The Drunk with Bad Direction

This tale was related to me by a good friend and long-time barkeeper by the name of Jimmy Littleton with whom I had the pleasure of working one summer in San Diego, Calif. when I tended bar at the fabled Grant Grill of the U.S. Grant Hotel. The Grill was more famous in Europe than the U.S. and served some of the finest cuisine I have ever seen. At this stage of his career, Jimmy was a much sought-after maitre d'hotel with a rather famous clientele which included Walter Winchell, Rocky Marciano and J. Edgar Hoover. A cosmopolitan group to say the least.

Jimmy was born and raised in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania, the son of an Irish longshoreman. Jimmy was a sometime boxer but paid the rent by tending bar in some pretty tough saloons down by the Philadelphia waterfront. His fighting skills were a definite asset to his job performance. This is the way he told the story to me.

"I was tending day shift bar at the Anchor bar" said Jimmy. "A great old monstrous saloon it was too, sitting on a corner with the main entrance at the intersection of two busy thoroughfares and a side entrance down either one of them, with a great long L-shaped mahogany bar facing all three doors". "One morning" he continued, "I was cutting lemon twists whilst talking to some patrons when a full-blown drunk staggered through the Delaware street entrance and headed for a stool". Jimmy quickly headed him off he told me and chased him back onto the street saying "We don't serve drunks!", came back inside and continued cutting his lemons.

A few minutes later, according to Jimmy, the main doors on the corner flew open and again the drunk staggered inside, doing a full three hundred and sixty degree pirouette before ricocheting onto a bar stool. This time Jimmy took sterner measures. Again he came out from behind the bar and, grabbing the souse by the nape of the neck and seat of his trousers, ran him straight to the street using the drunk's head as a battering ram through the doors while yelling "I told you before and I'm telling you again...We don't serve drunks!".

By this time the customers were laughing and kidding Jimmy about his inability to convey a message. He started to go back to cutting lemons, he told me, when "I suddenly had a premonition, a flash of insight, and I headed down to the far other end of the bar".

Sure enough, in a couple of minutes the other side entrance door banged open and once again the same drunk stood inside, looking slightly dazed and blinking his eyes. He finally focused and there stood Jimmy not making a sound but dramatically pointing his finger menacingly toward the just-opened door. "Okay, okay" whined the drunk, wheeling and starting to head outside "I'll leave!". Suddenly he stopped and, summoning newfound courage, focused his bleary eyes on Jimmy and asked: "Just tell me one thing, barkeep. Do you work in all the places in this part of town!"