The Bar Bar
What makes a bar a real bar.
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I don’t want to have to get Freudian about this, so let me make my point quickly: you can generally tell a good bar bar by its name because it is simple and straightforward. Call this
Atkinson’s Fifth Rule of Drinking: If you can’t say the name of the place when you’re drunk, it’s not a bar bar.
(borrowed with deep gratitude from Fred). The exquisitely simple “Joe Miller’s,” of course, speaks for itself; bars that are named after the guy who runs the place are almost always bar bars. It’s no accident that the best bar bars I found across the state were named things like the Esquire, the Point After, and, perhaps my favorite name of all, My Joint. Ideally, you should be as comfortable with the name of your bar as you are with the name of a good friend. I find it hard to say, “Let’s go to the Bwana Dik Club” with nonchalance and familiarity. But listen to this: “Let’s go to Joe’s.” See?
I marvel at how all this works. The social system of a bar bar is as intricate and mysterious as anything you might find in the primal sludge of a pristine pond. The pecking orders, the patterns of interaction, the endless varieties of symbiosis that compose the social fabric of a bar bar, are governed by a similar cosmic force. When you find the right bar bar, it’s as if you were always meant to be there. Once there, you somehow instinctively know exactly how to act, what to say, when to stay, and when to leave. It is something as natural and visceral as baby’s first cry.
The queen bee of this little ecosystem is the bartender. Here again I will use Joe Miller as the model, not merely for selfish reasons but because he is the archetypal bar bartender. Joe is a rangy fellow of indeterminate age and even more indeterminate background. Physically, he is built of non sequiturs. His dress is conservative, almost preppie, but his hair is in a ferocious Afro and he sports a Fu Manchu moustache circa 1967; from certain angles he looks slat-thin, but from others a well-established paunch suddenly appears. Joe never looks the same twice, which may have something to do with the circumstances in which one usually sees him.
He does always sound the same; his voice may best be described as Rodney Dangerfield with a bad chest cold. The resemblance is much more than accidental, for like all great bartenders, Joe is a frustrated comedian who finds his regular clientele a conveniently captive audience for his latest material, which is invariably of the two-liner, rim-shot variety. Example: “Hey, Joe, you got my check?” “No, but I got a Polack in the basement.”
Actually, Joe is much funnier when he’s just talking. His argot is a curious combination of Jersey street talk, selected idioms from his home country, Canada, and bar bar-ese, the universal tongue of bar barflies. This is served up in a Cagneyesque staccato, which, as the evening wears on, becomes less and less precise. For the uninitiated, a conversation with Joe can be a little like watching sign language for the deaf. You get the general drift, but you’re never really sure what’s going on. Example: “Anyway, this guy comes in, you know, and then it’s like boom and boom and the first thing you know, he pulls a Murphy on me. I don’t know. Anyway . . .”
I know of no one who knows exactly what a Murphy is, but we all nod dutifully whenever Joe mentions it in a sentence. It is but one of the obligations of being a regular. Those obligations begin and end with one rule of thumb, which I call
Atkinson’s Sixth Rule of Drinking: The single responsibility of the bar barfly is to show up.
This is not to suggest that frequenting a bar automatically makes you a regular there. Indeed, there are numerous frequenters at Joe’s who are in no way considered regulars. But it is to say that a minimal presence is required. It can be as little as once a week, as much as twice a day; it depends on who you are. Also, you can build up accrued time one week and apply it to the next month if you’re going on vacation or something.
In any event, when you do show your face, there is really only one other requirement—that you have more than one drink. This leads me directly to
Atkinson’s Seventh Rule of Drinking: There is no such thing as one drink.
I am not sure where the myth began, but it is among the most heinous fictions in all of drinkingdom. Why, just the other night I overheard a fellow bar barfly who really ought to know better utter the immortal words, “I just stopped in for one.” As is often the case when someone announces this, he proceeded to have four and then called his wife to repeat the lie, “I just stopped by Joe’s for one. I’m on my way.”
Aside from those basics, a regular at Joe’s is asked to comport himself according to a wide range of rules of the house, some of which make sense and some of which don’t. A bar bar is set up on a positive reinforcement model—you show up and play by the rules, and over time you are extended certain rights and privileges. The rules are as follows: You are expected to tip or, at the minimum, not to stiff the help consistently, to put your cigarettes out in an ashtray whenever possible, not to hassle the waitresses, to keep the holding forth—especially that of the profane variety—at low decibels, to pay overdue tabs as quickly as possible, not to bounce checks, and to attempt to laugh at Joe’s jokes. If you abide by these simple rules, you will soon find yourself the proud beneficiary of the perks of regulardom, including help who remember your name and drink, an occasional drink on the house, tabs that can be held for short periods if you’re a little light one night, and certain emergency medical services such as aspirin or, in the event that you stumble into what I call a transcontinental drunk (meaning you show up at five, find your favorite stool, strap on the seat belt, and don’t move until two), a cab ride home.
There is nothing formal about becoming a regular at a bar; you just kind of know when you’re accepted into the fold and can ask certain favors. One thing you don’t ever do is get pushy about your privileges. They are the exclusive domain of Joe, and they are extended or retracted according to some abstruse equation that I’m not sure even he understands. Another thing you don’t do is abuse a privilege once it has been extended. That can lead to ostracism or, worse, being barred. Being barred is a punishment reserved for perpetrators of felonies against regulardom. Lesser offenses are policed with a quiet warning from Joe or, frequently, a disgusted glance from another regular. Such misdemeanors include group singing. Other transgressions along this line—loud cussing, getting sick, falling off your barstool, pouring a drink into the aquarium to get the fish drunk—are considered crimes, but only repeat offenses will get you in trouble, and even then you may earn only a night’s probation.
Total barring is rare and results only from the commission of high crimes, things like repeated fighting, intentionally kiting checks, or, worst of all, not shooting straight with Joe. The one fellow I remember getting barred lost his status because he kept putting Joe off on an overdue tab and then ran into Joe one evening at another bar and offered to buy him a drink.
For the most part, good bar bars are self-policing. As often as not, troublemakers are run off by the regulars before Joe has to do anything. As at summer camp, you are expected to pick up the rules on your own, and failure to do so does not merely result in being chastized by your peers, your fellow regulars. In this way, I think that Nick Kralj of Austin’s Quorum is right when he says a good bar bar teaches a certain grace that can’t be acquired elsewhere. It civilizes you in a way that other social units, including the family, can’t. It’s like a finishing school for life, and you can always spot a bar barfly by the way he handles himself.
First bar regular: Listen, Dave, if I could just get the damned seed money in place, this baby would take off and never shut down until it went right through the power curve. You know? But the seed money’s gonna be tough, what with that bastard Reagan and all, not to mention Qaddafi. What this country needs is a little reprioritization, Dave. See what I mean?
Second bar regular: Precisely.
—Conversation from a bar
Much of the civilizing influence of the bar bar stems from
Atkinson’s Eighth Rule of Drinking: Drinking in a bar bar is the only purely democratic experience you will ever have.
All bar barflies are equal in the eyes of the bar, and regulars are expected to treat one another without the slightest hint of prejudice. This imperative cuts across race, creed, generation, and, yes, gender. While bar bars are commonly thought to be bastions of male chauvinism, nothing could be farther from the truth. Granted that bar bars tend to be peopled mostly by men, the women who become regulars in their own right are treated exactly the same as everyone else. You rarely see a male regular putting the moves on a female regular. After all, hitting on any woman—regular or not—is not your reason for being there.
My Library
