Mementos of a Dive Bar Maven

art by Catherine McGuire

by Bonnie Darves

I have a thing about dive bars. I like them, not just a little bit but a lot, and one of my sisters, Anna, is similarly afflicted. My mother accused us of frequenting them for less than noble reasons. “I don’t know why you girls insist on ‘slumming it’ in those places—don’t you know that you stick out like sore thumbs or snobs no matter what you wear?” What’s the point? she wanted to know. How could you tell her, in a way that she’d understand, that there’s so much rich and layered humanity on display, so much density of lives being lived, lives being abandoned, lives being put on hold, that it can take your breath away. There might be voyeurs and loseurs, but you won’t find many poseurs, and that’s part of the places’ appeal.

In the ideal dive bar, there are 10 stools at the bar. They’re backless, old-fashioned, deeply dipping wood ones with seats that accommodate a wide array of butts, even the double-wide derrieres, and the stools swivel so that you can talk to your neighbor without straining your neck. There is a small cluster of square wood tables with once-glossy but now dull tops—they’re called four-tops in bar parlance. These tables are placed in no discernible order throughout the remaining space, and most of them are empty most of the time.  

There’s a slim, weak sliver of light—sunlight or streetlamp light from outside, that spills into the place from a small window (this is important—a single, small window). It doesn’t illuminate the room, per se, but is sufficient to delineate the patrons’ faces and pick up the motes in the air and the dust on the windowsill. These suffused shadows also reveal where the tables haven’t been cleaned well, where they’re sticky with beer and honey mustard dressing.

It used to be you’d find the requisite jukebox, but these are getting harder to come by because even dive bars pipe in music now—whatever appeals to the bartender. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers if you’re lucky. Some sappy crooner like Wayne Newton if you’re not. This auditory ambience doesn’t so much define the place as simmer in it just above floor level so that your feet feel the music but your head isn’t so engaged that you can’t think of something else at the same time.

That was quite the finding, wasn’t it, that we don’t really, truly multitask? We just think we do. Whatever is playing on your brain channel is what’s playing just then, and the other stuff—thoughts, to-do lists, painful memories—is stacked up behind it like planes on the tarmac waiting to be received by the sky.

That’s important, too. One thing at a time is plenty to pay attention to, so just do that and there will be plenty of life to get done in the time allotted.

If that’s the case, why would I bother spending some of those precious interludes hanging around in dark, dusty dive bars? I don’t have to answer that question, on the grounds that my response might incriminate me. But I will anyway. For one thing, no one I know will see me go in there, and it’s highly unlikely that I’ll know anyone who’s already in there. That gives me license, should I engage in conversation with the patron on my left or my right (but it’s always the one on the left, in my experience, who mumbles something that might be construed as an attempt at conversation), to be whoever the hell I want to be that day.

I have been, in no certain order, a bunch of different people: I’m a flight attendant on a layover that got extended by a day, and I’m avoiding the handsy pilot who’s been pestering me in the hotel bar. I’m an archeologist on a dig on a rocky plateau a mile outside of town, and it’s hot, and I want a cold beverage somewhere the sun won’t melt my eyelashes. I’m a mother of three small boys, and my husband just up and left without a word or even a note, but I’m done crying. I’m a woman who’s been diagnosed with a degenerative disease at the age of 43, and I’m here to write my bucket list. (That’s the one to use when you’re trying to get rid of the guy next to you who’s slobbering over his bourbon rocks—sends ’em staggering right to the door, leaving half a drink on the bar.)

Once in a while, I am just myself, Molly Manson. These days, that’s a fashionable fiftysomething book-loving suburbanite—we’re ubiquitous and all but invisible at the same time, you know—who’s still fairly fearless and adventure loving. Like the time in Oakland in the mid-1990s when I’d just flown in from Portland OR raring to go—anywhere—at three in the afternoon. My sister Anna, a reliable seeker of dim lights, thick smoke, and loud music, takes me to her local dive, Charley’s Bar, near her law office. I’m wearing jeans and a sweater. She’s in a navy skirt suit, looking, well, lawyerly. A couple of dudes are eyeing us quizzically, trying to figure out if maybe we’re lesbians because we’re holding hands.

We’re a few sips into our margarita rocks with salt when I start reading, seriously out loud, some of the vintage sexist posters on the wall. “Keep her where she belongs” (image: scantily dressed woman spread-eagled on the edge of the bed doing a come-hither with her forefinger). “How to train your wife in 5 easy lessons” (the dame’s wearing an apron, with nothing underneath, serving her man a cold one. Lesson one, I suppose). And the real kicker: “Got tight nuts or a rusty tool? Use WD-40.”

I ask the laconic, ex-football-player bartender to remove the offensive items. He says, “Lady, this ain’t my bar—I can’t touch that stuff.” When I persist, he starts crab-walking his way toward the other end of the bar. I ask for a show of hands on who thinks the “stuff” ought to come down. Only my sister raises hers. So, I hoist myself up and over the bar, grab some matches and start pulling down the posters, lighting them and then dropping the flaming bits into the gargantuan glass ashtray on top of the bar. The bartender is too stunned to respond, but then one of the patrons says, “She’s nuts, man. Better call the cops.” So, my sister slaps a fiver on the bar, grabs my arm, and we hightail it out of there.

There are plenty of other stories—my fishy tales, I call them—but they don’t end as well. So, let’s turn to the patrons, because it’s their stories, or silence, that intrigue me. I hereby introduce some of my Dive Bar Hall-of-Famers, so named not because of their achievements but instead for the way they’ve taken up residence on my memory wall.

In one of my all-time favorite dive bars, Dick’s Place—one of the Mendocino, California, hangout’s many charms is a sign that reads “So few Richards, so many Dicks”—there was a guy everyone called “The Professor” because he’d spout off professorially and unfoundedly on any subject that flitted across his well-lit brain. He concluded each minutes-long monologue—faux British accent, to boot—by shouting “Holy Basil!”

The Professor followed me outside one night and placed his puffy pink hands on my shoulders, stared into my blue eyes with his red-veined ones, and declared that I’d been Catherine the Great in a previous life. “Oh, yes, young lady. You’ve had an interesting journey, and I predict it will get much more interesting this go ’round,” he said, “and it would be my honor to escort you.” As come-ons go, it was an original, so I let it slip without inserting my knee into his groin.  

Call me gullible, which I’ll own without shame, but I laughed every time The Professor blurted “Holy Basil!” I’ve since taken to uttering it myself when the situation warrants it. Just last week, a bodega clerk in Manhattan got annoyed with me because I kept changing my mind about which debit card I’d pay with. “Ma’am, there’s folks waiting, so would you please just get on with the transaction or come back later?” he said. “Holy Basil, sir. Cut me some slack!” I blurted, pushing a $20 bill across the counter.     

There was a guy named Crank (or so he claimed) who frequented the unimaginatively named but colorful Corner Saloon in suburban Portland, Oregon, in the early aughts. Crank was classically handsome (blue-eyed, sandy haired, and chisel-cheeked) and nattily attired in knife-creased twills, tweedy sport coat, and perilously slim tie—as regulars go, he was an outlier.

Crank would set up shop on stool No. 7. He’d order two Glenlivet single malts, neat, and place them side by side in front of him. Over two hours, exactly, he’d sip from one, then the other, while reading The New York Times cover to cover. I thought I could love him, in a novel maybe. But I could not for the life of me engage him in conversation, so I can’t imagine what he would have been like in bed.

I never found out who Crank was, but years later I encountered him at the local Safeway store wandering the aisles with a basket whose contents included a 12-pack of Scott toilet paper and a dozen microwave dinners stacked in fours. He gripped the cart as if his life depended on it.

_______

It’s not fair to pick on, or illuminate, as I prefer to characterize my observations, only the men. So, I’ll introduce you to Shirley. As old-fashioned as her name, Shirley was pretty, in her Laura Ashley-knockoff frocks (draped too loosely on her slim frame). She had emerald eyes and a crown of chestnut braids—always, a few errant strands dangled, as if abandoned, at the back of her neck. If she was trying to pick up a dude, she either missed the memo or went to the wrong un-finishing school—Shirley was clearly wedded to her dowdy look. I didn’t much like the bar where I discovered Shirley, the Mauna Loa in San Francisco, because it rarely got rowdy. But she fascinated me, so I stopped in frequently when I was living nearby.

Part of the game, for me, is trying to figure out who these people are when they’re not at the bar, without ever popping the question. Shirley I had down for one of three options: 1) legal secretary in a corporate law firm specializing in white-collar defense, 2) university librarian—Classics Department, or 3) personal assistant to a society maven ensconced in a Pacific Heights manse. So, when I overheard Shirley one evening talking to a friend about, of all things, creepy patrons and discovered that she worked days in a strip joint on Broadway, I nearly fell off my stool. “He literally had his shirt and his tongue hanging out the whole time,” Shirley huffed, “and he only left $2, the jerk.”         

To even up the gender distribution, you should meet Amanda. She’s a widow in her late sixties who dresses as if she should be at the Four Seasons but instead hangs out at a grubby spot called It Ain’t the Ritz in a Florida beach town on the Gulf of Mexico. (Yes, I do get around). I checked it out for the name, went back for the local color. Amanda, who sports a painful-looking lifted face and a coiffed blond up-do, holds court most afternoons on stool No. 10. She chats at the bartender, Stu, and anyone else in the vicinity who’s polite enough to stay put until she shuts up. She opines on politics, mostly, but her range has been known to include the outrageous price of peanut butter, the terrifying crosswalks in the neighborhood (no one stops!) and, once, the sorry state of local nail salons, on which she’s something of an expert, apparently. “The smell is just awful, like an auto shop! You can’t find anyone who speaks English, so you’re stuck watchin’ whatever ridiculous show they’re watching on the TeeVee,” Amanda drawled.

Amanda came to what some might view as a deserving end, Stu told me one afternoon, when I noticed she’d been absent for a while. It turned out that Amanda’s “habit” was to sip gin gimlets responsibly at It Ain’t the Ritz, then get into her 1989 platinum Cadillac Eldorado and drive up and down the Gulf beaches in a memory-lane tour of bars that she and her late husband Beryl enjoyed—all the while downing a thermos of dry martinis. During her travels three weeks earlier, Amanda had lost control of the car and slammed into an Auto Zone store, shattering the front window. In the process, she mangled the manager who’d seen the car coming and couldn’t get out of the way quickly enough. Amanda was uninjured.

“It was a huge deal, and the poor guy’s a cut-up mess,” Stu reported. (The cops had interviewed Stu because Amanda’s credit card slip was on the front seat of the Eldorado.) “I don’t think we’ll be seeing Amanda for a while,” Stu said. He sounded sadder than I’d have expected.     

_______

Which brings to mind a saying that I’ve never quite understood: Alcohol was involved. It’s absurd on the face of it, as if “A” is a character in a story—could be the main character or just a supporting one—and “A” assumes some responsibility for whatever it is that’s happened. The head-on crash between the guy who, after losing his job, lost himself in a bottle of Jim Beam and went for a drive and slammed into a nurse coming off duty at midnight who’d just lost two patients in the ICU. She didn’t even make it to the ICU. Or that passel of plastered post-pubescents who nicked the parental-unit’s Range Rover and blazed through town and hit 100 mph by the time they hit the causeway and then scaled it and sailed on to eternity (theirs).

In these stories, does alcohol go beyond mere involvement to a larger role? Or, because it’s inert, is it fair to ascribe it any role at all?

_______

I know what you’re thinking, so, no, I don’t laugh at what I see and hear in those dive bars. I don’t demean it. I don’t dismiss it. I imbibe it, along with my beverage of choice—Perrier with lime, these days, alas. And before you ask, I absolutely can sit there and stare at the rows of half-empty bottles—the glinting Stoli and Beefeater and the tawny Jack Daniels and Bushmill. Even those sickly-sweet liqueurs like Amaretto and Benedictine and that cerulean stuff they put in Blue Hurricanes in New Orleans—all that stuff that people rarely drink, so the bottles are ¾ full for the rest of their lives, or the lives of the patrons at least. They’re lined up neatly behind Bartender Bob who has, at any rate, already got three toes in his grave. The ones that aren’t yet numbed by diabetic neuropathy but soon will be. And I will not feel in the least threatened by those gleaming bottles. I will not eye them longingly, and I will not play that little scene in my head where I order one stiff shot just for the 10-minutes-later feeling of bliss and then do not order another one. That’s the thing, isn’t it, the part some of us can’t quite get right—not ordering the second one.

Oddly, they comfort me, all those bottles in all those dives, just knowing that they’re all stacked up and ready for me if ever I decide to fall off the wagon and then fall off the barstool and fall back into the old life that I didn’t like well enough but had its excitements, didn’t it?

_______

Yes, of course it did. Most of us who’ve ever tippled too many and who have a history of frequenting dive bars have their Story for the Ages, the one that’s on a loop in the back of their minds and can be invoked at the slightest prompt—a quality in the air, a certain song, an unrelated sadness.

Mine took place in New Orleans, a much-beloved mecca for dive-bar enthusiasts. Anna and I have a few time-honored watering holes in that fine town, and one sweltering June night as we were setting out to make our rounds, we bumped into a bunch of Irish dudes in the hotel lobby who all but begged us to let them tag along. Their “road show” was far more polished than our own. Trim, handsome to a one, and smartly dressed (they’d introduced themselves as Friar Frank, Monsignor Mike, Deacon Des, and Abbot Andy, but we pegged them for secular Dublin professionals), the fellows were in NOLA for their annual pilgrimage. “We’re here to indulge in the music and other frivolities of the French Quarter,” Friar Frank divulged. The Clergy Quartet, as we still refer to them more than a decade later, were already pretty ramped up and liquidified. “Ladies,” Monsignor Mike boomed, rustling an imaginary cassock and lifting his arms, “We are ready for anything you dare to dish out!”

The Monsignor wasn’t kidding. For three unholy hours, we locked arms with the Quartet, strolled the cobblestone streets and took up stools in Aunt Tiki’s, The John, and Snake & Jake’s. To buttress their “theme,” we introduced the Quartet to The Abbey and then The Saint. That’s where Monsignor Mike stood and recited from memory the last two paragraphs of James Joyce’s Ulysses while bewildered patrons twitched in embarrassment.

As we departed each bar, Friar Frank stood just outside the door hawking free confessions. A surprising number of revelers took him up on his offer. One spirited penitent named Daisy, a petite blonde and likely lapsed Catholic (she knew all the lingo) bedecked in feather boas and little else, knelt before him and launched into a litany of preposterous transgressions: “Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It has been 100 years since my last confession. I slept with my married fourth-grade teacher—when I was in the third grade. I stole my uncle’s BMW and blew it up. I killed my father and threw his body off the Tallahatchie Bridge.” Just before the young woman stood, while Friar Frank’s hand still rested lightly on her forehead, Daisy confessed that she was, at just that moment, lusting after the Friar. Without losing his cool or a beat, Friar Frank looked into her eyes and proposed Daisy’s penance, six Hail Marys and sex-addiction therapy, to great applause.

The final stop on our Bloomsday trek was The Rendezvous Tavern, an Irish bar that our cast of clerics claimed was the only NOLA bar that carried the Irish whiskey Tullamore Dew. “Triple distilled and positively divine,” Deacon Des explained, which hardly mattered at that point when we’d also been reduced to our own inebriated essence and our conversing had devolved into random observations and sputtering non sequiturs. Somehow, Abbot Andy managed to belt out a rousing and finely rendered version of “Danny Boy” on the street corner outside the tavern as a finale.

When we got back to the hotel, Deacon Des slumped to the sidewalk in front and commanded us to gather ’round. In between shoulder-shaking sobs, the Deacon revealed that he’d been diagnosed two weeks earlier with late-stage liver cancer. “Fellas,” he said wearily, lifting his heavy head toward Friar Frank, Monsignor Mike, and Abbot Andy, “this is my bucket trip. I’m counting on you gents to carry me home.” The Quartet huddled on the sidewalk in silence for a few minutes. Then we all gathered up the Deacon, took him to Room 213, and tucked him in to bed.    

The Deacon died four months later, Monsignor Mike reported via email. At his traditional open-casket wake, the Deacon wore a tux and purple Mardi Gras beads. At his request, the only beverage on tap was Tullamore Dew. The Abbot didn’t quite make it through “Danny Boy,” the Monsignor wrote, “but rest assured, ladies, that we finished it for him.”

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