Soft jazz flutters around you as you whizz past a stream of multi-colored lights. It’s a peaceful feeling walking downtown, as if the jazz is a sort of theme music to your measured steps on the sidewalk under the copper shine of streetlights.  ///  But then you fling open the door to 1311, the lone sports bar on Washington Street, and the jazz is suffocated by a deafening roar of Dubstep music that consumes the air.

It’s 1 a.m. but it feels much later, and the bar that wraps around the inside of 1311 is packed with people all searching for something — the next drink, the next dance, the next escape from life.
There are only two humans at the present moment who can give them one of those three, however, and they’re both bouncing to the music and dutifully serving their customers behind the stained wood that acts as a barrier between bar patron and bartender.
Katie has pink hair. Cambria sports a curly ponytail. Both girls zip around the bar, trading money for the nectar that will temporarily please the people nodding along to the music.
Katie is quiet but smiles at each customer as they hand her their money. “That’ll be $6, baby” Cambria says as she gently takes a $10 from a man’s hand and sticks it in the cash register.
These two are the people whose job description say one thing but really mean 20 others. They’re bartenders, sure, but they’re also mediators, therapists, servers and life coaches. If they played baseball each would be the always-reliable utility infielder.
In a span of 10 minutes, Katie has served three drinks, grabbed a plate of food out of the kitchen and helped restock the liquor shelf.
The bar is close to closing, and the dozens of patrons who once crammed inside are slowly filing out. Cambria and Katie treat each one like old friends as they close their tabs and sneak one more drink before going home.
Katie’s pink hair whips around while she runs back and forth down the long bar. Cambria shoots a smile at the man buying one more shot while the gold glare of full Corona bottles bounce off the faded brick arches of the wall.
“The thing I like most about bartending is the people,” Cambria says as she closes another tab out. “I’ve met people from Canada, Russia, all over. It’s like a mini Bourbon Street.”
The clock inches closer to 2 a.m. and Pharrell’s “Happy” blares over the speakers. It would be cheesy at any other place, the world’s happiest manufactured song playing inside a dimly lit haven of bacchanal. But it’s just so… fitting.
Everyone really is happy. The woman intensely dancing by herself on the floor. The DJ with his computer on stage. Katie and Cambria behind the bar.
Pharrell hits his crescendo as the two begin to clean up. Cambria dances along to the music, singing the words to herself as she pushes a rag across the countertop.
It’s the beginning of the end of the night for the bartenders at 1311.
And for that, they’re happy.