A Great Place to be a Mess
"Yeah, I'll have another one." Some thoughts about the beauty of and need for the dive bar.
There is nothing like a dive bar. Welcome to this week’s Specific, a celebration of the sleazy, the desperate, the beautiful, the honest – the dive bar. It’s time to get your Bukowski on. Specifics are about making your life better. Dive bars are about doing this by temporarily making your life worse. Sometimes way worse.
There have been so many. Brady’s Yacht Club in Santa Cruz. The Orchid Room in San Carlos. Dirty Frank’s in Philadelphia. Apple Jack’s in San Gregorio. I have loved each of them deeply, in different ways. Which is best? What is a dive bar? Why are they so great?
Brady’s Yacht Club, down near the Santa Cruz yacht harbor (hence the name) has a pool table, a paved side yard with picnic tables, absolutely bulletproof/gorgeous lady bartenders (sometimes), dogs running around inside the bar, all of it. If you’re a regular at Brady’s, you’re in deep personal trouble, usually, but you’re going to die happy, and entertained. The place is rumored to sell more Jameson’s than anyplace in Northern California. I have heard conversations there about fishing and meth at the same time. I have shot pool with drag queens in full regalia. I have stood next to a friend, and had a woman offer herself for the night to either one of us. My friend, who was visiting me, accepted and returned the next morning looking like he’d been beaten up by cops. The ultimate local joint in a tourist town, Brady’s stands alone.
Part of my love for these places is a byproduct of my size and stature, I suspect. I’m 6’2”, weigh well over 240 pounds, and am built like a wall. Dive bars can seem scary, and I’ve been privileged to know that they’re really not. My whole family is enormous, actually – I have nephews who are 6’8” and 6’10”. One of them once shared the thought that in our family, if you’re under six feet tall, you’re either defective or you’re a woman. Even in my sixties, even very drunk, people in dive bars don’t mess with me. The most belligerent drunk will almost always look up, see what he’s potentially pissing off, and move away.
I digress.
I think the appeal of dive bars to normal people, a group I fancy myself a member of, is the chance for some adventure. Day by day, step by step, it seems like the world is becoming a smaller, safer, more predictable, less interesting place, at least to me. You have to use the right pronouns. Every time you get on the plane, they remind you of the same rules. Children’s car seats now seem built to protect against an attack by an A-10.
Probably because I’m immature, I resent this. By nature, I really, really don’t like to be told what to do, and I especially don’t like a world that seems run by an aggressive army of Busy Mommies. Dive bars are a respite from all of this. There are very few rules, and the rules that are in place are mostly about alcohol, paying for alcohol, and not hassling the staff. Other than that, dive bars are places where nobody gives a shit who you are, where you came from, what you say, any of it. This has an obvious downside – some old guy in a trenchcoat may give you a long, unrequested speech about how things used to be better in the Sixties. But the freedom is worth it.
Farrell’s, in Brooklyn, was my neighborhood bar for two glorious years because of two facts:
I lived across the street. I could literally crawl home if I needed to
It was an institution, in the same league for its patrons as the Library of Congress
Farrell’s was a Brooklyn cops’ and firefighters’ bar, which means calling the police was meaningless, because they were already there. A major part of its wonder is its age – It was founded in 1933, hasn’t changed much since, and was a lovely, ongoing reminder of history, of the past. The place was so iconic someone made a documentary about it.
They sold one kind of beer (Budweiser), had tile floors, a rail at the bar, no food, bartenders in white aprons, and no stools. They figured that if you couldn’t stand up, you’d had enough. They were open at 6 AM or something, and on my way to work, I’d see little old Irish guys with their first whiskey of the day in there. They sold beer to go, in the same cardboard containers you’d use for soup in Chinese restaurants, which was both completely illegal and perfect for taking on the subway if you were headed into Manhattan. St. Paddy’s day at Farrell’s was completely nuts. It was the first place I ever saw women fight. It was men-only until someone sued in the 1970s. Farrell’s was amazing.
Dive bars are also, at least to me, deeply romantic places. Nobody goes into one because they’re feeling emotionally sound, at one with the universe, and knowing right from wrong. People patronize them because they’re lonely or sad or seeking companionship or need to just think. Often, in these places, people’s insulation is completely worn away, and you can see right through into their souls. It’s not hard to end up French kissing some stranger sitting next to you in a dive.
This isn’t always a blessing. There are people in these places who are seriously troubled, emotionally disturbed (which sometimes means flat-out crazy) or who have real, no-kidding drinking problems. This isn’t funny, and I am not making light of it. There can be a lot of sadness in dive bars, and if you venture into one, you need to be ready for that, too. However, the staff is there to keep all this manageable, and they always do. And in some way, the sadness is beautiful.
I once lived in Manhattan, and used to drink at a bar on the Upper East Side called the Tumble Inn, a dive if there ever was one. Sadly, it’s gone now. This place had a literal hole in the floor, enabling you to see through into the basement, sold a lot of tequila, and was one of the few places I’ve been actually kicked out of. One minute I was on my feet. The next minute, two guys had appeared, picked me up by my arms, and as my feet windmilled beneath me, moved me out onto the street. It was so expertly done it’s hard to be annoyed about it. It was like how security works in Disneyland or Las Vegas – efficient, silent, remorseless. I don’t remember what I’d done, but I do know this: to get kicked out of the Tumble Inn, it must have been something bad.
A big part of what makes dive bars such miracles is the people who work there. Given the nature of their occupations and clientele, it’s unsurprising that bartenders in dives are direct, well-protected, and happily wield a great deal of authority. They will cut you off. They will kick you out. They will tell you to shut up. And they will dress, behave, think and act however the hell they want. Dives breed a certain, highly specializes kind of hospitality industry professional, so to speak. They’re as perfectly adapted to their environment as a jaguar. Or Taylor Swift. Or Tim Cook.
The city of Carmel, California, is unbelievably pretty. Set on a hill right next to the Pebble Beach golf course, among other things, Carmel overlooks Monterey Bay and ruthlessly enforces a kind of fairytale charm. There are pretty little cottages with flowers that look like something out of The Hobbit. Incredible restaurants, patronized by ultra-rich European and Asian customers, movie stars and captains of industry. Ridiculously expensive real estate. And one dive bar, Sade’s Cocktails. If you absolutely cannot stand spending one more second following your wife around as she shops, you end up at Sade’s. Cash only, by the way. And a lady bartender wearing, unironically, skin-tight snakeskin-print pants, and heels. Take that, Charmel.
There’s a wonderful scene in the movie Blazing Saddles where Cleavon Little, who plays the sheriff of the fictional Old West town of Rock Ridge, staggers into the office early one morning. His pal, Gene Wilder, is there. Little can barely stand up, and ends up lying on his back on a desk, exhausted from having spent the previous night with the libidinous Lily von Schtupp, played by Madeline Khan. After a minute, he looks around and says, “So … what’s happening in the clean world?”
Dive bars are glorious because they exist specifically, expressly, as refuges from the clean world. Like the Orchid Room, in San Carlos, California. I lived in San Carlos while married, during my divorce, and afterwards. During the “afterwards” part I had more than a few emotional demons to try to pin to the mat, and I did some wrestling in that joint. It was one of the few places in San Carlos, a pretty, family-friendly and really wholesome town, that allowed smoking. The only source of natural light was the front door. It was dim inside, and we would sit in there, like Gollum in The Hobbit (again) watching the healthy, fit, good people of San Carlos walk by on the sidewalk in the clean California sunlight. Then light another cigarette, order another drink, and resume sinking further into depravity.
In my experience, women particularly love dives, under clinically controlled conditions. It’s a chance to be one of the boys, to stop being good girls and have a little just plain fun. It seems to me that this is a lot more important than men realize. Even the worst dive is not going to tolerate men hassling women, and is instead a chance to shoot pool, have a drink you otherwise wouldn’t, perhaps flirt a little and return home having seen how the other half lives, and plays, and drinks.
This happened to me at Apple Jack’s, another legendary dive. This place is tucked into a redwood grove in La Honda, California. It used to be a stagecoach stop, and hasn’t been updated, cleaned or changed since. Think plank floors, potbelly stove, front porch with chairs made from redwood logs, and truly mean lady bartenders. The clientele is equally diverse, consisting of people from nearby Stanford, backwoods rednecks and tweakers, locals and a fair number of lunatics. I remember going there on a Saturday night with a woman I was dating who was pretty serious, and by-the-book. Pool was shot, Bloody Marys were drunk, we got separated, and at one point, she came out to the front porch, where I was. She reported hearing some guy at the bar tell her about motorcycle racing … while tripping on acid. She said something like, “Oh, my. Isn’t that frightening?” His response was that it frightened him until he looked around and realized that everyone else who was racing was tripping, too. Then it was fine.
Despite being a writer, I have always thought the Hunter Thompson was kind of a dope. He didn’t, in the end, have that many ideas, his writing always seemed kind of one-dimensional, and getting hopelessly loaded is not, repeat, not a lifestyle. I need my brain, thanks. Same with that Samuel Johnson quote: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Inebriationland is a place to visit, not a place to stay. Dives are great because of what you’re NOT doing as much as what you are. They’re a place to play a kind of emotional hooky, to take a mental vacation, to stop being so damn responsible for a while.
Dives, in other words, are wonderful because of how they contrast with the rest of your life. The idea is to relax, blow off a little steam, make a mess perhaps, but then push through the door, go out into the night, feel that cold air, look up and, again, be amazed by the stars and then get on with things. You can always come back.