Part II - Last Christmas.

Previously: Part I: Have Yourself A Bitter Little Christmas.

Eddie and I checked our coats, scarves and hats (it's bloody cold out, and seemingly colder in Edward's car) in at the door and descended the small flight of stairs into Dionysus' main club area. It took my eyes some time to adjust to the low lighting, but once they had, I kind of wish I hadn't bothered, as what I saw was literally my idea of hell. At first I thought I had walked straight into the middle of some horrifying dystopian future where the only people who exist are the under thirties, like Logan's Run, or even worse, Skins (speaking of Skins - perhaps I'm not their target audience because I have a brain in my nut, but is this genuinely how young people are perceived on television these days? And more worryingly, is this program even being given the time of day by the general public? If that's the case, I hope you're all looking forward to my forthcoming, equally horrifying teen drama "Precocious Little Arsehats Who Came Down With The Last Shower Of Rain Think It's Well Cool To Take Drugs And Act Like The-Big-I-Am", because this blogging lark is quite clearly a mug's game - Channel 4 have probably already contacted me by the time you read this). Although the truth was actually more troubling - the DJ was blasting out some horrendous pop-punk number at a volume that made me feel as if Blink 182 were performing a stadium concert in my ribcage, and the sizeable dancefloor was packed to bursting with disgustingly vibrant young people. To tell the truth, if not out-and-out fearful, I've always been at least cautious of large gatherings of "young folks". While these people may well be my age, if not a little older, there's something I find genuinely disconcerting about massive groups of young people having a good time. I've never been able to explain it properly, I just find your garden variety "young people" to be extremely tiresome to be around.

Scarface invited us into his office and once our eardrums had stopped resonating with half-baked pop-rock from 2001, he asked us what it was he could do for us.
"We need a barrel of bitter." The baron looked at us, his face as confused as it was greasy, as if we had asked him for a barrel of Tintizzle Bosh or however much Bosty Old Ring-A-Ding he had lying about. We might as well have been from another planet.
"My friends, this place is a nightclub... we have never had the facilities to care for cask ales."
"But you're a managed house," said Eddie, who for some reason was already filling out a transfer paper (as if filling out a bit of legal gumph would make a barrel of bitter appear out of thin air). "You're required to keep the company's face products." Face products are the things you are meant to be able to order in any managed house; brands that are synonymous with the company. They are to us as Ant & Dec are to ITV.
"Hold on, you see the kind of people we have out there? How many of them do you think are throwing cask ale down their necks?"
"What's wrong with cask ale?" Eddie seemed a little affected by this - he was the same age, if not some years younger, than most of the people out on the dancefloor that we'd pushed and shoved out of our way, as was I, and he regularly drank cask ale.
"Nothing my friend, it's just inappropriate for a place like this. The brewery don't come running to me telling me I have to have it because they know as well as I do that it wouldn't move here. This place is aimed at young people."
"So you can't help us?"
"I'm sorry my friends." He offered us some drugs to cheer us up but even a ruddy good line of coke couldn't raise our sunken spirits. "I can go on the company's internet map and find you a place with a surplus of bitter, if you like? Save you a few trips I suppose." We thanked him for that, as Henry's computer doesn't meet the specification for the company's new software.

"Go to the bar with these vouchers, have whatever you like while you wait, my treat." A most kind and generous offer, I'm sure you'll agree, but one that came with a slight catch - we had to go and sit down in amongst all those bloody young people. The ironic Public Enemy and Iron Maiden t-shirts, the hair that is carefully engineered to look like it isn't carefully engineered, the frivolous abandon, the reveling in being young. It all made me sick to my very core. "I shall come and find you with the results."

We wedged ourselves among the hordes of jiggling sweat-sprayers (incidentally, I too am of the opinion that the smell of cigarette smoke is preferable to that of sweat, farts and stale beer) as we queued for the grossly understaffed bar. The staff were just getting on with it, however - throwing shots into plastic cups, mixing them up, taking (far too much) money for them (when I saw it was £4 for a double Vodka you could've knocked me over with a feather - or the five pound note it would take to get a double vodka and coke). No hassle. The DJ was now serenading us with an old Alkaline Trio single (to which I must profess a fondness when I can listen to it at a sensible volume in my own home, where some charming if slightly tipsy red-haired girl isn't flailing her arms like a mad woman and hitting me in the back of the head unapologetically in time to the music) as we tried our best to converse over the wall-splittingly loud music.

"CAN YOU BELIEVE WHAT THAT GUY SAID?"
"WHAT?" The chorus came to a close and brought with it the jarring picture of a gang of fetus-faced hipsters, waving their hands in the air and singing in unison "I won't have to quit doing fucked up shit", one of the band's less radio-friendly lyrics, as if chanting at a football match.
"HE THINKS HE KNOWS WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE ARE AFTER." Eddie had obviously been quite hurt by the assertion that he wasn't in touch with "da yoof" - personally, if being in touch with "da yoof" entailed flopping around in some overheated dungeon to the tune of tacky pop-punk crowd-pleasers with an alcopop in one hand and the tattered shreds of my dignity in the other, I could do without it. But Eddie was clearly feeling alienated, which wasn't hard to do when you looked at them against us - our jeans were unripped, our shirts without ironic daubings of any kind (I considered tearing the clock from the wall and wearing that around my neck, but then I realized the people with Public Enemy T-shirts wouldn't realize I was mimicking Flava Flav, because none of them know who Public Enemy were, they just liked the design when they saw it in Foppish Gent or H&M or wherever it is they buy their bloody clothes) and in that respect we must have appeared a right pair of "narcs". If kids are still saying "narc". Probably not, the fickle little bastards. Anyway, I decided to attempt to reason with Eddie.
"YOU CAN'T HOLD A -"
"WHAT?"
"I SAID YOU CAN'T HOLD A GRUDGE AGAINST HIM, HE DIDN'T INSULT YOU PERSONALLY. THIS PLACE JUST DOESN'T GO FOR CASK ALE, IT TAKES TOO MUCH TIME FOR ONE THING."
"HOW LONG IS IT GOING TO TAKE US TO GET TO THE BAR?"
"ARE WE EVEN IN THE QUEUE?" It didn't matter, apparently, because before the queue could become any more stationary, the man from Del Monte came back with the search results, revealing a part barrel was available at a slightly "rougher" establishment down the road. We thanked him for his generosity, kept the coupons at his insistence.
"in case you ever want to come back", he said - which we will do, right after we pull out all our teeth with rusty pliers, push piping hot needles through our fingernails until they crack, sizzle and fall away, and use a Manilla envelope to put papercuts in our eyeballs.

We hopped into Eddie's car and made our way over to this "other" pub. Now, this pub has something of a reputation - this is the kind of place where the police admit they have absolutely no control and they "deal with their own". Mostly by introducing the more troublesome punters (and "troublesome" in this sense means whistleblowers, grassers, witnesses and "narcs") to the business end of a beatdown. So we entered the pub with caution - being careful not to disturb the congealed blood on the doorhandle, we made our way past the rows of extremely sinister-looking gentlemen (several of whom had fingers missing - I hoped it was simply caused by frostbite, but soon realized that unless Frostbite was the name of the horse that came last one fateful day, that probably wasn't it). The barman was a weasely young man who looked like he'd be better suited for a game of "find the lady" on an Egyptian street corner than pulling pints in the Welsh valleys, but not wanting to point this out to him, we simply announced our business and asked if he could help us.

"Oh yeah, yeah, wicked, right this way." We were led down a corridor and into a ground floor cellar, something of a rarity I'm led to believe, and before us sat the holy grail - a barrel of bitter. It was three-quarters full, apparently, due to a shortage at the brewery, but it was here, and it was ours. We were delighted, and the barman looked pleased as punch to give it to us. We soon found out why.

"Oh, that's fantastic, if you could just sign it over -"
"Fifty quid." At first I thought I hadn't heard him correctly. He looked me square in the eye and I soon realized that perhaps I wasn't mistaken.
"I'm sorry?"
"Fifty quid mate." No, it turns out I'd heard him correctly after all. Better nip this in the bud, I thought. I assumed my best radio voice and relayed the quote from the back of the transfer forms.
"Um, no. You - the house - will get stock credit from the company when the transfer is declared -"
"Nah nah nah mate," rasped the slick-haired little weasel, shifting about on the spot as if selling knock-off DVDs down the covered market and having to constantly maintain a lookout for the rozzers. "I don't get fuck all off that, does I? That's company-boy bullshit. Where's my dollah, eh? What's in it for me?"
"Look pal," I negotiated - I decided to attempt to 'out-dodgy' him, which subsequently failed. "We're not giving you a monkey for a three-quarter barrel of B, you know what I'm saying?" Upon my proud retelling of this story later on, I was informed that a monkey is £500, not £50. Nobody seemed to notice so in future retellings I simply omitted the fact that I'd gotten my cockney denominations wrong. That kind of thing gets you chucked down the apples and pears around here, I'd imagine.
"Well what am I gettin' out of this, mate?"
"What are we getting out of it?" Eddie enquired. Eddie's far better at this sort of thing than me, I should probably have just sat in the car. "You think we're that fucking desperate that we're gonna give you fifty quid?"
"I got what you need, bruv, I got -"
"You haven't got fuck all, mate," Eddie corrected him. I suddenly felt my face become extremely hot as the horrible feeling of conflict came to the fore. "You're on the same level as us. Alright? We're just floor staff, just like you. In fact, why the fuck are we talking to you? I'm going to get your manager."
"No, Eddie, I'll sort this out." I said this with a decidedly authoritative bark, but in reality it was because I didn't want to be left on my own while Eddie, Bribery Bill and his manager duked it out. If the manager said no, he said no, and we hadn't lost anything. At least I could try and do it diplomatically. Eddie went out into the bar and sat down as Bribery Bill escorted me upstairs. "Anyway, I'm sure your manager will want to discuss the fifty quid service charge this place has inexplicably -"
"Alright mate, alright, alright," stuttered Bill, turning on his heel. "Okay, look, we don't need to get the managers involved in this."
"Yes we do, I need this paper signed to say we've taken stock from you. And your manager will need a copy."
"Nah, I meant the fifty quid. We can... twenty?" I simply turned my face to the wall and laughed.
"Let me see your manager."
"Aw mate, nah, nah," at this point Bill seemed to be getting agitated. Before he could fall to his knees and sob into the hem of my trousers, Eddie came barging up behind us.

"We're going."
"What?"
"Henry called us back. We won't be needing your bitter anymore mate." Eddie patted him on the back of the head a few times in a way that suggested a full-on slap was coming, before he grabbed me by the arm and led me away.
"Ah, okay, okay," Bill said with a decidedly calmer air this time around. I daresay this was the first time he'd even seen a stock transfer and - wrongly - decided it was a means of supplementing his income. Now, a long, long time ago I decided that this blog would never feature the real name of anything - no real names of breweries, pubs, people, nothing. This was not just to protect me from the company's legal jackhammer, it was also to protect the people on the receiving end of my abuse, and now I sorely, sorely regret that I can't name and shame the little bastards in charge of that pub. I can, however, say that the people running that squalid little shitshack shouldn't really wonder why their clientele seem to swap class-A drugs around the car park like football stickers in a playground - if I had to stay there for any length of time that wasn't absolutely necessary I'd have my belt around my arm faster than you can say tenner bag.

Anyway, I got in the car, as did Eddie, and neither of us could really believe what had just transpired.

"Can you believe -"
"Do you think he'll remember which pub we're from?" Eddie had his hand on the ignition and his eye on the rearview mirror, never breaking eye contact with the pub's front door.
"I have no idea. Probably not, he wasn't listening to a word we said until we mentioned the fact we needed a barrel, I -"
"Okay..." Eddie began to reverse the car out of the car park. He stopped to turn, and I heard something roll and thud in the boot behind us. Something large and heavy. I didn't quite know how to ask, but luckily Eddie answered the question for me. "Plus you didn't give him the transfer papers, did you? So this one's a freebie."
I went to protest, but the morality of it soon subsided when I realized we'd landed a free barrel of bitter on a day when bitter looked to be rarer entity than photos from the Pope's Bar Mitzvah.
"When did you -"
"When you were arguing on the stairs. Fucked if I'm sitting with the crackheads, man."
I can't explain it, but as we drove back to the pub, with 14 gallons of stolen bitter in the boot of Eddie's broken old car (which is only slightly safer on the road than the notorious bathtub on wheels from every single episode of Last Of The Summer Wine), listening to Mike Oldfield on repeat, I truly felt like Christmas was upon us. The lights shone brighter, the cold air felt more wintery as it came in through the cracks in Eddie's windshield and doors, the ice on the road felt less dangerous, it all felt alright. Because we were thieves. Proper, honest to goodness thieves. At Christmas no less - we were way worse than the Grinch and Ebenezer Scrooge put together. And if that isn't the spirit of the season then I really don't know what is. Nor do I ever want to.

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This concludes the This Is Bar Work story. Thank you for reading.

Merry Christmas.