Published in the June/July 2013 issue
PLUS: More from this year's Best Bars in America >>
For as long as I can remember, I have been binary in my outlook — either you share my feelings and beliefs and therefore are correct, or you do not share them and therefore are wrong. I'm trying to fix this. I'm trying to be open-minded. For instance, I once held a loud and unshakable opinion about what makes a great bar and what sort of bar has the best chance of being a great bar. More specifically, I have always been a believer in the Marginal Bar. Perhaps you are, too. And perhaps you are not. It's okay if you are not. In fact, you are lucky if you are not. We live in a magical age of bars as hubs rather than spokes. We live in a time of alchemists and cocktail miracles and a kind of social spotlessness that can make even European airport terminals seem like rat nests.
I have been to these bars. I have had drinks made by wonderfully knowledgeable and skilled mixologists who have rinsed my glass with absinthe and put before me beverages that would have qualified as scientific proofs not very many years ago. I have sipped them and pretended my palate noticed the subtle hints of electricity and saddle leather, and I have asked for another, please, and thank you, Marco, my wizard friend. And I've leaned back into soft, low-slung chairs with arms that rise as high as my ears and felt the music pulse through the poured-concrete floor into my feet. Amazing! What an experience! And I'm so glad my new self was receptive to it.
That being said, I think I still prefer the Marginal Bar. I hope you can understand why I might, just as I now understand why you might like what you like. I'm not talking about dive bars — true, dangerous dives. (I have been in bars—one in Yuma, Arizona, I can recall with that special brand of clarity that comes only with having spent hours alarmed — unable to relax for fear of being stuck with a knife.) I'm talking about those bars that are maybe a little gruff but within which beat tender hearts; those bars that say something about their host cities rather than their architects; those bars that cater to regulars and visitors mostly alike but where the regulars have earned a quarter pour more; those bars that do whiskey and a beer back and a burger for which you can request cheese but not any specific kind of cheese, and certainly nothing artisanal. I'm talking about El Paseo in Santa Fe and Jacoby's in Detroit and the Bukowski Tavern in Boston and the single greatest bar in America: Charlie B's in Missoula, Montana.
My former self would not have heard a single word of argument about any of this.
No, that asshole would have looked at you, in your skinny suit with your perfectly folded pocket square rather than your jeans and your favorite T-shirt, drinking a twenty-dollar old-fashioned made with ice lovingly mined by Nordic fairies from the cavernous ice mines of Lapland rather than a beer bottled proudly in the great city of Milwaukee; eating pork-belly-and-fried-egg Asian noodles served in ironic Chinese takeout containers (actually, those sound pretty frigging good right about now) rather than hot, greasy onion rings piled on a chipped white plate; listening to challenging pseudojazz rather than the Royals game, and said — that asshole would have said right to your face — "You have made all the wrong choices, you grand vizier of Who Do You Think You're Fooling, every last fucking one." Not only would that asshole have said that but he also would have made a big deal about saying it, and then he would have laughed at your feckless, feeble attempts to defend your life's direction when you were so obviously born to become just another digital cog in some giant industrial machine disguised as a friendly, intuitive device, hoping against hope that someone culturally essential will see you and think of you as daring or prescient or moneyed when the asshole I used to be knew full well that you're just a confused, insecure little boy, torn like thin skin between the man you'd like to be and the man the commercials and movie stars have told you that you need to be, praying to sweet Christ that nobody notices you're still sipping your first drink, because you can afford only to be in a place like this, not to drink in it, and besides, who would ever dream of getting drunk in a bar? My old asshole self knew, he knew what you were telling yourself when you looked at him smugly through the neon-streaked window — that you're too good to get drunk like him in a hole like that, that drinking to get drunk is some kind of messy broadcast of desperation, and that drinking in a shitty bar to get drunk is the last sad act of lonely old men who don't even have enough pride to wear something other than their jeans and their favorite T-shirt when they go out in public anymore.
Well, live and let live, the new me says. Have a great time tonight. Love your suit.
