One Sunday afternoon, I found myself working the back bar with one of Pete’s friends from Byron Bay. It was about 3PM and the party hadn’t really kicked off yet. This was pretty reasonable in retrospect, but we saw it as a serious problem and challenged ourselves to fix it. We polished off a bottle of Jager between us in just under an hour. It was structured drinking; one shot every 5 minutes. As we were making our way through the bottle, Sam Totty emerged from the main bar. He had a habit of extorting tips by approaching unsuspecting customers and rattling the tip jar until they paid up. If he maintained unbroken eye contact for long enough, this usually worked. He did the rounds and managed to scrape together at least $50. Sam wasn’t actually working that day, so this was an act of pure charity. We decided to reward him with a shot of Jager served from a plastic cup attached to three metre long stick of bamboo. We’d taped it together from other, smaller sticks of bamboo that were piled in a corner to disguise the cheap extension chord powering the fridge. It was a complete failure. The Jager hit him between the eyes and splashed past his mouth and onto his shirt. One of our regulars saw it happen and gestured for us to send one his way. Pretty soon we were serving everyone in the bar this way. Extend the stick once, pour the shot. Extend the stick again, collect the money. It was a beautiful business while it lasted. People would wave at us, and we’d pour Jager on the most enthusiastic patron. When the waving and pointing became more frantic, we just assumed that we’d successfully kicked Sunday afternoon into gear. Then we turned around. The wall behind us was decorated with plastic vines running floor to ceiling. A well placed candle had ignited the vines and set the entire wall on fire. So we did the only thing we could think to do. We shook every bottle of lemonade we could find and sprayed the fire until it went out. The lemonade flowed down the wall and into the tray we used to hold the day’s takings. The tray overflowed and the cash floated out from behind the bar and into the crowd. As you’d expect, everyone scrambled to grab as much as they could. But Jerome’s attracted a pretty honourable bunch of misfits, and most of the money made its way back to us. We never did get in any trouble for the fire. But Liege was pretty pissed that the cash he had to count at the end of the night was so sticky.