It pays to be nice

He seemed so much older to me back then. But when you’re a 22-year-old trainee bartender everyone seems so much older. In a bar environment, they usually are, because they have to be: It’s the law. But I doubt he was even 30. In customer service, eight years can be an eternity. I remember thinking then that I didn’t want to be a 30-year-old bartender. But the reality is that I didn’t want to be that 30-year-old bartender.

“What’s the best whiskey you have?” asked a man unknown to both of us.

“Max” didn’t flinch. He served him a $20 whiskey — which back then was astronomical in price — without even batting an eye.

“What makes that whiskey the best?” I asked.

“It’s the most expensive,” he said.

“Does that make it the best?” I asked.

“It does to me,” he said.

And that was all that really mattered to him.

We’ve all heard the old trope of the glass half-empty or half-full — pessimist versus optimist. We always think of how we perceive that glass of water, and what that means to us. What we never ask is what does any of that mean to the glass of water?

“There’s a sucker born every minute” is a quote often attributed to circus man P.T. Barnum. And there’s truth in that statement. Trends come and go in the bar business. One minute you’re layering mudslides and the next minute it’s whiskey on round cubes. People will literally line up for beer one day only to vehemently poo-poo the same beer the next day. It’s the nature of things. For better or for worse, I learned that from Max.

“Go get her,” said Max, when the next customer walked up.

I believe a double entendre was intended.

“What can I get for you?” I asked, spinning a coaster over to her, which landed off of the bar.

“Oops,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

“Chardonnay,” said the woman, looking at me judgmentally.

“Which one?” I asked.

“A good one.”

“Good?” I asked. “What does that mean to you?”

Oddly, in customer service, some customers will not tell you what they want directly. They couch their questions in “you knows” and “maybes.” I believe that James Bond is admired in the bar business not because his drink order is so meticulous, but rather because it’s delivered so assuredly. It’s his confidence that inspires, not his neuroticism.

She hemmed and hawed, hedged and faltered. It took nearly five minutes to figure out what she wanted. But figure it out we did.

Max watched the whole thing disapprovingly.

“You need to turn and burn,” he said. “Don’t waste your time with people like that.”

I took what he said to heart. He was training me after all. And he had been a bartender for nearly a decade.

But that wasn’t me. And over the next several months, all around the edges, I continued to help people.

The next time that woman came into the bar, she made a beeline directly to me. And then, so did her friends — and their friends.

“Max” still rung up a lot of sales. But sales don’t prove everything. In fact, sometimes sales hide everything. Is the bestselling whiskey really the best whiskey? I doubt it. And that goes for vodka, beer, tequila and wine, too. But, in the bar business, you’ve got to have those “bests,” because not everybody knows that.

Max’s sales eventually declined. And he moved on. It was then that I discovered that Max had always moved on. In his eight years of bartending, he had worked eight different jobs. He was very good at taking advantage of a crowd; he just wasn’t very good at attracting one.

When I turned into a 30-year-old bartender, Max had moved on to finance. When I turned into a 40-year-old bartender, he was involved with investing. Somewhere around my 50th birthday, I picked up a newspaper and read that Max had been arrested for some type of investment fraud. His trial dragged on and eventually he was convicted and sentenced to prison.

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time,” a phrase believed to have been coined by Jacques Abbadie.

• P.T. Barnum never said that about suckers. But you can buy T-shirts that say he did, proving that the attribution might be wrong, but the sentiment is most certainly true.

• Following the crowd might be the most expensive thing you ever do.

• “Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don’t have,” Anthony Bourdain wrote in “Kitchen Confidential.”

• I still see that chardonnay lady from time to time, three decades later. Just saying.

• Being “behind bars” has become a joke for me, probably not so much for Max.