When I was in seventh grade I lived in a small town in Southern California that had yet to be swallowed up by the sprawl of Los Angeles. I rode my bike to school through a downtown that felt quaint, with a few blocks of low storefronts fronted by angled parking. Most of these buildings were of brown brick with large picture windows, but on one corner there stood a bar, a stucco art deco box, windowless but for an incongruous nautical porthole in its heavy rustic door.
Being a seventh-grader, I was never actually in this tavern, at least not all the way in. But on one or two occasions on our way home from after-school football practice I, spurred by the dareful urgings of Tim Marquez and Mike Thomas and other boys whose names I have forgotten, would stick my head inside the door and bellow: "Dad, please come home, Mom's crying!"
For some reason we thought this was very funny and even dangerous, though we never hung around long enough to see if any coat-and-tied, day-drinking Willie Loman or Dagwood Bumstead type bolted out the door in panic. I couldn't even see if anyone was in the bar -- my eyes didn't have time to adjust to the contrast between the blue autumn afternoon and the black nicotine coolness of the interior. Poking my head into that bar was like going through the looking glass and finding a strange adult place of stale aromas and remedial self-medication.
It would be pretty to think that my first bar sparked something in me, that I was arrested by the possibilities of what sociologists call a "third place," distinct from home and work where people might gather and become something like a community. But the truth is I didn't think much about it then. It was only a lame prank.
Alcohol was handled casually around our house -- I never saw either of my parents impaired. On TV we laughed at faux drunks like Dean Martin and Foster Brooks and Hal Smith, who played Otis Campbell on The Andy Griffith Show. Sometimes my parents would dress up and go out for cocktails in supper clubs and dance halls. I remember lying in bed watching the headlights of passing cars rake across the ceiling, waiting for the moment when they'd arrive home, mumbling and laughing softly.
I think they mainly drank at home; they kept a small bar idiosyncratically stocked with Jack Daniel's, Tanqueray and, for whatever reason, a tall giraffe-throated bottle of Galliano. There were no teetotalers in my family then, and (though I found out differently much later, as uncle after uncle came forth to take the cure) no one for whom drink was thought to be a problem.
I was not a drinking prodigy. I was carded well into my 30s; at 15 I couldn't hope to pass for legal, though my mother once bought me a frozen strawberry daiquiri in the rooftop bar of the New Orleans Marriott. So I never really went to bars until I went to school at Louisiana State University, when we regularly availed ourselves of our proximity to Bourbon Street. We'd have a silly drink somewhere, then stop for Takee Outee, and watch the plastic trunkless legs swinging in and out of the window of Big Daddy's topless (and bottomless) dive. (Takee Outee and Big Daddy's are gone now, oh ye mighty.)
...
I remember like a scene from a movie the night a few of us road tripped into a roadhouse near Breaux Bridge and set up shop around a pool table. One of our number (I remember who but will protect his Honor's dignity) violated some arcane local code, and as the night went on I started noticing that our table was increasingly encircled by full-grown men with ropy forearms and disdain for college boys shining in their eyes. A few of them were weighing cue sticks in their hands when someone suggested that we slink on back to our dorms.
So we got in our cars and left, giggling in nervous relief. Lots of things get started in bars: fights, murders, protest movements, even the occasional revolution. We were happy none of those occurred.
Bars were crucial to us then and we sought them out. We went to them for music, to find each other, to be somewhere other than our wretched, lonely apartments on a Saturday night. If you had a date, you'd go to a bar; if you didn't have a date, you'd go looking for one in a bar.
There was a time when I was adventurous, when I considered myself a connoisseur. I can remember clapped-together rural juke joints where canned beer was served unironically from plastic foam ice chests and where you could buy a "setup" -- usually a half-pint bottle of whiskey, a can of Coke or other mixer and a bowl of ice -- and were left to mix your drink yourself. I saw a 90-year-old woman make herself a Scotch and pineapple juice while Clarence Carter played on the jukebox in a silver-wood shack called the Dew Drop Inn near Coushatta, La., one night in the early '80s. I saw Prince and B.B. King sitting together in Shreveport's Freeman & Harris Cafe (which wasn't strictly a bar but was lenient with its patrons after midnight) with a velvet-bagged bottle of Crown Royal between them.
I saw Stevie Ray Vaughan play guitar in front of half-a-dozen people in a place called Humphree's in the Square.
...
But like your mama may have told you, bars are sometimes the wrong place to be. I've seen several jaws broken in bars. A man I knew, a damaged sweet guy who worked as a barback in a biker bar I sometimes drank in, was sleeping behind the establishment's bar when burglars broke and entered. He stood up and surprised them and they shot him through the heart.
In the '80s I used to talk about maybe owning a bar someday with a few of my friends, a private club modeled on the meta-Blues Brothers Bar that Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi opened in Chicago when they were filming the movie of the same title. It would be a little place where we could get away to drink and talk and maybe set up guitars and a drum kit on a little stage and flail away. We never imagined we'd ever be able to do that -- back then most of us never imagined we'd ever qualify for a mortgage -- but it was something to daydream about.
When I was single, it seemed I always had a bar that served, more or less, as a kind of living room. I entertained in a Hawaiian cowboy bar in Phoenix for a while -- my initial interview for this job was conducted in that space. I also grew to love a dank cave called Chez Nous; to enter it was to travel back to David Lynch's fever dream of the 1950s.
But, like most people who survive into middle age, I don't go to bars much any more. I still love the ambience of a good one, the timelessness the best of them evoke. And I understand we've seen a great revival of cocktail culture in the past decade or so, people inventing new drinks and rediscovering the old ones, and having opinions on whether ice is appropriate or an abomination.
There are plenty of bars around town that I love -- Big Orange, the Capital Hotel, South on Main -- and plenty of others that I'd probably love if I got out more often. But going to bars is not the same as it was when I was less tame, and it's not only me who has changed.
The other day, in what might be the bar physically closest to our house, we saw a 21st-century man with his laptop open, tapping away, I guess, at some connection or another. These days bars feel like waiting rooms, with people sitting quietly, staring down at hand-held screens. In the old days, bars were one of those places where we were compelled to deal with strangers -- to flirt, or at least talk, with them. Now we're armored by the glow of our devices, by the headphones shutting off all channels but what we've self-selected.
We walk our dogs down Kavanaugh Boulevard most evenings, and if we're on the same side of the street as The Fountain, one of our girls, usually Audi but sometimes Paris, will stop and poke her head in, innocence intruding on the grown-up goings on. To investigate the mystery, to sniff the bitter-scented air.
Email:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
blooddirtangels.com
Style on 10/11/2015