Blondie’s Bar and No Grill is very dark when I walk in, and very quiet — except for the semi-old-school hip hop that’s playing so loudly it feels like they’re trying to make up for the silence. Most nights it’s a music venue, but the stage is empty right now. A football game is on the big screen by the restrooms, and a Superman movie is on the small one near the entrance.
Blondie’s specializes in martinis, and the drink list above the bar is dominated by a long section of gin and vodka options, all at a standard $12.50 price.
I asked the bartender what he recommended. “What kid of spirit do you like?” he asked.
And that … is a meaningful question when it comes to martinis. Gin is the best option for taste and provenance, but to say that is to align yourself with the privileged decadence of the roaring ’20s, to lean into the elite, who dress up and say “fuck it” while the world burns. Vodka is a much more egalitarian spirit, but that’s exactly its problem: It’s a lowest common denominator spirit, a drink that you have because there’s nothing else. I’ll never forget my first bar in Russia, where I asked about their vodka selection and they looked at me like I was a monkey in a suit. Why would I want that? Didn’t I have money?
To not care about this, to not even think about it … maybe that’s the right answer. Maybe apathy is the way forward.
“Gin,” I said. Because I’m that guy.
We finally agreed on a “Blondalope” – a cantaloupe-flavored gin martini with only a little sweetness in the melon flavor.
I was seated at the far end of the bar. The couple next to me was a young man enthusiastically explaining how programming works to a young woman who was drinking. She would occasionally speak so softly that I couldn’t catch her side of the conversation, but a moment later he decided that he needed to explain to her how technology works, too.
I turned back to the bartender, and tried to make small talk as he prepped my drink.
“It has been a WEEKEND,” he said.
“I have been so exhausted,” I agreed. “I could barely get up. But I think everybody’s struggling. The world. Politics. The hearings … I think everybody’s feeling beaten down and wounded.”
He didn’t respond. He didn’t want to go there. He just put my martini glass down, along with the shaker, which contained another glass’ worth. You’re basically getting two drinks for the price of one. Apathy, in this moment, was the right decision.
It was delicious.
The conversation next to me suddenly got heated as the girl said something to the bartender about maybe heading out. “What?” the guy said. “You were just hanging on me for a while, and then bugging out?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and it was the first time I could hear her clearly.
There was a long beat. “I don’t think this is working out,” he said.
“Probably not,” she said. “I don’t know if you’re my type.”
We all held our breaths, waiting to see who walked away first. But a moment later, she said something quietly again, something about nerdy guys who don’t know they’re nerdy. I couldn’t tell if she was in favor of them or not. In response, her date admitted that he’s not the best programmer in the world. That led her to start talking about the difference between Wozniak (“a true nerd”) and Jobs (“the marketing guy”). A moment later, she was mocking him for “being stuck in software” and not knowing anything about hardware.
They were slowly backing down from the cliff they’d stood at the edge of. And the less he talked the better this was going.
Then they started talking about blockchain and his friend who worked for a blockchain development company, and the date began firing on all cylinders. She touched his leg. This was a done deal. And it occurred to me for the first time that perhaps blockchain isn’t really a “technology” so much as a conversation topic that technologists who are bad with people feel comfortable enough to talk about on dates.
That, at least, seemed like what had happened here. She’d clearly arrived wanting to make this work, but required him to cross some kind of minimum threshold for it to happen. That was all he’d had to do — be unobjectionable — and he hadn’t been able to get there until they agreed that blockchain would solve the problems of the future. She started kissing him, and I wondered how many one-night stands have happened only because they had cryptocurrency in common.
I asked the bartender what else I had to try. He consulted the incoming bartender, who had just arrived for his shift wearing large streaks of glitter under his eyes, and together they agreed on the Medic … which is a vodka martini. Which goes against everything I stand for. We’d been through this.
But what the hell. What have standards ever gotten any of us?
“Let’s do that,” I told them.
The couple next to me had gone momentarily cold again. Apparently he lives in New York, and when she mentioned she’d be coming to New York at some point, he got excited, said she should look him up, they could do things. She said — and I could hear her more routinely now — that they’d see, maybe, but whatever, it really wasn’t about him.
Only when he finally agreed, and backed down, and stopped talking, did she start kissing him again.
Only blockchain. That’s the only conversation he can have with her that doesn’t turn her off.
“It’s really chill tonight,” I told the bartender. “Not that I mind.”
“It’s been this way all weekend,” he told me. “Not just here. All over the Mission.” Indeed, every bar I’d passed all weekend had been a shell of itself, filled with empty space. We speculated that it’s a result of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, and the Blue Angels, but … I wonder if it’s Kavanaugh, and a frost the political winds are casting over everything. But again, the bartender didn’t want to go there.
The girl was was all over the boy now, significantly escalating physical contact. She was working way harder at this than he was, throwing her arms around him, sitting in his lap on the barstool (which is as hard as it sounds), as he seemed more and more hesitant. When he tried to ask for details about her life, she said “whoa, whoa, I hardly know you.” All she’d tell him was she’s single, and intends to make sure that, someday, the kids she eventually has will not grow up poor.
The boy turned to the bartender. Told him that he had no idea the drinks would be this strong.
“That’s why I brought him here,” the girl chimed in. “To get him drunk.”
The boy asked if there was a band coming in. Yes, the bartender told him. Live music would start in about half an hour. The boy told the girl that this is all so unexpected, he’d like to stick around to see that.
She didn’t like the idea … and at that point the dynamic entirely shifted. From then on, I could hear every word she said, but barely make him out.
“I’m an alpha woman!” she said a few minutes later, in response to something he said that I couldn’t hear, and she led him out the door, into the night.
The bartender I started with was now off shift, but still here, drinking. We raised our glasses to each other. “Those kids,” I told him, “were a fascinating spectacle.”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “That’s a thing. They’re young, and it’s time to go home. But they don’t know it’s time to go home. They’re trying to drink their way into it, and it’s like ‘no, just go home.’”
The new bartender stepped over. “If you hang around here, you see that all the time,” he said. “As long as they’re not bothering anyone, sure, okay, take your stupid time.”
Looking around, I suddenly realized that, yes, proportionately, Blondie’s was filled with young couples. I had made a terrible mistake coming here alone. And aging.
As the band started to set up, the atmosphere got more active and charged. On the small TV, Lex Luthor had gone to jail. “You have to enjoy yourself,” the new bartender told me. “You have to celebrate the fact that you’re alive. So many people can’t. They are trapped, afraid to leave their homes. So we have to celebrate life.”
Two new kids sat down in the seats next to me. A woman and a man. Aside from being different ethnicities, they seemed exactly the same as the couple who had just left.
The band started playing.
Well-told tale of San Francisco. Made me feel oddly nostalgic!