Next Stop: The Drunk of Sullivan's Island 🇺🇸

A guy walks into a bar... God help us all.

I'm a food and travel writer from the shores of Lake Erie, now based in Berlin. I attempt to send out weekly essays on my latest mishaps and travels around the globe and in the kitchen. If you would like to support my work, please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend or acquaintance (I’m not picky).

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A quick note…

This will be the final newsletter of the year. If you’re new-ish here, you can catch up on previous newsletters over here and you can find everything I’ve published over the past year in a little Twitter thread I threw together.

Thanks for subscribing, reading, comment, and all that jazz. It truly means something to me.

And now onwards to Sullivan’s Island.

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Melanie and I were on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina for a wedding. Her parents dropped us off on their way into Charleston one September afternoon. We had a couple of hours to kill before dinner and figured we’d walk around the area for a bit.

“A bit” didn’t last long. There’s not much to see, so we head back towards a bar we spotted earlier––Dunleavy’s Pub, complete with the obligatory Irish flag waving in the sea air. We start to walk in, but stop at a sign posted on the door.

“Cash only.”

Cash only? What is this, 2019 Germany?

Suddenly, a man throws his arm around me during our moment of hesitation.

“You going in?” he asks.

“Thinking about it,” we answer.

“No need to think about it,” he says, patting me on the back. “Let’s get a drink.”

On paper and in retrospect, this man already sounds like a drunk. But there was something about the moment that led us both to believe that this man was the bar owner; a friendly, neighborhood guy wanting to show a couple of out-of-towners a nice time.

It didn’t take long for, let’s call him Matt, to dissuade us of that illusion. We grabbed an open high-top table in the center of the bar. Business was steady. Matt leaned against that table like it was the only thing keeping him from tumbling into a grave. Every other word slurred out of his mouth like molasses slowly falling off the end of a spoon. He was probably a decent high school quarterback and it’s been downhill ever since.

A waitress took our order. We each got a drink. One of us didn’t need it.

The waitress left the bill on the table. Matt immediately slid it away from us, over to his side.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. Melanie and I shrugged. We didn’t mind taking a free drink off this guy.

Matt repeatedly asked us about ourselves; the same questions over and over. What do we do? Where are we from? What’re we doing here? Clearly nothing was penetrating the fog surrounding his boozy brain, so Melanie decided to have some fun at his expense. Ironically, we had recently talked about fabricating our life story whenever we meet strangers, tired of the same old rigmarole: “Oh, Germany? How long have you been there? Why Germany? Do you speak Germany? Will you move back? Do you kids?”

“We’re from Dallas,” she said without a hint of a southern accent.

“Dallas?” he said. “I’m from Oklahoma.”

We also admitted to being in town for some cocaine because our fictitious children were with their grandparents.

“She’s a wild one!” he whispers into my ear, buckled over in laughter.

But then we turned the tables and learned a bit about Matt. It sounded like he and the Mrs. had been having a rough go of it. I can’t imagine why. This is, after all, a man who spotted a table of senior citizens having a birthday party and continually grumbled about how he was going to throw one of them through a window.

Oh, yeah. That happened. Buried the lede there a bit, didn’t I?

One of the folks who apparently caught his ire had an arm cast. That didn’t stop him from staring them down, talking about how he’s going to throw them through a window.

You might be wondering if we said something. Truthfully, it was too preposterous to take seriously. Plus I’m pretty sure a light breeze would’ve knocked Matt down at that point. I think the only reason he managed to stay upright was because he kept wrapping his arm around me, shaking me like I was an old college buddy. I doubt he had an ounce of self-awareness. His face was mere inches away from mine when he spoke. If he had COVID, I was getting it. And this seemed like the kind of guy who would go to a bar knowing full well that he had COVID.

After finishing our drinks, we make it clear we’re leaving and start looking for our exit. That’s when Matt starts to wander away, first to the bar, and then outside.

He left the bill on the table.

“I’m not paying for that guy,” Melanie says, waving over a waitress. We explain we weren’t actually with Matt and she apologizes profusely.

“He was in here earlier…” she said, shaking her head. I can imagine what she’s thinking. “I’m really sorry about that.”

At this point we let her know that he was threatening under his breath to throw some AARP members through a window and that he admitted to stealing a pair of glasses that were now left on the table. The waitress sighed and took the glasses over to the bar along with the check.

While waiting for our new check, I spotted Matt hanging around one of the tables outside. He looked like he was trying to work his way into another conversation. We decided that Matt’s wife recently kicked him out or left him, so he drinks himself stupid and tries to get others to pay for it.

Before we can leave, Matt waddles back in. He pats me on the back, but doesn’t say anything. He just bounces off the narrow hallway towards the bathroom.

“Perfect,” I think. “That’s a multi-minute pee, at least.”

Plenty of time to make a break for it. We pay, we leave, and silently wish Mrs. Matt all the best. She made the right call.

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