his head and looked up at us.

Danny was finally carried out on a stretcher. A paramedic shoved equipment back into a medical duffel bag as they took him outside. “He’ll be fine,” the paramedic said, “his cuts are across the wrist . . . it takes a long time to bleed to death that way. Cut yourself lengthwise, open up a long section of the vein, and you’ll be dead in a few minutes.”

An ambulance was backed up onto the sidewalk in front of The Lark with its rear doors open. Two small fire trucks had parked beside the ambulance. The lights on the vehicles continued flashing their warning in silence, but it was too late now. I stood at the end of the bar by the front window and watched the ambulance doors close.

We didn’t see Danny after that. When we followed up with the Refer counselors, we found out he was going to be OK. Later, we heard he’d been sent back to Marcy State Hospital.

(Paul and Sonny were two undercover narcotics cops, friends of Marty, our bar manager at The Lark Tavern. They become regulars at The Lark, and one night they stepped in to help Marty out of a jam. This true story was originally posted here in 2011.)

Life at the bar rolled on, and everything still seemed to move too fast. I kept expecting a little quiet after a rocky start. In sports, there’s an old saying: “The game slows down!” It’s advice a veteran ballplayer might pass on to the youngsters, explaining that, in time, the game won’t feel so out of control. It wasn’t happening at The Lark. Despite months of pouring drafts, sometimes I still had to put on a brave face. This was a city bar, each night was new, and the place could get crazy.

The bar manager, Marty, started having trouble with a customer we’d just shut off, a seedy guy in his early thirties. He kept making a fuss about being asked to leave, yelling about his legal rights. Of course, it was only stupid bar talk, but Marty took it personally this night. Marty stood lean and muscular at 6’5”. He’d been a military guard in the Marine Corps. He grabbed the guy by the shirt, lifted him off the floor, and carried him in the air for three or four long strides before throwing him toward the door. The man landed on his feet, stumbling to catch his balance, and made one last comment about his citizenship rights before ducking out the door as Marty advanced.

Half an hour later, Marty got a call on the kitchen phone. “Just a minute,” he said to the caller. “Give me a minute. I’ve got customers.” He walked out from the kitchen over to Paul and Sonny, the undercover cops sitting at their usual spot at the bar; the other bartender and I joined them. The man who had been thrown out was on the phone, Marty told us. He planned to hire a lawyer and sue Marty for assault.

“Get him to come down here,” Sonny interrupted right away. He chimed in while Marty was still speaking before the rest of us had time to figure out what was going on. “Tell him you want to talk first,” Sonny said. “Suggest settling out of court, that you’ll make him a good offer.”

Marty returned to the kitchen as Paul and Sonny moved apart without saying a word to each other. Paul stood with his elbow leaned on the bar, looking toward the TV—while Sonny sat a little further down, bent over his drink. A half-turned barstool was now empty, with one of them on each side; I suppose they looked like anyone else at the bar. When the man walked through the front door fifteen minutes later, Marty waited behind the bar across from Paul and Sonny, so the guy stepped into the space between them. “You had no right to put your hands on me!” he snapped immediately. “You had no right! I called a lawyer.” Paul and Sonny never moved.

“I’m sorry,” Marty said, “I know I was wrong. It’s been a long day.”

“You were way out of line,” the returned customer leaned forward, “and I’m gonna sue your ass!”

“Look,” Marty continued quietly, “I told you I was sorry. Let’s talk about it.

“There’s other things,” Marty said, “and I can’t afford to go to court right now. So what can I do for you? How can we make this go away?

“Listen,” Marty said, “. . . can I give you some money? How much would take care of it, fifty dollars? A hundred dollars?” The man tried hard not to smile as he gained the upper hand. Our jukebox played in the background.

“What do you say?” Marty asked. “How about two hundred dollars. Is that enough?”

The guy thought about it for a moment, and then he made the mistake. “I guess that would be fair,” he said, “. . . two hundred dollars?”

Paul and Sonny pounced simultaneously in a split second, throwing the man forward and bouncing his head off the bar rail. Paul spun him into a full nelson, pinning his arms up above him. Sonny whipped his badge from his pocket and slammed it on the guy’s face. “That’s extortion, asshole!” Sonny shouted. “Asshole . . . asshole!” He kept bringing the badge down hard, again and again. Blood spurted from the man’s eyebrow.

They rushed him toward the door, twisting and turning. Paul slammed the man’s face into the door frame on their way out. Splinters of white wood popped out from the frame. The man moaned something, slumped forward in the full nelson, but his words were unintelligible.

It all happened in a blur. Paul and Sonny hustled him outside and into their car. Paul drove while Sonny held the customer in the back seat. We saw Sonny’s fist snap down in the rear window as the car peeled away. The entire incident lasted about twenty seconds.

When they returned later, we learned that Paul and Sonny had driven the man around, continuing to hit him, telling him they were going to send him to prison—for extortion, resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer. “You’re going away for fifteen years, asshole!” Sonny shouted as he punched him.

“Maybe we should whack him out,” Sonny said, turning to look at Paul while holding the customer in the back seat. “Why don’t we kill him?” Sonny said. They talked about how they could dump his body by the projects, in the poor section, which had so much crime no one would really investigate. The guy was so scared he pissed in his pants, wetting his crotch. When they finally dropped him off near the projects, he bolted from the car as soon as the door was opened and ran stumbling across the parking lot.

“I don’t think we’ll see him back here anytime soon,” Sonny laughed as he and Paul told the story after hours. Later, when Marty and Paul stepped away, leaving just the two of us at the bar, I asked Sonny what would happen if the man filed a complaint against them. “What if he claims it was entrapment or excessive use of force?” I asked.

“Well,” Sonny said, “in that case, I’d have to kill him, wouldn’t I?” He laughed, but he wasn’t kidding. “He’d have to disappear,” Sonny said. “They’d never find the body. I’d never let a jerk like that fuck up my career.”  *****************************************************************************************

As Johnny D’s is about to close, a lot of us who worked there have been called for interviews. The club’s upcoming exit made the front page of The Boston Globe. It’s a big deal in this city … Johnny D’s has become an institution, winning national awards and featuring live performances by Dixie Chicks, Allison Krause, Neil Young, and Irma Thomas whose 60’s hit “Time is on my side” was later a smash cover for the Rolling Stones.

So, along with owner Carla DeLellis and others, last week I wound up talking about Johnny D’s with Amelia Mason of Boston’s National Public Radio Station, WBUR. (You can read the full transcript and Amelia’s oral history of our nightspot here. The actual broadcast on WBUR 90.9 was on the afternoon of 3/10/16. )

(Don’t forget to check out Amelia Mason’s great piece on Johnny D’s. Again, it’s http://artery.wbur.org/2016/03/04/johnny-ds .)

I’m sure you’ve seen Meg Ryan’s famous antics in When Harry met Sally–she fakes an orgasm so well in a restaurant that a lady seated nearby tells her waiter “I’ll have what she’s having.” It’s a great scene, hysterically funny and seemingly original … but if you’ve ever worked in restaurants or bars you might recognize where that line came from.

We hear it all the time. A customer joins friends and when asked about a drink, simply tells the bartender “I’ll have what they’re having.”

At some moment in bar history, a customer must have watched someone fall off their barstool and then joked to the bartender: “I want the same thing he’s drinking!”

It’s a classic bar line that’s been bounced around for generations, so when I heard director Rob Reiner tell how he and his mom (who plays the nearby lady) came up with this original idea out of the blue, I started to think of how many times I’d heard it before.

Here’s one example from a movie made in 1986–three years before the production of When Harry met Sally. In Round Midnight, Dexter Gordon has the role an American saxophone player living in Paris in the 1950’s. Waiting for a drink after his night’s performance, Dexter watches a customer gulp down his last cocktail … and then fall straight back onto the floor. Dexter turns to the bartender and says, “I would like to have the same thing he had.”

Rob and his mom may have spent more time in bars than they care to admit. Click the image below to watch.

(2) Classic bartender’s line …

We’ve posted this before but I have to include one of my all-time favorite bartender lines. I first saw it on TV as part of an Oscars show while working the bar–a short clip in a montage of movies scenes. It took quite a few years of watching old movies and asking friends but I finally found it again. You can read the story of that long search here, but the actual short clip is below. Henry Fonda asks the bartender if he’s ever been in love … and the gentleman playing the barman delivers his line with perfect, deadpan acting.

(3) There’s nothing like bar conversation …

When I was working in Albany, a young nurse came into our bar after a hospital shift. She wanted to know how I came to stand behind the taps at The Lark Tavern. It was a long story which I tried to keep short–that while on my way to Boston, my friend Stacey suggested I should visit her in Albany for a couple of weeks when passing through.

After running into trouble with a motorcycle gang and a big beef with Stacey’s ex-con boyfriend, I began slinging drinks at The Lark where I’d meet politicians and gangsters, undercover narcotics cops, shameless deadbeats, scheming housewives … and eventually, I’d wind up living with a tall blonde who loved to be tied up and spanked.

It took me three years to leave Albany.

Meanwhile, as I told the nurse a few of the twists and turns, a frayed sort of man sat alone two barstools away. Wearing brown pants and a shirt that might not have been changed for days, he’d been bent over his drink–but now he slowly lifted his shoulders and joined our conversation.

“Life is a path of many windings,” he muttered, looking straight ahead.

The nurse and I laughed out loud. A drunk sat up to deliver a line from Confucius. You just can’t beat conversations in a bar.

These two short events happened late last Sunday night.

During closing duties at the nightclub, one of the waitresses scrubbed the stainless steel counter of the service station. Only she was using an industrial steel scruffie!

“Stop!!!” I shouted. The metal curls of the steel wool will leave permanent scratches in the surface. The new, nearly invisible grooves will fill with dirt and as soon as you get them clean, they’ll fill up again. Never use steel wool on stainless steel counters!

“Stop!!” I cried out, but she kept on scrubbing. “Stop! Stop! Stop!!”

After a brief explanation, she begrudgingly nodded her head in agreement . . . although she still wanted to argue about it. “That’s the way everyone around here is doing it,” she said.

“Then everyone has to be told why they shouldn’t,” I replied. By now she’d begun using a bar cloth instead, but she didn’t seem completely sold on the idea. She continued the conversation. “I don’t understand why I have to use a bar cloth” and “What harm could it really do?”

“Listen,” I said, in a rough attempt at humor while making a point. “The next time you use steel wool on this counter . . . I’m going to use steel wool on your nipples.” She stood for a moment with a blank expression. I could see the wheels churning as she searched for a comeback.

“Hmmm,” she said, staring straight at me. “I LOVE steel wool on my nipples.”

“OK,” I said. Clearly, I’d lost this little tete-a-tete.

“Alright . . . next time I’ll use the steel wool on you for fun, and then we’ll think of an appropriate punishment.” Well, at least now maybe she’d remember.

 The waitstaff finished early, and immediately began drinking . . .

With the club area closed and the waitstaff done for the night, I stood behind the bar for the last part of the shift–the front area would remain open until 1:00 a.m. as a neighborhood bar. “I’ll have a Patron margarita for my shift drink,” one waitress said. Our house pour is 1 1/2 ounces and the margaritas are “double drinks” so we’re talking about three ounces of liquor.

She guzzled down the drink with four or five long sips through her straw. “I’ll have another,” she said.

Halfway through the second drink, she wanted to order one more. “You know,” I said, “ . . . there’s a lot of liquor in those and you’re knocking them down pretty fast.”

“Are you driving?” I asked.

“I drink these all the time,” she told me. “I know what I can handle.

“Yes,” I replied, “but I want to be sure you make it home OK.”

“I’m just drinking fast so I can get out of here and drive home before it hits me,” she explained.

That’s not something the bartender wants to hear. She’s drinking fast so she can drive before the buzz makes her too woozy? “Listen,” I said, “I think you have two choices. You can slow down and I’ll serve you again in a few minutes, or you can make that your last one.”

“I know you can handle your liquor,” I said, “but I don’t want to worry about your trip home.”

Now she laughed and said, “Yeah, you’re probably right. I’m done for the night.”

“And a word of advice,” I told her. “When you want another drink, be careful how you explain it to the bartender.”