Mouths Have Moved
Vol. 3, Issue 30
When I first moved to New York City in 1999, I was super into and seriously impressed by this well-dressed woman who had an apartment in the East Village and massive credit card debt. She seemed into the idea that I wanted to be a writer but she also knew I was poor and would not help her put a dent in her debt situation, but we moved in together anyway. I desperately wanted to impress her, too, at some point, but I had hard luck landing a full-time job. We’d still go out almost every night, and before we’d venture out, she would drink a glass of wine and scour a bar review guide called Shecky’s to find us a new spot to get drunk at. I would catch her chuckling, and then she’d read the reviews out loud to me.“You should write for these guys,” she said, sometimes spilling wine all over her $300 blouse. She had, as far as I could tell, superior cultural taste.
Reluctantly, I read what she had found so funny and decided that I should definitely write for these guys because I knew that I could write better reviews than any of this crap. Plus, if I did that, she’d finally find me impressive and then I could maybe afford to move out and get away from her forever.
For those who don’t know or care what Shecky’s is – it’s a sarcastic bro-y version of Zagat’s but for bigger dimwits and it only lists and reviews bars. After a couple of years of middling jobs at legal news wires and financial trade pubs, I finally saw a Media Bistro listing that they were hiring freelancers and applied. They required a writing sample, so I sent them one and immediately got the gig. And since I lived in the East Village, they never ever assigned me reviews above 14th street, and I could walk to most of them. I usually got the real shit boxes – Burp Castle, Lucy’s, D.B.A, Korova Milk Bar but I didn’t mind. Those were my people.
I was fastidious at first. I’d show up to the bar a little before happy hour and begin to craft my reviews. I usually wrote down notes about the drink specials (“$2 Buds will help offset the cost of the pants you’ll ruin!”) and the decor (“Imagine if Bennigan’s and a pirate ship had sex!”) and the clientele (“Runny-nosed guidos in Brooks Brothers roam freely!”) before I went off to the next bar. I’d also get completely blind lightning drunk.
I think the word count was 200, and the pay was $15 a review. Shecky’s did not reimburse for drinks, so I was not above writing favorable reviews in exchange for, say, free pickleback shots. (“Eagle-eyed bartenders serving the best picklebacks in the United Staes perhaps even the world rahhh!”)
Beats working, I’d tell myself, as my liver turned gray and the light in my eyes dimmed.
When the 2003 Shecky’s Bar, Club, and Lounge Guide came out in bookstores all over the city, my byline took up most of the East Village and LES sections. And, wouldn’t you know it, one of my reviews got printed out and slapped on the dirty window of a honky-tonk bar called Doc Holliday’s soon after that. I’d walk by that bar twice a week just to look at it, probably the same way a young composer would stare up at the name of his first musical on a glittering Broadway marquee. For me this validation was a real-deal momentous occasion in a professional life sagging with unfulfillment. I was on my way up. A real shooting star.
I could not wait to start on my 2004 reviews. I’d finally moved out of the East Village apartment and over to the Bowery, so I assumed I’d get assigned a similar coverage area. But they gave me uptown bars – some in the 60’s and on the West Side. It was like I got deployed to the Yukon after six months stationed in Ibiza.
I emailed my editor to make sure there wasn’t a screw-up because it seemed silly to waste me – clearly their most hilarious, up-and-coming writer – on lame bars where no one under the age of 50 would be caught dead. “We like to mix it up,” he wrote back, or some other bullshit like that. I was pissed.
So here’s what I did: Instead of wasting my time and my talents traveling all the way uptown to what I was sure would be joints full of empty bar stools save for a few occupied by ancient hobos lugging around oxygen tanks, I’d just find the basic info available online and then double-up on the funny bits. People read Shecky’s for (my!) jokes, not helpful information like “kitchen open until 9 p.m.” or “closed on Mondays” or if there is ever a cover charge. And, since I’d cut out the subway commute altogether, I conserved my creative energy and was able to turn in all my reviews on time, or even days early in some cases. I’d email my editor an invoice each week, sometimes with five hilarious bar reviews on it. I was killing it.
One night I got a voicemail from Chris Hoffman, founder of Shecky’s, and he asked me to call him back immediately. Here it comes, I thought. He probably got a call from Letterman or Spy magazine inquiring about my availability. Guess he was calling me to make a counteroffer, to beg me not to leave him until after they finished the 2004 edition. I called him back, and he thanked me for doing so and got right to it.
“Hey, so, what day did you go to Barcade? This was quite a review.”
Hmm Barcade Barcade Barcade … ah!
“Sunday?” I said with humble uncertainty, implying that I’d done so many reviews of so many bars recently that it was tough to keep track.
“Was it crowded?” he asked.
Oh, so this was a fact-checking call. Bummer. Still, he’ll probably ask me to come on full-time since he’s obviously short-handed.
“Not really,” I said. “To be honest, I didn’t stay that long. Yep – in and out!”
There was a short silence and an angry breath right before he revealed to me that this particular Barcade at the location I’d gone to last Sunday night had closed almost three years ago. My face got hot, then cold. Then I got dizzy.
“You can never write for us again.”
“Yes, that’s fair,” I said.
And it was. The next day the nice editor I’d worked with sent a shockingly kind and apologetic email to ask if I could tell him how many bars on the most recent invoice I actually went to.
None. The answer was none.
Turns out they’d flagged most of my recent reviews because they were very short on the basic legitimate, helpful information needed – they were not Shecky’s quality.
“Good luck in the future,” he signed off.
In hindsight, the origins of this particular lie were done out of reckless entitlement and desperation. I wanted to be a successful, well-paid writer at something other than my dismal trade pub so badly that I’d convinced myself that I deserved it right away.
And this lie was also just dumb fantasy – I thought the quickest way to become the writer I wanted to be was to pretend it had already happened for me. So I pretended Shecky’s hired me just to write jokes. That’s it. Save the hours of operation and the dress code for the scrappy interns. I was a shooting star.
Sometimes it was easier to lie about that than to sit with the truth.
– AJD
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Want more lies? Good. Our readers submitted more as part of June’s Inverse Pitching assignment. Thanks to their submissions, we will contribute $40 to the Katal Center this month. Read ‘em all in the feature pit down below. — AJD
All Images By Edith Zimmerman
I Would Go to Bars Alone and Tell Lies to Strangers
by The Small Bow Family Orchestra
“I once got myself so obliterated while home alone that when my wife got home that night I had trouble speaking, putting coherent words and sentences together. She had never seen me like this, didn’t know I was an alcoholic and had no idea what was wrong with me. I told her I had mistakenly taken too much of my newly-prescribed ADHD medication. It was a good lie; she believed me. The problem with the best lies is they’re also the most effective at demolishing trust.” – ANONYMOUS
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“I once told my husband that I had the stomach flu because I was too hungover to attend our children's Sunday school Christmas program. I was a first-grade Sunday school teacher at the time, so my absence also stiffed the co-teacher and other volunteer adults. Up until then and for years afterward, I worshipped and taught Bible lessons with an ax in my forehead. Used to turn around in the pew and wonder if anyone else was hungover. No one looked like it and I didn't, either.”
–ANONYMOUS
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“When I finally finished college and got a book agent I was over thirty, so my agent asked if I was comfortable lying about my age. Newly divorced and dating DJs, I said sure and we rounded down by five. All my friends and lovers thought I was younger, and it was nbd until I ended up in Guatemala with my boyfriend holding my passport. I tearfully confessed and it was over in Belize where - hating elderly me - my evil ex arranged for us to bike through the siesta and I have sun damage from it today.” – ANONYMOUS
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“I was waiting tables at a French joint in Brooklyn, owned by the spouse of a friend of my closest friend. I was drunk every single night, which was encouraged by the owner, a French prick who illegally kept our tips when he could swoop in to pour wine at the bar when we were slammed with 10 tables each. He allowed the staff to disparage non-White customers and talked openly about people's bodies in a sexual way. I drank more and more and got angrier and angrier. Then I'd oversleep and lose any chance I had of getting another job, getting out of there, DOING something with my life. All one big hangover.
So I started stealing money. It was a cash-only place. Never from the pooled tips -- always from him, the French creep. I'd keep a whole bill, but always share the tip, even beefing it up if the cheapskate customer left less than 20%. It was a small thing that got bigger as it kept going. I used the cash to cover late-night drinking at the after-hours bars we all drank at after service, for pizza and drugs and cabs and clothes. I splashed out and I didn't want to stop having all that extra cash to buy all that booze. It went on for months ... And then I got caught.
I'm not really sorry, although I see now that I'm sober how destructive my anger was.” - ANONYMOUS
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“I was housesitting. It was winter and the ground was covered with snow. The family gave me permission to drive their stick shift car. I was in the driveway, and the car lurched forward - it was in between gears or something- and it crashed into the garage door. In fear, I raced home, told my parents that someone crashed into the garage door. They called the police. For the next 4 hours, I lay in bed, listening to Joni Mitchell Blue on repeat, terrified of the lie I had told. My parents knocked on my door around midnight and said “the police are saying that you did this they said that the tire tracks in the snow match the tire tracks on the car!?!” At which point I broke down in tears and told the truth.” – ANONYMOUS
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“I loved lying so much when I drank, it’s impossible to know what the biggest one I told was. I would go to bars alone with the intent of telling lies to strangers, usually sad tales of my tragic life because back then I confused sympathy with love and I had a hard time getting either. Once, on a stopover in Honolulu, I told a young sailor looking for the last bit of strange before shipping out, that I was coming back from Indonesia where I was doing missionary work. I fingered the small gold cross around my neck that a Dutch guy had given to me after I sucked his dick on the beach just days before and looked up piously. The sailor asked if that was something akin to being a nun, and knowing absolutely nothing about missionaries, I nodded slowly and sipped my drink. But that’s probably not my biggest lie. My pendulum swung so wildly in the other direction after sobriety that I can’t lie anymore. But it was fun while it lasted.” – ANONYMOUS
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“I told my then-girlfriend / now-wife that I wasn't still seeing my ex when I was very much still seeing my ex. I want to say I came clean, but really I was caught. We worked through it, got married, have a family now. Can't believe how close I came to blowing it all back then.”
– ANONYMOUS
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“I’m fine.” – ANONYMOUS
