“I felt that by taking a bartending job on Lansdowne Street, I could start to earn my first real stripes of Boston citizenship”
It often happened that my shifts fell on the mornings of the days when the Red Sox played at home, mornings when us younger, hungover bartenders would finish setting up inside and then sit out on the stoop to watch as Lansdowne Street slowly came together. The vendors would be setting up their merchandise stands, the bar staff wheeling out the tables and chairs and umbrellas for their dining patios, the sausage carters scraping and oiling their grills for the beef and onions that would smoke out the street come game time. One by one, the steel-gate entrances to Fenway Park were raised open. Everybody had iced coffee and cigarettes. There was an unspoken excitement for the baking-hot, chaotic day ahead, but we would just sit out on that stoop and pretend like we didn’t want to be there, like we were over the whole thing. We kept it a secret that there was no place else we would rather be.
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When I moved here from the Midwest five years ago, I had a desire to prove myself capable of withstanding the city’s rough edge – a view of Boston that, like the rest of the world, I had learned through its harsh portrayal in American popular culture. I felt that by taking a bartending job on Lansdowne Street, I could start to earn my first real stripes of Boston citizenship. This was a foolish idea.
People who are new to Boston want to experience Boston – that same one I was preparing for – and this is especially true of the area around Fenway Park. They want the accent, the stories. They want to hear the word ‘wicked.’ They even want, dare I say, a bit of that blunt Northeastern rudeness. So, you can imagine the disappointed looks on my customers’ faces when they were greeted by my big cheeky smile and nasally Midwestern tone: How ya doin today, folks? What can I get started for ya guys?
But, once these clouds of self-importance dissipated, I realized that what the job offered instead was an opportunity to observe a major artery of Boston from the inside looking out. I developed an understanding – and a love for – the fast-cash market of drug use and alcoholism that pulses in the shadow of Fenway Park. Lansdowne Street functions like a woodchipper: every day I watched hordes of pretty undergraduates and tourists launch themselves into it, and every night I stepped around the piles of sloppy, penniless mulch on my way home. The whole thing became an education in people, and instead of paying for it, I was making more cash and having more fun than I ever had before.
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There are fifteen-or-so bars on this circuit: three of them have a reputation for treating the working people of the street exceptionally well, and one stays open for everybody to come drink after their shifts. I have fond memories of the warm, exhausted nights after a game day or a concert when, with our adrenaline still pumping and our cash tips stuffed into our pockets, we would go sit up at one of these bars with everybody else from the street and drink Miller High Life and shots of Fernet Branca or Montenegro or Jameson, either paying for every other drink or not paying at all, and we would laugh and rehash and talk nasty about the wild days we were living through.
Last summer, a Vermont singer named Noah Kahan sold out Fenway Park for both a Thursday and a Friday night’s performance. Lansdowne Street was slammed for it. I was on the tail-end of my shift that first night – the concert had been going for about an hour and the bar had cleared out – when these four guys dressed in their all-blacks came in and sat up at the bar. They had concert passes on their belt-loops, so I asked them if they were working security for the show. In British accents, they told me no, that they had just gotten off stage – they were the backing band of the concert’s opening act, English singer James Bay. I thought that was pretty cool, so I didn’t charge them for their beers. They were drinking twenty-ounce Kona Big Waves. A lot of them.
At one point I had to run down to the basement cooler and change the keg. They were hand-rolling their own cigarettes on the bar top and walking out to the street to smoke them. They were the only customers in the bar, so eventually I went out and smoked one with them. Before they left, they had me and the other bartender write our names down on a white bar napkin and then told us to plan on going to the show the following night. Sure enough, after our shift that next day, we walked across to the entrance gate, gave our names, and were guided down onto the field, right in front of the stage, with a sold-out Fenway Park behind us. I’d never had an experience like that before in my life.
That same month, we were taking the garbage bags out to the dumpster in the alley behind the bar. The alley looks out over the Turnpike and runs alongside the Commuter Rail. There was a young college girl standing out on the tracks waiting for the train to come. We called out to her, told her to get off, but she wouldn’t move. We called the police and stood around waiting for them to come, panicking, until they finally arrived and forced her off.
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I was recently playing pool in Kendall Square when I ran into someone who I had briefly bartended with about a year before. Like many of the workers on the street, he had come and gone quickly, and we hadn’t stayed in touch. We both looked healthier, thinner. We were both drinking soda water. He reminded me of one night we had worked together, a hot and sweaty after-party of a Boston University fraternity formal, and how afterward, when we were crossing Brookline Avenue over the Turnpike to go and drink ourselves, we came across one of the students passed out against the chain-link fence, his shirt buttons undone and his chin tucked down on his neck. He was drooling. I remember we thought it was funny at the time. We speculated as to who had been the one with the stronger pour that caused it. This was before I found myself in a world of my own trouble, before I ran out of runway for my own mistakes and forced myself into a situation where I had to grow up. It’s only now that I can realize how unfunny that night truly was.
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Five years I’ve lived in Boston, five dreadful winters and five dreamy summers, and I’ll be moving at the end of the month: a typical tenure of a typical Boston transplant after all. This summer has been my first one without Lansdowne Street since I initially took the job. It’s also been my first one sober. I’ve been bored as hell. I can’t sleep at night anymore. When I’m done writing, I’ll take a jog or a bike ride sometime between 2 and 4 a.m., over the Longfellow and Harvard Bridges, down Newbury Street, up around the Common and the Public Garden, through Beacon Hill and over to the Esplanade. The lights of Boston’s skyline are deceptive – at this hour the entire ground floor of the city is locked up and deserted. It’s just the sprinklers and the empty pools of streetlight and myself.
And while it’s been good to spend this alone time with the city, time to help me appreciate what it’s done for me, I can’t help but think about how just a few blocks over, the working people of Lansdowne Street are tucked away in one of the bars drinking over the day they just had and blurring on into the next one. I can’t help but wish I was still there with them. I can’t imagine there being a time in my life when I won’t be wishing I was still there with them.
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