Jeff Burkhart: Not everyone is a good wingmate

I had seen the two of them around my apartment complex — maybe it was at the pool, or at the mailboxes. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but we were certainly acquainted. It was Dave and Dan, or Dan and Dave, I couldn’t quite remember. They were about the same height and had the same color hair and eyes. And the fact that they were almost always wearing matching golf attire didn’t help.

And now, here they were sitting in front of me at my work: Dan and Dave — or the other way around.

“We’ve always wondered what you did,” said one of them, echoing a sentiment that I’ve heard many times throughout the years.

When you work an opposite schedule from most of the world, it can often seem like you’re just arriving when everyone else is leaving — or vice versa. It was certainly much more of a challenge when I was single. But being married is a different set of challenges.

“Dave just got divorced,” said Dan, presumably. “So, I’m here to help him get over it. Get back on the horse, so to speak.”

They call them “wingmen,” but more correctly it’s “wingmates,” because I’ve definitely seen it both ways. The old trope is that a lone wolf is to be feared, if we read our myths correctly. So, somehow, in a bar, two men often seem less intimidating than one, which has always struck me as odd. Shouldn’t more people be more intimidating? Well, when it comes to meeting people in bars, the fact that someone else has a friend seems to always indicate at least a certain level of safety, flawed as that logic may be.

Soon enough, as with all busy bars, other matters took me away from my neighbors — specifically, skinny margaritas for a group of women, and ranchwaters for a group of men. Ironic, since they’re the exact same drink; the only real difference is the name. But sometimes women and men see the world differently.

“When’s the best night?” asked one of the two women I was now waiting on at the other end of the bar.

I looked around at the busy bar that I was standing in.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You know,” she said.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“When the single men come here?” her friend added for clarification.

“My friend just broke up with her boyfriend,” said the woman, gesturing to her right.

“Well, it just so happens,” I began but didn’t get to finish.

Another customer had a to-go order emergency. Yes, there’s such a thing. Oftentimes the to-go customer is the neediest customer — and often the least rewarding.

Water seeks its own level, and so does behavior, because those four people found each other all on their own. In fact, by the time I could really get over to them, they had already gone from boy-boy-girl-girl to boy-girl-boy-girl. Life is so much simpler when things work out.

Beer had switched to cocktails, which in bar lore is the opposite way you want to do things, but in the practical world, it’s the way it so often happens. Just like value, you should always start off with the most expensive — while you can still really discern the difference — before you switch to the less expensive. But in reality, it almost always happens the other way around.

So much for logic because bars are about mixing things up. And these four seemed to have figured that out. Two of them really seemed to have figured that out. At some point, those two “had to” go out to the car — something about retrieving something before they needed a ride-share.
“Just a minute” turned into 20 minutes, then into half an hour. By then, the bar had slowed down considerably.

“Where are your two friends?” I asked after longer than that.

“They’re still out at the car,” said the wingwoman rolling her eyes as the wingman nodded his head.

“Oh,” I said, sensing the awkwardness.

“Sometimes breakups hit people hard and they tend to act out a little,” I added sympathetically.

They both looked at me for a long moment.

“They are not the ones who have broken up,” replied the woman. “We are.”

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• Strangely, both Dave and Dan still pretended to barely know me after that.

• Ask anybody in the service business, bachelor and bachelorette parties are the hardest to deal with, not usually because of the prospective spouses, but because of everybody else.

• Any night can be “the night” depending upon what it’s you’re looking for.

• Sometimes being a “wingmate” is just an excuse to act out.

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 NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com