The Bar

It was pouring rain outside, but inside the bar, it was warm and dry. It was also dark, and the task lighting here and there behind the bar made pools that illuminated the area around them. The murmur of conversation played off the piped-in piano jazz, and the overall effect was that you were lucky to be alive while such a place existed.

It was the bar in a nice hotel in downtown Memphis in the year 2002. I was freshly divorced and stony broke, and once a week or so I would scrape $20 together and visit this place of luxury and drink two drinks. Just two. That was all I could afford, and even in those days I knew alcohol was not my friend.

It was always the same order: A vodka and tonic in a tall glass, with a lime. I had picked that up in the days when I would take clients out for drinks, and I needed a “standard” drink that every bar in the world would be able to make. It was the blue blazer of drinks.

It had the advantage of being clear, so if you were getting in over your head, you could just order tonic and lime and no one was the wiser. But those days were long gone. Now I was no longer on expenses, no longer wooing clients. Now I was the sort of person who scraped $20 together once a week to get two drinks in a nice bar.

It wasn’t really about the drinks. It was the way they would kiss my ass when I showed up. The way they knew my name, knew my drink. The way the bartender polished the glasses, the way he always had a basket of pretzels at the ready.

I loved the ways the candles on the tables would flicker in the mirror over the bar, the way the glasses tinkled, the sound of the drinks being mixed. The bathrooms in that bar were temples to the art of tile and plumbing, and to this day, it might be the nicest toilet I have ever used. An elderly Black man in the hotel uniform handed you a paper towel after you washed your hands, and you gave him a dollar while you acted as if this didn’t embarrass either of you.

The bar manager was a Black man in his mid-thirties named Daniel. He was always happy to see me, and for a while, he would remember the name of the woman I had brought there once when it was important to me that she know the things that were important to me. And when I told him we had broken up, he never mentioned her again.

It would be another six years before I would have a smart phone, and this was much too nice a bar to have a television in it. The drink sat on a coaster, sweat running down the sides of the glass as I would twist it clockwise with my fingers.

I sat at the bar, slowly drinking my clear drink, eating pretzels, and chatting with Daniel. Nowhere to go, no one expecting me or trying to get in touch with me. I was just sitting in that perfect, dark, flickering world as long as the money held out.

I don’t really drink much anymore. I might drink three drinks a year, and some years, I might drink none. But I am still a sucker for a quiet, dark bar, one that’s warm and dry when it’s wet outside, the sort of place where, when you break up with someone, they do you the favor of forgetting her name.

These days, I have come to see luxury hotels as a sort of hack. I can’t afford to stay at a luxury hotel, but I can sit at the bar in the lobby and drink my clear drink with a lime, and be treated like a king for a $5 tip on top of the cost of the drink. It doesn’t have to be the bar, either. Maybe it’s their café. Maybe it’s the nice restaurant, where you just get coffee and a dessert. For a few minutes, you can sit in the flickering light while they pretend that you too are royalty. You too belong.

And in exchange, you too can relax and forget, just for a moment, that the world is on fire.