A young man with a cold face, much nervous energy and a
tired-of-the-world expression leans over the polished,
silver-mounted drinking bar.
You look at him and order your drink.
You know what you think of him, and you think you know what he
thinks of you.
Did you ever stop to think of ALL THE STRANGE HUMAN BEINGS
besides yourself that pass before him?
He stands there as a sentinel, business man, detective, waiter,
general entertainer and host for the homeless.
In comes a young man, rather early in the day.
He is a little tired--up too late the night before. He takes a
cocktail. He tells the bartender that he does not believe in
cocktails. He never takes them, in fact. "The bitters in a
cocktail will eat a hole through a thin handkerchief--pretty bad
effect on your stomach, eh?" and so on.
Out goes the young man with the cocktail inside of him.
And the bartender KNOWS that that young man, with his fine
reasonings and his belief in himself, is the confirmed drunkard
of year after next. He has seen the beginning of many such
cocktail philosophers, and the ending of the same.
The way NOT to be a drunkard is never to taste spirits. The
bartender knows that. But his customers do NOT know it. ----
At another hour of the day there comes in the older man. This
one is the fresh-faced, YOUNG oldish man.
He has small, gray side-whiskers. He shows several people--whom
he does not know--his commutation ticket.
He changes his mind suddenly from whiskey to lemonade. The
bartender prepares the lemon slowly, and the man changes his mind
back to whiskey.
Then he tries to look more dignified than the two younger men
with him. In the midst of the effort he begins to sing "The
Heart Bowed Down with Weight of Woe," and he tells the bartender
"that is from 'The Bohemian Girl.'"
He sings many other selections, occasionally forgetting his
dignity, and occasionally remembering that he is the head of a
most respectable home--partly paid for.
The wise man on the outside of the bar suggests that the oldish
man will get into trouble. But the bartender says: "No; he will
go home all right. But he won't sing all the way there. About
the time he gets home he'll realize what money he has spent, and
you would not like to be his wife."
The bartender KNOWS that the oldish man--about fifty-one or
fifty-two--has escaped being a drunkard by mere accident, and
that he has not quite escaped yet.
A little hard luck, too much trouble, and he'll lose his balance,
forget that there IS lemonade, and take to whiskey
permanently. ----
At the far end of the bar there is the man who comes in slowly
and passes his hand over his face nervously. The bartender asks
no question, but pushes out a bottle of everyday whiskey and a
small glass of water.
The whiskey goes down. A shiver follows the whiskey and a very
little of the water follows the shiver. The man goes out with
his arms close to his sides, his gait shuffling and his head
hanging.
It has taken him less than three minutes to buy, swallow and pay
for a liberal dose of poison.
Says the bartender:
"That fellow had a good business once. Doesn't look it, does
he? Jim over there used to work for him. But he couldn't let it
alone."
The "it" mentioned is whiskey.
Outside in the cold that man, who couldn't let it alone, is
shuffling his way against the bitter wind. And even in his poor,
sodden brain reform and wisdom are striving to be heard.
His soul and body are sunk far below par. His vitality is gone,
never to return.
The whiskey, with its shiver that tells of a shock to the heart,
lifts him up for a second.
He has a little false strength of mind and brain and that
strength is used to mumble good resolutions.
He THINKS he will stop drinking. He thinks he could easily
get money backing if he gave up drinking for good. He feels and
really believes that he WILL stop drinking.
Perhaps he goes home, and for the hundredth time makes a poor
woman believe him, and makes her weep once more for joy, as she
has wept many times from sorrow.
But the bartender KNOWS that that man's day has gone, and that
Niagara River could turn back as easily as he could remount the
swift stream that is sweeping him to destruction. ----
Five men come in together. Each asks of all the others:
"What are you going to have?"
The bartender spreads out his hands on the edge of the bar,
attentive and prepared to work quickly.
Every man insists on "buying" something to drink in his turn.
Each takes what the others insist on giving him.
Each thinks that he is hospitable.
But the bartender KNOWS that those men belong to the Great
American Association for the Manufacture of Drunkards through
"treating."
Each of those men might perhaps take his glass of beer, or even
something worse, with relative safety. But, as stupidly as
stampeded animals pushing each other over a precipice, each
insists on buying poison in his turn. And every one spends his
money to make every other one, if possible, a hard-drinking and a
wasted man. ----
You, Sir. Reader, have seen all these types and many others, have
you not?
WHY did you see them? What REASON had you for seeing them?
The bartender stands studying the procession to destruction,
because he must make his living in that way. He is a sort of
clean-aproned Charon on a whiskey Styx, ferrying the multitude to
perdition on the other side of the river. But what is YOUR
business there?
You might as well be found inside an opium den.
The drink swallowed at the bar braces you, does it? If you think
you need a drink, you REALLY need sleep, or better nourishment,
or you need to live more sensibly. Drink will not give you what
you need. It may for a moment make your nerves cease tormenting
you. It may do in your system for an hour what opium does in the
Chinese for a whole day. But if it lifts you up high, it drops
you down HARD.
And remember: