No one thought it was a good idea when I left my hometown and moved to Carrboro in 2002. The notion was that I should go to New York. Smart people went to New York. Ambitious people went to New York. What was I?
My first house in town was a dump. Four girls. A divorcee. Two college students. An otherwise unemployed music critic (me). We smoked cigarettes on a ravaged screened-in porch and watched traffic and reruns. When I was home, there were always too many people there, which was exactly enough people for me. When I wasn’t home, I was working at the record store, seeing shows, and visiting the bar.
The bar.
The bar was always better than a dive. It had bouquets of fresh flowers on the battered copper bar and trailing jasmine and trumpet vine on the patio. Meaningful flourishes from the women who owned the space. That and the comfortable bathroom chairs, therapist-positioned in a nook in the pink-painted ladies room, where a girl might hide for a second or two and collect herself on a blind date or a bad night, and eavesdropping might happen on a bit of local gossip.
In the early days, I ordered well gin and tonics and PBRs. A five-dollar bill bought a g&t plus tip. Fifteen dollars would buy me a pretty serious night out. Twenty if I wanted to pick up a pack of cigarettes, which I usually did in those days. The record store paid in cash. I lived on the front sofa in the bar window in the winter and on the back patio in the summer. My home away from home.
I met friends at the bar. I met dates at the bar. I met celebrities at the bar. One night I let Peter Buck of R.E.M. buy me a beer after work. “They might serve me first,” he said. Fair. I didn’t tell him that his band had been my favorite band for the majority of my young life. I did, however, tell him that the bar was my favorite bar and how happy I was to live so close by.
“Walking distance,” I said.
He nodded. I like to believe he was impressed.
My second house was not quite two blocks behind the bar. 180 steps, at my pace, if you cut around the outside of the EMS station. On clear nights, you could follow the constellations south. Orion hung out just over my driveway.
Proximity made the bar my satellite living room. The place where I took my guests, celebrated my occasions, marked the seasons. I could show up at late afternoon and slide up at a patio table with a novel and a cocktail. I could wander up in late night when my restaurant friends lured me out of pajamas for a nightcap. I could provide charging cables when the barstaff left theirs at home. I could quietly leave a half dozen or so of their bar glasses on the patio when I found them in my yard after a party. I could drift off to sleep to the distant rattle of bar glass at midnight, at one a.m., at two a.m. The sound of a world still breathing. A reminder I was not alone.
When I bought a house, I surrendered the ability to stagger home past the ambulance. My new house was a couple miles out. Close enough to walk, sort of, but not really at night. I marked the occasion with an attempt at moderation on the precipice of the world shutting down. 2020 was so very lonely. My fellow bar patrons and I gathered online to drink on Fridays and play trivia to fundraise, and it was absolutely not the same, and I missed everyone. I even missed the self I was in the presence of everyone.
When it reopened, that first night felt like a family reunion. What I knew then, what I know now, is that the bar was never about the drinking. It was about the community. It was about having someone to talk to, a song you liked on the PA, a corner table on the patio where you could read a book with a negroni and watch the sunset turn the sky Campari red over the fence. Every time I mark an occasion at the bar, I feel like I’m surrounded by family. That’s one hell of a cocktail, even when it has no booze in it at all.
Happy twenty-fifth, OCSC.
Thank you for always making me feel like I belong.
