The Bar Bar
What makes a bar a real bar.
(Page 6 of 6)
The compulsive lying that seizes bar barflies when they must make the inevitable, obligatory call home is not lying of the sociopathic variety. Mythology notwithstanding, I’ve never heard a bar barfly say he’s got a flat tire or the boss kept him late at work. Those lies exist only on I Love Lucy and in Jacqueline Susann novels. The true bar bar lie is more along the lines of a sin of omission. By telling her that you’re at Joe’s just having one, you are stating—sometimes rightly—a mere intention, while in a dark, interior lobe of your brain, you know you’re not giving her the whole story. Having started with noble intent, you will be waylaid, and fate’s cruel hand will make you stay.
In some cases, of course, this is more or less true. After he’s made the call, what’s a good bar barfly to do if a fellow regular buys him a drink? Not only does he have to consume that one, he owes his buddy one as well. By the time all that is negotiated, he’s staring squarely at an unsavory option: making the second call or strapping on the seat belt and winging off on a transcontinental. Fellow bar barflies tend to be more sympathetic about this than bartenders are. A good bar bartender is willing to mother and coddle you in almost every way imaginable, but one thing he obviously doesn’t care about is the health of your marriage. In fact some bartenders seem to derive untold glee from gently nudging you across the invisibility threshold, beyond which any rational or moral activity—especially something like the second call—is completely impossible.
Joe’s especially insidious gimmick here is the perfectly timed drink on the house, what I call a Retrograder. As the name implies, this single drink, because of its perfectly timed arrival, has the effect of reversing your noble intentions and setting you on a new flight pattern. I don’t know how Joe knows just when to push the Retrogader button. Sometimes it’s on your third drink, sometimes on your sixth; it can be early or late, when you’re alone or with a group, on a Monday or on a Friday night. It’s a well-developed sixth sense, refined over a lifetime of watching people drink. He checks your eyes, watches your gait on the way to the restroom, notes the decibel level of your holding forth, and then—whammo!—he kicks in the Retrograder, knowing full well that the rules of the bar dictate that you will drink it.
Joe’s protégé, Louis, who has taken over many of Joe’s bartending duties without missing a beat, has developed an equally insidious variation. When your drink gets about halfway down and you begin to feel smug and secure in the knowledge that this time you really are going to live up to those good intentions, Louis will scoop up a handful of fresh ice and dump it into your glass, creating a whole new drink. In an ordinary bar, this gimmick probably wouldn’t work. If a joint is pouring with computer guns or with a shot glass, most of the booze in there is probably gone by the time you’re halfway down in the glass anyway. But a Joe Miller cocktail is no such animal. It is served in a monster thirteen-and-a-half-ounce glass, and it contains at least two, if not three, ounces of booze. So when Louis pulls the ice trick, he’s in effect making your first normal drink.
Mark, a bar bartender at the Bullington Point, is fond of hitting you with a shooter (a straight ounce gulped all at once) of peppermint schnapps or tequila. It tends to have a time-release-capsule effect, which can without warning blow your good intentions to bits. This delayed reaction can even happen when you’re literally on the road home, producing some rather panicked adjustments in your driving and, at time, a stop—off at the nearest available bar bar.
Whatever the method, bartenders have a way of turning the second call into an awful prospect, leaving you with a moral choice roughly along the lines of being lost at sea in a two-man boat with your priest and your broker and having to decide which one goes. If you don’t call, you can hop on a transcontinental and pay the price the next morning. I have occasionally found this effective because (1) if I don’t call again, I don’t have to lie again, and (2) I look so pathetic the morning after a transcontinental that my condition elicits a begrudging sympathy. If you do call, you may as well face up to the necessity of lying again in some form or another. The second lie, like the first, is based on good intentions, and it usually introduces a third party. “I was on my way and guess who came in and bought me a drink?” That sort of thing. The second call may work, because it shows you’re still thinking of her, but its effectiveness can be severely diminished if and when you have to enter that uncharted territory known as the third call. I can’t give you much advice on the third call because I’ve never made one. But I can tell you that the one fellow I know who did make one is not only not married anymore, he’s not drinking at the bar bar anymore either.
Come to think of it, what’s at the root of this primordial conflict between bar bars and wives may not be the call you make to her but the call she makes to you when, as all bar bar widows eventually do, she gets up the gumption to call you there. When she does, you-know-what happens: someone tells her you’re not there, and at that instant she faces the ugly truth about being a bar bar widow. It’s not that you’re there; it’s that you’re not there, which is where a husband is never supposed to be.
I see no easy solution to this state of affairs, because the fact of the matter is that bar barfly is forever doomed to juggling two marriages—one to his wife, the other to his bar bar. Far be it from me to suggest what another man’s priorities ought to be, but I will offer as some food for thought
Atkinson’s Ninth Rule of Drinking: You can probably find another wife, but can you find another bar bar?
Former bar regular: Hey, Frank, what ya been up to? Where you hanging out now?
Other former bar regular: No place, really. Since the joint closed, I’ve kinda stopped drinking.
—Conversation not from a bar
If you doubt the cultural importance of bar bars, then I offer the preceding exchange. Sad but true; the loss of a good bar bar can drive a man to stop drinking altogether. I mention this because although my stagger across Texas in search of good bar bars yielded some worthwhile results, I returned with ominous feelings about the future of the species.
There are good bar bars out there, to be sure. But the tradition is a tenuous one. After all, Texas has had liquor by the drink for barely more than a decade now. Many of the small private clubs that served as bar bars before then have died, and there’s been precious little time for new ones to develop. Bar bars, like the people who populate them, grow good, or even great, only with time.
More worrisome is watching a good bar bar go bad or (shudder) die altogether. I lost my first bar bar a few years back, and I can’t honestly say I’ve recovered from the trauma. It was a joint called the Point Downtown, and for years it served ably as my daytime counterpoint to drinking with Joe. It was a plain affair, enlivened only by the proprietor, a big bear of a man named Brownie. Brownie could always improve a day with this traditional greeting for regulars, “Oh shit, oh dear! Look who’s here!” and with his frequent exhortation, “Whiskey for my friends!”
But like much of the rest of downtown Dallas, the Point was doomed by progress. Brownie left before the joint did, disappearing to Houston as if he couldn’t bear to be around when the joint went the way of the buffalo. It limped and gasped its way through its final months like a cancer patient. And like the loved ones of that cancer patient, we all finally ran out of ways to ignore the inevitable. A month or two before it lost its lease, I stopped going—thinking, I suppose, that if I created some distance between me and the bar’s instant of death, I would never know what hit it and would barely remember it the next time I was in that area of town.
But I did. Not long after the Point closed, I happened to be in its neighborhood on business. I was preoccupied with my work, and so I was almost upon the spot before I realized it. Sensing its presence, I glanced up at the building. It was swathed in a white façade now, a covering that looked very much like a body bag. I wondered if it would be appropriate to stand there a moment, allowing the proverbial rush of memories to hurtle back. I decided not to—bar bars don’t want to be remembered, they want to be succeeded.
It’s not just that good bar bars are a civilizing influence in an increasingly uncivilized world, and it’s not just that they teach you social graces that you couldn’t otherwise acquire. It’s that they give you a break. I remember the time a friend and fellow regular at Joe’s announced he was going to take a little ride on the wagon to flush his system. We wished him well, but I for one was a bit disturbed because I knew I’d miss seeing him and I worried that he might take this wagon business too seriously. The next week, there he was at the bar again, right at the stroke of six. “You fell off already?” I asked. “Nah,” he mumbled glumly, pointing to his glass. “Soda. Frankly, it’s making me a little sick. Wonder if I should try orange juice tomorrow.” It was the “tomorrow” part that struck me as especially resonant. It’s true—it’s not the booze, it’s the people. That’s why my worries about the future of this sacred institution may be unfounded.
Atkinson’s Tenth Rule of Drinking: There will always be bar bars because there will always be bar barflies.
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