When I was a junior in college, I spent the year studying in England—mostly because I was sick of California sunshine and thought being around buildings from the 1300s would somehow loosen the sticky bay salt from my ribs and make me a real student. In the end, it was more a year of drunken romping through ruddy-faced, bescarved, collegiate pub culture than an immersion into the serious side of scholarship, but that turned out to be just what I needed.
I got my job at the Turf Tavern (aka where Clinton didn’t inhale) in an one-off scene: I walked in to inquire, cold and rain-soaked after being turned down from four pubs for being too American and green. I was immediately sent up to the office of one Darren Kent, the bar’s proprietor, a bulgy-eyed bloat in his mid-30s that looked like he could have been quite the ringer in his day before the waterlogging. The office held exactly three things: oily, stained carpeting, a tall lock box with expensive wines inside, and a cheap black chair, which Darren slowly swiveled around on to face me. He was stroking a cat. Really. First interview question: ” “Do you have a boyfriend? RULE ONE in my pub—don’t tell any of these leeches that get a beer off ya’ that you don’t have a bloke. Fuckers will be ON you.” (I’m transcribing this from my notebook at the time). Second comment: “I run my team like a family, almost TOO much; the Turf motto is incest is best.” I took the job right away. Seemed legit.
What ensued was many months of hording little bottles of tonic from behind the bar, smoking Winstons when we went outside in the freezing weather to steam the pint glasses and dump the lemons and ash, coming back to my room at 4am when I still had 20 pages to write, brewing mulled wine and smelling like cloves for hours, and learning more than I ever cared to about British microbrews and changing casks. And then there were the others; Wilco—the droput stoner rugbyhead, Jon, the American-loving chef who wore cowboy boots to work because “they made him look affluent,” Rob, the gaming-obsessed manager with soft speech and pounds of 80s glam hair, and of course Darren, who claimed to have been a carnie in his youth and to have bedded over 2000 women.
In September, the Turf is hosting a black tie anniversary gala for everyone who has ever worked there, and I cannot get back to Oxford to make it. But oh, if I could, I would.
