"And the way all the bottles they shine.."
Sometimes I miss the smell of bars.
I miss that lazy free-floating feeling of having gotten off work from an early morning shift at the coffee house, reeking of ground beans (a smell that is appealing when you’re passing through to just get a latte; less so when you’re there for hours at a time multiple days a week), and my wallet filled with tips. I am tired, I have been up since five am, and likely I may be still a little hungover from the night before. But it’s a warm fall day, all the other nine-to-five suckers are still in an office somewhere, and you? You have about twenty bucks or more in tips, you are still in your 20s, and you and your fellow shift worker are about to go get drinks. These are your Smoking Years: a hard pack of Camel lights waiting in the bottom of your bag with a lighter (you are always accidentally stealing lighters) alongside your car keys and a book. If your coworker wasn’t joining you for icy cold pints at a bar with walls marked up with Sharpie and pen, you’d drive to another nearby bar you love and drink Miller High Life for hours, reading your book or working on the New York Times crossword puzzle.
There are at least three copies of the New York Times available at the coffee house, alongside the obligatory copy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which does not have a very good crossword puzzle. It does have an excellent food section that comes out every Thursday, and the backseat of your junky Acura–it didn’t used to be that way until you got drunk and hit an open door of a car–looks like a sea of yellowed newspaper. It doesn’t matter. Honey-warm sunlight hits you and your coworker’s face, lighting you up inside after hours of seeing the morning pass through plate glass windows. It is time for a drink. And you tell yourself the lie you always tell yourself: Just a couple of beers. Then I’ll go home and crash.Maybe this time it will happen, anything is possible.
This is me realizing over twenty years later that it was never possible. It was an illusion I could fool myself into thinking was an everyday magic trick. Back then, I may have had an inkling about my out of control drinking, may have understood that I would keep going too far, but I could nudge it into silence. I could smother it under cigarette smoke and denial.
The smell of a familiar bar. The smell of all bars in that time period, before smoking bans crept across the US: cigarette fug, spilled beer, disinfectant. A smell I loved, a smell that lifted my spirits when I opened the door, jukebox music spilling out into a bright afternoon. My mouth salivated at the first cigarette and beer of the day–my smoking only connected to beer, no need for nicotine outside of that ritual–and we slid onto the red naugahyde barstools, my coworker and me. I couldn’t always persuade my shift mates into an after work drink, but my success rate is still pretty good; I am very persuasive when I need to be.
This is me realizing over twenty years later I asked them to drink with me in the afternoons after work because going home to be lonely and sad–despite the love of my two cats–sounded worse than drinking in the daytime. It is not.
It has been five years since I last drank, but in my head, I can still recite the litany of bars I loved and frequented. The Gravity Pub, the Earl, Euclid Avenue Yacht Club, Moe’s & Joe’s, George’s, the Righteous Room, 97 Estoria, the Milltown Tavern, Mary’s. A few are lost to time, developed into shinier places with craft beer lists and better lighting. And in the end, it has been years since I stepped inside an Atlanta bar with every intention of watching the afternoon sunlight melt into early evening. I still remember those places with their smells and jukeboxes and idle bartender chatter. I never found the same rhythm when I moved to Canada, but it was not for lack of trying.
The feel of the first beer as it glides down your throat; it tastes like heaven and it is everything you’ve ever wanted. You feel ashamed about this, but don’t worry, it won’t matter. That shame will dissolve a few more beers later. You and your coworker order fries or some other deep-fried menu item, knowing though you really should eat something, anything, instead of just beer. (You are rarely convinced by this. But you order something anyway and pick at it disinterestedly.) You calculate how long it will take before your coworker pays their tab and goes about their day, living a life that doesn’t involve calculating at how buzzed you can get before you shouldn’t drive.
If I sound like I miss drinking, I apologize. I do and do not. I miss the steady creep of a beer buzz as the jukebox plays all the songs you fed money for, but I do not miss the hollow sadness beneath. The sadness that said, You are empty, you are empty, you are empty, no one will ever really love you.
The sadness lived in you all the time, the sadness you knew but didn’t know words for. Words you wouldn’t discover until you stopped drinking and started talking to a therapist. Your drinking was a way to keep the sadness and those words at bay. Words and feelings you would have to deal with someday, but you decided early on, without tacitly agreeing to it, that alcohol would drown the need for those words. You truly thought you could do this forever; you wanted to do this forever.
Sometimes I miss the smell of bars.
Despite remembering that golden afternoon sunlight years ago, those strange moments of liberation between the coffee shop and the bar, that person I was, that person I can feel more kindly towards now, those bars, those smells, are another country. A country where I was no stranger. I was a fixture. The words I now have for myself cannot be found in a bottle anymore. I did fill myself up; I did discover I was not empty. It just took a while to find a way to occupy that space inside me.