A Clear Head After 30 Years of Drinking
In the beach apartment, things got real bad.
“In the mornings, I’d start out with Bacardi and Coke in order to ‘sober up,’ and then, around noon, I’d switch over to vodka and tonic. Did this for about two years, following my divorce, until the pain in my kidneys got to a point where I had a hard time sitting down. If I went to sit down, it was like knives coming into my kidneys.â€
Steve Brodie draws deeply on a cigarette, pauses, then continues:
“I reached a point, and I don’t know exactly how it happened, because I’d been a drunk for years, that the voice went off in the head: ‘This is it. You’d better do something, dude. Or it’s Ivy Lawn for you.’ â€
But not before one last stupendous drunk, involving a “night at a bar with a woman†that led to 28 days in the slammer. A rather cold on-ramp to the sober life.
That was nine years ago, at age 43. Brodie’s been straight since.
“Now, my ex-wife respects me,†he says, working up a laugh. “And that’s quite a feat.â€
Although he’s sober, Brodie handles more booze today than he ever saw as a drunk. Jim Beam. Jack Daniels. Cutty Sark. Absolut. Starting at 9 a.m. weekdays.
Brodie is the bartender at Ventura’s most notorious, most richly storied fight-a-night oil patch bar: The Derrick Room, on North Ventura Avenue. Tucked discreetly behind the bar is Brodie’s beverage stash, cases of the elixir that sees him through the day: Diet Coke.
But things get odder still. After work, Brodie attends school to become a counselor of drunks and addicts.
This is his second year of course work at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Last year he maintained a 3.5 grade-point average in classes with titles such as “Dynamics and Models of Alcohol and Drugs.â€
“I like it,†he says. “I just like people. And I knew I wanted to do something with people. I’ve been there, have a clear head after 30 years of booze. I can help someone who wants help. As for the bartending, I like that too. It’s comfortable to me. I like the camaraderie.â€
Brodie takes another drag on his cigarette, pauses a moment.
“We’re all living this life, you know, and we’re just doing it different ways. Everybody has a story to tell.â€
*
Brodie’s starts in Albion, N. Y., a tiny rural upstate town known for winters of Siberian cold.
At 12, Brodie was leaving the house at 4:30 a.m. to run across a tundra-like field and up a hillside into woods to check 112 trap lines for muskrat. Returning, he’d commence his newspaper route, only later in the day to “skin out†the muskrats and sell their pelts to Rochester, N.Y., furriers for 75 cents apiece. For a kid, it was big money. “But what I really remember is the mornings, checking the traps,†Brodie says. “It was so quiet in all that cold air.â€
The ethic around the house, clearly, was to keep busy. His father owned the local flour mill, and the family joke was, through Brodie’s physician grandfather on his father’s side and mortician grandfather on his mother’s side, “We had everybody coming and going.â€
That’s how it seemed, at least the first time that Brodie, in the kitchen, tried a nip of port wine. He was a teen-ager. It was his grandmother’s wine, for drinking and cooking. It made him a little high, a feeling he would come to like.
In high school, Brodie would meet his future wife and have a tough time getting sufficiently good grades to stay on the football team. He would leave the cold to attend the University of Southern Mississippi. He’d enter the military and travel to Lebanon and the North Pole. Then, after returning to Upstate New York, he would marry his sweetheart and attend the Rochester Institute of Technology.
It seemed, for a while, that Brodie was trying and enjoying some success at everything: He and his wife, while having three children, would develop rental properties. He’d dabble in insurance. And then, through most of the ‘60s, Brodie would wear Hart, Schaffner & Marx suits as a stockbroker.
But he was drinking too much, and by his mid-30s knew that he was “a drunk.†His wife would argue with him about it, beg him to stop. He wouldn’t.
The new life was in California. Brodie’s sister, a Sherman Oaks public school teacher, had always promoted the place. Brodie came out on Valentine’s Day, 1973, when the temperature in Rochester, N.Y., was 5 degrees below zero and in L.A. a balmy 68. He kicked around, went home, and announced: “We’re going.†They came to live in east Ventura.
Brodie got his first taste of the oil patch culture back then. He became a salesman of industrial chemicals to oil field businesses out along Ventura Avenue beyond The Derrick Room.
Yet Brodie would look for other things to occupy himself. Within three years, in 1976, he found a bartending job at the Oxnard Elks lodge. His title was bar manager, though he had never tended bar before. It’s not very difficult to mix drinks,†he says. “What makes a bartender good is being able to listen to people.â€
At the same time, he went into business for himself, starting Ventura Barbecue Co., to this day a thriving catering service. Much would come together in this venture, as it joined two of Brodie’s loves: food and people.
Brodie recalls that a formative culinary experience occurred at a stag party thrown for him just before his wedding back in Upstate New York: “My friend’s grandmother was in the kitchen showing me how to make red sauce. That’s where I learned how to take the tomatoes and grind them up, to take my time, to get it just right. At my stag party, this woman taught me about food what is true of so many good things: You have to put love in it. Love in it.â€
*
Brodie works the Tuesday-Thursday shift at The Derrick Room. Most Thursdays at noon he’s got a barbecue going in the parking lot.
This is, however, not standard restaurant fare: You can’t buy a rack of ribs or a tri-tip sandwich. You may only take a portion of whatever’s being cooked, then go inside and order a beer or a drink. The food’s on the house.
“It’s fun, and I enjoy it,†Brodie says. “This is why we do it.â€
A knot from among The Derrick Room’s “100 or so†loyal patrons contributes the ingredients, fuel, equipment and chefly efforts, making it a community project of sorts.
In this interview, held on a Wednesday night, Brodie is mindful of time because he needs to get home to his Ventura house “to parboil 15 or so racks of ribs†in preparation for the next day’s barbecue. The racks, as a result, need only a quick “browning off on the grill†before serving to Derrick Room patrons.
Clearly, parboiling more than 100 ribs at home at night exceeds most employment standards for job dedication. Brodie is the first to acknowledge this.
“The things we do, the fact that the crowd is a bunch of regulars, it gives me the sense: This is our joint. We’re all here together.â€
The Derrick Room, however, wasn’t always such a warm and fuzzy kind of place. Brodie recalls one of his first nights on the job, when a male patron pulled a knife on a woman. “The woman threw a karate chop to his hand, knocked the knife out, and then placed it on the table. He says, ‘I’ll kick your ass’ and advances toward her. What does she do but beat the living hell out of him. That was one tough woman.â€
Not long after that, Brodie himself became the target of an attack.
“I heard about it because I didn’t see it,†he says. “I’m busy tending bar, and this guy comes around behind the bar and starts walking up behind me carrying a bottle--he’s lifting the bottle to smash it into my head when some patrons jump him.â€
Brodie, the budding therapist, posits: “There was something bugging the guy, you know?â€
*
It turned out the attacker’s mother had died that day. He returned the following day to apologize to Brodie, who continues, to this day, to serve him as a Derrick Room regular. “He’s a good guy,†Brodie says.
Brodie has been less lucky in the face of violence that surrounds alcohol. In fact, he is missing his left eye from it. “I was sucker-punched from a drunk sergeant while in the service,†he recalls. “I was in the hospital, with a staph infection, for six months. The eye just doesn’t work.â€
The dead eye is hardly apparent to those who are not told of it. Indeed, it is a key part of Brodie’s warm, trusting countenance, a face that seems at once familiar and neighborly.
His kids figured it out first. When they call their father on the phone and hear his hello, their first word is “Beav?â€
“It’s true. They think I’m The Beaver,†he says, referring to the late ‘50s-early ‘60s TV character.
Brodie turns serious pressing out a cigarette butt, noting how “addictions are weird, this is my next one to conquer.â€
“My children would like for me not to be there, at The Derrick Room, I know that,†he says. “But they want me to be happy. And I am. Also, they respect me. And that is the thing that makes me happiest of all. As big as a screw-up as I was, they’ve been super. I love them tremendously.â€
He pauses, notes that it’s pushing 10 p.m., that he’ll soon need to be home amid his extensive cookbook collection parboiling the ribs and perhaps watching a video from his sizable John Wayne/Gary Cooper/Humphrey Bogart collection.
“I should have been dead years ago,†he says, lighting up one more.
“Bartending is a dead-end, go-nowhere job, I know that.
“People say to me: ‘Steve, how can you do it? The people there, they must drive you nuts.’
“Well, they don’t. I like the people. I like the atmosphere.â€
He repeats: “It’s our joint.â€
Brodie packs up his UCSB grade reports, and a big smile opens up across his face, throwing a happy light across the dinner table.
The Beav. At once adult, at once childlike. At once experienced, with a bit of wear; at once innocent, with more than a bit of hope.
“I’m 52,†says the barkeep who listens, the cook who makes love an ingredient. “Things are pretty much where I’d like them to be, I’m doing what I want. The fact is, I like to hear other people’s stories. Because, really, it’s simple: We’re all just struggling to survive, to do what we can to survive.â€
