Put That On My Tab

I like a good bar.

Scratch that. I LOVE a good bar.

There are very few places I'm happier than a great bar. Give me a nice wood bar counter, a stool (preferably with a back), a hip and talkative bartender who knows how to pull a draft just right, decent and varied beer selection, tasty pub grub, a good jukebox, some friendly and interesting folks sitting at the bar and, for good measure, a small stage for music and I'm as happy as can be. The best bars have no TVs but that's not a deal breaker. So many bars have TVs these days that it can be hard to find one without them.

One of my favorite things about going to bars has always been striking up conversations with other people sitting at the bar. I just love being able to chat with other people sitting there drinking beer. A bartender that you can talk to is also essential. This is why I hated living in Boston so goddamn much. In three years not once was I able to chat up a bar patron or bartender. Hell, bartenders in Boston are such assholes (and apparently don't care about their tips) that I've sat at a bar in that town for up to ten minutes with an empty beer glass in front of me before I finally get asked if I want another. The TV show Cheers was such a fucking lie.

The best thing, though, is when you are talking to someone and when the bartender brings your next round somebody says, "I got this one."

Now, being bought a drink in a bar is never about getting a free drink. Unless you are a total dick you will end up picking up just as many of the rounds as the other guy. Or if the other person just really insist on picking them up. That happened to me on a train ride from New York to Chicago last year. I shared a table in the cafe car with a young lawyer going from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh who kept buying every round of the Sam Adams and wouldn't hear of me paying for any of them.

But for the most part it is not about getting some free drinks. No, what is nice about picking up rounds is that you are saying to the other person, "Hey, I'm enjoying hanging out and talking to you so I want you to stick around."

I know it may sound goober-istic and hokey, but there is something beautiful about that kind of basic human connection that often seems to only be able to happen over alcohol. I once heard the conservative columnist David Brooks theorize that the reason there was so much antagonistic animosity between the political parties in recent years was because people in Washington didn't drink together anymore. Not my favorite guy in the world, but I thought he made a great point.

While these kind of connections may not be good for the liver, they do seem exceptionally good for the (for lack of a better word) soul.

And they can happen without warning in the most unexpected places.

I was in Poughkeepsie, NY one night with a few friends for a Wilco show back in 2004. Four of us were walking around looking for a bar in downtown Poughkeepsie to go to before the show, not wanting to hang out in the line for several hours like the other Wilco geeks. My friend Noam was one of the four and he was going to school in Poughkeepsie at the time, but Vassar kids don't actually go to the bars in town so he knew nothing about any of them. Those Vassar kids are a confusing bunch.

The four of us walked up around the corner from The Chance Theater, where Wilco was going to be playing and came upon a nondescript bar with big windows in front. It was fairly well lit inside and we could see people shooting pool and a good amount of the crowd inside. It appeared that every person in the bar was black.

"We HAVE to go to this bar," said Ronen, a guy that I had met in Boston through the Wilco message board, ViaChicago.

Now remember, we're in town to see Wilco, a band that competes with OK Go, Radiohead and The Flaming Lips for title of World's Whitest Rock Group, with fans to match. And the four of us were no exception, despite my buddy Noam's love of hip-hop. He's still an Upper West Side Jew.

So we grab seats the bar. Oddly enough, with a bar full of black people, the bartender looks pretty rednecky, even sporting a mullet. We order four beers and the girl with us, a friend of Ronen whose name escapes me, says she'll get the first round. The bartender says, "That's six bucks."

She replies, "I've got all four."
"Yea, that's six bucks," he says.

I loved this bar immediately.

So we're sitting there chatting and most of us are getting close to the bottom of our first mug of beer when the bartender comes over and puts four shot glasses upside down in front of us. What the hell? We all kind of look confused at the bartender and he tells us that the next round is on the guy at the end of the bar (the upside down shot glasses were markers for the bartender to keep track). We look down to the end of the bar and there is a black man probably in his late 50s or early 60s sitting there, wearing a suit and hat combo that can only be pulled off by older black dudes. Made me think of Lightnin' Hopkins in his later years.

Guy raises his cocktail to us and we raise our beers back to him. He then came over to talk to us. Told us that he wanted to buy us a drink because out of "all those white kids going to that concert" we were the only ones who came in to that bar. "Kids" being a relative term I suppose, I was 33 at the time. He thought that was cool of us. And it was true, there was nobody from the Wilco crowd in this place and it was practically spitting distance from the club. I don't think there was a closer bar.

He stuck around our side of the bar and we had a grand time talking to him. Eventually we would have several of the bar's regulars hanging around with us, shooting the shit. Just about all of them asked us who we were seeing that night and responded with, "Who's Wilco?"

I'm pretty sure that at least three other guys in the bar that night bought our rounds and I know the bartender himself treated us to two. I don't think I spent any money before we left for the show.

(A humorous side story to this night - The only other white person in the bar besides us and the bartender was this middle-aged woman who totally fit the description of "barfly" and was all over Noam, who happened to be all of 19 at the time but had a fake ID. She was in to him in big way, to the point where I think she even tried to get him to go to her place.)

We were having such a great time there that we skipped the opening act and barely made it to the club for Wilco's opening song.

One of my favorite nights ever in a bar. We made just an amazing human connection with a really nice group of people. And yes, the result of that connection was being completely shitfaced by the end of the night. But I think you'd be hard pressed to think of another place besides a bar where such a thing would happen. I doubt the night would have been as fun or social if we were in a coffee house. Would anybody have bought us a latte?

There's something about a bar. It is a beautiful thing. Especially when somebody else is buying.