The Bar Bar
What makes a bar a real bar.
(Page 5 of 6)
While bar bars do tend to attract birds of a feather, the best cohorts of regulars are rambunctiously varied. Joe’s is known as a media bar, and a lot of journalists do hang out there. But the group at the bar on any given evening may be only 25 percent media; the remaining regulars are lawyers, judges, visiting bartenders, football coaches, and insurance agents. They are old and young, black and white, well dressed and sloppy, wealthy and middle-class. They share only a dedication to the bar and a need for the spiritual sustenance it provides.
You can see the democratic ethos of the bar bar affirmed and reaffirmed every night in a series of odd cants and rituals. One of my favorites is the arcane custom of buying one another drinks. To the outsider, this process may seem silly and inscrutable: what’s the point of buying each other drinks when you can just as easily buy your own? But no bar barfly I know of questions the ritual. Regulars are expected to buy drinks for other regulars occasionally, and it is an unwritten canon that the recipient should try to return the favor before the evening is over.
This must be a universal principle, because I hadn’t been in Elizabeth’s Cocktails in Corpus Christi for more than five minutes before this fellow next to me—a crusty old auto mechanic who was holding forth on his attempt to bail a friend out of jail, the King Ranch, and plane crashes—bought me a drink. I thanked him and dutifully listened to the rest of his oration, a service that is all the more obligatory after a bar barfly buys you a drink. At any rate, I waited through a couple more rounds and then, by instinct, signaled to the bartender in my best bar bar sign language to put his next beer on my tab. (The universally accepted signal here is to point to the other fellow’s empty glass or beer can and then, with a slight flourish, to point at your tab or, preferably, at your stack of change on the bar. This is why you never see bar barflies pay for a drink with exact change or put their change away after purchasing a drink; that stack of change is an important badge and a useful implement of communication. If you’re in a real bar bar you don’t have to worry about someone’s ripping off your money. Heck, I’ve left my wallet at Joe’s and not worried about it.)
Of course, nowhere do the democratic principles of the bar bar come more into play than in the time-honored rite of holding forth. It is here that the mettle of any bar barfly is tested night in and night out. Either you are able to sit there patiently and act not just interested but enraptured with what another bar barfly is holding forth on, or you don’t belong in the joint in the first place. There are no exceptions to this rule of the bar, for you never know when you are going to need a similarly sympathetic ear after a rough day.
The most common type of holding forth is a kind of pontification. This will involve your current events, though frequently—as in the exchange recited earlier—it focuses on some vague entrepreneurial venture that the holder forth in question just can’t quite get off the ground. You tend to get a lot of your investment-tax dodge strategizing. This is because bar barflies share the belief that the government and the economy are screwing them worse than anyone else and that they can evade the ravages of inflation and the IRS if they just give the matter a little more thought.
Another type of holding forth is a form of sermon or exhortation along some moral lines. The master of this is a charming old black fellow named Hawk, who may be my favorite person in the world to listen to. Hawk’s sermons, which revolve around how to live one’s life more happily, are delivered in a perfectly unique street poetry, an endless stream of home-cooked homilies and euphemisms that evoke only a dim and visceral understanding of his point. Example: “Right on, right on . . . really, really and truly . . . multiply, really and truly . . . enjoy life.” And then in a deep growl, “Thank you!” Followed by this in a screeching falsetto, “And I ain’t lyin’, neither!” And finally, “Everybody pick on me, but that’s okay . . . happiness, enjoyment, the vitality of life. Gotta follow through! Take a BC and come back strong.” You get my drift, even if you don’t get Hawk’s.
Sometimes holding forth can be more serious. I ran into a fellow regular recently, and as is usually the case with bar barflies, I could immediately sense that he would be doing the holding forth that night and I would be doing the listening. I’m not sure what it is, but bar barflies learn to emit a complex set of signals to one another that indicates who needs to rap and who doesn’t. And once the appropriate signal is transmitted, it is definitely bad form to ignore or slight the plea to be heard out. In this case my friend said, “Sit down. I think I’m gonna need you tonight.” He explained that an old and dear friend had died suddenly, and there followed a heavy rap about the frailty of life and how you never think to let people know how you feel about them until they’re gone. When he was finished, I could tell he felt a lot better, and so did I.
Holding forth is a form of communication that doesn’t exist outside the darkness of the bar bar. It is one more facet of the peculiar relationship between fellow bar regulars. Most regulars didn’t know one another before they started going to the bar, and most don’t associate much outside the confines of the bar. When you do run into a fellow regular on the street, it’s invariably a somewhat uncomfortable moment because you both realize that you don’t have that much in common. And you really don’t want to. Here again, I find the analogy to summer camp instructive. As you did with the special friends you made at summer camp and then left for the next eleven months, you get the feeling that to try to take the special bond between bar regulars outside the bar would somehow cheapen it, even ruin it.
This is especially true of old guys, who are among my favorite fellow bar bar regulars. Somehow, in the cold light of day young men and older men seem doomed to relating to one another awkwardly and with suspicion. The young alternately envy the older for their maturity and loathe them for their narrowness; the older men both resent and admire the younger for their youth. But in the dark of a bar bar, you’re not an old guy or a young guy; you’re just another bar barfly. The bar bar is a place where you can get to know people—kinds of people—you might otherwise not interact with, and somehow I always feel like a better person for having had the experience.
Bar regular on phone to wife: Yeah, I’m at Joe’s havin’ one, and then I’m on my way.
Wife: Oh, really? I just called over there and they said you weren’t there.
—Conversation from a bar
There comes a time in every essay like this when one must deal with the unpleasant aspects of an otherwise pleasant pursuit. No meditation on the bar bar could approach thoroughness or honesty without at least broaching the subject of the bar bar’s strained relationship to the institution of marriage. There has always been an oil-and-water situation here, and I am not optimistic that that will ever change. But perhaps with some further ventilation of the subject, we can at least fashion a détente, though I suspect it may prove to be about as meaningful as that one we had with the Ruskies a few years back.
First things first. Wives don’t merely regard bar bars with suspicion or mild loathing; they hate them. Without going into a lot of personal detail, let me say that I know this firsthand. It would be easy enough to lay the blame at the feet of petty jealousy, but that would be shortsighted and definitely chauvinistic, and since I think I’m going to get into enough trouble here as it is, I don’t need that to compound my problems. A form of jealousy is at the root of the problem, but it is not petty. It is the natural jealousy—no—the resentment that one gender feels toward the other when he or she feels left out. Let me say right here that men are equally guilty of this. As liberated as we would like to fancy ourselves, we can’t comprehend why a woman would prefer the company of other women in many circumstances. In the same way, wives seem to resent it when their bar barflies go to a bar bar seeking the special bond that only those of the same gender can share.
In truth, the big problem that wives have with bar bars is that the places turn their husbands into pathological liars. Most bar barflies would rather phone home from the scene of a one-night stand and fess up to it than admit to being at Joe’s for “just one.”
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