Jeff Burkhart: Choose your role models carefully

Humorist Will Rogers once said, “I never met a man I didn’t like.” What’s noticeably absent from that sentiment is how he felt about them 30 seconds later. In my business, you learn to like everyone — at first.

I initially thought this man was the guest of a man I knew. They came in together, they found two seats together and they sat down together. They even ordered together.

Two martinis, if memory serves, and the irony is of all the things I remember from nights that I work, a person’s drink order is probably the thing I remember best. It’s certainly the most important thing to me because that’s how I make my living.

The fact that the order diverged almost immediately should have been my first clue. The man I knew ordered his usual, a chilled vodka martini with a twist. The man I didn’t know ordered a chilled gin with a lime squeeze.

They say that birds of a feather flock together, and while that most likely is true, in the bar business, friends order together and good friends often order the exact same thing. Maybe that’s the basis of their friendship, and maybe it isn’t. But it’s certainly something I have noticed over the years.

The two men were in their mid-50s or mid-60s, which is often hard to tell. In a job where judging age is of paramount importance, you start to realize that people ages 25 to 35 often appear the same. It’s the same with people ages 35 to 45 or 55 to 65. Man or woman, it doesn’t seem to matter.

The man I didn’t know was barrel-chested and bearded. Put him in a woolly turtleneck, and he might even have been a late-model Ernest Hemingway. And I don’t think that was accidental.

Hemingway, of course, is still a giant in the bar business. People order like him, people drink like him and people quote him all the time. What no one has been able to do is write like him.

My erstwhile Hemingway seemed earnest at first. It was his first story that raised an eyebrow. And that first story started unsurprisingly with his second drink order.

“I’ll have a Commodore Nelson,” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear.

“I don’t know what that is,” I had to say.

He paused for dramatic effect, only made certain by the fact that he looked around to see if anyone was listening. No one was, so the unfortunate job of audience fell exclusively onto me.

“It’s one of these,” he said, pointing at his chilled gin. ”Only a double on the rocks in a tall glass with soda.”

There’s a great scene in the 1988 movie “Cocktail” starring Tom Cruise — based on the 1984 book by Heywood Gould — where the cocktail waitress stumps Cruise’s character by ordering a Cuba Libre — a scene that clearly evokes Hemingway (Cuba and Libre) as well as bars and bartenders. The point of the scene is that a Cuba Libre is actually just a rum and coke with lime — an easy drink made difficult by adding an obscure name. Maybe not so Hemingway-ish after all.

“So, a double gin and soda?” I replied, perhaps more snarkily than I intended.

But I quickly added a “sure,” hoping that would be the end of the story. It wasn’t.

“It’s named after the commodore of the yacht club I used to go to,” said the man with the beard. “He used to drink them all the time.”

“Great,” I think I said.

Good stories know when to end, and bad stories do not. And this was more of the latter than the former.

I set the simple drink with the ridiculous name down in front of him and turned to walk away. But his story wasn’t over.

“At least until they cut him off and threw him out of the yacht club,” replied my erstwhile Hemingway.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Your go-to opening story is ordering a drink named after a yacht club commodore who got thrown out of his own yacht club for being a drunk?”

“Yeah, I guess it is,” he replied.

I looked at the man I knew and realized that he didn’t actually know this guy. Coincidence can be so coincidental. And things didn’t really get better from there. After one more “Commodore Nelson,” there was a dispute over the bill, followed by a dispute with me, followed by a dispute with the manager, all followed by a dispute with the arresting officer.

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• Beer brand Dos Equis has released a new series of “the most interesting man in the world” commercials. Clearly these commercials are based on an idealized Hemingway.

• The Cuba Libre was named during the brief Spanish-American War (1898) by American soldiers fighting in the Caribbean. A Cuban product mixed with an American product symbolizing Cuban liberation. Drink names are sometimes ironic. And sometimes they are extremely prescient.

• Kurt Vonnegut once said, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”

• Hemingway drank double drinks. And he once said, “I drink to make other people more interesting.” There doesn’t seem to be a record of what those other people thought about Hemingway, especially not, it would seem, the bartenders.

Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the New York Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com