Clever Work, Minor Arcana Bartender...

…clever work INDEED.

HERE IS THE SITUATION:

• At Minor Arcana, they have a Happy Hour Relapse at midnight, at which time you can get Genny Cream (which, for my money, is the queen of all Avowedly Shite & Delightful To Drank-On Beers) for a mere $2 until 2am.
• It so happens that I was POSTED UP at Minor Arcana at precisely that midnight hour, having been upwardly posted since about 9:30, and arguably staying that long for the sole purpose of taking advantage of this incredibly good deal
• RELATED: I also stayed that long because my friend Marc was visiting from California, and he is not in town very often, and I felt guilty because he says he called me a few weeks ago and sang a song to my voicemail whilst also announcing his intentions to make out with a famous rockstar.  I SWEAR I DID NOT RECEIVE THIS VOICEMAIL—how could someone forget a voicemail like that?  Either way, I am easily guilted, so I felt I should rock the late shift and have catch-ups with Marc, and enjoying these $2 Genny Creams seemed like an ideal way of facilitating this.
• OKAY SO ANYWAY: Midnight rolls around, and we rush the bar in search of affordable slosh…only to discover that the bartender has vanished into the night.  WE LOOK TO THE LEFT: there is a pack of hipsters eating cupcakes in the back of the bar.  WE LOOK TO THE RIGHT: there is a pretty sweet diorama presenting a scene from the 1991 Mario Van Peebles film New Jack City (Minor Arcana features many such dioramas celebrating early-90’s cinematic achievements—it’s pretty sweet.  They also have these kind of mock Coney Island Freakshow advertisements that a local painter made—one of them advertises a monkey who plays the piano and sweats real gin, and I wish that was a real thing).  
• We spot the bartender outside, smoking a cigarette.  I go out with Marc, real casual-like, in an attempt to gage the sishwashun.  I cleverly pretend to merely be sitting outside with Marc while he smokes a a cigarette of his own, which, in a related story, he received from the person behind him in line for the bathroom in exchange for cutting said line.  The main message here is that Marc knows how to work it.  BUT ALSO THE MAIN MESSAGE IS THIS: The bartender finished his cigarette and then got in a taxi and fled the scene!  I swear to you it is true!  The charlatan clearly had no intention whatsoever of awarding us our hard-earned beverages.
• Outrage sets in.  However, it fades as we discover there is another bartender, though she is super-flaky and difficult to flag down.  But we get our Genny on, and Marc reveals that he attended June Raphael and Paul Scheer’s wedding, because dat sucka knows how to WORK IT.