The Slow-Mo Bar Hop
ONE NIGHT LAST week, Morgan and I ventured back to what had been our home bar for the past year and a half. We hadn't been there in quite some time, though, and were both a little nervous about what might be awaiting us.
Still, more often than not, my answer to that question has been "nope." And the reason the answer is "nope" is twofold. First, the fundamental atmosphere of any New York bar-I don't care which one you throw at me-can change in the blink of an eye. In fact it's almost destined to. And once it does, we split.
The other reason is that I often go for very long periods of time without talking to, let alone seeing, many of my friends. It's not a matter of rudeness, and I'm not trying to avoid them. It's just the way things too often turn out in this crazy, topsy-turvy world of ours. In those intervening months or years, Morgan and I may well settle into, then flee, a good handful of bars.
Most of the home bars we've fled, we've fled for the same simple, awful reason: They've become overrun with young, loud, cellphone- packing assholes. Life is too short to spend so much of it in bars where you want to kill everyone.
Sometimes it feels like there's a pack of them following us around, lurking in the shadows, biding their time, waiting for us to get comfortable. We'll find a quiet, low-key tavern, and set up residence there. Then before long, they'll start creeping in and staking their own territory. Soon there are hundreds of them packed in around us. People start playing hiphop on the jukebox and ordering drinks with ridiculous names. Since there are far more of them than there are of us, we know it's a losing battle. It's happened time after time, it's always sad, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
(An odd thought occurred to me not so long ago. I grew up feeling very uncomfortable in crowds. Never could stand them. So what do I do, instead of moving to a cave? Of course-I move to the biggest city in the country! And now that I'm here, I spend much of every day doing what I can to avoid the crush of people. Seems absurd. But that's just an aside.)
Sometimes it's not the nature of the bar crowd that changes first, but the staff. Give me a grizzled old man behind the bar instead of some chirpy bubbleheaded youngster most any day. Once the latter replaces the former, you know the end is near.
We fled one bar-fancy place it was, much fancier than we were accustomed to-after the aging Weimar decadence that seemed charming at first began creeping down the bar toward us, a little closer every day.
Blotto elderly ex-theater types, overbearing young would-be theater types, drunken old dames who used to write for television (so they said), fat movie producers, sleazy, wife-swapping Wall St. executives, the occasional third-tier celebrity-and for a while there, us-came together every afternoon. Most were there to quietly drown their sorrows and lost dreams. Then they'd get loud about those sorrows, or start singing. After a while they were reduced to complaining about how weak the drinks were.
("I put five shots of vodka in that," the very patient bartender once explained to a sloshed old broad who was on the verge of hysterics over the matter.)
We'd ended up there for the simple reason that it was very convenient, and it seemed quiet. But once some of the regulars started talking to us, everything turned weird and sour. We finally came to recognize the true nature of the place, and we moved on.
That's yet another problem. If you establish yourself as a regular, you come to recognize the other regulars. Worse, they come to recognize you. Then they want to start talking. While that first time might be an interesting diversion, too many people too quickly assume that they're welcome to come join you whenever you walk in a place. As soon as I sense that happening, I'm ready to bail.
This last place seemed perfect. It took us a while to warm up to it, but the more we saw, the better we liked it. It was a convenient little neighborhood bar, quiet much of the time, warm atmosphere, swell bartenders. It could get ugly, but it got ugly at specific times. The music was either great or laughably bad. And the other regulars were okay. We quickly found ourselves sitting at the end of the bar at least three or four nights a week. Up until a few months ago, that is, when we just stopped going.
For the first time, we stopped not because some human force pushed us out or caused us to flee. Quite the opposite. This was the first place where we'd ever gotten to know a few of the other regulars, and actually enjoyed their company.
We stopped going because we discovered that it was much, much cheaper and easier to drink at my kitchen table. It didn't have the atmosphere the bar did, but on the bright side, I could smoke and I could find my own way to the bathroom.
We even started drinking less, which to be honest was for the best, way we were headed.
Stepping away from a bar where you've established yourself as a regular can be a dangerous move, in that the longer you stay away, the more difficult it is to go back. And we wanted to go back. While all the other bars we'd fled had left a bad taste in our mouths, we still liked this one.
But we knew that if we tried to go back, we'd have to deal with the questions, the hurt, the sense of betrayal on the part of the manager and the bartenders. The "Where were you? Why haven't you been here? It's another bar, isn't it?"
Such was one concern as we headed over there on election night. Another was, it might have changed. During the months we'd been gone, it might very easily have been "discovered." Would it now be packed with cellphone jackasses in suits? Or hip youngsters who've since told every single one of their goddamn friends? Would it be packed and loud, with Billy Joel blasting from the jukebox and strollers blocking the aisle?
We stepped through the front doors, and saw that someone was sitting in our old seats. That was mildly disappointing, but okay-couldn't very well expect them to hold our seats for a few months. So we took a seat by a small table along the wall. One of the bartenders was there before I had my coat off, not to accuse or chastise, but simply to welcome us back. He gave Morgan a peck on the cheek and eventually found my hand to shake it. Then he moved on.
I sat down (couldn't see a damn thing) while Morgan went to get a couple beers and say hi to the manager, who was behind the bar.
"You see any regulars?" I asked, after she sat back down.
"A couple," she said, pointing them out. "Most of the crowd seems new. But the staff's the same."
That was good. It sounded crowded in there, but she assured me it wasn't too bad. It was election night after all, one of those nights-like the night after the attacks and the night of the blackout-when people seem to be drawn out to watch the tragedy unfold collectively.
Looking at it that way, it clearly wasn't the best night to judge whether the tavern had started to turn or not. Apart from that, it seemed okay. In fact it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be. And that, no doubt, is a good thing. I do wonder how long it can last.