Always Check the Bathrooms

Whenever I’ve found someone passed out in a bathroom as a bartender, it’s because they’ve well exceeded their personal limit with alcohol. I also can’t help but think it’s because there’s been too little of something else.

Twelve years ago this month, I stepped behind a bar for the very first time. A lot has changed, both for me and for the restaurant industry, since then. In 2010, the cocktail renaissance—as industry vets and booze nerds call it—was well underway: Classic cocktail knowledge, fresh-squeezed juices, obscure liqueurs, and a kaleidoscope of bitters were expected in big city, metropolitan bars and were becoming the norm in places like Austin, Boston, New Orleans, and Portland, Oregon, where I was living. Bartenders and their bars were becoming famous in a way that chefs and their kitchens had been for decades, and the idea that a beverage could be as much of an experience as a meal was taking hold across the country. It was an incredibly exciting time to be a brand-new bartender; I just didn’t know it.

I wish I could say I’ve always been good at my job, that at twenty-two I took naturally to the high-speed multitasking and the professionally casual bullshitting with regulars that make a great bartender, but when I first started, I was not just new and inexperienced; I was so oblivious I was dangerous. I got in the way, I came out of the walk-in drenched in beer every time I tried to change a keg, I put grenadine instead of sweet vermouth in the first manhattans I made. I’d counted on bartending being just like waiting tables, which I’d done in high school, but with making drinks—and, oh, I was laughably wrong.

I did, however, have some very good teachers.

Cassidy was in her early thirties, tall, with long dark hair, and had beautiful tattoos running up and down her arms. I was terrified of her, not because of our age or height difference, the latter being pretty extreme, but because she knew exactly what she was doing and I grasped so little of the responsibility and nuance of our jobs. I spent most of my time just trying to stay out of her way. Given how little I understood about sharing the tight space behind the bar, it worked out less well than either of us would have liked.

Eventually, we managed to work together without me wanting to cry or her yelling at me, which says something very powerful about her people skills, and near the end of my first week on the job, we were scheduled to close the bar together. It was my first time closing up fully, and the way the bar was staffed, I needed to get up to speed quickly: I’d be closing alone at least once a week.

Closing a bar at the end of each night is a long and detailed process; in many places there are pages-long checklists to work your way through, which might look something like this:

Carry the floor mats to the dish pit to be washed by the dishwasher or outside to be sprayed down by the opening staff; wipe down all the surfaces of the bar—the bar top, the back bar, the wells, the computer consoles; burn (barspeak for melt) the ice in each well; wipe down all the bottles; put tiny plastic caps (called nipples) over each of the bottles with a speed pourer on top to keep fruit flies out; date and refrigerate all juices and syrups; make sure your checks are closed, with tips adjusted, and run your cash out; do a quick walk through the building, making sure no loose beer cans or stray glasses are on any tables. I’ve probably forgotten something here, which is why there is a checklist.

“Oh, and always check the bathrooms,” Cassidy said as I followed her, at a very safe distance, around the bar.

We’d just crossed off the last item on our list, but Cassidy took one final sweep of the building. I’d paused behind her as she opened the door to one of the bar’s single-stall bathrooms, but the look in her eye as she turned to stare at me over her shoulder brought me to a dead stop. I knew she was waiting for this final piece of advice to sink in, for me to ask why. I don’t remember if I actually asked or if the look on my face did it for me, but I’ve never forgotten her answer.

“You wanna make sure nobody’s passed out and locked themselves in there, or puked all over the place. Or both.”

*

I have only ever come across two people passed out in bathroom stalls, but honestly it was one and a half too many. The first time, I smelled it before I saw it. A large crowd was gathered at one end of the bar for a birthday party, and I hadn’t seen one guest—I think it was the birthday girl—in a while. My coworker and I had already had The Talk with each other about how she wouldn’t be served anymore; it is part of a bartender’s job to help people walk the line—if they want to—between pleasantly drunk and visibly intoxicated, and the woman in question definitely did not need more alcohol. And now she was missing.

Something else Cassidy taught me during our brief tenure together: If a bar guest goes MIA for an extended period of time, they’re either outside on the phone, they’re outside smoking, they passed out in the bathroom, or they walked out on their tab. If they’re passed out in the bathroom, it’s best you find them before a guest does.

I knew she was waiting for this final piece of advice to sink in, for me to ask why.

On this occasion, I’d barely pushed open the bathroom door when a tidal wave of vomit smell—sour and acidic and sweet all at the same time—flooded my nose. In the same instant, I saw her, seated on the toilet, bent in half, head hanging down near her feet, a pile of what had to be regurgitated pizza all over the floor in front of her. The ends of her hair, long and wavy, rested in a dribble of bile. One of her flip-flops was totally covered in goo.

“Fuck me,” I said after the initial shock wore off, when I’d wrapped my head fully around the horror of what I was smelling and seeing. I sighed. It was 2015, long enough into my bartending career that a totally destroyed bathroom stall made me angry instead of scared. Like, where are your people? How long have you been in here? Why isn’t someone looking for you? Why the hell didn’t anybody tell me there’s an unconscious person in the bathroom?

It was a coworker, Michelle, my first work wife, a woman I can probably still have entire conversations with using only our eyebrows, who found the second—and, I’m praying, final—passed-out-in-the-bathroom person in my bartending career. She’d gone to use the restroom and came back white as a sheet, requesting backup.

Seated atop the open toilet, jeans fully zipped, was a woman in her midforties. Her arms hung by her sides, limp; her head was thrown back and her mouth was open like she’d fallen asleep in a La-Z-Boy, but she had not fallen asleep in a La-Z-Boy. She had passed out on top of the toilet in a bar.

By the time we found her, she had already gotten her business done: The light-blue denim over her crotch and stretched across her inner thighs was soaked, a dark-blue island floating in a sky-colored sea.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me” is what I’m pretty sure I said, out loud, as I took in the scene. This woman was a complete stranger to me, and not just in that I didn’t know her name; I’d never even seen her before. This meant she hadn’t been served at the bar, which was good: We had nothing to do with her level of intoxication; she must have been sitting at a table all night. But she was still passed out in the bathroom, which was very, very bad. There is no reliable, discreet way to determine who the friends of someone passed out in a bathroom are. The best you can do is ask all of the servers if one of their tables is missing a guest. When that fails, like it did that night, your next option is to start asking the guests themselves:

“Hi, excuse me, sorry to interrupt, but do you have another friend here with you tonight?”

I asked every table in the restaurant. No one said yes.

Michelle took over at that point, while I manned the bar. I don’t know how she did it, but she got Wet Blue Jeans out of the bathroom and into a nearby booth, and then into a cab. On her way back to the bar, a couple at a table near the kitchen flagged her down and said their friend left her purse at the table.

I could see the question on Michelle’s face from the bar: You mean to tell me you are, in fact, missing a member of your party and that you said nothing to anyone, even when someone who works here asked you that exact question?

“Yeah, her purse is still here, but she must have left. Did you see her leave?”

I’d never seen Michelle at a loss for words.

On a night long after we’d stopped working together, Michelle and I met for drinks at one of our go-to spots. The conversation came around to the night we’d had that woman out cold in the bathroom.

“Oh, did I not tell you what her friends said after we’d figured out that she was, in fact, sitting at their table? After I got her in that cab?” she said.

My eyes widened, eyebrows wrinkled into inchworms: You did not; what the hell happened?

“No? Yeah, they were like, ‘Yeah, we knew she was in the bathroom. Couldn’t she just have stayed there?’”

Reader, I hope you’re as shocked and angry as I still am.

*

Like most things people tried to explain to me in my twenties, the full weight of what my incredibly patient work elder Cassidy was telling me that night in 2010 took years to sink in. Now that I have not only given her exact same speech to more than a few new hires at the various bars I’ve worked in since that first closing shift but also, on more than one occasion, found someone passed out in a bar bathroom stall covered in their own fluids, I get it: As a bartender, you have to check the bathrooms—at the end of the night for sure, but also if someone sitting at the bar goes missing for an unsettling amount of time—because you might be the only person who notices that something’s gone wrong. I don’t know if that’s what stopped me in my tracks that first night, but it should have been.

We are not meant to navigate the world alone, and that, in many ways, is why bars exist, and it’s sure as hell a major part of why I’m still bartending: Bars are centers for community. There might be the occasional acts of violence and infidelity and the more visceral aspects of overindulging, and we don’t teach swimming lessons or have a pickleball team, but bars are—are meant to be—spaces where people connect. It’s an old joke now, but it’s true: You’re not drinking alone if you go to a bar because, no matter what, the bartender will be there.

In my most calm and collected moments, of which there are admittedly fewer and fewer these days, I know that we are all doing the very best we can. That we are all walking around with varying degrees of fear, anger, and trauma, and that we don’t always have the energy or the tools to deal with any of them effectively. That doesn’t make us lost causes or bad people, but it does make for some alarming interactions and can trigger an avalanche of frustrations. At some point, some point soon, I fear the people too wrapped up in themselves to look out for other people, even people they consider friends, will become the majority. As someone working in hospitality, it often already feels that way.

At the same time, it is nothing short of magical the way people gather with friends and strangers in spaces like restaurants. Hundreds of thousands of people get up and go to work in hospitality every day, and hundreds of thousands more make dinner reservations, go on dates, text their friends drinks after work? Alongside the urge to disappear into our blankets and pillows or our various screens, we also have the desire to connect with one another, to sit down and share the stories of our days and lives—to get out of our own heads and remember we are part of something bigger than our jobs, our coursework, or our marriages. Alcohol can certainly help with that, all on its own, but alcohol alone has its limits.

We are not meant to navigate the world alone.

Whenever I’ve found someone passed out in a bathroom, it’s because they’ve well exceeded their personal limit with alcohol—there’s just been too much—but I also can’t help but think it’s because there’s been too little of something else, something more nourishing that we can only get from one another. Cheers, after all, is an expression of good wishes to those you’re gathered with, in nearly any language (salud, sláinte, and На здоровье, some of the most popular global glass-clinking phrases, all translate to “to your good health”). However you say it, raising a glass with someone is literally a way to express connection and acknowledge a shared experience. We could all be better served, I think, by remembering that—at the bar and beyond.

It sure feels like the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but the next time you go out with friends or your coworkers, or share a shot with someone random you’ve just met, consider your cheers a contract of wishing well—not only with those whom you are with, but, you know, the collective. Because at the end of the day (or night), that’s still what we are: one big, sloppy, beautiful, obnoxious, ingenious, lumbering hive marching on toward what we hope is the best version of ourselves. It won’t fix climate change, it won’t bring us back to a time before the 2016 election, it won’t abolish ICE or reinstate Roe, but it will keep at least a handful of people out of some incredibly embarrassing (at best) situations, which has still got to count for something.

The alternative is way too fucking bleak.