Dave Housley
Kelly Lee Bohn was our name. All of us. Officially, we were born on January 20, 1964. It said so on Kelly’s driver’s license, which was about three feet high, made of posterboard, large enough that when we stood next to it, the resulting Polaroid could be artfully cut, slipped into a wallet, and handed confidently to bartenders throughout Snyder County, Pennsylvania.
The bars were dim and smoky and smelled, unsurprisingly, of piss and alcohol. They were small and rough and old and thrilling, and we felt like finally we had an answer to the question: what the hell is there to do in this town?
At the Olde Trail Inn, we watched Skynyrd cover bands and grouped into corners while the high school sports heroes of our youth smoked Marlboro Reds and did shots of Jack until they grew drunk enough to go out into the parking lot and fight. At the Selins Hotel Bar, we played AC/DC on the jukebox and honed our skills at shufflebowl. At Bots Café, we watched students from the nearby university and realized that we were “townies,” that no matter how we looked or dressed or scored on standardized testing, to these students, a few years older but otherwise similar in nearly every way, we would always be townies.
We went off to college and found new dive bars. In these bars we sat and talked about girls and music and school with our classmates from New Canaan, Connecticut and Richmond, Virginia, from Conshohocken and Long Island and every part of New Jersey.
They had a different relationship with the dive bars, these children of suburbia. Their eyes adjusted slower to the cavern lighting. They asked first for Heineken or Amstel Light and were surprised when the bartender shook his head and pointed at the taps. They avoided contact with the locals, men wearing hats bearing the names of tractor companies, with work-worn clothing trailing cement dust and exhaustion. Of course we recognized these men. We had grown up with their sons, many of whom were in the rapid process, back home, of becoming bar men in their own right.
Meanwhile, our new friends, these kids who were so worldly, who owned Upstairs at Eric’s or Birth of the Cool to our Destroyer or For Those about to Rock, seemed to barely notice the locals at all. They breezed through the barroom, past the shufflebowl machine and the jukebox, high-fiving and wearing pants that fit in a way that ours didn’t, button up shirts not made from flannel. We watched and we wondered and we drank and smoked and did shots.
In the back of our minds, we knew we were different, but the battered neon of the Yuengling and Budweiser signs revealed it like a black light: While our new friends were slumming, we were home.
Near the end of college, we lived at the beach for the summer. Here, we stood on the decks of bay-front bars with the rest of the summer help. We met new friends from further down the coast, and we learned how to crack crabs, to de-vein shrimp. We learned that it was fun to drink out in the open, by the sea, the sun shining in our bleached hair, turning our pale skin pink and then a rusty, lager-colored orange.
We learned, sooner than we would have thought, to hate Jimmy Buffett. We learned that crowds got to be too much after awhile, that there were always going to be groups of people who were better-looking and more interesting than us, people who seemed like they were born on these deck bars, who knew what the good kinds of tequila were, whose skin turned brown instead of red.
And so we found the dive bars. Billy’s, Rosko’s Reef, Pirate’s Cove, all smelly and dark and immediately familiar. We gossiped about our summer jobs while we watched the bar men grouse into their beers. We realized this was the second time we’d moved, only to find ourselves right back at the dive bar. This said something about us that we’d rather not think about, something backward and clannish and maybe permanent, something that would be as hard to get rid of as bad teeth. So we sat at the bar and nursed our Budweisers and smoked our Marlboro Reds, and we didn’t talk about it.
After college, we moved to the city in search of employment. We usually did it in that order because the only thing we knew about our impending professional lives was that we couldn’t do whatever it was we were going to do in Central Pennsylvania. We found jobs, places to live, new friends who went drinking on Friday afternoons with their ties still on. We went to cigar bars, martini bars, wine bars, Irish pubs, dance clubs, rock clubs, other kinds of clubs that we weren’t hip enough to understand.
In the cities where we worked and the suburbs where we lived, we found the dive bars. Hank Dietle’s Cold Beer, a prohibition-era roadhouse sitting, wonderfully, directly across the road from Bloomingdales. Dan’s Café, where the bartender answered the request for a jack and coke with a bucket of ice, a half pint of whiskey, a can of off-brand soda, and a glass. Hell, an appropriately named basement two levels below a dance club called Heaven, where punk blasted from the stereo and none of the chairs had four legs and the bartender had things protruding from her lips and nose well before this was fashionable.
Of course, we flirted with other bars, the big billiards pubs and the sleek, clubby lounges. But when the evening grew darker, we found ourselves back at the dive bar, punching hair metal into the jukebox in a non-ironic fashion and making fun of one another in the tones of people who feel safe and comfortable.
Some of us got married. We went back home, all of us together again, and celebrated. After these weddings, we went back to our dive bars, sometimes in our suits and ties, our tuxedoes. Things were changing, but at The Selins or Bot’s, it was as if time had stood still. The same people in the same places. They shook our hands and bought us shots. You still living in The City? they said. We nodded, took a drink, and changed the subject.
The wives were the first to stop liking the dive bars. It’s so smoky in there, they said. My hair smells like an ashtray for a week. I have to get my shirts drycleaned if I ever want to wear them again. And why go out anyway, when we have all this wine here?
It's just really stupid, they said.
Oh for god's sake, they said. Go. Just go.
There were responsibilities now, jobs and kids, but still there were times when we found ourselves with a critical mass, enough Kelly Lees to fill up a chipped formica table in some dark, smoky bar in DC or Philly or New Orleans. Although there were executives and lawyers and writers and artists among us, we talked only in the shorthand that only works for old friends—shit talk, cutting and friendly and casual, no hard feelings, just passing the time. Just doing the thing we do, the thing we've always done.
Every now and then, one of us would come back from the bathroom, from checking on the wife, the kids, or the voicemail, and we'd look around at the nicotine-stained walls, the dirt on the floor, the pitchers of swill and empty shot glasses, and think, what the fuck are we doing? Why can’t we go somewhere nice for a change? What is it that we can’t get out of us, this dive bar thing like a birth defect, like malaria or the herpes simplex virus? But then something would start up–some stupid game or story or debate–and we’d forget about it all over again, sit down, take a sip of watery beer and realize that we felt good, felt satisfied, and for a little while that was enough.