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Some thoughts on bars
Jul. 29th, 2003 09:21 amI really like bars. There are a lot of people out there who don’t, I know. And of course, some like the bars too much. But I really do like them. I like the smell of spilled beer, the neon, the etiquette, handwritten signs with drink specials, the names of last night’s pool players written in chalk , watching other people socialize, the whole concept of the jukebox: it’s all so comforting.
But since I tend to like empty bars, my favorites often close. There was that one which is now the table-clothed ‘Lone Palm" where the bartender wouldn’t let you pay if you weren’t working. It had incredibly ugly Egyptian friezes behind the booths. The Crystal Pistol was great back in the day, before it became a tapas place, especially the happy hour which usually consisted of me, my housemates, and two 50ish women who were there every weekday from 5-9pm. The women kept to themselves and treated us like unwanted visitors to their living room. Happy hour "free food" was advertised so at about 6 PM every day the bartender would leave and return five minutes later with a bucket of KFC. Or sometimes a 5-piece box if the "crowd" was especially sparse or he was in a bad mood. I played the one Joan Jett song on the juke box ("I hate myself for loving you") every time we went.
But bars also scare me. Neither my brother or my dad drink anymore and with good reason. I don’t have a big family, but I guess it’s big enough to have a black sheep relative, who I didn’t know existed, call me once, drunk, looking for my mother. I pretended I knew her because she knew exactly who I was and I didn’t know what else to do. Plus, experience has taught me to humor, not rile, drunks.
But I keep a worried eye on my own drinking. Of course, I don’t drink nearly as much these days as I drank in high school so I suppose it’s working out ok. Though it seems that drinking, while acknowledging a bad family history with alcohol confuses some people.
Awhile ago, I was at a birthday party at a bar, waiting to catch the bartender’s eye. A woman who was also at the party started talking to me, flirting a little. Heck, it was a party full of the sex-pos crowd so it was hard to tell if she was actually flirting with me, or flirting out of habit.
Anyways, she started to talk about how weird it was to be in a bar because she hadn’t been in one since she went into recovery a couple of years before. She started detailing her drinking problem and I shared some of my family history. We were getting along nicely, good for me because I only knew a few people at the party and I wasn’t feeling quite social enough to bust into the main group around the birthday girl. Just then the bartender looked my way. "Hold on," I told Flirting Girl, and I ordered a beer.
I looked back at Flirting Girl, who looked peeved and much less interested. That was when I realized that she started talking to me because I didn’t have a drink in my hand. "It was nice to me you," she said in a voice that told me it wasn’t. Then she got up and walked to the other side of the circular bar.
But since I tend to like empty bars, my favorites often close. There was that one which is now the table-clothed ‘Lone Palm" where the bartender wouldn’t let you pay if you weren’t working. It had incredibly ugly Egyptian friezes behind the booths. The Crystal Pistol was great back in the day, before it became a tapas place, especially the happy hour which usually consisted of me, my housemates, and two 50ish women who were there every weekday from 5-9pm. The women kept to themselves and treated us like unwanted visitors to their living room. Happy hour "free food" was advertised so at about 6 PM every day the bartender would leave and return five minutes later with a bucket of KFC. Or sometimes a 5-piece box if the "crowd" was especially sparse or he was in a bad mood. I played the one Joan Jett song on the juke box ("I hate myself for loving you") every time we went.
But bars also scare me. Neither my brother or my dad drink anymore and with good reason. I don’t have a big family, but I guess it’s big enough to have a black sheep relative, who I didn’t know existed, call me once, drunk, looking for my mother. I pretended I knew her because she knew exactly who I was and I didn’t know what else to do. Plus, experience has taught me to humor, not rile, drunks.
But I keep a worried eye on my own drinking. Of course, I don’t drink nearly as much these days as I drank in high school so I suppose it’s working out ok. Though it seems that drinking, while acknowledging a bad family history with alcohol confuses some people.
Awhile ago, I was at a birthday party at a bar, waiting to catch the bartender’s eye. A woman who was also at the party started talking to me, flirting a little. Heck, it was a party full of the sex-pos crowd so it was hard to tell if she was actually flirting with me, or flirting out of habit.
Anyways, she started to talk about how weird it was to be in a bar because she hadn’t been in one since she went into recovery a couple of years before. She started detailing her drinking problem and I shared some of my family history. We were getting along nicely, good for me because I only knew a few people at the party and I wasn’t feeling quite social enough to bust into the main group around the birthday girl. Just then the bartender looked my way. "Hold on," I told Flirting Girl, and I ordered a beer.
I looked back at Flirting Girl, who looked peeved and much less interested. That was when I realized that she started talking to me because I didn’t have a drink in my hand. "It was nice to me you," she said in a voice that told me it wasn’t. Then she got up and walked to the other side of the circular bar.
