The Night Bobby Almost Burned the Bar Down

Mookie returns to Ink vs Algorithm for another solo reading, this one a true story from his nightclub-managing days in 1990s Chicago, and a companion piece to his published novella Greg's Gift. Before diving in, he opens with a real, honest check-in on where his head's at these days: five shows running in parallel, a self-described introverted extrovert New York City emigre now happily isolated in Southern California, and a hard-won sense that his writing has finally earned the confidence it took decades to find.

The story itself picks up a thread Mookie's been pulling all season: that the most chaotic, humiliating, out-of-control experiences of our lives are exactly the ones worth telling, not despite the mess, but because of it. The harrowing tale centers on a bartender Mookie liked a little too much to manage properly, the quiet ways enabling someone can start to feel like loyalty, and a single shift where every bad habit Mookie let slide finally came due at once. He tells it in the roman à clef tradition where real events, real people, compressed and shaped for maximum impact, and insists every beat of it  happened, down to sending it years later to the real person it's about and getting back a giggling, unprompted confirmation.

Mookie closes with an honest look at his own process, why reading his own work aloud makes him a sharper writer every time, and where this story fits into a planned sequel to Greg's Gift he's already hungry to write.

The Short Story

The Novella

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to Inkverse Algorithm, The Writer's Pod. I'm your host and writer, Moogie Spitz. And today I am going to read another one of my short stories. I've been interviewing lots of great writers and poets, and I tend to go through oscillating phases where my emails light up, a lot of numbers in my inbox, opportunities to bring people on the podcast. Not only this show, but I've got four other shows. Bald ambition, focused on the business world, No Hair All Heart, Relationships, Bald and Bloviating, Politics, Rambling, Philosophizing, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory, where I already have talked to at least sixty science fiction writers and illustrators, fans. It's been a blast. But I like my space too, to be honest. I'm one of those extroverted introverts where I could flick the switch and engage with people. I lived in New York City, much of it in Manhattan for 13 years, and I loved it until I hated it. I've also written and ranted about that experience and will no doubt do more of it. But I've moved the last couple years and a half to Orange County, California, and I'm sitting here in an apartment in Lake Forest, suburban city planner's wet dream. I revel in opening up the shades every morning and seeing nothing but palm trees and a parking lot. I love it. So these podcasts have been a great opportunity for me to actually connect with people. I do it as well on Zoom calls and Teams calls for my consulting gig, what would be considered the day job. So I get that too, but that's virtual also. And to be honest with you, my kid even revels at seeing me never leave the apartment all week long. And I reiterate, I love it. I'm at the phase in life where less is more, especially when it comes to direct human interaction. And more is more in terms of concentrated attention, focus, time, energy, resources to creating content. And it's almost like I had to go through all those other more extroverted phases to reach the point of zero FOMO that I'm experiencing now. Almost this sense of utter exhaustion with society, other people, which gives me not only the space to create a lot of content, but the raw material, the lived experiences. I've related on other podcasts and in other stories and essays how my younger years, my younger creative years were plagued by this lack of legitimacy. I didn't feel I really had the creds. I felt deep down inside I was an obnoxious punk. In Hungarian, they say tuk nyosh kyuk. I love all the umlots in Hungarian and the weird diphthongs. Tok nyosh kyuk. Tuknosh I even have trouble saying it, is uh snody. Snody and kyuk means punk, like a young kid. Tuk nyosh kyuk. That's how I felt about myself. I was a snot-nosed punk. I was entitled and spoiled and at the same time neglected and abused. You know, your typical 20-somethings American Gen Xer. And I took it to its extreme. So I didn't want any part of real relationships or real careers because I was an artist. But it all backfired in the sense of me not feeling that I had the creds to do it. I would put pen to paper, tap on endless keyboards, fill endless floppy disks of content. I wrote millions of words. I'm not kidding. And I used it largely for therapy at one point because I just felt I couldn't really complete a story that had legitimacy. I thought I was full of shit. Was that accurate? I don't know. I see so many writers writing such garbage, frankly, with no hint of self-consciousness, that I don't know. Could I have faked it till I made it? Of course. But it is what it is, and no regrets. Amor Fati. I lived it, I loved it, now I have a chance to do it. And the the best news of all this, frankly, is that now I really like my stuff. I feel that I've earned it. And I feel that my voice is legit, that I actually have things to say and a manner through which to say them. And the technology is caught up, too. It's it's so DIY now. This mic I'm ranting into is 70 bucks. Then I got a subscription to the app, which is maybe 30 bucks a month, and then I've got another subscription to distribute the podcast, and that's it. I mean, I taught myself how to do all this stuff, which isn't exactly a marvel in and of itself. But again, the technology has caught up to make this almost effortless. And my own lived experiences have caught up to give me the dibs to crank this stuff out and to feel great about it. I think it's good. And I think it's so good, coupled with my naturally extroverted, introverted, very introverted personality, that I don't even really care what you think. Listen, enjoy, read it, consume it or not. It's not gonna preclude me from doing even more of it. And frankly, if I had a fan base, I don't know how much more it would motivate me, if not provide more distractions. So I say bring it, either way. And that all said, I've been publishing. So my dream novel, my science fiction novel came out last year. Johnny Fizzuli and the Transfinite Reality Engine, exceeding my own, never quite humble expectations, which is a lot to say after you heard all that. I could say, frankly, 30 years in the making, maybe even more. And that would be true. So there. And I've been following up with smaller publications. I published a play I had written in between. This one goes back to 2007-2008. Mr. Lawrence, the sky's gone out, a satirical corporate drama. Ionesco meets Pinter in an American high-rise. You can call it that. The sum greater than its parts and its influences, I think it's a great play. So I pulled it together, and without too many edits required, I published it. And I like that too. And another novella that I published, Greg's Gift is based on an extended short story that turned into a novella that I published on Medium just before the pandemic struck. And that's when I really got my stride, I think. It is a memoir in the style of a romana clay, which is, I believe, literally translated a story with a key from the French. And the essential idea is that you write from your own lived experiences, you borrow generously from your own memories, and you're allowed to exaggerate and most significantly compress to make it as interesting as possible. What was that comment that I heard recently? Uh, I believe it was from the writer Matt Witten, who wrote a delightful novel recently, Dystopian Futuristic, Dashell Hammett meets Philip K. Dick style novel, 51%. And he quoted, I forgot who, and the quote goes something like great writing is just like life, only you take out the boring parts. And I love that. And that's what Greg's gift is. It takes what would amount to maybe a month or so often distended experiences lived around the mid-90s, and it compresses them into a very manic, very compressed two, three days of time. But almost every vignette in Greg's gift is direct from memory. And if I took artistic license, it's just stringing these vignettes together in a way that created a continuous and I felt breathtaking narrative. And I love Greg's gift. I think I really cranked, and that was a milestone moment for me in my writing, and it flipped in a way where I really, really learned the craft. And since then, I collaborated on an illustrated monstrous holiday satire called Super Santa and the science fiction book. But what I'm getting to here is I published Greg's Gift on Amazon as its own book. And I think it stands. It's really juicy. So if you want to check it out, you can just find me Mookie Spits on Amazon. Notice I'm crassly self-promoting here, which frankly I normally don't do at all on these podcasts. I hardly do it at all, actually. So I'm giving myself promotional license now to do it for my podcasts and my novels. But that that all said, Greg's gift rocks. And all that is relevant to this short story. Greg's gift is those two, three days which happened on a week on weekdays. So basically, from you'd say a Tuesday to a Thursday, I think, or a Wednesday to a Friday, actually. And the novel ends, spoiler alert, with me about to go into my shift on a Friday night to the local bar disco nightclub where I was the bartender manager. And this story that I want to read to you is one of those crazy weekends, one of the many, many vignettes that I think are not only memorable but worth Romana claying. And I hope to amalgamate a bunch of these into Greg's Gift Part two, which I am so hungry to write. I am thirsty to get all of this down and to publish it, and to and to smoosh it all together. Greg's gift and whatever this Greg's gift sequel will be, where Greg's gift was Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. This sequel be Friday, Saturday, Sunday into Monday morning, and the inevitable yet still surprising IHOP visit early Monday morning, already beginning the detox procedure from the weekend before. So that's the setup. The night Bobby OD'd and almost burned down the bar happened. I published this in written form on Substack uh not too long ago, a couple months ago, beginning of June, and I sent it to Bobby, with whom I'm Facebook friends with to this day. And Bobby chagrined, and he didn't he didn't deny any of it. He implicitly felt that this was an accurate portrayal of that fateful night. And we joked about it, and it validated so much of my experiences. And if nothing else, it also demonstrated that with time, the the cringy failures of our lives, what I call cheapness, in my last podcast episode on bald and bloviating, the cheapness of our lives, the disappointments, ostensibly what would be construed as the as the horrific moments of our lives make for the very, very best storytelling, I think. So let me let you decide. Here's another true story from the Rip Roaring 90s. I'll place the link to the Substack article in the description below. And uh I'll also place the link to Greg's gift if you're interested in learning more about where my head was at during this wild time of life. And allow me to just revel and celebrate all of the all of the cringe in a way that I think would make Frank Zappa and Nietzsche proud. Saturday night teaser Hello? Bobby? What? Front desk calling. This is your wake up call. That was our running joke. Bobby was chronically late for his weekend shifts, and rather than fire him for it, as I did so many others, I accommodated him to the point of calling him at home minutes before he was supposed to be at his station and ready to go. A former high school football star and now neighborhood celebrity dance club bartender, Bobby was handsome, built, and a terrific draw. Treating him special made me feel special. His immaturity and lack of professionalism mirrored my own. I wasn't just tolerating his behavior, I was rewarding it. That arrangement worked great right up until the night it nearly led to catastrophe. His chronic tardiness was actually the least of my worries. During several prior shifts, I noticed that he almost passed out at his station. The culprit GHB, chemical name Gamma Hydroxybuterate, a central nervous system depressant ingested by bodybuilders and ravers. Until combined with alcohol, when the relaxing euphoria could lurch into blackouts, respiratory collapse, and sometimes even death. Stop with the G, I'd repeat to Bobby at the start and end of every shift, assuming he, like so many others, dosed water bottles with the poison. What are you talking about? He'd smile, wink, and play ignorant, knowing that I knew while also knowing that nothing I said was enforceable. As an enabler, hypocrite, and passive aggressive mess, I was your typical bar manager. Arguably I broke a few of those norms by running the business efficiently and having a gut sense for when my staff was ripping me off. The 90s club scene in Chicago was by any stretch over the top. Overdoses I'd been handling for months alongside rampant theft, police raids, brutal fights, public sex, broken plumbing, AWOL DJs, and every variety of nightclub disaster. I'd even been assaulted more than once, including taking a full pint glass to the side of the head that exploded across my face. Really, really, and no doubt another short story. Anyway, Crazy had long ago stopped feeling crazy and became just another Saturday night, which is why what happened next truly freaked me out. Small business owners and managers develop a spidey sense for trouble. With hundreds of intoxicated patrons acting crazy in the club on a Saturday night, I instinctively knew wherever trouble was brewing, often getting there before it even began, or right at the trigger point. That's why I saw the whole thing happen as if in slow motion. Bobby was dancing between mixing drinks as he usually did, then doing a shot with his right hand, simultaneously hurling an open bottle of water into the air with another. The momentum sent its contents cascading in a broad arc across the dance floor. The tip of the fountain, of course, splashing right into the big screen projector mounted on the ceiling above the dance floor. The resulting electrical fire was immediate as sparks flew, the device caught on fire, flames flickering into the combustible ceiling insulation and spreading fast. The dance floor was packed. Almost none of the patrons noticed. And of those who did, they cheered as the flames took hold. Bobby didn't notice either because when I glanced back at his bar seconds later, he had vanished. I rushed to his bar, looked behind it, and saw him crashed on the filthy rubber matting. The two other bartenders in the stations on either side of him were still flirting with customers and mixing drinks, nodding in my direction and already talking shit as if all this were my fault. They were, of course, correct, but that didn't help. The projector had short-circuited, the porno playing on the opposite brick wall went dark, and the ceiling fire was spreading. Moment of truth. Do the professional thing and turn the house lights on and evacuate the bar? Or do the far riskier, grievously irresponsible yet most fiscally hopeful thing, and try to put the fire out ourselves, and then act like nothing happened. Bobby, regardless of his medical condition, would have to wait. I got onto the walkie-talkie and summoned the bar back, Matt, a tall and lanky lad from Kansas or Oklahoma or wherever. And who at the time was downstairs in a cooler hauling up another case of beer. Matt, do you copy? Crackle, crackle. Yes. Stop what you're doing, grab the stepladder and fire extinguisher from the back closet, plow your way through the dance floor and meet me in front of Bobby's bar ASAP. Crackle crackle. What? Crackle crackle. Go Waiting for fireman Matt and his ladder, I had a few seconds to see if Bobby was still alive, and if so, get him into the basement pronto. Tony, I called out to the bartender on my right, we need to get Bobby downstairs. What about the regulars? he asked, his nightly ring, or more accurately, the high percentage of which he stole top of his mind. Does Bobby have a pulse? I asked, considering this relevant at the time. I think he's still breathing, nodded Tony, who on again, off again dated Bobby, so I couldn't tell how he felt about that information. Barney, I called out to the bartender on my left, can you cover all three stations? By the time Matt showed with the ladder and fire extinguisher, Tony was carrying Bobby on his shoulders across the dance floor toward the basement door, patrons cheering. Given their on-again, off-again relationship, this was arguably the most affection Tony had shown him in months. It helped that both men were built like refrigerators. Bobby taken care of, at least for now, my attention turned back to the major crisis at hand, the bar being on fire. Matt, a recent college graduate and arguably the most formally educated of the staff, performed a rapid and accurate situational assessment. Let me get this straight, he said, pointing to the burning projector and spreading flames. Yes, I interrupted him. Prop the ladder beneath the projector and climb up there. I'll pass you the fire extinguisher and then you blast away. You sure? Go. By this point the smoke was thick, blending seamlessly with the fog machine output and the blurred vision of our patrons, who continued dancing as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. The next 15 seconds were critical. Either Matt would put the fire out or I'd have to pull the ripcord. House lights on, DJ off, club evacuated, 911 called. The owner would absolutely lose his shit, and I'd have more hell to pay than Bobby, assuming he survived the night. Nice work, I shouted as Matt let the flame retardant foam loose, covering the projector and rapidly spritzing the surrounding ceiling. A bit more to the right. That's it. Up a bit. Over Shut up shouted Matt, sneering at me. I got this. Sure enough, he did. The dance floor finally took notice and erupted in applause as the last of the flames was squelched, smoke pouring from the gaping wounds in the ceiling, the projector a smoldering husk. I high five Matt as he leaped off the last rung of the ladder, folded it back up, and still carrying the now empty fire extinguisher, returned to the back closet to stow them away. Mookie shouted a patron, you did it! The show must go on, I bowed, already headed downstairs to deal with existential problem of the night number two. Bobby. That's my money, honey. I found Bobby sprawled on the concrete basement floor. Terry, our transgender coat check girl, fanning him with a tattered copy of that week's Gab magazine, The Gay Ghettos Gossip Rag. I think he's still alive, she said, shaking her head. You boys never know when to stop. How many times have I told you that shit's gonna kill ya? I checked his pulse to make sure, then licked one of my fingers and put it close to his mouth, feeling then timing his breathing. Didn't I just tell you that I think he's still alive? snapped Terry, meaning it. You did, girl, I nodded, but as the manager I got a double check. You go, boy, she said, puckering her lips, filing her nails. The bar not burned down, Bobby's still alive, all was not back to being right with the world quite yet. Matt, do you copy? Crackle crackle. What? Bring me Bobby's register drawer and tip jar, please. Crackle crackle. As I unlocked my office door, more like an unfinished storage room with a sheet of particle board padlocked to a frame of two by fours, I glanced over at a printout someone had stuck to an adjacent mirror the day I got promoted to manager. Doesn't play well with others. Man arrived with the drawer and jar about the same time Bobby stood and shambled toward them. Likely not a coincidence. The bills in both were soaked through with booze, sweat, water, and who knew what else. Chill, Bobby, I said, trying to sit him down in a folding chair. Yuck, he replied, looking and sounding like Bill the Cat from Bloom County. In retrospect, I became impressed by Bobby's superhuman effort to claw his way out of a GHB overdose for one overriding purpose, making sure nobody touched his money. He had been bartending for only about 90 minutes before ODing, giving me a snapshot of that moment in time. His register drawer contained $238, and his tip jar contained $745. A few days later, just before one of his weekday shifts, Bobby showed up on time. I asked him to come down to the office before stocking his bar. Have a seat, Bobby, I gestured. Want a bump of meth? he asked, sensing trouble was brewing and trying to get on my good side. Let's spend a few minutes discussing your performance from Saturday night, I began. Okay, he said, blushing like a little girl despite his 27-inch biceps. You do G during your shift after I told you a million times not to do G during your shift. Mookie, I then you toss a bottle of water in the air which sets the big screen projector on fire. Mookie, you which sets the ceiling of the bar on fire. Silence. Which almost burns the whole bar down. Silence. Then you OD Silence. Now if that wouldn't be bad enough, I got to see what was in your drawer and what was in your tip jar. And then I ran the register tape. Jesus pause. I know, I fucked up. I promised not to do any more G. Alright? You rang up fifty bucks worth of drinks, Bobby, I said, still stunned. Had five times that in your drawer and fifteen times that in your tip jar. I know, I was fucked up. I promise I'll be good from now on. Cool? You're fired, Bobby. What? How can I do anything else but can your ass? You almost burned the joint down, overdosed, and ripped the place off. What could have been worse? If all that wouldn't have been astonishing enough, the coup de gras shocker came next. Bobby started crying. I gave him a tissue. Managers never know how people are going to react when they're fired. A skinny barback once tried to beat me up. Another disgruntled employee chased me around the bar with a fire extinguisher. But a Schwarzenegger-sized, Dudley D-Wright handsome bartender bursting into tears? Now that was a surprise. Which, as I'm mentioning, I'm gonna try to compress into part two of Greg's Gift. I want to weave it into a story story, I'm thinking. Greg's gift in ways meanders through the three days. It uses the artifice of, and again, true story, of the local drug dealer dropping off a duffel bag full of his stash, and then just leaving with me, leaving it with me running off. And then what? That's the setup for Greg's gift. And I have various setups for the weekend. This, as I'm saying, is one of many, many vignettes that I could capture. So I'll probably do the Romana Clay and compress what would be maybe a dozen different crazy weekends into a supermanic super weekend as part of the novella turn novel. But I have to figure that out. But I have to say the creative process is tough. Every writer, every creator will tell you that. One writer likened it to laying pipe. It's hard work. It's physical for your brain. But I have to say, taking this multimodal approach is really a blast. Writing it down, publishing it on medium and substack, tweeting it, revisiting it, aggregating it, polishing it a little, and publishing it as its own book on Amazon, then expanding it, playing with it, and recording these as podcast mini audiobooks, audio stories, is just terrific. I feel that I'm improving as a writer when I read my own writing aloud. I've spoken to many writers on my various podcast shows, and some of them do this. They don't necessarily record the audiobook or a podcast like I'm doing, but reading it aloud helps. And this helps me. Even reading this story, I noticed a few spots that I could still polish. And it's just great to be able to let it out there in all these different modalities. We're creatures that indulge ourselves visually, first and foremost. But we love to talk, we love to interact, we love to listen. And this is super fun for me. So I hope you find it enjoyable too. And let me know what you think. I've got a link at the bottom of each and every audio podcast for you to contact me. You can email me. And once again, my final piece of self-promotion here: you can subscribe to me on Substack. You don't gotta pay. If you want to pay $5.55 a month, I'll take it. You can buy me a Triple Iced Espresso at Starbucks. Or just sign up for free. I hardly paywall anything. That's a whole separate conversation. Substack sets it up so that you don't really get noticed unless you paywall off some of your content for paid subscribers only. So what I've done is every Friday I share a section of my sci-fi novel, Johnny Fizzuli, and I paywall that action off just to keep the algorithm sprightly, tease it a little bit. But all my shit on Substack is for free. Take it, leave it. I guess that disincentivizes you from actually subscribing with a payment, but I don't really care. If you want to pay me, pay me. I really appreciate it. If you don't, I just feel blessed being able to blast all this stuff in all these different ways across all these different channels. And I feel particularly blessed that I'm actually enjoying my own content. Ask most writers, and I bet you they can't say that most of the time, I'm so spoiled. More to come. Like, comment, share, subscribe. Subscribe to the podcast for sure. That doesn't take any cash olas. Hit the subscribe button. Gimme five stars. Gimme, gimme, gimme. Thank you, thank you. Thank you.