Back when I was able to stay up late enough to watch The Daily Show (which, actually, was back before The Daily Show was even around), I used to be able to close down the bars. I’d be one of those people hanging out until the last possible minute, dawdling over a pitcher while the band packed up, the cocktail waitresses started flipping on the lights (bar patrons and cockroaches being the only creatures that interpret bright lights as a sign that the party is over), and finally, the bartenders began to yell.
“All right now, that’s it; everybody out–we’re closed. Come on–we’re closed. Everybody out. Time to leave. Time to go. Good-bye. Out! Get out!”
Sure enough, ten minutes or so later, I’d leave, but not without thinking: Boy, throwing out a bunch of uncooperative drunks has got to be the lamest job ever. I’m sure glad that isn’t me. Fast forward fifteen years: I’m still directly involved in the process of people being shoved out of doors, but now I am one of the shovers, and the shov-ees are none other than my very own children, Clementine and Clyde. However, instead of this experience making me emphasize with the bartenders of my youth, it actually makes me a little bit jealous of them, because, after all, not only did those bartenders have bouncers to fall back on when things got really bad, they also only had to get people to stop drinking; I have to get people to go to school.
Also, unlike most bartenders, I have to start initiating eviction proceedings 90 minutes before school begins. And I’m not talking about issuing a generic order to “get ready for school”–I mean I have to go down a checklist that includes such minutia as “Find your socks. Turn off the TV. Put on your socks. Turn off the TV. Put one sock on each foot. Turn off the TV. Now put on your shoes. Ok, then find your shoes–no, they’re not inside the TV. Now put them on. Ok then, put your socks back on. Then find them. Who turned on the damned TV?” And so on, until the magical time of 8:10 appears on the clock, and everyone traipses merrily off to school. (Once I have successfully gotten them to leave the house I feel I have earned the right to imagine them any way I like–even if that means imagining them as two smiling, apple-cheeked siblings heading off to school in Rockwellian bliss–complete with a pair of blue birds twittering above their heads).
Of course, what really happens is that at 8:10 I’m standing at the door like the loneliest member of the relay team, holding out the baton that no one wants to take.
“Come on, it’s 8:10, time to go!” I yell, only to have Clyde call back from the kitchen that he has changed his mind–he’ll take a packed lunch after all–and Clementine call from the computer to say that, by the way, she needs a little bit more information for her report on Tripoli that’s due this morning. For starters: what, exactly, is a Tripoli?
At this point my vision of them on their way to school is starting to looking a lot more Edvard Munch than Norman Rockwell–forget the blue birds of happiness twittering above their heads, I’d settle for a pair of ravens fighting over a moldy chalupa if it meant that they were actually out the door.
And that’s when the bartender’s ultimate advantage occurs to me, because, no matter how frustrated I get, I’m still not allowed to use the bartender’s final and most effective encouragement to get lingering patrons to vacate the premises: “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”