In the beginning, all the team’s energy was directed to playing in what was then called the Gay Olympic Games, as well as other gay tournaments. Soon after I arrived, a friend and I started a gay soccer team, the San Francisco Spikes. I used to joke when I first moved to San Francisco that I had an easier time coming out as gay to my straight friends than telling my gay friends that I loved soccer. For the first month or so, working that almost empty bar was as close to heaven as a job could get.
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I was able to figure out how to find all the soccer games I wanted to watch. I don’t know why the owners thought an upscale English bar needed four television sets and a satellite system (to show British period dramas?), but I was grateful. I could not remain standing for ten minutes, let alone an entire shift, so I moved one of the barstools behind the bar, next to the wall on one end, in order to be able to sit comfortably and indulge in my two passions, reading and watching soccer matches. It took me less than an hour at the place to realize that I had to change some things in order to make the environment ideal for a person with my temperament. I mean, why would patrons of a diner want a spot of sherry or a tumbler of Armagnac after their good old-fashioned burger and fries? Even though I wouldn’t make much money, the situation suited me fine, for I’d discovered early on that working was not my forte. The bar did not have many customers, not at first. In a stroke of genius, the owners had baptized the place the Nineteenth Avenue Diner.Īs the newest member of the staff, I was given the day shifts, the slowest. I, on the other hand, was hired to work in the bar upstairs, a faux upscale taproom with an English private club motif: leather fauteuils, pretentiously bound hardcovers in fake bookshelves, and port in the well. My friend worked in a good old-fashioned diner where every other day the plat du jour was meatloaf (probably the same one). I had done nothing comparable in my life, nor had I taken any drink-mixing classes, so I was hired on the spot at that odd establishment. To be completely honest, I did not consider bartending until a friend told me there was an opening for a bartender where he waited tables. Which, of course, led me to pack those sweaters and move back to Beirut, where the winter was even milder than in San Francisco.Īnd I said, Why, bartend, of course. Since I lived in San Francisco, where the weather was moderate for three hundred and forty-five days of the year, I ended up buying stacks of cashmere sweaters. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that the most therapeutic sprees are those where you buy nothing of any use. When I was informed of the news-the nice nurse sat me down in an oddly sized chair that made me feel like I was back in elementary school-I did what any rational person would do upon hearing that he had a short time left on this earth: I quit my nine-to-five corporate job, which was the last time I ever held one of those, and went on a six-month shopping spree. Oh, and some four years earlier, in 1986, I had tested positive for HIV. In San Francisco, we were still in the middle of the AIDS epidemic, a disease that killed many of my close friends, and within a few years would decimate an entire generation. In Lebanon in 1990, the civil war was ending with a mighty crescendo, fifteen years into a regional disaster that tore my country and my family apart. To my mind, it was a most rational decision. That made eminent sense to me at the time. You might ask, as any rational person would, why I was trying for a third useless degree. I was thirty, back in school, going for another graduate degree I wouldn’t use. I never cared much for drinking, rarely spent time in bars, whether gay, straight, or questioning, but for a brief period of time in 1990, tending bar was what I did. Most of my friends are surprised when I mention it. But everyone agreed that I was a mess in those days. Everyone disagreed, depending on what they were looking for in a bartender. I was the best of bartenders, I was the worst of bartenders.
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