A decade ago, during an otherwise quiet day shift at a neighborhood bar in Brooklyn, a man came in, ordered a shot of whiskey from me, and announced that he was the Angel of Death. But that wasn’t his most disturbing utterance. This was: “You were kind to me when I walked in,” he said, “and you will come to regret that kindness.”
I’ve written elsewhere about that day, and about those words. Then I filed them away in my memory and have seldom revisited them these last 10 years. But I thought about them often as I watched Baby Reindeer, Richard Gadd’s Netflix series, last week. (Note: spoilers ahead.)
Gadd plays Donny Dunn, a bartender and comedian who is stalked by Martha Scott, a deeply troubled customer (portrayed with virtuosic dimensionality by Jessica Gunning). The stalking stirs up an earlier trauma in Donny’s life and jeopardizes his relationships, his work, his home, his sense of self.
The dramatic action is set in motion in the London pub—conspicuously called The Heart—where Donny works. Martha walks in and takes a seat at the bar. She appears to be on the verge of crying; Donny feels sorry for her. He asks for her order; she tells him she can’t afford anything. “How about I give you a cup of tea on the house?” he asks, and there’s an instant shift in Martha’s face and body language: Someone is being kind to her. And Donny will (mostly, complexly) come to regret his kindness.
Although the show has generated considerable commentary—most of it positive, some not—close attention has not been paid to the detail of Donny’s occupation. And it is a crucial detail—because bartending is an office that makes its holder a captive audience in a way that few other jobs do. A Netflix ad for the series depicts Martha at the bar; in front of her, a miniature Donny is trapped like an insect inside a dirty, overturned pint glass. Salted peanuts lie scattered to one side of the glass, a coaster printed with a reindeer to the other side. The imagery is unambiguous: The pub is the locus of Donny’s entrapment—The Heart of it, you might say.
“There’s a power dynamic, often tacit, sometimes explicit, between customer and server, and this is where the notion of the bartender as the person in charge can falter.”
In all my bartending jobs, my supervisors invariably told me some version of this: In the little world of the pub, I was in charge. I liked to think that was true, but I’m not so sure; a bartender’s authority is limited by the unpredictable variables that might arise during a shift. When I was on the working side of the bar, I was subject to a particular kind of confinement, both circumscribed and on display—like Donny inside that pint glass. And I knew that being a bartender meant that I could easily be found, should anyone wish to find me, in a place of work with virtually unrestricted access. (I became lazy about making plans with friends when I was a bartender—after all, they knew where, and usually when, to find me. I, however, couldn’t just walk into their workplaces—say, a kindergarten classroom, a publishing company office, a restaurant kitchen—when the mood struck me to see them.)
As Donny and Martha demonstrate, the relationship between bartender and patron cultivates an unusual sense of person-to-person intimacy—real, illusory, performative, sometimes all three. This may depend on what kind of bartender one is. I always wanted to be the kind of bartender I liked best: sincerely friendly but not obsequious, genuinely interested in the people to whom I served drinks but careful not to get too personal. Even though he sees his work at the bar as “a dead-end job,” Donny comes across as that kind of bartender. Even though he comes to regard his sympathy for Martha as patronizing, he engages her, asks her about herself, and means it. (I remember the late Gaz Regan, in one of his “Mindful Bartending” workshops, affirming my conviction that if you ask a customer How are you? you must wait for their answer, and listen to it).
There’s a power dynamic, often tacit, sometimes explicit, between customer and server, and this is where the notion of the bartender as the person in charge can falter. Donny is not alone—in the series, and in the real world, too—in his sense that his bartending job is meaningless. He learns quickly that Martha is a lawyer, and only later that she is a disgraced lawyer. No matter: She is, or was, a white-collar professional, and he is in the service industry. Teri, the trans woman with whom Donny has an on-and-off romantic relationship, is also a professional—a therapist—and unabashedly dismissive of his day job. “Nobody wants to work at a bar,” she tells him. “What’s the plan? The big picture? Where do you want to be in 10 years’ time?”
By the final episode, viewers might have the same questions. Baby Reindeer’s ending mirrors its beginning. We’re back in a bar—not The Heart, another bar. There’s Donny—but now he’s on the customer side. And now he’s the one who’s crying—and who, having left his wallet behind, has no money to pay for his drink. A soft, familiar look crosses the bartender’s face. He feels sorry for Donny. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “It’s on me.” The scene is tender and chilling at once. Of course, it doesn’t mean that Donny would go on to stalk the barman who’d shown him compassion. But if he wanted to, he’d know where to find him.
