A thrill shoots down my spine whenever my husband and I are commiserated with by bartenders or servers. If they’re telling us about bad customers, it means we aren’t bad customers. If they’re saying to us that one particular wine is “86’ed,” it means they know we know what that means. I haven’t worked service since 2019; my husband stopped bartending full-time at the end of the same year, and he hasn’t heeded the siren call of a part-time return for a few years now: That we still have a worker sheen despite guest status means we’ve retained… something. Something intangible in how we carry ourselves, or maybe it’s just that we usually hit one of the buttons over 20% when presented with the machine to tip. You can’t be too generous when you’re a regular.

I used to fear being a regular anywhere, even for a haircut. I’d call the salon and say give me whoever when I made an appointment, inevitably offending whoever gave me my last cut when they saw me in another chair, but it had nothing to do with skill: It was that I didn’t want to reveal that I felt incapable of deepening the relationship in any way. I didn’t want to reveal that my chest feels weighed down by lead when it’s time for small talk.

With time, I’ve gotten better about this, and Old San Juan has forced me to level up even more and smile through any agonizing conversations with couples just off a cruise ship, because I have a dog and we’re regulars everywhere we go. At El Batey, new bartenders are swiftly ushered into the daily ritual of tossing him an ice cube by the security guard, who recently said he’d kick another dog out if Benny didn’t like him. He’s given water at every coffee shop, and if we were open to it, he’d have us drinking four espressos a day at different cafés. He goes to Bodega Chic hoping to suck the marrow from a gifted lamb bone, but he will settle for pets from the proprietor; there are some people and places to whom he just wants to say “hello.” 

My real connection to the neighborhood, the fact that I spend hours a day out and about observing and even having the once-dreaded small talk, is why I’m so angry all the time about how things work. I’m writing to you now without running water in our house, awaiting the loss of more shade as the local government plans to cut down 50 trees and business seems to go on for a new Hard Rock Hotel that will drain more resources and cause more traffic. Mejorar my ass.

But just last week, we did win a small fight against the anti-tree city hall.