“My father will have…”

There’s nothing more indicative of an asshole to come, a first time customer who tweaks the universal bartender antennae, than the guy who leads off with, “I’ll have a scotch and water and my father will have…”

My father!!!

Of course he’s referring to a guy who’s roughly the same age or even younger, which tells me the bartender (who is ALWAYS fucking older, if not in years but experience dealing with hats-and-horns debris of this subset) that the next thing out of his mouth will be, “Wine and fresh horses for my men!” Or, “Where are the girls?”

He’s a first class handjob and a guy who’ll surely be “cut off” within the hour. It’s in his DNA and if it was 1958 he’d be wearing a conventioneer’s fez.

I once made that same mistake a thousand years ago. It was at 39,000 feet, obviously on an airplane (a flying machine whose commercials back then said, “We shake our tails for you”), when I was not your friendly bartender but an upright American citizen of respectable employ. And I said the same stupid line about my equally upright colleague of respectable employ.

Just like that aforementioned asshole… that guy who enters the bar with his expense account and the moral fiber of a quail… when “tail” leaned way over and asked me what I’d like to drink, I said, “I’ll have a scotch and water and my father here will have…” which caused the disappointed stewardess to not only shower my “non-father” with kisses and hugs, (literally), but to utter in full “coo” mode, “Ooooh, what a handsome young father you have!”

And she proceeded to fawn all over “pops” the entire fucking flight. Not that “pops” wasn’t fawn-worthy or coo-able to say the least which clearly he wasn’t, it was that I was a fucking asshole and she wanted me to know it.

“Judge not lest you be judged,” it is written, but judge I now dare do. Yes, I judge the asshole who orders for “my father” because I have judged my sorry self in kind. Life teaches you shit and shit teaches you life, I shit you not. Else how do you think I got to be five foot ten?