Behind the bar: Triad bartenders recount ridiculous and unbelievable things they’ve seen

These days, my boss is too preoccupied with running a business to tell too many stories from his time as a bartender and miscreant in New Orleans. But in the five years I’ve worked alongside Brian Clarey, I’ve heard at least a dozen hilarious and usually wildly inappropriate stories involving late nights of inebriation. None are fit for print, and most wouldn’t be believed anyway.

Unless, that is, you’ve worked as a bartender, too. Because anyone who’s bartended long enough is filled with these kinds of tales, even if they didn’t spend years behind a bar working the third shift in the Big Easy.

As a booze columnist, I often hear these absurd and ridiculous recounts once my notebook is closed. I’ve done and seen some stupid things when I’m off the clock, but my anecdotes pale in comparison to what industry folks witness while pulling their shifts.

Here, a few Triad bartenders and owners agreed to share some of the good, the bad and the downright foolish things they’ve seen.

All of them — even the most forthcoming — have held back some of the more obscene incidents, but still be warned that many of their memories should at least be rated PG-13. Better yet, these bar stories are probably best suited for those of legal drinking age.

Here’s a sampling of the sorts of things that happened in and around Triad bars in the last decade or so. It’s by no means anything approaching an exhaustive oral history. Instead, we invite other local bartenders to share their own yarns in the comment section of the online version of this piece.

Tiffany Howell: Owner at Burke Street Pub (W-S)

When Tiffany Howell joined the team at Burke Street Pub in 2005, she’d already spent a few years working in local bars. She’s been at the Irish bar ever since, save for a two-year period when she left to finish her degree, and in the beginning of 2015, she bought the pub.

One of Howell’s favorite stories happened a decade ago, in the summer of 2006 while she worked at the pub’s upstairs and outdoor beach bar one weekend. A beloved customer pulled himself up on the side of the fence around the patio where Howell was closing up, to where she could see him from the nose up. He offered to snag her a hot dog from a vendor nearby and she declined, but it’s what he said next that stuck with her.

“He said, ‘I love you; I love this pub,’ and then he said, ‘Burke Street Pub is to Winston-Salem what Disney World is to America.’”

And then he fell off the fence.

Later that night, he wrote it on his MySpace page. Earlier this year, Howell used it for branding, putting it on T-shirts and attributing it to “BSP,” which are the man’s initials as well as the pub’s.

The clearest indication that Burke Street is akin to Disney World is another customer. Howell said this one is fond of showing up in full costume, be it a monkey suit, Santa Claus getup or a beer-wench outfit. He’s affectionately known as “our class clown,” and is known for “autographing every hard surface he can find” and returning the next day to paint over his penmanship.

Burke Street Pub is home to three national championship teams for a quarter-bouncing game that Bud Light used to sponsor — teams traveled to Las Vegas and Cancun to bring back $25,000 each in winnings, hanging their oversized checks inside the bar. Other patrons have left things behind too, though somewhat less intentionally, including underwear, bras, socks, wallet photos of their kids and, oddly enough, eye patches. One guy almost had to leave a front tooth.

Howell remembers him ordering a beer right at the corner of the bar by the taps, and a false front tooth fell out into the motor of the cooler.

“My tooth! My tooth!” he exclaimed.

Howell could hear it spinning in the motor, but she managed to unplug the thing and force the tooth out. The man, grateful, headed for the bathroom and stuck it back in, seemingly undamaged.

Howell prefers not to dwell on the more unsavory stories — she tries to forget them, she said, and she doesn’t want to give the industry a bad name. But she did offer one other inoffensive memory; one busy Saturday night, she looked up to see the bar’s big Altoids-dispensing machine bobbing its way towards the front door amidst the crowd. The staff quickly stopped the man, who Howell said was just being silly and seeing if anyone would notice.

Now he’s one of her employees.

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Pam Cooper: Bartender at College Hill Sundries (GSO)

For bartenders like Pam Cooper — who’s been working at College Hill Sundries for 14 years, since she turned 21 — the stories start to blend together. It’s easy to take small quirks for granted, such as someone skateboarding through the neighborhood dive bar or two dogs showing up unattended but finding adoring patrons.

But a few moments still stand out to “Mama Bear,” as some call Cooper. Like the night a guy put money in the jukebox right before close, and then demanded his money back when the bar shut down and his songs hadn’t played. Cooper told him he could come back the next day to hear them, and continued closing up. When she finished and locked the bar and left with a coworker, they immediately heard a large crash from the front of the bar — the guy had thrown giant rocks through the front windows.

Cooper ended up at the dive until 6 a.m. that morning, waiting until someone could come board up the front of the bar. Next time, she said, she’d just give the jerk a few bucks out of her tips.

Other stories that weren’t humorous at the time are funny in retrospect, like a baby possum that would crawl into the bar through a broken drain. Cooper remembers looking over and seeing it atop a trash can inside the bar and everyone — herself included — freaking out.

Cooper once saw a girl giving a guy head in the women’s bathroom (and promptly kicked them out). And she recalls a former regular who started literally ankle-biting women. He bit her once too, she said, but she just yelled at him.

Cooper seemed unfazed as she retold the ridiculous stories, adding that she started the job as a “nice hippie chick” but gained friends and a better intuition about people and their behavioral tendencies behind the bar. She still loves the job and cherishes the connections she’s made there, even becoming old-school pen-and-paper pen pals with a former regular.

She’s seen scary things at the bar including someone suffering a seizure in the middle of a karaoke number, weird things like a Dumpster full of mattresses across the street going up in flames, silly things like a squirrel that hung out on the back patio that regulars dubbed Pitter Patter and renamed Splitter Splatter when a car ran it over, and sweet things like people who moved away returning over the holidays or seeing couples who met at the bar later celebrating their engagements there.

“I know there are other dive bars in town, but this is the dive bar for me,” she said, adding that if she didn’t work at College Hill, it’d still be her bar of choice.

Jerry Cooper (no relation): Bartender at Hoots, formerly the Black Lodge and Single Brothers (W-S)

“Don’t worry,” Jerry Cooper said, directing his comments at past patrons. “Your secrets are safe with me.”

Cooper joked that the interview should end there to protect the drunken behavior of his fellow Winston-Salem residents, especially given what he’s witnessed over the years as a door guy and barback at Single Brothers and later as a bartender at the reclusive Black Lodge and local brewery Hoots.

But he still shared a couple anecdotes.

The most bizarre and entertaining comes from Single Brothers, where he would catch men pissing in all sorts of places they shouldn’t be. Once he found a guy relieving himself in a flower pot right near the picnic tables alongside the bar. Cooper said he grabbed the guy by the back of the neck and forced him out of the bar with his member still swinging in the breeze. The guy tried to act like it wasn’t a big deal, naturally.

Another time, at the Black Lodge, Cooper “essentially put this dude in a full nelson and dragged him through the bar” in order to break up a fight, while a coworker kept chatting with patrons as if nothing were happening. The two guys fighting were friends with each other, and Cooper too, but he still needed to kick one of them out. Once outside, the guy tried to flip Cooper and get the better of him, but instead Cooper ended up slamming him through the bar’s sandwich board.

The guy landed in the nearby gutter, and later needed a medical boot on his foot, but he came back later and apologized to Cooper for his behavior.

One more story before Cooper closed his mouth, a story well known to anyone familiar with the Black Lodge. Somebody, or likely two people in the act of coitus, broke the sink off the bathroom wall. It took forever to repair, and the folks at the bar put up a picture of the destruction with the date of the damage, which happened to be near Sept. 11, and the words “Never forget.” People added text implying conspiracy theories and an inside job, and the Black Lodge put up lights similar to those previously memorializing the World Trade Center attack and vowed that: “We will rebuild.”

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Danielle Bull: Owner at Bull’s Tavern (W-S)

featuring her employees Greg Gerald (formerly of Ziggy’s) and Nate Tomkinson

The best story anyone told may come from Nate Tomkinson, the door guy at Bull’s Tavern in downtown Winston-Salem. It was a Wednesday, and early, too, when a woman likely in her mid forties showed up with some regular heavy drinkers and started knocking back Michelob Ultras.

At one point Tomkinson turned back and realized the woman was drunk, so he brought her some water. Moments later she disappeared, though her friends remained, which worried Tomkinson. Her friends ran up and down Fourth Street looking for her while Tomkinson searched the bar, but couldn’t find her.

Eventually she turned up and Tomkinson could discern what had happened.

The woman had made her way into the storage room somehow and puked on the floor by the mop sink. Then she grabbed a fire extinguisher and sprayed the vomit and herself before passing out on top of the mess she made.

It took forever to clean up, Tomkinson said, and the experience taught him a valuable lesson: don’t prejudge patrons, because anyone can be an out-of-control day drinker.

Sitting across from him and Bull’s Tavern owner Danielle Bull at a local bottle shop, Greg Gerald offered a story from his days at Ziggy’s in Winston-Salem that may be even more outlandish.

The music venue and bar was hosting a Wake Forest University fraternity party when he saw five guys go into the bathroom together, a suspicious move that suggested possible drug activity. But when Gerald followed he was shocked to find the young men with their pants down standing in a circle, measuring their members in front of each other.

“No no, you measure from the base!” he remembers hearing. The students defended their actions by saying it wasn’t what it might look like, adding that they were following through on a bet. Gerald wishes he could un-see it.

Bull remembers plenty of good stories, too, including one Halloween when a guy teetered over the bar, ready to puke behind it when a bartender batted him in the face “like a volleyball” to keep him from puking into the ice container. She saved the ice but knocked him and his spew onto three patrons by accident.

Tomkinson followed with a story of a woman reaching up a man’s shorts while they sat at a high four-top with two friends in the middle of the bar. He walked up, trying not to draw attention to her tugging, and asked her to stop. The woman played dumb, but when he insisted she finally relented. Things went back to normal, Tomkinson said, and the four continued ordering drinks.

That’s nothing compared to Bull’s singing mime story, about a woman who appeared on “America’s Got Talent” and would show up and ruin open-mic night. Once the woman sang a “horrific” rendition of Alicia Keys while she had a stuntman lift her up, Bull said, all while Brian Duffy and the camera crew from “Bar Rescue” happened to be in Bull’s Tavern for an after-work drink.

Once they kicked out a guy only to see him strip to his boxers and start screaming in the pouring rain out front before being tackled by the police. They’ve found a child’s birth certificate, Christmas gifts, at least four child-support checks, a hunting license and three iPhone 6s the same day the model came out, Bull said. Tomkinson found panties on the floor before 9 p.m. once, and saw an entire purse emptied into a toilet bowl. Gerald said he’d seen “an upper decker” in a toilet at Ziggy’s, but that’s nothing compared to the time they called the cops on someone who’d crapped his pants and police in two cruisers argued over who would have to take him in before staff helped wrap the man’s legs in trash bags for safer transport.

They’ve witnessed countless faceplants, and Tomkinson once saw a bike cop, likely in his fifties, flying down Fourth Street, hit his front brakes and fly over the handlebars to tackle someone in one swift motion — like Superman — to break up a fight, he said. They saw someone else get arrested and placed in the back of a cop car only to kick out the rear windshield and escape, running down the street in cuffs.

They’ve seen plenty of women partially and accidentally topless, especially after booze-heavy street festivals. They retold a story of two women coming in after a tanning convention and each putting both of their hands down a man’s pants. Bull saw a man get down on one knee and propose one night when the lights came on to end the evening. And she’s overheard too many bad dates, especially Tinder hookups, than she’d like to admit.

Bull’s been in the game long enough that she pays “puke money” — $20 to clean up vomit, a policy she instituted after she tried to clean up chunky vom on the wall outside the bathroom and started hurling herself when she felt some land on her new pattern tights. All in front of customers, who also saw her tear the tights off and chuck them into the puke pile.

There are other stories, many of them, like the time early on Bull had to kick a bathroom door in on someone filming a sex act who refused to stop or leave when she caught them. But those might not belong in print.

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Chris Flathers and Trevor Austin: Co-owners of Stumble Stilskins (GSO)

Chris Flathers’ bar stories predate the founding of Stumble Stilkskins, the downtown Greensboro sports bar he opened with Trevor Austin in late 2004. Like the time Jon Bon Jovi was hanging out at the old Rhino Club and Flathers caught a woman stealing beer from the back.

But most of the memories the friends offered took place inside their own venue, especially in the early days. The night Austin found a man pissing all the way down a back hallway and pushed him into it with a foot to the behind. The night a guy jumped on a table, performing an Ozzy Osborne song that blared from the jukebox while someone flashed the lights inside, though they can’t remember how exactly the man wound up out cold on the sidewalk.

The night a woman squatted to pee into a trash can in the men’s room, or that they saw a guy dressed as Mario for Halloween stimulating a woman — probably with his big fake Mario glove still on, they said — or the woman who flashed them repeatedly for shots for a year straight, not realizing they’d been reciprocating with non-alcoholic shots they called “Cotton Candy.”

They stopped each other short of telling several stories, or offered highlights from others like a woman being told to get off a table and instead jumping from table to table before mis-stepping and tipping the table vertically, then hitting the floor. There’s a host of stories that recall the Mario incident sans costumes.

But others are a little more innocent, like the old days when Flathers, Austin and other area bar owners and ’tenders played a friendly game of thievery, stealing items from each other’s venues including distinctive tap handles and wall art and mounting in their own establishments, seeing how long it would take someone to notice. Once someone nabbed an alien-shaped piñata Flathers had brought in from the old Rhino, and periodically sent him Polaroids of the alien in various bars. In one, the alien posed smoking a cigarette, but eventually it came home.

Chris Flathers and Trevor Austin are older now, and not behind the bar as much as they used to be. There’s a hint of nostalgia in their voices, for the early days when they could get away with harmless mischief like the cordial thefts, sort of like Tiffany Howell’s Altoids story. I’m sure the two have stories that mirror the debauchery Brian Clarey’s told me about on his smoke breaks, or the secrets Jerry Cooper is going to keep to himself. But if you want those stories out of any of these folks, you might need to buy them a couple of drinks first.