They warned me about the questions.
I told my friends that I’d be open about my sobriety when I returned to work tending bar. After 13 years in the beer industry, I’m fortunate to know a lot of people who found sobriety before I did, and they’ve been incredibly helpful along the way. They were the ones who warned me.
I wasn’t worried about the questions. Most interactions with customers from behind a bar are short and transactional, and I can disarm those kinds of questions with a joke.
“Why’d you stop drinking?”
“Because I love beer too much.”
“You don’t drink any of the beer here?”
“Do you want us to run out of beer? Because that’s how we run out of beer.”
“Who bartends sober?”
“Ever heard of Sam Malone?”
I feel bad when people don’t get that last one, but most of them seem like they’d rather smile and pretend that they did anyway. Then they order their beer and go back to their table.
There are harder questions, but they mostly come from my side of the bar.
Questions like, “Why can’t I just be like them and drink normally?” and “Would one shift beer really hurt?”
I try, in vain, to disarm those thoughts with humor. I ask myself, “What would Sam Malone do?” I might be a tough audience, but hey, at least I get the reference.
Occasionally I’ll mention my sobriety to a customer, and they’ll say, “Man, I wish I could do that.” My friends didn’t warn me about this. I know exactly how to respond, though, because I’d said the same thing before to others when they got sober. I offer the same, gentle encouragement that those people used to give me: “You’ll figure it out when you’re ready.”
