The Truth Table of Weeknight Taverns

Today I stopped in a bar on the way home to Have a Beer.

I know. I know. "When doesn't he?" the sage asks. Good question. Lest I should seem an urbane bastard, let me remind you: I live in the burbs. Starbucks are easy to find; comfortable bars, not so much. If your schtick is a crowded, neon-glared watering hole filled with balding has-beens shouting at whatever game is on (and it's got to be HDTV, no less for these bastards with their pushbroom mustaches and missing teeth), my neck of the woods is quite delectable; but if, like me, you long for the old days of pubs and a veritable drinking culture, you might as well be living in Salt Lake City.

Not so Joe's Place, which is a mere skip down the road from my humble home. We started hitting it mornings during my holiday break, and I have to admit, there's something to be said for guzzling Heineken while staring out the window at people headed for work. Every morning I pass the place, and I never fail to glance inside longingly: the morose bartender mopping up last night's mess; the overworked crew just getting off the night shift; the hard core alcoholics; and the hung over, nursing headaches over tomatoe juice and Budweiser. Roll of booze, hear my cry, I call to them. I am one of you! Now save my seat, or I'll kick your asses.

It was a crappy Monday today, one of those days where you leave wondering, had you been born in the 19th century, would you lumber home on a morning like this, head full of existential angst over your place in life, your career path, your overall health and karma...or would you be too busy trying to survive while doctors fed you opium and sawed off your limbs?

Ah yes, simpler times.

So, completely independent of my own conscious thought, I found myself wheeling into the parking lot of Joe's for a $1.75 Heineken. I'd decided to Have a Beer.

Having a Beer calls for a certain approach. I've not had much practice in Having a Beer. I've Gone Out for a Beer, true: there, the objective is to celebrate the end of a day or week by consuming as much as possible, without stepping over the line and screwing your short-term sobriety too badly. If Going Out for a Beer is a journey with a tangible end (drunkenness), Having a Beer is a meditative, introspective act, and it demands a certain sense of dignity, one I'm not likely to find in myself as I pound the bar furiously while calling Tso a buffoon for subscribing to Libertarianism.

Actually, I've only recently understood Having a Beer; if you're not out to get wasted, why not just have a Coke? But the beer itself is a reward, a garland for the exhausted Greek athlete, I suppose. The beer itself matters less than what it represents: Victory. Or, in my case, Survival.

If you don't want to Have a Beer, or Go Out for a Beer, you can always Get Drinks. "Let's Get some Drinks" used to be a danger sign in most places I worked, up to and including my current occupation. It was an open door policy: the more the merrier, true, but x amount of people fed into the equation equals a certain number of hours out, of money spent, of poison ingested. If, say, Tom Haldemann were to send out an e-mail tomorrow, "Out for drinks at 4," the danger would be minimal: It's a Tuesday, most people are going to work late or go home; Tom is not, shall we say, universally liked; e-mail invites are routinely ignored, etc.

But if John Pepper sends out such an e-mail, as in "We're going out for drinks at 4," the equation shifts: John has something political to get off his chest or he wouldnt' be offering; John will scare several others into going and I don't want to leave them hanging; he owes me two rounds and this is my chance to get paid back.

None of that is likely in the second week of February, especially while we're in the midst of all this damned snow. I'd worked late, not really wanting to stay but hating the thought of rattling around an empty house in the mid-afternoon with anything school-related on the brain. So when I Had My Beer, it tasted more like water down a Welsh warrior's throat, the cries of the dying surrounding him as his king stares at him inscrutably. Only I had no king to adulate, the battle was far from over, and I can't shoot a longbow to save my life.

The bar was relatively empty, but what it lacked in population it made up for in volume: the Juke Box O Matic was blaring something by the Scorpions, and two guys on my side were bellowing at each other about their wives. No fooling. I make claims like that sometimes, they're total crap, but this was true: "I just said that to fuck with you!" the first guy called.

"Yeah, better fucking with me than with your wife!" the other catcalled.

"Better than fucking her in the ass, you mean!"

And on and on, and I knew I could never reproduce the conversation believably. It would look too cliched. And isn't it pathetic that was what I was worrying about, sitting in a bar all by my lonesome, guzzling cheap Heineken while the two guys on the other side of me watched a high school volleyball game on TV with, shall we say, more than usual interest. That I wouldnt' be able to tell about it and make people buy it.

I could have sat there all night. Cars were passing out the window. My mind, weighed by the minutae of daily teaching while at school, found itself strangely untroubled in that dump. I started glaring at everyone around me: "What're you so happy about, asshole? Bet you don't have to redo curriculum. Bet if they ever gave you a study hall, you'd run screaming. What's that you do, lay bricks? Come over here and lay on my asshole."

It's a bad idea to be eyeballing so many of this sort. They're not bad people, but they're not used to taking crap from anyone (one reason, I suppose, they're not co-workers of mine, watching fifteen-year-olds roll their eyes and shoot water bottles across the room), and they're certainly not going to take it from yours truly. When the volleyball watchers started glaring at me and the wife-fuckers on the other side started scaling back their conversation in favor of curious glances in my direction, I realized I'd been muttering to myself. Bad habit. Thought I lost it years ago. Wasn't even drunk. So either get drunk now, Teacher Man, cover your tracks and dive into the bottle, or get out. Go home, put on Jane Austen from last night, maybe have a glass of wine. Show those Philistines.

So that's sort of what it likes to Have a Beer on a Monday night. I'd like to try Getting Some Drinks tomorrow night, but I think it's much more likely I'll Down a Brew when I get home, and maybe Go Out to Imbibe Wednesday or Thursday night. Or maybe I'll just wait until Friday and Get Plastered. There ought to be a flowchart for the options you're supposed to exercise. Me, I'm reduced to a self-created blog.