Losing St. Patrick’s Day. Again.
The strangest thing about St. Patrick’s Day 2020 is how strange it all felt then. For a week the news was drenched in a sense of “surely this can’t be happening” as the CDC recommended cancelling large events for eight weeks and top officials hinted we might need to shut the country down for fourteen whole days. Governors and mayors dragged their feet, occasionally floating trial balloons for voluntary lockdowns but in smaller circles cautious optimism thrived under a torrent of depressing push notifications. Because there’s no way we would be asked to live in a world without schools or sports or museums or concerts, where you couldn’t just walk up to any bar, any night of the week and order a drink. Not for two whole months.
I spent the weekend of St. Patrick’s Day the same way I’d spent almost every other weekend of my adult life — I was behind a bar. I’d been manning a mezcal pop-up in the east village, which is another outdated combination of words like “the possibility of a two-week shutdown” that feels like a naive relic from a simpler time. I loved that job. The space was small, barely enough for twenty people if you didn’t mind packing in like the L train at rush hour with live music every night and exactly three things on the menu: mezcal, beer and grilled cheese. Not exactly an Irish bar but we were looking forward to a busy weekend nonetheless to shake the dust off the slowest months of the year. Except when I arrived for my Friday shift I found a whole host of new tasks waiting for me. In addition to pouring drinks and entertaining guests I was going to have to clean the place to hospital standards every time anyone touched anything and maintain this new thing called “social distancing.”
Like thousands of other bartenders I was being asked to do things I wasn’t trained to do, enforcing regulations that seemed to change daily and without warning. “We’re getting subsidized by the Health Department right?” I joked to my manager as rumors jumped back and forth across the neighborhood of cops showing up and shutting down bars that weren’t adhering to 50% or 25% or whatever the capacity was that day.
The frustration was palpable. One man was so furious when I insisted he keep his distance from a group of young women that he kicked in the plate glass door of my bar in the early hours of Friday the 13th. Anthony Fauci, who at this point was not a household name and still had to be introduced as “the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases” warned that the worst was yet to come. We did everything we could, scooping up empty glasses as soon as they hit the table and liberally squirting purell on every pair of hands that came to the bar. But there was a growing sense that no amount of work from any bartender on earth could hold back the tide we were trying to reign in.
The shutdown came on Sunday, two days before St. Patrick’s Day, and a day that many establishments depend on after a long, slow winter evaporated. Everyone had it bad, Irish bars had it worst. According to one pub owner in Times Square the week of March 17th typically brings in two to three months worth of revenue, to say nothing about the food and the whiskey and all those kegs of Guinness that would be sitting on the shelf for… two weeks? A month? Longer? Some folks tried to sneak in under the wire. A friend of mine worked a party that Saturday on the Upper East Side and described a typically jolly and lucrative event stripped down to the studs, attended only by college students who didn’t tip or cover their mouths when they coughed. Two days later he spiked a 101° fever that persisted for a month.
Losing St. Patrick’s Day felt minor at first, a forgettable casualty as we all set up Zoom accounts and panic bought toilet paper. But after we spent Easter and then Cinco de Mayo and then Memorial Day indoors I started to wonder what the cumulative cost was of losing all these days, of always waiting until the next special occasion before we could gather at our favorite spots with our favorite people.
The cost for bars and restaurants has been measurable, and drastic. According to the Independent Restaurant Coalition over 110,000 bars and restaurants have been forced to close since the start of the pandemic — that’s more than one in six in an industry that accounts for 4% of the nation’s total GDP. For perspective aviation and the airlines that received a very large, very public bailout clock in at around 5%. Estimates of how many places could permanently shutter before this all ends range from half to 85%, and the people that work these jobs aren’t doing much better. As of January bars and restaurants have shed over 2.4 million jobs, vastly outstripping every other industry in America. On top of that roughly 10% of all restaurant workers are undocumented immigrants with hamstrung access to aid porgrams and no choice but to show up to work despite a vastly increased risk of serious illness and death.
Friends who have closed bars say they’ll only bring them back if they can ensure the type of work environment where employees feel safe, empowered and confident they’ll make a living wage. But while we wait for the day when strangers can pull up a stool next to strangers those of us in the industry have to spend our time contemplating that better way instead of building it. Staggering though they are, the numbers don’t paint a picture of what losing these places have cost us, all of us, on a deep psychological level. Bar and restaurant workers, maybe more than anybody else have felt that curious elastic stretch of time over these past twelve months, how it seems to race by all at once while in the same instance grinding to an undignified halt.
I was thinking about this as I chatted with friends and family over the phone and through screens in the last week of 2020. Normally this is my favorite week of the year, those forgotten seven days between Christmas and New Years when everyone tacitly agrees to throw out the rules and even folks with 9–5 jobs — we call you “Daywalkers” sometimes — can spend a lazy afternoon or two catching up with old friends in a cozy bar over several pints of beer. There’s only so many times you can ponder out loud how it doesn’t feel like Halloween or Thanksgiving or the Holidays or New Year’s Eve before you realize what those days are for, why every human civilization that’s ever lived set aside certain days as special. Because we need to gather, to commemorate the end of one time and the beginning of another, to turn the page together with the people we love. Without holidays or the people we celebrate them with or the places we celebrate them in time stretches out like an old sock that doesn’t fit right. It’s too tight, it’s too loose. It’s rushing by at an unimaginable pace and yet repeating itself over and over and over. Then before you know it it’s St. Patrick’s Day again.
When I finished cleaning the bar after the last shift I worked a year ago I grabbed a sharpie. This was one of those free-wheeling places where we encouraged people to write on the walls, another relic of frivolous fun from a time not too long ago and yet very long past. I grabbed a chair, and on the doorframe over a brand new sheet of plate glass I wrote “See You Soon.” I’m not sure what to expect from “soon” these days. But I still hope it’s true.
