Chapter 12 Finn
Finn
It was Saturday. I’d been wandering aimlessly around the bar for two hours. It wasn’t even one o’clock.
The door rattled, keys jingled, then Mark stepped inside.
I was slumped over the bar, staring at a blank legal pad like it held the secrets to the universe.
It held three words: “GET MORE CUSTOMERS.”
“You texted our emergency code. Did something catch on fire?”
He tossed his phone onto the counter, the text from me bright on his screen.
Blarney Boy: 69. STAT. I’m at the bar.
Ordinarily, I would laugh. The preteen boy living rent free in my head would snicker at sixty-nine being our unique abbreviation for 911. The adult adolescent would chuckle at the nickname Mark had given me on our one and only failed date.
But in that moment, I barely had the heart to cock an eyebrow.
Mark flopped down across from me at the bar.
“I smell coffee.”
I looked up from my phone to catch him staring at me, his “concerned father” face taking up far too much rugged real estate.
Without so much as a nod, I turned, snatched a mug from below the back bar, and filled it with hours-old coffee. Then, because Mark and I knew far too much about each other, I dropped in two spoonfuls of sugar, about a gallon of half and half, and one Werther’s Original.
Yeah, Mark was weird like that.
He caught the mug when I slid it toward him, took a long sip, then sighed.
“I think I just caught diabetes watching you drink that shit.”
He grinned over the rim. “You can’t catch diabetes.”
“Says the guy drinking an entire island nation’s sugar output in one mug.”
He took another long pull, his eyes dancing at our familiar banter.
“Okay,” I said, leaning across the bar and pulling my pad toward me while simultaneously clicking my pen about a thousand times. “We need a plan.”
“We have a plan. Open the doors, serve good food and drinks, and let word of mouth do the work.”
“Word of mouth takes months. We have maybe six weeks of operating capital before we’re in trouble. We didn’t even net enough last night to pay for Rod’s salary, much less the others.”
“So we speed up the word of mouth.”
“How?”
Mark shrugged. “Marketing?”
“That’s not a plan; that’s a concept.”
“It’s a start.” He pulled out his phone. “What about social media? Maya’s been posting—”
“Three times. She’s posted three times over the course of a month. We have forty-seven followers, and six of those are accounts owned by . . . wait for it . . . Maya herself.”
“Okay, so we post more.”
“And say what? ‘Hey, we exist, please come drink here’?”
“Isn’t that what all marketing is? And isn’t that precisely our message?”
I scribbled “post more” onto my pad, then dropped my head to the bar with a thunk. “We’re going to fail.”
“We’re not going to fail.”
“Our grand opening was last night, and in case you missed the corporate-wide memo I sent earlier today, it wasn’t exactly grand. We had maybe thirty people total. Thirty. On a Friday night in Ybor. The ice cream shop had more foot traffic.”
“They put gummies in their mix.”
“No, they don’t,” I groaned against the wood.
“What if we had a pot gummy dessert? I bet the boys would—”
“Mark, please. I’m serious.”
I heard him sigh right before his hand fell onto my shoulder. “Finn, relax. It was one night. People don’t know we exist yet.”
“Right!” I lifted my head. “People don’t know we exist. How do we make them know we exist?”
Mark thought for a moment. “We could do some events?”
I scribbled “events.”
“What kind of events?”
“I don’t know. What do other bars do? Game nights? Trivia? Theme nights?”
I wrote every word. “Okay. Think theme. What kind of events would bring people to a gay sports bar?”
“Sports.”
“Thank you, Obi-Wan. Thank God you’re not our only hope.”
Mark chuckled. “That makes you Leia. Where are the cherry Danishes you wear over your ears?”
“They’re cinnamon buns, fuck you very much.”
“My bad.” He grinned and held up his palms.
“Okay, sports-themed events. But which sports? And what kind of events? We have TVs to watch, but is that enough? When? How do we compete with every other bar showing the same games?”
“We make our sports things better, make it more fun.” Mark was getting that look in his eye, the one that meant he was about to have either a brilliant idea or a terrible one. “What if we did watch parties? For big games?”
“Every bar does watch parties, and not just for big games. They do them for every game.”
“Not like we would. We could make the whole thing an event. Rod could make special menu items. You could come up with fancy drink specials. And . . .” He thought a moment. “Maybe we do some kind of contest or giveaway.”
I was writing this down. “Okay. That’s not terrible. When’s the next game?”
Mark pulled up the Lightning schedule on his phone. “Tomorrow. Sunday afternoon. Three o’clock.”
“Ooh, that could work.” I was thinking out loud now.
“We’d need to open a couple of hours earlier than normal, maybe bill it as an opening weekend ‘lunch with the Lightning’ special or something.
What about some kind of promotion where if the Lightning win, everyone gets a discount on their next visit? ”
“I like it. What else?”
“What do you mean, what else?”
“We need more than just sports. Not everyone cares about hockey.”
He had a point. I tapped my pen against the legal pad, clicking the button a few more times and earning an annoyed glare for my effort. “What’s popular right now? What are people talking about?”
“What about that new show? It’s all over Instagram,” Mark suggested. “The gay hockey romance. What’s it called?”
“Horny Rivals?”
“That’s the one! The gays online won’t shut up about it. They claim it’s the best thing on TV.”
I’d heard about Horny Rivals. It featured two rival players who hated each other until their dicks decided they didn’t. It was very enemies-to-lovers, very gay, and apparently, more addictive than the ice cream shop’s special flavors.
“When does it air?” I asked.
Mark was already googling. “Sunday nights. Episode three is on tomorrow at eight.”
“Wait.” An idea was forming. “What if we did both?”
“Both what?”
“Lightning game in the afternoon. Horny Rivals watch party in the evening. We could make it a whole Sunday Funday. ‘Come for the game, come with the show.’”
Mark hooted. “We can’t use the word come in promotions. Not like that anyway.”
“Says who?” My grin was now wide. “The gays would love it—and even if you make me tone down the wording, the idea’s solid. We appeal to the sports gays while also tickling the fancy of fiction smut readers who like their porn a lot more firm than soft.”
“You’re evil. I love it.” Mark snorted again, shaking his head. “Says here there’s ten episodes this season, and they’ve already renewed it for season two. The show’s blowing through records. We could start tomorrow and have six more weeks before season one ends.”
“That could give us some momentum,” I thought aloud. “But that brings us back to marketing. How do we get the word out? It might be a great idea, but it’s useless if no one shows up.”
“Flyers,” Mark said. “They’re old school but effective. We can print flyers and put them on cars within a mile radius, on every windshield in Ybor, Seminole Heights, maybe downtown. Think about every place there’s a concentration of pride flags where people park outdoors.”
“That’s hundreds of cars.”
“Thousands,” Mark corrected. “I’ll call Jacks. He’s an eager beaver.”
“Eager for your beaver, maybe.”
“If he wasn’t an employee, I’d drive him like a mule train.” Mark groaned. “Alas, rigid professionalism prevents me from planting my flag in western soil.”
I let out a groan of my own. “I don’t know which is worse, the mental image of you planting your flag or poor Jacks getting ridden like a horse.”
“Both make my shorts tight.”
“Jesus. Please stop.” I went back to scribbling furiously. “Flyers, social media blitz, maybe we could even—what if we scheduled posts to go out every hour until the show airs? Build anticipation. ‘Come watch the Lightning,’ ‘Don’t miss Horny Rivals,’ that kind of thing?”
“Yes! Maya would love that. She’s been dying to do more social media stuff.”
“Because she’s been so effective to date?”
Mark ignored my jab. “Okay. Here’s the plan.
I’ll call Maya, get her on the social media blitz.
You work on the flyer design. We’ll get them printed this afternoon and spend tonight and tomorrow morning papering every car we can find.
Come up with names of fun hockey drinks.
Rod can work on a special menu for tomorrow.
We’ll make this the biggest watch party Ybor has ever seen. ”
“One of us has to run the bar tonight.”
“That’ll be you. I can’t mix drinks for shit. Jacks and I can hit the town while you cover.”
“What if we have a rush tonight?” I said, not believing it was a concern.
Mark gave me a “Really, dude” look, but said, “Then you call me and we come back to help. No worries.”
I couldn’t help but smile. This was Mark at his best—turning panic into action, fear into momentum. It’s why his construction company had succeeded. It’s also why he’d convinced me to quit my job and go into business with him in the first place.
“You think this’ll work?” I asked.
“I think it’s better than sitting here spiraling about our forty-seven Instagram followers.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Come on, sweet pea, we’ve got work to do.”
Well, fuck. He’d heard Priya last night.
By 4 p.m., we had flyers. Maya had arrived at three, taken one look at our design—which was functional but boring—and completely redone it in twenty minutes.
The new version was colorful, eye-catching, and featured both the Lightning logo and a still image from Horny Rivals that she’d pulled from the show’s official Instagram.
“This is going to get us shut down for copyright infringement,” I’d said.
“I doubt the network will see your flyers unless their lawyers happen to be parking in Ybor tonight. This will get you customers,” Maya had countered. “Pick your battle.”
We’d printed a thousand flyers at a copy shop in Seminole Heights. Mark called in favors from his construction buddies, and by the time we opened at four, we had a small army of people ready to blanket Ybor.
Maya scheduled fifteen social media posts to go live between now and tomorrow night’s show.
Fifteen. I’d asked if that was overkill, and she’d looked at me like I’d suggested the earth was flat, which was pretty much how every Generation Whatever-the-fuck looked at anyone a hot minute older than them.
“This is the minimum for engagement. I have a group of friends programmed to like and comment. We’ll also post in Facebook groups. Maybe your grandmother will want to join,” she said with a wicked grin. “Trust me.”
I was trusting a lot of people today.
Rod refused to simply rename his menu items, creating a special menu just for the game and watch party.
There were Lightning Bolts, mini burgers with blue cheese and buffalo sauce; Horny Wings, maple bourbon glaze that he swore would “make people cry with joy”; and a specialty cocktail called “Puck Bunny Juice” that was blue and involved three different types of rum and whipped cream that dripped down the sides.
“This is either going to be amazing or a complete disaster,” I’d told him.
“It’s going to be amazing,” he’d said with the confidence of someone who’d run a Michelin-recommended kitchen. “Trust me.”
And there was that word again.
Trust.
Saturday night brought better traffic than Friday. It wasn’t “we’re going to make it” traffic, but it was better than our opening flop.
One guy in his mid-thirties wearing a backward Rays cap told me he’d come because his friend had texted him about “the best burger in Ybor.”
“Is it really that good?” he asked.
“Try it and tell me,” I said.
He tried it, cleaned his plate, then ordered another one to go.
It was only after the guy had left that I realized I’d only served one burger the night before. Chase must’ve mentioned us to his friend. That was nice.
By 11 p.m., the bar had cleared out again, leaving only a handful of stragglers watching the late west coast hockey games, nursing beers, and not really engaging.
I was slumped against the register, staring at the empty space, doing math on my mental spreadsheet that didn’t look good.
Two nights.
Seventy-one customers total.
Average spend around thirty dollars per person.
That was just over two grand in revenue minus cost of goods and payroll and utilities and rent—
We were hemorrhaging. Dear God, those were angry, pointy rocks ahead, and there was no way to turn the ship around. We were going down.
Mark appeared at my shoulder. “Stop spiraling.”
“I’m not spiraling. I’m calculating the cost of life rafts.”
“Finn.” Mark turned me to face him. “Listen to me. We’ve been open for two days. Two days. You can’t judge success in two days.”
“I can judge cash flow in two days.”
“Cash flow will improve. Word of mouth takes time. We just need to keep working hard and be patient.”
“I’m not good at patient.”
“I hadn’t noticed.” He smiled. “You’re good at problem-solving and planning. You’re also good at making things work when they shouldn’t. We’re building something good here, but building takes time. Okay?”
I wanted to believe him.
I really, really wanted to believe him.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?” He raised one brow.
“Okay, fine.” I took a breath. “We do the watch party tomorrow. We give it everything we’ve got. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, we’ll figure something else out.”
“That’s the spirit.” Mark pulled me into a hug, which was very Mark. “Now go home and get some sleep. I’ll close up here. Tomorrow we’re going to pack this place.”