Wednesday, March 16, 2005
the bar
As you, my dear reader, are no doubt already aware, Spring Break is upon us.
I have just returned home from an evening's outing in honor of the occasion.
The Wife took The Boy to see Her Parents for a few days. They are five and half hours away as the car drives.
So, for the previous two and duration of this night, I am a single man, unencumbered by the responsibility of being husband and father.
I acted in the manner most suitable for all men in my particular circumstance.
I went straight to The Bar.
First, my dear reader, allow me to clarify what exactly is my meaning. By "The Bar", I do not refer to what either the most urban or urbane amongst us would properly consider "a bar".
It is more of a windowless limestone box alongside an always busy four-lane city street. Its interior is entirely lit through the neon of beer signs. Its presence is known through the half burnt out neon sign embazoned with its logo that serves as a beacon on a metallic pole near the curb. As a beacon, it invites and it summons.
This bar is the bar of our grandfathers, where people would gather at the end of a long day in the factory or field and share there cares with their neighbors.
(Please pardon any and all overblown and flowery prose. By night I went to The Bar. By day, I stayed home and finally had the opportunity to enjoy all six discs of this and all of its glorious extended director's cut edition entirety. I fear that for the near future I will be only able to communicate in such language as is befitting the proper Common Tongue of Men.)
Today it sits as a relic to a dying age, in defiance of the sprawl in the name of progress that slowly creeps in and surrounds it. It is a small neighborhood bar for comraderie and cold ones. The juke box has both kinds of music: country and western. They serve both kinds of beer: bottled and canned.
Yes beer. No fancy sissy boy martini drinks with twists of lemon. No pretty little metrosexual pastel colored daiquiris. Beer. Damnit. Beer. Icy cold and inexpensively priced.
It is not a big place. There is room for a pool table, a shuffleboard table and a scattering of tables with black plastic ashtrays and those red glass restaurant candles. The place was not crowded, there were plenty of comfortably worn and padded bar stools around the the most comfortably padded bar in the city. It's "U" or "horseshoe" shape dominates the room. The vinyl padding is replaced from time to time after the spills and burns begin to take their toll. It is usually the drab color of The University's primary school color, as a show of spirit.
Business was not slow. One typically does not go to The Bar for one or two beers. Leave that pace to the yuppies and the coeds who mix and mate at the trendier and hipper downtown establishments. One or two is only acceptable when you arrive at last call for "c'mon, just one or two more" on your way home. Go to The Bar to drink beer. Lots.
So I sit at the bar and order a beer. There is a rodeo on the television in the corner. On my right side a college couple on spring break exchange sly touches and furtive glances. She is talking about her disgust at the rodeo, about its cruelty towards the bulls. He sits and feigns attentiveness, sneaking his hand farther upwards and inwards on her thigh in between drags on a Camel Light.
The men across the bar gesture towards the television in appreciation.
Seeing this, I glance back over my shoulder at the television in time to see a young cowboy ride a bull named "Slim Shady". What's this? Some rednecks idea of a joke to demonstrage the superiority of their culture over that of the urban hip-hop generation?
The young cowboy was thrown in 2.46 seconds.
I fondly recall a feeble attempt some years back by management to institute a dress code. One night there suddenly appeared a sign. It was taped over cigarette smoke-stained beer signs to a wooden support pillar in the middle of the room. Neatly typed, in a font that filled the page it read:
When I returned the following weekend the sign had been altered, an exception was made to the new rule. In black marker scrawled across the top of the sign was a single word. The sign now read:
Presumably women without sleeves were still welcome.
Standing right beside the sign was a tall man in a tattered t-shirt with the sleeves long since removed. He is holding one beer and ordering another.
This man had the most amazing and strangly beautiful mullet I have yet to experience. Delicately moused and gelled on the top, it cascaded in permed ringlet curls down his back and lingered gently at the base of his butt crack as it crept out from the tight waistband of his blue "Ocean Pacific" courdoroy shorts. Just like the ones I use to wear. In 7th grade.
I parked in the back, always mindful of the advice imparted to me by an older gentlemen I had the good fortune to be seated beside one evening many years ago:
"Always park in the back. That way, if your wife or girlfriend drives by looking for you, she won't see your car in the front parking lot and won't know your here. That way you can drink your beer in peace."
That sentiment of that statement still rings true. In The Bar I usually sense an underlying and outdated attitude. The Bar once was a refuge for men of all ages wary of and away from the prattering and prying minds of women. To some extent, it still is. Except that now there is almost a likely a chance of a woman sitting at the bar drowning her sorrows over another woman as a man.
This liberal and progressive worldview places well with the clientele. As though many feel that if men are doomed to feel misery and woe about loving women, other women deserve the same opportunities in the name of equality. So just deal with it. Let them all marry. Who cares? Now let's move on. We are after all still in the proudly Blue beating heart of the Reddest of states.
You can see it in the eyes of The Regulars. I know this because I have seen them.
I know them to be The Regulars because I sat three, four, sometimes five nights a week, across the other side of the bar, watching the same group of men sit in the same spot. One always has a Bud and a cigarette, another drinks Pearl Lite on ice in a big travel coffee mug.
It is their faces that stare out from the photos that adorn the walls, giving the place an air of sincerity that is shallowly mimicked in the chain clubs and franchise bars. They are photos of late night celebrations and annual holiday parking lot picnics with bikers and barbecue.
I did this in the years before The Wife and The Boy, when I had just returned from my self imposed isolation "out of the country" (also known as my first marriage). What my heart lacked in sobriety it on ocassion made up for in sorrow. I went to share " a drink they call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone."
And as I sat there tonight and watched their faces, and the faces of a few others gathered around, I noticed something I had not seen before.
Not a single man wore a wedding ring. While they joked and they smiled, their eyes held no joy. You could see it when they stole lustful and longing glances at the nubile coeds who arrived and played dominoes with a small group of friends. These are lonely men. While they may consider themselves happy, successful and proud of their independence, they still long for something more.
It was like holding up a mirror reflected back upon time. I recognized the expression because I once sat there and wore the same expression. I had not done that before. For a moment the absence of The Wife and The Boy pushed that same expression back onto my face. It quickly faded into a smile as I thought about holding them both close to me.
One time, an older gentleman shared with me the secret to a long and happy marriage. He told me that many decades earlier he had instructed his new bride in the art of performing fellatio. He finished his last beer with a smile, telling me it was time for him to go home so his wife could practice her well-honed craft.
Remembering that poignantly punctuates my current feeling of being alone. I miss The Wife.
I miss The Boy.
They will be home tomorrow evening.
Only one more sleepless night.
|
I have just returned home from an evening's outing in honor of the occasion.
The Wife took The Boy to see Her Parents for a few days. They are five and half hours away as the car drives.
So, for the previous two and duration of this night, I am a single man, unencumbered by the responsibility of being husband and father.
I acted in the manner most suitable for all men in my particular circumstance.
I went straight to The Bar.
First, my dear reader, allow me to clarify what exactly is my meaning. By "The Bar", I do not refer to what either the most urban or urbane amongst us would properly consider "a bar".
It is more of a windowless limestone box alongside an always busy four-lane city street. Its interior is entirely lit through the neon of beer signs. Its presence is known through the half burnt out neon sign embazoned with its logo that serves as a beacon on a metallic pole near the curb. As a beacon, it invites and it summons.
This bar is the bar of our grandfathers, where people would gather at the end of a long day in the factory or field and share there cares with their neighbors.
(Please pardon any and all overblown and flowery prose. By night I went to The Bar. By day, I stayed home and finally had the opportunity to enjoy all six discs of this and all of its glorious extended director's cut edition entirety. I fear that for the near future I will be only able to communicate in such language as is befitting the proper Common Tongue of Men.)
Today it sits as a relic to a dying age, in defiance of the sprawl in the name of progress that slowly creeps in and surrounds it. It is a small neighborhood bar for comraderie and cold ones. The juke box has both kinds of music: country and western. They serve both kinds of beer: bottled and canned.
Yes beer. No fancy sissy boy martini drinks with twists of lemon. No pretty little metrosexual pastel colored daiquiris. Beer. Damnit. Beer. Icy cold and inexpensively priced.
It is not a big place. There is room for a pool table, a shuffleboard table and a scattering of tables with black plastic ashtrays and those red glass restaurant candles. The place was not crowded, there were plenty of comfortably worn and padded bar stools around the the most comfortably padded bar in the city. It's "U" or "horseshoe" shape dominates the room. The vinyl padding is replaced from time to time after the spills and burns begin to take their toll. It is usually the drab color of The University's primary school color, as a show of spirit.
Business was not slow. One typically does not go to The Bar for one or two beers. Leave that pace to the yuppies and the coeds who mix and mate at the trendier and hipper downtown establishments. One or two is only acceptable when you arrive at last call for "c'mon, just one or two more" on your way home. Go to The Bar to drink beer. Lots.
So I sit at the bar and order a beer. There is a rodeo on the television in the corner. On my right side a college couple on spring break exchange sly touches and furtive glances. She is talking about her disgust at the rodeo, about its cruelty towards the bulls. He sits and feigns attentiveness, sneaking his hand farther upwards and inwards on her thigh in between drags on a Camel Light.
The men across the bar gesture towards the television in appreciation.
Seeing this, I glance back over my shoulder at the television in time to see a young cowboy ride a bull named "Slim Shady". What's this? Some rednecks idea of a joke to demonstrage the superiority of their culture over that of the urban hip-hop generation?
The young cowboy was thrown in 2.46 seconds.
I fondly recall a feeble attempt some years back by management to institute a dress code. One night there suddenly appeared a sign. It was taped over cigarette smoke-stained beer signs to a wooden support pillar in the middle of the room. Neatly typed, in a font that filled the page it read:
SHIRTS
MUST
HAVE
SLEEVES
When I returned the following weekend the sign had been altered, an exception was made to the new rule. In black marker scrawled across the top of the sign was a single word. The sign now read:
MEN'S
SHIRTS
MUST
HAVE
SLEEVES
Presumably women without sleeves were still welcome.
Standing right beside the sign was a tall man in a tattered t-shirt with the sleeves long since removed. He is holding one beer and ordering another.
This man had the most amazing and strangly beautiful mullet I have yet to experience. Delicately moused and gelled on the top, it cascaded in permed ringlet curls down his back and lingered gently at the base of his butt crack as it crept out from the tight waistband of his blue "Ocean Pacific" courdoroy shorts. Just like the ones I use to wear. In 7th grade.
I parked in the back, always mindful of the advice imparted to me by an older gentlemen I had the good fortune to be seated beside one evening many years ago:
"Always park in the back. That way, if your wife or girlfriend drives by looking for you, she won't see your car in the front parking lot and won't know your here. That way you can drink your beer in peace."
That sentiment of that statement still rings true. In The Bar I usually sense an underlying and outdated attitude. The Bar once was a refuge for men of all ages wary of and away from the prattering and prying minds of women. To some extent, it still is. Except that now there is almost a likely a chance of a woman sitting at the bar drowning her sorrows over another woman as a man.
This liberal and progressive worldview places well with the clientele. As though many feel that if men are doomed to feel misery and woe about loving women, other women deserve the same opportunities in the name of equality. So just deal with it. Let them all marry. Who cares? Now let's move on. We are after all still in the proudly Blue beating heart of the Reddest of states.
You can see it in the eyes of The Regulars. I know this because I have seen them.
I know them to be The Regulars because I sat three, four, sometimes five nights a week, across the other side of the bar, watching the same group of men sit in the same spot. One always has a Bud and a cigarette, another drinks Pearl Lite on ice in a big travel coffee mug.
It is their faces that stare out from the photos that adorn the walls, giving the place an air of sincerity that is shallowly mimicked in the chain clubs and franchise bars. They are photos of late night celebrations and annual holiday parking lot picnics with bikers and barbecue.
I did this in the years before The Wife and The Boy, when I had just returned from my self imposed isolation "out of the country" (also known as my first marriage). What my heart lacked in sobriety it on ocassion made up for in sorrow. I went to share " a drink they call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone."
And as I sat there tonight and watched their faces, and the faces of a few others gathered around, I noticed something I had not seen before.
Not a single man wore a wedding ring. While they joked and they smiled, their eyes held no joy. You could see it when they stole lustful and longing glances at the nubile coeds who arrived and played dominoes with a small group of friends. These are lonely men. While they may consider themselves happy, successful and proud of their independence, they still long for something more.
It was like holding up a mirror reflected back upon time. I recognized the expression because I once sat there and wore the same expression. I had not done that before. For a moment the absence of The Wife and The Boy pushed that same expression back onto my face. It quickly faded into a smile as I thought about holding them both close to me.
One time, an older gentleman shared with me the secret to a long and happy marriage. He told me that many decades earlier he had instructed his new bride in the art of performing fellatio. He finished his last beer with a smile, telling me it was time for him to go home so his wife could practice her well-honed craft.
Remembering that poignantly punctuates my current feeling of being alone. I miss The Wife.
I miss The Boy.
They will be home tomorrow evening.
Only one more sleepless night.
|
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