At the Raven
by David Lazar
At the Raven Bar in NW Washington, DC, my friend Alyce asked for a cocktail, as in what can you give me in the way of a cocktail, barkeep? But the gentleman seemed flummoxed and replied gently: I more or less pour liquid into a glass. I guess I can do a gin and tonic. That’s a cocktail.
It seemed to me that this met some essential requirement of dive-iness: stripped down, basic, unadorned.
The Raven did have some Christmas lights up, but balancing that were the lack of sinks in the
bathrooms, which were covered with absurd, silly, toiletty philosophical, and vulgar graffiti, my
favorite of which was the following:
Have Faith In Your Self
Offer Your Hand
Prevail Over Fear
Engage Love
(under which was the addendum)
Wipe and Flush
A toilet Desideratum.
Alyce and I started debating whether it was truly a dive, though, or just an old bar that had been revived. This is what writers do, I suppose when they go out to drink and want a break
From talking about the debacles of their romances and how much they hate the current administration. I offered that it might be a joint instead of a dive. I’ve always loved the word “joint,” undoubtedly because of the ways it figures in movies from the thirties and forties, as in, “What’s a dame like you doing in a joint like this,” or “I never thought a dumb cluck like you would fall for a meeting in this kind of a joint.” I’d like to take a time capsule, not into a time, but into an earlier invented language, part literary, part cinematic: film noir dialect, and just live there. “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter,” Humphery Bogart says as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, but that gaudy patter (the line itself is gaudy patter!) is rich, sharp, street smart, sexy, a bit cruel and edgy. A map of wish-fulfillment.
So, joint and dive. It’s all in the experience, really. A joint used to imply a place that was a bit seedy, a natural connection considering its nineteenth century connection to opium dens. Dives
aren’t necessarily seedy so much as a bit down and out (in London, Paris, New York, Chicago. . . .) and, well, hardboiled in their aesthetic, at least as I understand them, and usually have a history of serving mostly men, mostly working men in the dingy dark. As Alyce pointed out, you can’t open a new dive bar, as much as Mr. Hipster sometimes wants to try to. But I’m a bit morbidly curious about this desire to newly create the worn, to invent the forgotten, to provide a sanitized version of the out of time beatness that dive bars offer as their inversion of the idea of a haven.
The essential thing you can’t do in a faux dive is dive. Dive bars may be highly social (set ‘em up, Joe!), but they’re also the dark places that ask us to consider the dark places. As I sat in the Raven with Alyce, drinking rye, which is what I like to drink when I go to dive bars—(My dear sir, my thirst knows no bounds! I need to quaff and soon! I say in my mind, another retreat into fantasies of language)—we talked about the bars of our past, as though we were speaking of lovers, and I mentioned the few days I had just spent in New York, and going to the Houndstooth Pub.
I was staying in a hotel on 38th St. off 8th Ave, mostly just grooving being back in the city, back in the thick of those streets where I used to run tickets for my father, whose travel agency was across from Madison Square Garden. He’d give me a stack of tickets and a buck for subway fare, which I’d pocket to keep, and walk instead to all the garment center businesses whose airline tickets it was my charge to drop off. I thought of this walking back to my hotel when I passed 1407 Broadway, where I always had deliveries, and this made me nostalgic, and when I’m nostalgic and it’s 3 pm. I inevitably want to grab a drink somewhere.
I found the Houndstooth Pub on 8th Avenue, and . . . was it a dive? Let’s say it was a dive because it was sadder than the dive bars I go to in my residence town of Chicago that I call “dives” without hesitation, sadder because it was just a place that had run out of steam and all it had was location. It had generic beat up tables, a “u” shaped bar, an embarrassed veneer of respectability that would have made Jean Harlow guffaw, dirty floors, a menu that made generic diners seem like a plenitude and, surprisingly, a wonderful bartender. He had the patter of a gentleman bartender, but not so extreme that it seemed ironic. “Welcome, sir, what can I serve you,” he said in his gabardine sweater and blandly handsome fifty-year-old face. “Rye.” And as every bar denizen understands (a dive is like an underground den, so denizen seems right), he gave me a really good pour, a large drink. There’s nothing so annoying as a bartender who serves a puny drink, and one who measures by the ounce ought to self-immolate.
I told Alyce about how much I enjoyed sitting in the chilly Houndstooth, while sitting in the warm Raven, and it reminded me of another kind of dive bar in New York that I used to visit years ago, with my friend Tony. Alyce and I talked about those old, urban Irish bars—I only know the ones in my hometown of New York—where you would really see these men from central casting, red-faced, melancholy, high humoured, lapsing into a kind of memory coma. They would dot the bar at any time between ten a.m. and four a.m., and, in my late twenties and thirties, I encountered them with Tony on our afternoon walks in the city.
Having drinks with an old friend in a dive bar is like being in a liquid confessional. So, I told Alyce about the stages of my friend Tony’s descent, how I met him in my first ever nonfiction workshop with Phillip Lopate, and was repelled by how he reeked of gin in the afternoon class. He would always sit by me. Have you had the experience of repulsion turning to love? Of refusal turning to acceptance? Those of you who are teachers know the experience of the student who fights you only because he is so afraid of yielding, and then does, that sublime progression. And in love-love, those others who at first annoy the fuck out of us, only to end up in our arms. Tony became my dear, if complicated, friend in my doctoral years, and then for decades after. I met him for promenades around Manhattan, always stopping at the most sullen, last-stoppy, end of the road dive bars so he could drink some form of gin and I could drink whatever I was then drinking, and continue our lit way. That’s the fly in the ointment of my dive bar-ishness, my I’ve escaped and witnessed the stages of decline and degradation of my friend—a wonderful poet by the way—who died, as Berryman said of Delmore Schwartz, “miserable and alone.” I said some of this to Alyce in the Raven. And then thought later about Poe himself on the street. Of course, truly, the story of my friend Tony, or anyone who succumbs to drinking is not about dives but about, well, other things, about that whole nexus which a million other writers have written about. But this essay is about situation, about place, about where we go to do that drinking that that is hopeless not fatal, or fetal, or disastrously feckless.
My ruined friend Tony (at some point do you feel that everything threatens to become an elegy?), a Manhattan silver-spooner, born and raised in Gramercy Park, liked nothing better than some 58th St., some 32nd St, some Village hole where men went who were all washed up. It was a projection of his own dark destiny. I thought of that at the Houndstooth, the kind of place where Tony would have been comfortable, and thought about it again, at the Raven, when I told Alyce about Tony.
This raises the inevitable question of the emotional valences of going where we see what we think we might have been, a kind of Christmas Carolization of our lives. We look around and see holes we might have fallen into, all in the shapes of others drawn into themselves, dark shades who took paths we might have taken, who drank themselves into permanent places on stools in some joint. We indulge our dark sentimentality in the form of appropriated projection: we might be them, those poor souls we say to ourselves, measuring our uncertain circumstances against horrible, imagined alternatives. Until human voices wake us and we resume our listless melancholy? There was no one like this at The Raven—the weary few visitors at the bar were more listless than washed up. If they had seen better days, those days weren’t necessarily worse than mine.
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore
Thus quoth the narrator of Poe’s “The Raven,” on his midnight weary. He may as well have been at a dive bar, or some joint, yearning to find the balm that is there so offered. As for myself, at The Raven in NW Washington, my balm was my “rare and radiant” friend Alyce, and that was balm enough that dark and dreary night.
It seemed to me that this met some essential requirement of dive-iness: stripped down, basic, unadorned.
The Raven did have some Christmas lights up, but balancing that were the lack of sinks in the
bathrooms, which were covered with absurd, silly, toiletty philosophical, and vulgar graffiti, my
favorite of which was the following:
Have Faith In Your Self
Offer Your Hand
Prevail Over Fear
Engage Love
(under which was the addendum)
Wipe and Flush
A toilet Desideratum.
Alyce and I started debating whether it was truly a dive, though, or just an old bar that had been revived. This is what writers do, I suppose when they go out to drink and want a break
From talking about the debacles of their romances and how much they hate the current administration. I offered that it might be a joint instead of a dive. I’ve always loved the word “joint,” undoubtedly because of the ways it figures in movies from the thirties and forties, as in, “What’s a dame like you doing in a joint like this,” or “I never thought a dumb cluck like you would fall for a meeting in this kind of a joint.” I’d like to take a time capsule, not into a time, but into an earlier invented language, part literary, part cinematic: film noir dialect, and just live there. “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter,” Humphery Bogart says as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, but that gaudy patter (the line itself is gaudy patter!) is rich, sharp, street smart, sexy, a bit cruel and edgy. A map of wish-fulfillment.
So, joint and dive. It’s all in the experience, really. A joint used to imply a place that was a bit seedy, a natural connection considering its nineteenth century connection to opium dens. Dives
aren’t necessarily seedy so much as a bit down and out (in London, Paris, New York, Chicago. . . .) and, well, hardboiled in their aesthetic, at least as I understand them, and usually have a history of serving mostly men, mostly working men in the dingy dark. As Alyce pointed out, you can’t open a new dive bar, as much as Mr. Hipster sometimes wants to try to. But I’m a bit morbidly curious about this desire to newly create the worn, to invent the forgotten, to provide a sanitized version of the out of time beatness that dive bars offer as their inversion of the idea of a haven.
The essential thing you can’t do in a faux dive is dive. Dive bars may be highly social (set ‘em up, Joe!), but they’re also the dark places that ask us to consider the dark places. As I sat in the Raven with Alyce, drinking rye, which is what I like to drink when I go to dive bars—(My dear sir, my thirst knows no bounds! I need to quaff and soon! I say in my mind, another retreat into fantasies of language)—we talked about the bars of our past, as though we were speaking of lovers, and I mentioned the few days I had just spent in New York, and going to the Houndstooth Pub.
I was staying in a hotel on 38th St. off 8th Ave, mostly just grooving being back in the city, back in the thick of those streets where I used to run tickets for my father, whose travel agency was across from Madison Square Garden. He’d give me a stack of tickets and a buck for subway fare, which I’d pocket to keep, and walk instead to all the garment center businesses whose airline tickets it was my charge to drop off. I thought of this walking back to my hotel when I passed 1407 Broadway, where I always had deliveries, and this made me nostalgic, and when I’m nostalgic and it’s 3 pm. I inevitably want to grab a drink somewhere.
I found the Houndstooth Pub on 8th Avenue, and . . . was it a dive? Let’s say it was a dive because it was sadder than the dive bars I go to in my residence town of Chicago that I call “dives” without hesitation, sadder because it was just a place that had run out of steam and all it had was location. It had generic beat up tables, a “u” shaped bar, an embarrassed veneer of respectability that would have made Jean Harlow guffaw, dirty floors, a menu that made generic diners seem like a plenitude and, surprisingly, a wonderful bartender. He had the patter of a gentleman bartender, but not so extreme that it seemed ironic. “Welcome, sir, what can I serve you,” he said in his gabardine sweater and blandly handsome fifty-year-old face. “Rye.” And as every bar denizen understands (a dive is like an underground den, so denizen seems right), he gave me a really good pour, a large drink. There’s nothing so annoying as a bartender who serves a puny drink, and one who measures by the ounce ought to self-immolate.
I told Alyce about how much I enjoyed sitting in the chilly Houndstooth, while sitting in the warm Raven, and it reminded me of another kind of dive bar in New York that I used to visit years ago, with my friend Tony. Alyce and I talked about those old, urban Irish bars—I only know the ones in my hometown of New York—where you would really see these men from central casting, red-faced, melancholy, high humoured, lapsing into a kind of memory coma. They would dot the bar at any time between ten a.m. and four a.m., and, in my late twenties and thirties, I encountered them with Tony on our afternoon walks in the city.
Having drinks with an old friend in a dive bar is like being in a liquid confessional. So, I told Alyce about the stages of my friend Tony’s descent, how I met him in my first ever nonfiction workshop with Phillip Lopate, and was repelled by how he reeked of gin in the afternoon class. He would always sit by me. Have you had the experience of repulsion turning to love? Of refusal turning to acceptance? Those of you who are teachers know the experience of the student who fights you only because he is so afraid of yielding, and then does, that sublime progression. And in love-love, those others who at first annoy the fuck out of us, only to end up in our arms. Tony became my dear, if complicated, friend in my doctoral years, and then for decades after. I met him for promenades around Manhattan, always stopping at the most sullen, last-stoppy, end of the road dive bars so he could drink some form of gin and I could drink whatever I was then drinking, and continue our lit way. That’s the fly in the ointment of my dive bar-ishness, my I’ve escaped and witnessed the stages of decline and degradation of my friend—a wonderful poet by the way—who died, as Berryman said of Delmore Schwartz, “miserable and alone.” I said some of this to Alyce in the Raven. And then thought later about Poe himself on the street. Of course, truly, the story of my friend Tony, or anyone who succumbs to drinking is not about dives but about, well, other things, about that whole nexus which a million other writers have written about. But this essay is about situation, about place, about where we go to do that drinking that that is hopeless not fatal, or fetal, or disastrously feckless.
My ruined friend Tony (at some point do you feel that everything threatens to become an elegy?), a Manhattan silver-spooner, born and raised in Gramercy Park, liked nothing better than some 58th St., some 32nd St, some Village hole where men went who were all washed up. It was a projection of his own dark destiny. I thought of that at the Houndstooth, the kind of place where Tony would have been comfortable, and thought about it again, at the Raven, when I told Alyce about Tony.
This raises the inevitable question of the emotional valences of going where we see what we think we might have been, a kind of Christmas Carolization of our lives. We look around and see holes we might have fallen into, all in the shapes of others drawn into themselves, dark shades who took paths we might have taken, who drank themselves into permanent places on stools in some joint. We indulge our dark sentimentality in the form of appropriated projection: we might be them, those poor souls we say to ourselves, measuring our uncertain circumstances against horrible, imagined alternatives. Until human voices wake us and we resume our listless melancholy? There was no one like this at The Raven—the weary few visitors at the bar were more listless than washed up. If they had seen better days, those days weren’t necessarily worse than mine.
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore
Thus quoth the narrator of Poe’s “The Raven,” on his midnight weary. He may as well have been at a dive bar, or some joint, yearning to find the balm that is there so offered. As for myself, at The Raven in NW Washington, my balm was my “rare and radiant” friend Alyce, and that was balm enough that dark and dreary night.
David Lazar's recent books are Stories of the Street: Reimagining Found Texts, Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors, and the anthology Don't Look Now: Writers on What They Wish They Hadn't Seen, co-edited with Kristen Iversen. He is the editor of Conversations with M.F.K. Fisher and Michael Powell: Interviews. Forthcoming from Nebraska is Double Indemnities (collaborative essays). Best American Essays named ten of his essays "Notable Essays of the Year. 2016, Lazar received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Nonfiction. He is co-editor of Ohio State University's 21st Century Essays imprint. He created the undergraduate and graduate nonfiction programs at Ohio University and Columbia College Chicago.
