<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Carl Gerych, 68, Bartender The Lark West Bloomfield, Michigan I wish I could grow older with the business. But time&amp;#039;s catching up with me, too. When I was very young, we moved to Arizona. As a matter of fact, my father opened a liquor store there. So I&amp;#039;ve been around liquor almost all my life. And when I came back to Michigan, my father and I bought a bar. Back then a bottle of beer was 30 cents. Premium was 35. A shot of Crown Royal was 45 cents. That was premium liquor. My uncle was the general manager \u2014 back then they called it vice president \u2014 of the Riviera in Las Vegas, and he says, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m gonna make you a barback for a couple of weeks.&amp;quot; Well, that didn&amp;#039;t last too long. He says I&amp;#039;m too good with the B.S. and too good with the people. That&amp;#039;s what I was brought up doing: the old drinks from the Sixties, Seventies. Sazeracs and sloe-gin fizzes, Singapore Slings. Every now and then a customer will come in and try to test me, and I have no problem with them. I grew up with all of those drinks. You know, Dean Martin was not as big a boozer as people thought he was. I mean, he drank. The other guys just did a little better job than he did. He was more fun to laugh with, you know. He had a good time. One of the Supremes died. And Stevie Wonder came in. They were all there for the funeral. As I served them, I was watching, and Stevie Wonder would put his hand a certain ways away from his drink so he&amp;#039;d know where it was. Every now and then he&amp;#039;d hit an ashtray or he&amp;#039;d hit another drink or something. So I says, &amp;quot;Mr. Wonder, let me show you something.&amp;quot; You know that gold-and-silver stretch cord like you would wrap a Christmas gift in? I tied it in a little slipknot and I tied one end around the drink and I flipped the other one over his hand. Right over his wrist. I says, &amp;quot;Whenever you&amp;#039;re sitting and you wanna find your drink, just follow the cord. It&amp;#039;ll lead you right to it.&amp;quot; The next time he came in, which was a little over a year, he had a gold bracelet with a little clip on the end that he would clip to the end of his glass. I thought that was so cool. The young bartenders. You know, I love them. But they get so infuriated with the business. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s no money, there&amp;#039;s no money.&amp;quot; It took me fifty years to build a clientele and the young ones want to make it overnight. They get so frustrated because, in this day, they can&amp;#039;t handle stress to begin with. They&amp;#039;re always in a hurry. Take your time. The customer&amp;#039;s not going anywhere. And the better you get to know them and the better you get to talk to them, the more money you&amp;#039;re gonna make. It&amp;#039;s not gonna happen overnight. It&amp;#039;s gonna take years. There&amp;#039;s dozens of drinks that come out daily. I don&amp;#039;t know them all. I probably wouldn&amp;#039;t know a third of them. But what can you do with watermelon? What can you do with cantaloupe? Now they have bacon vodka. What can you do with this? I don&amp;#039;t like to work like that \u2014 never have. People are gonna eat and drink all their lives and alls you have to do is take the time and enjoy the people. Let them enjoy you. But you have to have a good line, too. See, everybody thinks that because I work in a five-star restaurant, that I drink the best, that I eat the best. I don&amp;#039;t. I&amp;#039;m a simple guy. I like a good burger and I like a lot of B.S. Every Sunday I go sit and play Keno and have appetizers with my wife at the bar. And 99 percent of the time somebody \u2014 customer, staff, friend \u2014 somebody will join us. Like Sunday, my wife and I went out, just the two of us. By the time the party was over there was twelve of us. Nobody even knew we were there in the first place. PLUS: Read More Bartender Wisdom on Eat Like a Man &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/bars/interviews/a10511/the-lark-bartender-070811/>