Rob Rutar - Jerry’s Bar
MARCH 22, 2020 © Right Here, Right Now.
Jerry's is my child, it’s always going to be my child. I’m lucky to be a part of Yoshitomo and Eleven Eleven but like, I don’t know how to use the registers up there, I don’t know how to cut fish, I’m not proficient on wine. That’s why Dave is where he is and Jeffrey is where he is and I’m smart enough to try and not push to be part of it. I’m happy to be this guy.
I didn’t take it seriously at all, I thought it was…I had no idea what it was becoming because it didn’t seem like anybody else was taking it very seriously. And my thing was I’m going to stay open until they come and close us. And they’re either going to demonize us for being socially irresponsible and not closing or we are going to be the one beacon in the storm that stayed open for everybody and helped everybody get through it. At this point, I’m glad we closed because I hadn’t realized…I don’t think I had proper access to information that allowed it to be as serious as it actually was. You know, it came around to St. Patricks day week which is also our 8th anniversary and we’ve got beer gardens planned, and I’ve got beer reps coming, and I’ve got all these things that are supposed to happen and we’re canceling everything and we’ve got a ten-person maximum. That was kind of a gift to have that one last day. Everybody came up here and people were like “Thank God you’re not closed” and then the next day they were like “Done” you’ve got to be closed. And we’re watching the news, we’re watching press conferences that say 50 or less, you know this was before the ten for St. Patricks Day, and I was like “Fifty we can do, our capacity is 49, we can do this. We can still remain a bar, we can still be here for the community”. It wasn’t about us staying open to try and make money, I mean you have to make money or you have to close the clubhouse, but it’s about the community of people who come up here. There are older folks that come up here every day, well they’re the ones with the biggest risk and it’s…I’m glad we were able to close and take this seriously but I really didn’t want it to have to get to that point.
I can’t stress the word community enough, that’s the thing lacking. It’s like what you said earlier, everybody needs a hug right now but it’s the one thing you can’t give them. Everybody needs their community, everybody is fragmented right now and doesn’t know what direction anything is going and the new normal is not normal. It’s everything but.
It’s like walking through a wild west ghost town. You can tell things use to happen here, you can still hear people's laughter. It’s exciting just to have you guys in here because there's people, a house isn’t a home until people are in it, a bar isn’t a community without the people, it’s just a bay at the end of a strip mall. It doesn’t matter how decorated up it is and how full of booze it is, without people it’s nothing.
I think I’ve fallen prey to the same thing that everybody else has done, which is I don’t know what day it is. I got in the car and turned on the radio and was like “Why are they playing this music? Oh, today’s Sunday? Oh my god, today is Sunday…okay, right on. It’s the same as it was on Tuesday and the same as it was on Friday”. It’s the new normal again, it’s one of those things...The general manager at Envy down the street posted a bunch of pictures from the last couple of weeks and it’s the faces of people that I see every day and everybody is smiling and hugging each other and drinking and having a great time. And I commented on his post and said, “I’m happy that you posted this, but I under-appreciated this time, cause it was something that I had in my life every day”. And to see that realizing that this was this month, it’s not even a year ago, it’s not even a full month ago, and it’s gone…for now and hopefully for not long. But we have to do what we have to do.
Somebody had said, “I feel like we’re in kindergarten and we keep losing recess time because people won’t play by the rules. If everybody plays by the rules eventually we get to go out recess but people aren’t playing by the rules so we keep losing recess time. It will be great to get everybody back together.
I miss people. It’s just the people. A couple of the grumpy old people that come up here and play keno and complain about absolutely everything, and they’re just as important as the 8 o’clock in the morning nurses that just got off work and it’s their Friday night and by noon they’re all completely wasted and playing dirty songs on the Jukebox and dancing to them. It’s the everyday people. It’s my family, it’s the people that work here, they’re my family and I worry about them. I worry about them than I worry about myself. Some of them are on unemployment and some of them aren’t and I don’t know how long before this changes and there’s a lot of people supporting locally right now, but three months from now that might not be happening anymore. And that scares me. At what point does supporting local become watching your own money and realizing like “Every week I buy a $100 dollar gift card to a different restaurant. That's great but now you’ve got $1200 worth of gift cards that we’re sitting on for three months and we don’t know when we can use them. And we could have used that money to buy more supplies, or we should have bought $1000 worth of food that we are now running out of because the grocery stores are empty because the trucks aren’t running anymore because the trucks aren’t allowed to run anymore. And as people get desperate, and I really really hope it doesn’t…I really hope that by the end of next month that this is all wrapped up and we can go back to normal. You can watch people start to get a little bit nervous that society might break down in a little while and that’s really frightening. I don’t think it’s going to be the end of the world but man, it could get way worse before it gets better and that’s scary.
I’ve seen kindness, I’ve seen people slow down and be a little more kind. And again, for right now, people are being kinder and that’s great. You go through the Target check out and you have one item and somebody says, “Please, go ahead of me.” But the checker is having a problem running their card and they apologize, and it’s like man, you know what, everybody needs to just take a breath and give a little patience to everybody and I hope we come out the other end and I hope that we remember.
I hope that we come out of this with a little bit more feeling where we understand that we are a global community. It’s not us and them, and those people over there. Shit we do in Omaha might affect South America, and I hope there is some kindness that comes out of this and a little bit of patience. Maybe we all needed to take a little breath and slow down. That’s what I hope comes out the other end of it.
We were still scheduled for this weekend, on Tuesday we were talking about the fact that if we’re ten only, we’re not going to need two people Friday, Saturday night. We were going to work until we couldn’t work…and then we couldn’t work. The plan was to try and keep the community rolling, so I told everybody to get on unemployment. But there are a few new people that I don’t know will be able to get the benefits from unemployment. I worry about them, and like I said I miss them, they’re my family. We just went out March 1st, we went out for our Christmas party. I mean those people are more important to this place than I am, those people run this. They are the faces people come up to see and again it’s not about money, it’s about friendship and community and taking care of each other. Yeah, it’s difficult to not see those people and not kiss and hug them, and high five them. That’s just every day, we greet each other when we come in and when we leave with hugs and kisses and it’s a different time. If for some reason the world decided to stop selling booze, yeah we would have a speakeasy…hell yeah, we would! But that’s irresponsible. I don’t know if it was from Brittain, I think Brittain finally started closing stuff, but they were like, “People still going out, might as well be coughing in somebody else mouth.” It’s that irresponsible. We got to do what we got to do, and we’ll do it.
Keep your mind busy, if you start thinking about too much about not doing what you normally…I don’t know how to not wok, I don’t know how to not be up here behind the bar, doing paperwork, coming up with new sweatshirts, ordering booze, doing the paperwork and stuff, doing insurance stuff like that…I think being around the people that you can be around, your small community, your partner, your brothers and sisters, something like that.
My wife and I were supposed to go up and see her family in Sioux City this weekend for her nephew's birthday party and we like Skype chatted with each other and talked to each other and it was weird but you have to keep in contact with people. Don’t go down the rabbit hole. It would be super easy to drink a bottle of whiskey a day right now, or do other things and to me, the clarity of the situation is important because it doesn’t go away, the problems don’t just go away because you shut yourself off. It’s really hard to be a bar owner and be like “ You shouldn’t drink…don't drink too much!” (Laughs) There’s a lot of easy ways to cope and compensate yourself with this right now and I think just being aware is a great idea. Being aware of your surroundings and your community and…what can you do to help brighten other people, you’re in the service industry, you’re used to taking care of people. This afternoon my wife and I are going to be baking nine dozen cookies and put them in disposable Tupperware and walk around and just leave them on people's doorsteps in our neighborhood. There are older people that can’t get out. We’ll use gloves and we’ll make cookies and then we’ll wipe off the containers and then drop them off, you know, keep taking care of people and take care of yourself too.
We ripped the house apart and kind of bleached everything to make sure everything is as clean as it can be. Cleaning closets out and going through all the shit you think you’ll get around to doing…now’s the time to get all those little projects done. I’m worried about 3 months from now (Laughs) that’s when you’ve played every board game and you’ve cleaned your closet three times and you're down to your core, “This is all of the stuff that I need”, that's really what I’m worried about is a couple of months from now when the insanity starts to get to people and you’ve run out of all of your chores. As soon as it gets a little bit warmer it’s going to be better because you can get outside and you can go for walks and you can go for a run and a bike ride. Just go wear yourself out. We’re all used to being behind bars 8-10 hours a day running back and forth. You finish up and you’re exhausted and it’s a good tired. Maybe’s the time to get more physically fit. Just burn off all that energy. I don’t know, I have no idea (Laughs)
I grew up in Benson, I’ve lived in Benson. Benson has a huge piece of me. I dreamt about Benson last night, I dreamt about Old Benson. I grew up in Snuffy’s bar which is now The Barley Street. I dreamt about Snuffy’s and being a kid and wondering around Benson. Benson used to be really affluent, popular, and cool in the ’70s and ’80s, and then in the 90’s and 2000’s it kind of became almost blighted and it was very similar traffic like it is now. I mean there were biker bars and thrift stores and that’s about it, and you know, Benson has blossomed and bloomed and exploded, and we’re part of it and we’re proud to be part of it. But it’s weird to see it kind of back to where it used to be. And it’s a little creepy and it’s so calm. I’ll go to see Jeff at the wine bar and I’ll walk up and his vehicle and my vehicle are the only ones on the block.
