Maybe.
I spent a year setting 'em up for the Nardini boys at Club Lago in the tony River North neighborhood earlier this decade. Mind you, if a bartender were to live a glamorous, exciting life, River North would be the place to do it.
We had our share of celebs. Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins loved the place. The painter Ed Paschke held frequent dinner meetings at a corner table. Photographer Marc Hauser blustered in on a regular basis. News anchor and television producer Bill Kurtis ate there a couple of times a week.
The elder of the Nardinis, Giancarlo, once walked Kurtis to the door. "I hope you liked it," Giancarlo said. Kurtis turned to him dramatically and, in that famous authoritative, stentorian voice, issued the proclamation, "We love it." Giancarlo scratched his head as he came back behind the bar. "He was alone," the boss said. "Was he using the royal we?"
The restaurant even was featured in a key scene in the movie "Mad Dog and Glory," a Robert De Niro vehicle that was about as memorable as a case of hiccups.
Since it was a good Italian eatery in a trendy district, Club Lago drew its share of sports stars. One night, the head coach of the Blackhawks came in with his wife. Giancarlo, a maniacal hockey fan, almost screamed like a teenaged girl at a Jonas Brothers concert. Patrons and staff were puzzled by the fuss. As a Chicago celebrity, the coach of the Blackhawks ranks between the Recorder of Deeds and the ice cream man. I don't remember his name; for all I know, his wife forgets it too.
Former Bears quarterback Bob Avellini once graced the joint with his business. For the sports-impaired, A Chicago ordinance bars the pro football team from employing competent quarterbacks. Avellini was as pedestrian as any passer in Bears history. Still, customers flocked around him at the end of the bar. Avellini stood as erect as a victorious Roman general charioting back into the city.
Baffled by the idolatry, I pulled aside a fellow named Mr. Darby, one of the most fevered of the flock bleating around the retired jock.
I quietly asked him, "You know that's Bob Avellini, don't you?"
"Of course," he gushed, "isn't it great?"
A brief tangent. That night's Avellini-mania was further proof that Americans value celebrity above all things. If a person is somehow lucky enough to be caught, even briefly, on a television camera, his or her life is deemed fulfilled. To wit: my nice Sheila brought her 12-year-old son to the Barack Obama victory rally in Grant Park on election night. One of the ten bazillion CNN camera crews found the kid and asked him his thoughts. He told the nation that it was an historic occasion. Cut to commercial. The rest of the family hasn't stopped talking about his six seconds of fame since. I expect him to be using the royal we soon.
Back to the point. Despite the romance engendered by caricatures like Billy Goat's in Chicago, the fictional Cheers in Boston, and Joe Bell's from "Breakfast at Tiffany's," a tavern is really nothing more than a church for drunks. I swiftly adopt a local bar in every neighborhood I move into. For the first few months, I'm giddy over my new friends whom I can depend on seeing any night of the week. Like the ideal family, they're always there for me. Eventually, though, I realize that they're not there for me but for the booze. I become disillusioned until I discover a new bar family.
So, where can I go to be surrounded by kindred souls? I haven't the foggiest notion but I continue to look. The only other place in the modern world where people regularly gather and commune is, well, church itself. I can't figure out which is the sillier addiction: god or alcohol.
As for the glamor of a bartender's life, by the time I left Club Lago, I was sick to death of stinking like cigarette smoke and being told what a great guy I was time and again, time and again, time and again. In a bar, a compliment can be nothing more than a verbal tic.
I'd been able to buy both a laptop and a car in cash, though. Paid my rent that way too. Pocketing a thick wad of bills every night is a powerful draw for the profession. Money, like sex, drives us.
Speaking of sex, I never was seduced by a ravishing beauty when I was a bartender. It didn't seem quite fair, capitalizing on the fact that she might have had four cosmopolitans in her. It reminded me of the old Woody Allen line: I never like to play to a roomful of people high on pot - they'll laugh at anything.
