...

Skenny

My friends and I used to keep a weekly meeting called Ladies Night Tuesday where the three of us would dress like rich divorcees and walk down to the bar at the bottom of our neighborhood. The barkeep was this 40-something-year-old man with a bowl cut and little round glasses whose name we thought was "Kenny", but apparently he just went by "Skinny" and pronounced it in a manner which wrought confusion upon our minds. Skenny would serve us beers for free and let us pick what was on the bar TVs and we would put on things like ice skating and satanic murder crime shows. One time he took over an entire table to roll us some weird herbal cigarettes, then went outside to smoke them by the dumpster with us while ignoring all other patrons.

Another time, he started off with the usual routine of serving us free beers and whatever snacks he had in the back. We'd barely settled in and let our fur coats slide off our shoulders when he turned off the OPEN sign in the front window and declared, "It's OUR clubhouse now". We thought he was maybe going to off us in the back when he invited us to come see the brewing equipment, but he had also given away so many free beers over the preceding months that I guess we figured we owed him some of our life force at that point.

We often wondered how Skenneth never got fired with the amount of free wheatwater he was doling out—until we showed up one fateful evening to discover he'd been replaced. We were in shock when our checks came—initially that they'd come at all and then at the actual cost of four beers each—and that was the last Ladies Night Tuesday ever to occur.

Pour one (1) free beer out for Skenny and take one (1) doleful puff of your herbal cigarette, the bartending profession lost a real one. (He's still alive, but probably not that employable.)