A Bartender and Her Favorite Regular Went Sober, but Still Hang Out in a Dive

Sara turns 39 in October. Her birthday marks five years since her last drink. Her life now looks almost nothing like it did then—a move from New York to St. Louis, six months in rehab, two years at her mother's house, and learning to function without alcohol changed her. But in one way, she's come full circle.

She's back in New York. And she's back at B-Side.

The idea of a recovering alcoholic tending bar at the same dive in which she lost herself to addiction might sound a few Liberty-sized alarm bells. But bartenders who don't drink are surprisingly common; top-tier mixologists across the country don't allow themselves to sample what they serve.

The decision to remain in the industry as a former drinker has its risks. But on this particular Saturday in New York—that city of the impossible—Ms. Sara Ann Rutherford appears to be handling herself just fine.

Standing in front of B-Side, she yanks the lock fixed to its protective grille toward her and pulls a set of keys from her pocket. She flips to the correct one, and—with a satisfying click—begins her weekly routine. She jerks a chain down hand over hand, and the grille rises like a stage curtain, revealing the glass face of the bar she's worked at, on and off, for a decade. She walks through the doorway, inhaling the day's first whiff of stale beer and citrus, and flips a switch. The pink "B-Side" neon in the window flickers on. Only the dull drone of the refrigerator and the low whirr of the AC unit trouble the silence. Then, a violin's tremolo, an organ's whirl, and a cymbal's crescendo fill the room. "We don't… do the same drugs no more." Sara sings along to Chance the Rapper's anthem as she zips between the storeroom and bar, dumping buckets of ice into the well, slicing limes for the fruit caddy, unloading Coronas from a box. "We don't do the we don't do the same drugs." She props open the door with a rock the size of a toaster and places an A-shaped chalkboard on the sidewalk:

B-SIDE SPECIAL
PBR & A SHOT – $6
TIME 2 GET DRUNK

Perched on the waist-high fridge behind the bar, she shoots RC Cola from the soda gun into a pint glass, and waits for Mike.

Mike first met Sara in 2008, on a summer morning that began—as so many mornings back then did—with a hangover. He decided to shake it off with a walk. It was a long one—over the Brooklyn Bridge, across Chinatown, into the Lower East Side, through the Village—but he had plenty on his mind to keep him occupied. It had been a year since Mike's father died, and since that day he had been drowning the bitter mixture of guilt and anger and regret death brings with alcohol. He tried to repress his grief by spending more time with friends, but he couldn't keep from talking about his dad. People he'd known for years stopped taking his calls. At work, he could only focus for 15 minutes at a time. When he got off, he started drinking, and kept on going till bedtime.

With all that knocking around inside his head and a soreness renting his leg muscles—he'd been walking for more than an hour—Mike found himself on Avenue B, staring at B-Side's front door. It seemed as good a spot as any for the day's first drink. He stumbled in.

Behind the bar stood Sara, a punkish, tattooed girl in a dress straight out of 1953. "Hey darlin'," she said. "Whatcha drinkin'?" Mike (who asked that his last name be withheld) sat with the regulars clustered around her. All day long, they drank. They told jokes, watched movies, played dice, ordered food, listened to music, and drank, and drank, and drank. Mike hadn't had a day like that—a day so fun, so uniquely New York in its mythic union of chance, strangers, and an unfamiliar bar—since before his father's funeral. His sisters were in LA, his mother was in Connecticut, and his father was buried six feet beneath the earth. But his family—as he came to call the folks huddled around the peeling, wooden bar each week—was at B-Side.

For three years, he and Sara spent almost every Sunday at that bar. The ritual seemed like it might last them the rest of their lives. Until one day, as most things in an alcoholic's life invariably do, "family Sundays" fell apart.

Sara disappeared. Like so many of Mike's friends before her, she stopped answering his calls. No one knew where she'd gone. Weeks later, Mike went to a goodbye party for Laura, Sara's sister. He recognized a few regulars from B-Side. Mostly, he saw strangers. He found Laura and nudged her into a quiet corner of the room.

"What happened to your sister?" he asked.

Laura sipped her drink. "We had an intervention," she said. "Sara's in rehab." Laura told him how bad Sara's drinking had become: a shot of vodka in the morning, several at B-Side, beers through the night, more liquor wherever she could find it. She spent everything she had on booze, and wound up homeless. Her mother had come to New York to gather her up, drive her home, and check her into a clinic.

Sara was gone, and no one really knew when—or if—she'd come back.

Mike returned to B-Side after that night. But without Sara, family Sundays weren't the same. The bartenders changed, the music changed—everything but that stubborn old smell of stale beer and citrus, it seemed, had changed. Regulars who'd shown up for years stopped coming in. Mike did too.

By the end of his first afternoon back, the half decade that had passed between them felt like half a day.

Sara explained that she'd lost a job in retail, and dialed up the only place she knew could get her back to work in a matter of days: B-Side. The owner gave her a few shifts, and Sara managed to lock in a regular schedule.

She was sober, and by that point Mike had gotten his habit under control. They brought back family Sundays—family Saturdays, now—and Mike figured if Sara wasn't drinking, he could stop too.

That was ten months ago. Mike hasn't had a drink since. Which brings us to a sunny Saturday on Avenue B, where Sara sits perched atop B-Side's waist-high refrigerator, waiting for Mike to arrive. The door creaks open.

"Heyo!" Sara calls, hopping to the floor.

"What's up?" Mike says, swinging a black plastic bag up onto the bar. He takes the same corner stool he always does.

"What'd you bring me?" Sara asks.

"Well, let's see." He rummages through the bag. "Got some detergent. Few scratchers."

"Nice!"

"Coffee for me, Push Pop for you."

"You want ice?" Sara asks. She scoops a few cubes into a glass and places it in front of him. She cracks open his Starbucks tallboy and pours it in. Mike fishes two quarters from his pocket. "Might be our lucky week," he says. Hunched over the bar, opposite one another, they scrape away at their scratch-offs.

"This thing just fucked me right in the butt," Sara says.

"Ooh, 20 bucks!"

"What!" Sara cries.

"You know I always give you mine," Mike says. He passes her the ticket. "Double-check it for me."

They spend the evening together, Mike rising from his seat only for an occasional trip to the graffiti-covered bathroom, Sara straying from behind the bar only for the same. A delivery guy drops off a beet salad and 15 hot wings, which they split. There Will Be Blood plays on a TV above the bar, and they look up from time to time to watch the violent, alcohol-fueled drama unfold. They crack a few jokes. They re-tell old stories. Mostly, they share silence. Five games of "Exquisite Corpse," two more movies, four ice cream bars, three food deliveries, and six hours later, Sara's shift is up. She digs through a bucket of bills, and tucks her tips into her wallet. She walks toward the door and turns to Mike. "See you Saturday," she says, hugging him.

"See you then."

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