Barflies: the Drinking Life

I remember laying eyes on my first 100-proof alcoholic, a solitary figure perched at the empty clubhouse bar of a public golf course in Upstate New York. 

The 19th hole. 

Yet he wasn’t any golfer. It was 6 a.m. The year was 1972.

It was probably the only place open at that hour, or the only one that would serve him. Back then, I was a teenager with a weekend job cleaning up from the previous night’s depravity, vacuuming up swizzle sticks and lipstick-smeared cigarette butts.

I watched the owner, a rheumy-eyed man with drinking issues of his own, pour his customer a shot, which he raised shakily, spilling most of it before it reached his lips. He downed it and asked for another.

This time, he let it stand there at the bar, and leaned down to sip it slowly, like a cat lapping up a bowl of milk. And all the while, he was smiling, even laughing, intent on having a good time amid the haze.

That image stuck with me.

And suddenly the other day, I was back inside that bar at Westvale Country Club, the Caddyshack of suburban Camillus N.Y. 

A bartender with a red ZZ Top beard and bouncy demeanor wakes up a man asleep at some 24-hour bar. It’s early-morning, but instead of kicking him out or counseling him to go home, he pours him another shot of whatever he’s having. 

I was not in the bar myself, but watching a new film — part fiction, part documentary — called Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, where brother directors Bill and Turner Ross condensed 18 hours of hi jinks of a fraternity of hopeless drinkers at a bar called The Roaring 20s, located on a dingy back street of a city that’s supposedly Las Vegas.

It’s 90-minutes of endless drinking inside a place where the bartender calls you Darlin or Baby, where time is measured in 16-ounce glasses and jukebox singles. Here, the laughter is cackled and life philosophies are both shouted and whispered. 

Several grizzled conversations play out at once, each with its own edgy levity. The advice, both good and bad, is sometimes slurred, or delivered neat, precious wisdom from people who’ve been there. 

There are draws taken from cigarettes like they were rinds of some succulent fruit. Patrons write regrets on a grease board above the bar.

“I pride myself for not having become an alcoholic until I was already a failure,” one man declares. “Alcoholic failures are boring. I ruined my life first and then I came to you.”

The film is sketched full of professional drinkers you'd find in a Charles Bukowski novel, men and women resigned to their fate, or lost in their past, like the Vietnam vet so far gone he slurs a private joke no one else can understand. 

There’s an Australian bloke who holds up a $20 bill and shouts out “Who’s got Adderall? — like the Mickey Rourke character in the 1987 film Barfly, who stands and calls out to the collection of fellow brooders, “My friends!”

Watching Bloody Nose reminded me of the first time I’d read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where Hunter S. Thompson so convincingly describes the hallucinatory realm of being on drugs you feel like you’re at his side, having just taken your own tab of acid.

A friend of mine who’d recommended the film said he watched it while drinking a few beers, as if to join the party. 

I viewed it sober, and still felt woozy.

I’ve never been a regular at any bar, but I’ve spent hours drinking to excess, sometimes in dives like the Roaring 20s.

In some of these places, I believe, had you taken a collection from the inhabitants, you could have come up with a full set of teeth. 

Inside a Las Vegas bar called the Double Down Saloon, I once tried to hook up a friend with a woman who had purposely scarred her chest in the shape of what looked to be a pentagram.

After he'd bought her a drink she told him that her boyfriend, who was facing possible child sex charges, was at the other end of the bar.

I’ve partied with a character nicknamed Mr. John Booze for his public antics. When my brother once belched at me from across a bar table, I felt like he was saying “I love you” in beer talk.

When it came to drinking, I have always been a pure amateur.

I’ve consumed so much tequila that I fell asleep on a bench in Ensenada, after becoming sick on a good friend’s shoes.

When I was in my 30s, I took a shine to a wild-child of a woman I’d met inside a bar one weekend night in Pasadena. She was a young lawyer who liked to drink and to properly woo her I had to keep coming back. 

Until the Wednesday night around midnight when I’d had far too much to drink and realized that I didn’t really want to be there, that these people were not my tribe, that I’d rather be home in bed with a good book or, better yet, asleep.

I realize now that I was always doing things the wrong way, never lingering long enough to actually see the people sitting next to me, to share in the camaraderie of people who didn’t feel they belonged anywhere else.

Once, years ago, while traveling in Australia, my first wife and I visited the Fourex beer factory in Sydney and then stopped in for a drink at a pub across the street.

We stayed a week, renting a room right upstairs.

Quickly, we fell into the rhythm of the regulars. When I landed a job interview, Maggie the bartender took me out to find a new tie. We went to dinner with Malcolm, trying in vain to counsel him over a recent breakup.

Later, in Far North Queensland, we stopped at a crowded roadside pub in the middle of nowhere. A big bearded guy nicknamed Burnsey, a local bush pilot, bought us rounds and later took us to dinner, wanting to know all about our lives in America.

For years afterwards, he sent us postcards with his familiar scrawl and Aussie wit.

I’d made a connection with these so-called barflies.

Did some buzzing of my own.

Inside the Roaring 20s, each new craggy face is a new train wreck. The door opens and the natural light of the day floods in with another regular.

“Buzz the door,” somebody shouts. “I can’t wait to see who this is.”

And neither can we.

The opened door revives one man from his stupor.

“You aren’t about to close, are you?” he asks.

“Yeah, but just for you,” Mark the bartender says. “Everyone else can stay.”

The hours flow past. Mark gets a call on the house phone from a patron asking if he’s ever going to get the last beer he ordered. He dreams of going to Reno to play his guitar and make “dozens of dollars.”

Everyone here is seeking their own version of truth. One man admits that he couldn’t find any truth so he decided to go after beauty instead.

Some of the barflies turn to bar wasps, replete with stingers. They try to pick fights. As someone watches Jeopardy on the bar TV, one drinker finally has enough.

“Fuck this game,” he announces. “What are you watching this for? I don’t need anything to make me to feel dumber today.”

There’s romance as well. Slow dances and sloshed embraces.

One character has a crush on a Black trans prostitute.

“You still hookin?” he asks. “I need your number. I lost it two cell phones ago.”

A woman sits with the Vietnam veteran and amid hiccups, spraying spittle on his face, tells him he’s a hero, wiping the tears from this face.

Two boozers dash out for a quick bite. They stagger across traffic with the older man revealing a secret about how to the street in their condition.

“Whether you’re right or wrong, stay in motion,” he says. “That’s how it’s done.”

In a life filled with drinking, there are stages, like with grief, and sometimes the last is acceptance.

An inebriated man reads a self-written poem, finishing the sentimental lines with the caveat: “And you can all get fucked.”

Nearby, a cake made for the occasion has a saying written in frosting that says, “This place always sucked.” 

How’s that for truth?

A main character named Micheal, an intellectual and onetime actor who is 58 but admits he looks 70, challenges a patron who calls him family.

“I am somebody you hang out with in a bar. I am not your family,” he says. “I don’t feel like bitching every time I open my mouth. But that is an overused phrase.”

Later, he tells a younger musician to flee this boozy life.

“There is nothing more boring, nothing more ‘Oh my God, when is he going to go away,’ then the guy who used to do stuff and now doesn’t do stuff because he goes to a bar.”

At some point, Michael the bartender gets another call

He approaches a patron who's dead asleep.

“Ira,” he says, “I’ve got terrible news for you. It’s something that I can’t actually believe but you’re apparently supposed to be at work someplace right now. “

He pours him another shot, one for the road.

Then two men help Ira out the door, into the bright sunlight.

His friends.