Desperate Dopplering
Authored by: pacificstandard In the course of starting my bar in Brooklyn, Pacific Standard, there have been a lot of unpredictable messes. But the roof of our back room proved to be the unfit mother of them all. While we were replacing the roof (why we had to replace it is an entirely different story) there was a Sunday with what we had dreaded the whole time, a chance of thunderstorms. You see, we didn't exactly have a roof--our roofers had just finished taking off all the tar, but hadn't yet put new tar on. We had a roofless ceiling, in some spots, and gaping holes to the sky in others.

So my business partner Jon and I sat there all Sunday, frantically tracking the Doppler radar to see the thundershower situation. At first, the coast was clear. But then two big storms lined up in Jersey and made their foray into Brooklyn. We didn't know how the bare roof would take it--would the drain up there still mostly work? Our question was answered as the first raindrops began to fall. We saw a drip in our bathroom. A relatively slow, harmless drip. We put a bucket under it. A drip near the roof drain. Bucket. The rain outside intensified. Steady streams of water began running down the bathroom walls. We hung plastic to direct the stream away from the walls and into the bucket. Went outside the bathroom to check on the rest of the room.

In the spot where our skylight had been, where there was a massive hole covered with a tarp, water was pouring in steady drips from several sides of the hole onto our floors, benches, and tables. We quickly used up our few remaining buckets and began finding anything--water bottles, beer cans, local dogs--to put under the drips. I can still see those drips now, numerous as the sons of Moses, wet as a raincloud taking a bath...

Halfway through the first storm, we discovered that in the basement, water was filling an entire room, pooling up in spots to almost six inches and working its way through adjacent walls. The only solution was to madly sweep the pooled water away from valuable objects and towards safer areas. Thus began a division of labor that would define the evening: me the crazy basement water-sweeper, Jon the crazy upstairs bucket-runner. Through two big storms we labored, trying to save our unprotected, unfinished, meek and innocent bar from what could be thousands of dollars in water damage.

Finally, the rain was over. There was nothing on the map except some blip far off in West Virginia that couldn't possibly reach us that night. So we went across the street to a neighbor bar and enjoyed a few well-earned beers. And a well-earned shot of Jameson. And a less-well-earned additional shot of Jameson. Then a few shots of things we couldn't possibly have earned. A couple hours later, sitting back in our barstools in a joyous celestial stupor, we watched the late crowd traipsing home from Park Slope drinkeries, laughing, talking, dashing down the street to avoid the torrential downpour...

Our bartender: "Hey Johns, it looks like it's raining pretty hard out there."
Jon and John (together, with feeling): "Oh, shit."

We hadn't even noticed that that what looked like a redneck West Virginia dirt clod had managed to dash up to New York and cause the worst rain yet. We ran across the street, and began our old activities at a far more frenzied and drunken pace than before. The floors of the back room were covered in filthy water. Jon was covered in filthy water. Our gigantic trash buckets filled up with filthy water, then got dumped into our toilet and filled again.

We slept that night behind the bar, in case any other storms tried to pull something. We slept in promotional beer brand clothes the bar-owner across the street gave us to replace our own soaked rags. We slept in shame and fear and fatigue and maybe a vague proud sense that we might have actually coped with the worst of all the hurdles to opening our bar. Jon probably dreamed of nothing, or whatever business partners dream about. I dreamed of fair Central Valley nymphs, or maybe Sac State students, prancing in fields on dry summer days in Sacramento. There is 1 comment