A much-loved bar that served the students of Syracuse University in New York, Maggie’s now exists only in photographs and memories—and in writer Adam Lorenzo’s book, All I Need to Know I Learned from My College Bar.
“I think it’s a dorm now,” says Lorenzo who spent many a night at Maggie’s as patron, bartender, and eventually owner while he was an undergrad. “They flattened it. Underneath us was a Follett bookstore, the largest college bookstore chain in America. Being underneath a bar was the worst place for a college bookstore. At a bar, you ruin books all the time.”
One memory leads to another, and Lorenzo–a TV and film writer who works in both live action and animation–recalls that Maggie’s held weekly turtle races during which the turtles would have a bottlecap attached to the backs of their shells and “race” around a customized track. On the following morning, bookstore employees would show up at Maggie’s with a shoebox full of the slow-footed winners and also-rans. “Drunk people lose their turtles,” explains Lorenzo with a laugh.
Turtle racing is just one of the situations captured in Lorenzo’s book. Featuring illustrations by Antonio Giovanni Pinna and published by Fayetteville Mafia Press, it is his first foray into publishing. Not only did he have a blast assembling it, but he also took great pleasure using the project to revisit his pre-entertainment industry life.
Lorenzo was a kid from Buffalo attending Syracuse, and like many undergrads not yet certain where his life would lead him. Hustling his way through college, he worked as a bartender and therefore spent lots of time at Maggie’s. Upon learning that one of the owners was retiring, Lorenzo put down a small amount of money to take over ownership, signing a promissory note both to meet his financial obligation and pledging not to screw things up. Once he took over, “I would be there until 3 a.m. jumping on the garbage in the dumpster so the lid would close,” he says. “Everywhere else [people are] asleep at 11 p.m. on a Monday night, but in a college bar, you can’t move. You can’t get in. It was a zoo.”
This zoo invited human connections. When he wasn’t tramping down garbage or sacking out on the pool table, Lorenzo was gaining valuable wisdom that he dispenses, one bit at a time, in his book, offering venue-specific advice such as “Get the fries” and “Participate in a turtle race,” as well as more generalized life lessons: “Choose your friends wisely” and “Breathe. It calms the nervous system.”
“It’s a place where people think about what they’re going to do for the rest of their lives, like I did,” he says. “And as a bartender, you hear everything.”
He points to sage words once offered to him by an unhoused person: “You can never do wrong by doing right.” This maxim appears in the book, which he set up as a journey from when a student enters college through to graduation. “What were the things that really helped me? What did I see? What did I learn?” he says.
Lorenzo knew from early on that his future did not lie in bar-owning. He began selling jokes to David Letterman’s production company and was invited to join the staff of The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn. The move took him to Los Angeles and out of the bar business in 1999.
He went on to write for such series as Everybody Loves Raymond and Everybody Hates Chris, and he joined TAG when he began developing the animated series Oswald the Lucky Rabbit for Disney. He is also working on several other TV and film projects including an animated environmental comedy movie with Producer Paul Green. His future plans include turning All I Need to Know into a comic strip with illustrations by regular The New Yorker contributor Brooke Bourgeois.
“We’re just starting to take the strip to market,” Lorenzo says. “It will have different characters and be a whole different thing. That’s how much I have enjoyed doing the book … It has opened up so many doors in my brain.”
Ultimately, Lorenzo says he will be pleased if the experiences in All I Need to Know I Learned from My College Bar bring as much joy to readers as they brought him to live them. “I want it to be funny and have a heart and messages that are meaningful,” he says. “I hope it can maybe lift somebody up on a down day and make them laugh. That’s what I try to do with all my writing.”
To purchase a copy of Lorenzo’s book, visit fayettevillemafiapress.com.
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