By
Jay Fox
Brooklyn, NY, USA
Nothing
good happens after midnight. – American parental
warning.
I
don’t visit bars like I used to. It’s not simply because I’ve gotten older or
because I’ve decided to consciously cut back on drinking. It’s just something
that gradually happened over time.
The
bar used to be the primary theater of my social life, particularly on the
weekends. It was where I met up with my friends and where I met new friends whom
I would perhaps never see again. We’d stay late into the early hours of the
morning, popping out every round or so for a cigarette, and only leave for good
when someone was too drunk to form a coherent sentence or when the bartender
told us we didn’t have to go home, but we couldn’t stay there. On more cavalier
summer nights, we’d decide to keep the party going, stop at a local bodega for
a few sixers, and then end up greeting the dawn from a roof or a courtyard or a
patio and only call it quits after we were told to shut up and go to bed by angry
neighbors. The following day would be spent nursing a hangover either on the
couch or, if it were football season, at yet another bar over a pint of
Guinness and a plate of nachos.
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| Jay Fox |
Though
these kinds of nights do still take place, they don’t happen all that often. It’s
not because of a single or a series of come-to-Jesus moments. It’s not because
of kids. It’s not because of New Year’s resolutions or so much as the conscious
decision to stop being a degenerate on Fridays and Saturdays. Rather, you just adopt
minor lifestyle changes that unwittingly put you on the path to responsibility.
By twenty-four, you start avoiding bars that attract college or law school
students. By twenty-seven, you decide that you will no longer go anywhere that
has a line. At thirty, you stop bothering with places where you can’t sit down.
By thirty-three, you think it’s entirely acceptable to not go out both nights
of the weekend. These incremental changes don’t happen because you’re trying to
clean up your act; you just don’t want to be inconvenienced.
Suddenly,
on the nights when you do go out, you realize that you don’t end up talking to
strangers as often as you used to. It happens the first time without your processing
it, but then you realize that it’s part of larger pattern that runs on replay each
time you go out. As you think about it, you recognize at least two reasons for
the change. First, you are no longer part of the smoker club who convenes in
front of the bar because you quit. (And it is a club, too. When you smoke in
front of the bar, you end up meeting people because you either bum someone a
cigarette or you end up standing next to someone while you both smoke and
eventually someone starts talking because it would be weird to stand there and
not say anything.) Secondly, bars that are empty enough to have available seats
don’t attract people on cocaine, and people who are not on cocaine tend to not
talk to strangers. People on cocaine, conversely, tend to use a dump truck to
unload their head on anyone within spitting distance.
By
thirty-five, things have become even more reasonable and responsible. By this
point, you refuse to walk more than ten blocks out of your way to go to a bar
unless it’s for an extremely special event, like a birthday party for one of
your friend’s kids—at which point you will travel to Jersey, and then take five
forms of public transportation home over the course of two and a half hours,
stop only to look unsuccessfully for a bathroom in the West Village, and then
arrive home (no longer drunk) with a pocketful of Lifesavers that you received
from an amateur boxer with swollen fists whom you met on the PATH train and who
(for whatever reason) took a shine to you and decided to talk your ear off
instead of robbing and beating you. Again, it’s not that these kinds of nights
never happen anymore; it’s just that your accumulated preferences end up eliminating
a lot of possibilities that would have allowed you to be a degenerate.
Furthermore, the reasons that compel you to go out in the first place, your
friends, cease to be available all the time.
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| The Sackett - Park Slope |
Just
about everyone I’ve known since moving here more than 18 years ago had kids and
moved to the suburbs; had kids and moved even farther away; or failed to find
someone with whom to have kids here and consequently moved to a place where
they thought they’d have better luck on the dating circuit. The few who are
still regularly hanging around places until last call either are the youngest
members of my friend group or aren’t out for the sake of a good time—they’re still
out at 4am because they don’t have anywhere else to go or, worse, they’re
there feeding a problem. More importantly, this latter group tends to keep
making the same mistakes that you saw them make in their twenties, only by now
there’s a sense that these lapses in judgment will ultimately culminate in more
than just a funny story about how they got a particular scar.
Consequently,
the bar has become more of a weekday and early evening destination for me. It
has become the place for a few drinks, typically in a familiar setting with a
familiar cast of characters and a familiar drink list. I’m not looking for a
place to meet anyone new or for the opportunity to do something stupid, and I’m
certainly not going somewhere where you have to join a throng of drunks vying
for the bartender’s attention over the throbbing pulse of a DJ set just to get
a drink.
I
want a local.
I’ve
written about locals in the past, but I don’t believe I ever considered myself
a local at a specific bar. The reason is twofold.
First,
I’ve never been much of a regular. Yes, I know a lot of the bartenders in my
neighborhood. In some cases, it’s because I’ve been to the bar where they work
enough over the course of many years to have established a rapport with them
over music or books or crosswords or beer or the fact that we know the same
person or group of people. In other cases, it’s because I’ve either played
music with them or because our bands shared a bill (about half of the bartenders
in Brooklyn are musicians). However, it’s rare that I spend a lot of time at
one place consistently. The reason for this, again, is twofold. On the
financial front, I’ve been far too broke for most of my adult life to spend a
lot of money having casual beers during the week, so most weekday drinking has
taken place in my apartment. Secondly, I’ve been too busy with deadlines or
literary projects or band practice or whatever else to find the time to
religiously go anywhere for a night cap or during happy hour.
The
second reason why I haven’t sought a local is because I never entirely felt
like a local. Even though I’ve now spent half of my life in this city, and over
fourteen of those years have been here in Brooklyn, I’ve always acknowledged
that I am something of a transient. Yes, Brooklyn is my home, but Brooklyn has never
meant a specific neighborhood like Sunset Park, South Slope, Brooklyn Heights,
Greenpoint, or Williamsburg. The idea of Brooklyn-as-home was the borough as a
whole because I defined home as being within a social group that was spread out
over five or six neighborhoods. My connection to a specific block or neighborhood
always felt somewhat accidental or superficial, as though my presence in the
area lacked the ability to leave any discernible imprint. The most pertinent
aspect of my presence to the fabric of the neighborhood was that I precluded
another from existing in the space.
Recently,
however, I’ve begun to feel more comfortable saying I’m a part of the
neighborhood rather than being just a person who happens to live here. After
all, I’ve either worked or lived in a four-block radius for more than 13 years.
This is home even though I do acknowledge that I have displaced others and
that, given my potential socioeconomic position and education and the potential
socioeconomic positions and educations of my neighbors who have been here for
more than 13 or even 25 years, I play a part in the wider problem of displacement
and gentrification.
I’ve
also ceased to be too broke to treat myself to a happy hour beer or two once a
week.
Consequently,
I finally feel as though I have a local, and that local is The Sackett
(661 Sackett Street, Park Slope), even if it’s not technically in my
neighborhood. Rather, it’s about the halfway point between my friend’s
apartment and my rehearsal space, and about twenty blocks north of where I
live. We meet there every week before I go to rehearsal, have two drinks
(cocktails for her; beer for me), and then go our separate ways. If the band is
running late or the weather is particularly bad, we’ll sometimes have a third
round.
There
are no good stories to relay, as the happy hour environment there is exactly as
it’s supposed to be: warm, relaxed, affordable. There are perhaps ten seats at
the bar and another twenty chairs set around a few tables. We typically prefer
to sit at the bar because it’s illuminated by white string lights, while the
space away from the bar is mostly dark.
The
people who come in run a pretty wide gamut. You get your yoga wives and their
asshole husbands on the c-suite track from up the block sometimes dipping in
for a quick glass of wine before heading back to the brownstones. You also get
more blue-collar people who work nearby coming in for a bottle of beer after
calling it a day. I’ve seen clusters of friends, students, and door-to-door
salespeople take over most of the tables. The music jumps from playlists of Yo
La Tegno, Pixies, and Galaxie 500 to throwbacks that only go as far back as 2008:
MGMT, Silversun Pickups, and Arcade Fire.
The
whole experience is not anything special and, in a way, it’s not supposed to
be. It’s supposed to be the opposite of special, which is regular, usual, comfortable.
And that comfort comes from more than the bar’s smell or look of the place. It’s
certainly more than the familiarity of the playlist or the fact that you know a
lot of the people who come in even if you’ve never given them more
acknowledgment than a polite nod of the head. There’s a certain comfort there
that transcends your local, your regular. It’s the comfort of feeling at home
in the neighborhood and in your situation in life. I’m very happy I’ve found
that.
Link:
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