Bartending Cross-Country During Democracy's Last Call
I will be spending 45 days after the midterms on a road-trip, guest bartending at bars in 39 cities across 22,000 miles, getting the drunken truth about America. Part memoir, part guidebook, the book will get at the universal etiquette surrounding bars, while cataloguing the Great American landscape as seen from her roadways.
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It's reference to a novel you've never read! It's also the whole kit and caboodle, which, when you discover that caboodle means "everything in the group," makes you wonder what the hell "kit" is doing in the phrase. ANYWAY, it's Drinking & Driving (the book and audiobook), All The World Is Lost, Prospect Falls, Black Horse, The So-So Gatsby, and We Are Monsters.
Nightlife has never really come back after COVID, not the way it was before lockdown. A whole generation of kids were delayed by two years of the joys of learning how to exist in bars and nightclubs, and they're not catching on very fast. Probably because they tend to drink less than their older siblings and aunts and uncles did when they were their age. So what does this mean for the industry? How do we get butts on stools? How is the industry coping on a national scale, with theme nights, board games, pinball, non-alcoholic cocktail programs?
That's partly what I'm setting out to discover. What unites us as an industry, what solutions there are out there on the road, hiding out in all of the dive bars that no single bartender has worked. Over 45 days, I will guest-bartended in 39 cities, learning what works where and why, while taking the political temperature of the nation during what we can only hope is its midlife crisis between the midterm elections and a new Congress being sworn in.
I've already chronicled my year pandemic bartending in "Werewolves Of Lockdown," which was published by Evergreen Review to some acclaim, and my non-fiction piece, "F*** You, I'm Not A Millennial," has been read by almost a million people between its appearances on Medium and HuffPost. I've published two novellas and am finishing the third novel in my "Occupational Trilogy," a series of books about working at a pawnshop, a CD store, and, finally, a bar.
Service workers of all ages, the vast number of Americans who have at one point been in the industry, and alcoholics of all ages.
Born in Philadelphia and raised in South Jersey, I've been writing novels, novellas, and non-fiction for over twenty years, and living in New York City for nearly that long.
The publishers will be visible after the campaign has ended.
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The author hasn't added any updates, yet.
Pat - Looking forward to seeing you in Kansas City!
🚗 🍺
on Oct. 14, 2026, 11:36 p.m.
Don't drink and drive