REQUIEM FOR RUTHIE

If you've spent time with any amount of regularity in a local bar (preferably one in your neighborhood that you don't have to drive to), and are fortunate enough to know the staff, you know that they can be like a second family. This is especially true if it's been your haunt for a long while. Bartenders can be surrogate parents, brothers, sisters, drill sergeants or shrinks. Sometimes they can be all in one night. And Ruthie, my favorite bartender of all time, often was.
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Ruthie wasn't the owner of Pacific Shores, but she might as well have been. She was a rarity among bartenders, one that was equally comfortable with the career barflies that held down stools during the day and "those damn kids" that came in at night. I kind of straddled the chronological line. I was lucky enough to have started drinking there before the deluge of hipsters. I still count as one of my happiest moments the time the surley day bartender Dave bought me a beer. (It meant nothing to him, but to me, I had fucking arrived.) I owe that to Ruthie. As long as I was okay with Ruthie, I was okay with Dave.
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Ruthie died earlier this year and there was a wake at the local Masonic Temple. There was no real eulogy. Instead the mic was passed as regulars related their favorite Ruthie stories. Most of them centered around her wit, her huge shrouded heart and her keenest of bullshit detectors.

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A couple visitor entries at an online guide to San Diego are indicative of the way she was seen by younger patrons:

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"The old lady bartender here is like Cruella DeVille minus the bank account. I swear she wakes up in the morning and has a bowl of cigerettes [sic] for breakfast. If she's working you better know what the fuck you want and you're best to not even smile at her. She will fuck your ass up! Seriously.. she can spot a smartass from 20 feet away. No shaninigans or you won't get a drink hipster!"

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"Ruthie, the bartender who bears a resemblance to Carla Tortelli, takes umbrage with every stranger that walks in, frequently describing them in her raspy voice as "this cocksucker over here" or "fuckin' assholes," and regularly refuses to serve people who she doesn't like the look of."

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Heart be still! She really was my type of people. Anti-fufu in all regards. I loved Ruthie and was smitten when, late one afternoon, I walked into the bar and she asked "Waddya want Tom, besides me?!" She was a good twenty years older than me, and, make no mistake, she was joking. But I still got the same feeling that I had the first time I experienced a reciprocated crush (and every time since). Even so, she really was too independent for male suitors even her own age, and probably thought of them as unneeded baggage. Besides, anyone her age would had a hard time keeping up with her. It was telling that she liked to go camping by herself.

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I loved everything about that tough-skinned, raspy-voiced, frizzy haired beauty.

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Everytime I hear "Here Comes a Regular" by the Replacements, I think of Pacific Shores. And everytime I think of the Shores, I think of Ruthie. I miss her. The world needs more people like Ruthie.

Now get the hell out.

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The Replacements - Here Comes A Regular mp3 at The Swill Merchant