A man who has taken aboard two or three cocktails is less competent than he was before to steer a battleship down the Ambrose Channel, or to cut off a leg, or to draw up a deed of trust, or to conduct Bach’s B-minor Mass, but he is immensely more competent to entertain a dinner party, or to admire a pretty girl, or to hear Bach’s B-minor Mass. The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind. Piticanthropus erectus was a teetotaler, but the angels, you may be sure, know what is proper at 5 P.M.
There are bars nowadays that have neither bartenders nor regulars. In the language of business, if a consumer demands a cocktail, the product is supplied—by a machine. Gin and tonic? Press one button and pull a lever. Simple. No mistakes. (Lime wedge extra). As our world becomes increasingly sterile and automated, and men like H.L. Mencken—the voice at this essay’s beginning—are condemned by the politically correct as worthless drunks, maybe we should take a minute to ponder the much maligned neighborhood saloon. Just because this tradition is associated with European white males, please do not cast it into the same shunned company as our canon of literature and the wigs of Great Britain’s bar. Not only does it not deserve its reputation as one of society’s ills, it may in fact be one of its cures.
It seems that Mencken may have stumbled upon the essence of the tavern milieu: it is a place where the joys of life are to be fully enjoyed. Thanks to the teachings of the ancient Greeks, we know that the successful existence is one that is best able to balance the opposing influences on one’s equilibrium; in other words, all work and no play makes Aristotle a dull philosopher. Mencken knew that there are many tasks in life that are tedious or difficult or simply annoying; he also recognized that they are necessary. Just as importantly, he realized that leisure (read: drinking) should not impede such chores—business is business. Thus he devised certain rules to separate the two. In brief, they are: never drink if you have any work to do, never drink alone, and never drink before dark.
These self-imposed regulations fascinate me—the man who never met a drink he did not like also knew when to abstain. Everyone from college students to their professors to magazine editors need to balance work with leisure, whether it be a trip to the saloon or not. There is enough unpredictable unpleasantness in the nine-to-five shift of the workday that people naturally yearn for the congenial and familiar when they are off the clock.
Much of what a true tavern is about, then, is security. One of human nature’s most powerful drives is the desire for comfort and stability. People find relief from the unknown in many different ways. Some retreat to the confines of their home, while others seek out parents, relatives, or the family golden retriever. But others want to go to a place where they not only know the routine, but are an integral part of it. An old New Yorker cartoon comes to mind. Two men have made themselves quite comfortable at a crowded bar and apparently have enjoyed more than one cocktail. One comments, “This is the part of the afternoon I like—too late to go back to the office, too early to go home.”
Each saloon is unique because its particular cast of characters mold its personality. The frame with the first dollar bill is still tilted. The same joke told after a few beers is even funnier. It is like rereading your favorite book and each time catching a new detail. Here, one man’s problem is another man’s consolation. And, bartenders have always had at least the reputation, and at best the vocation, to be informal psychologists. (Some say King Solomon got his start stirring martinis.) One could almost describe the gathering at the local bar as a slightly twisted (or perhaps stirred, not shaken) support group.
Who better to bring alive such a scene than the New Yorker’s estimable chronicler, Joseph Mitchell. In his “Obituary of a Gin Mill,” he delves into the personality and even the very soul of Dick’s corner pub, a local dive, before it moved and was renovated into a hospital-like operating room with bartenders in starched white coats. People lived in the old Dick’s not because of the food, or any service with a smile, but to enjoy the companionship. Mitchell describes the regulars as “clannish,” and he explores their quirkishness in detail, such as “the barwalker” who was “not happy unless he was up on the sagging bar, arms akimbo, dancing a Cossack dance and kicking over glasses of beer.” What drew these odd folk to Dick’s was an expected spontaneity; the nightly outline was the same, but the details were left to be filled in. “On these lovely, irretrievable nights a kind of mass hysteria would sweep through the establishment. The customers would tire of singing and dancing and shaking dice. There would be a lull. Then, all of a sudden, they would start bellowing and throwing their drinks on the floor.” Thoroughly accustomed to such behavior, the bartender would “grin at the antics of a customer, shake his head, and say, ‘This place is a regular Bellevue Island.’ ”
The bonds formed within the walls of the bar were not locked away with the hooch at closing time. Dick would close the bar in the event of the death of a regular; then after the funeral he would take the whole procession out for Chinese food and Scotch. The scenes that Mitchell creates are those of a group of ordinary men who, when brought together by the sagging counter of the corner pub, become an extraordinary spectacle. What is even more powerful about Mitchell’s tale is the quick and thorough destruction of the spirited platoon by the physical and symbolic changes in the revamped Dick’s. An appeal to new customers, a menu featuring s-car-gots, and a bar that was polished and stable made the regulars feel like strangers. The same men, under different circumstances, dissolve and disappear. A part, if not all of them, died when the old Dick’s was locked for the last time.
The experiences that Mitchell describes are not unique to 1930s New York. The history of the American tavern is one marked as much by human relations as by alcohol, and its lineage is a running theme in the nation’s annals. In the early eighteenth century, only one tavern was allowed per county in some areas, so it was often adjoined to the courthouse. Before and after trials participants would gather for a drink, and it was not unusual for charges to be dropped after a few rounds. (If only today’s lawyers were as efficient as early-American ale.) In some instances large trials were held in the bar, as it was often more spacious than the courtroom. This was, however, an era without a Surgeon General, and so when the pulpit-pounding Cotton Mather proclaimed in 1708 that rum was “a Creature of God,” and when Benjamin Franklin later remarked, “if God had intended man to drink water, He would not have made him with an elbow capable of raising a wine glass,” people listened and responded appreciatively.
Of what did men speak while partaking of these blessed spirits, at a time when the Redskins versus the Cowboys was a frontier, not football battle? Quite often, freedom. In the Alcoholic Republic, W.J. Rorabaugh argues that taverns were “seed beds of the Revolution,” where the King was denounced and independence plotted. It should therefore come as no surprise that in 1775 Philadelphia’s Tun Tavern was the first recruiting station for the United States Marine Corps. That explains why Rorabaugh calls saloons “nurseries of freedom” and concludes that “there is no doubt that the success of the Revolution increased the prestige of the drinking houses.”
The triumph of the revolution did not quench the patriot’s thirst; in fact it heightened it. Americans adopted drinking as a symbol for their hard-earned right of equality. Rorabaugh notes that “all men were equal before the bottle.” Furthermore, “while drinking in a group made the participants equals, it also gave them a feeling of independence and liberty.” It was “an act of self-will by which a man… sought perfection in his surroundings”—the same kind of perfection that the barwalker sought atop the counter at Dick’s. There are very few places where man can reasonably hope to find perfection, yet somehow a bar is one of them. Strangers of any social class talk about the oppressive King, argue the validity of the proposed Constitution, worry over Napoleon or Hitler, or root for the Yanks in the World Series. There is comfort in the openness, as well as the timelessness, of this atmosphere. The tavern experience opens up new worlds of existence simply by the bonds it creates. As William James said, “Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.” Aristotle wrote that the highest and most enduring types of friendships are those that are based on equality and common interests. The hierarchies of the workplace and even the family rarely foster these qualities in the same manner as a saloon.
I have worked in bars for over three years and have witnessed the best and worst of human nature. Without a doubt it is the positive aspects of this life that stand out. Numerous couples have returned to my bar, revering it as the place where they met and where their romance grew. Countless strangers have met, talked, returned, and cultivated friendships. As a bartender I have had jobs, apartments, and even a daughter offered to me. (“If you’re ever in California, you must look us up”). Most importantly, I have been a part of a tradition that is larger than the sum of its parts, where great people, great friendships, and great ideas flourish. This is no doubt why G.K. Chesterton, in his book on Charles Dickens, sees the saloon as a metaphor for heaven and the perfection of friendship: “The inn does not point to the road; the road points to the inn. And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters; and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.”