the bar

For almost as long as I can remember a central presence in my life has been housed in one bar or another. I’ve been a regular bar frequenter since I was eight years old. I can still remember getting off the school bus in my catholic school girls’ uniform and rather than playing with friends outside or watching TV, I would clutch the almost too heavy door and slip into my step-father’s dark and smoke-filled bar in South Buffalo. Immediately, I would be transported from the mid-afternoon’s sunlight and sucked into near darkness and coolness that’s only really comparable to that of a cave. As my eyes adjusted to the change in light I would begin to make out the shadowy figures slumped over the bar.

At this point in the day there would only be a handful. They each had varying stories… one was a textbook alcoholic, one was hiding out from his family after his recent job loss, one was living in a nearby halfway house spending what little money he had on the cheapest draft beer, one was my step-father’s old high school buddy dried up from his excessive drug use during the 70’s, and then there was me.

My older sister didn’t share in the adventure and secret world that the bar held for me. She somehow knew it was inappropriate for an eight and ten year old to be there. But for me, I couldn’t have been more thrilled to spend the afternoon at the bar. The fact that there was the faint scent of urine, the occasional passed out drunk, and ash trays over flowing with cigarette butts made it all that more appealing to me. No one paid me much notice and that’s the way I liked it. I wanted to pretend as if I too were a regular… as if I belonged to a private club of social outcasts with tragic life stories that the best American novels are based on.

As I sipped my Cokes at the bar, dangling my feet above the floor, I would mimic their slumped posture and reflect on my own life tragedies thus far… the way the kids in my class would remind me everyday that my name rhymes with “Barfa,” the embarrassment of being held back a year in kindergarten when I moved from Texas to NY, and having an older sister far more beautiful than I would ever be. With these social outcasts, I was at home.

Eventually my step-father was busted for selling cocaine out the basement of the bar and not even his brother, a city Sheriff, could save him. He lost the bar and it was replaced with new ownership that stole from it everything I loved. My fellow pariahs were replaced with happy hour specials and girls in tight clothes. There was now a dance floor and neon lights where the jukebox once stood.

And worst of all, Houlihan’s was now known as Finn McCool’s.