The Varieties of Hipster Drinking Experience and The Slippery Slope of "Authenticity"

As a snobby New Yorker, the popularity of dive bars has always eluded me. I was never one to drink into oblivion, so the idea of going some place disgusting to do disgusting things never really appealed to me that much.

However in the hipster revolution of the past 20 (!) years, the dive bar has assumed, like so many other discarded cultural treasures, from the grilled cheese sandwich to the mustache to the record store, a sheen of glory, dignity, and hidden class that the authentic element never really had. Sure, there was a tongue in cheek irony to these resurrections, but there was also an underpinning and earnest belief that if you do something really well, *anything* can be beautiful, delicious, or even sublime.

And I confess that in recent years (though still a super light drinker), I have found myself in more than a few of these tasty dive bars that hatched in their native habitats of Brooklyn, Portland, and, slightly more (non-ironically) authentically, Austin. The patrons have not always been the cream of the crop in terms of the higher echelons of society, but you could reliably find the cloistered, gradually embittering, interesting conversationalists with cool clothes and hairdos that the blue city universities have been churning out like candy corn for the better part of 50 years.

The fare in these places is meant to please the palates and sensibilities of the crowd and usually does a good job of appearing "down home," with cans of Budweiser on proud display, as much decorative accents as anything, accompanying a hyper local brew or two, and then a mix of something blue collar but drinkable that won't break the spell these establishments try so diligently to cast around their ever-drunkening, but clearly clean-fingernailed denizens. If you're lucky, buffalo cauliflower wings will sneak onto the menu, but usually there will be some easy bar staples, that you still at least like to tell yourself have been well sourced and lovingly prepared. And usually they pull the whole thing off marvelously.

And after so much reliable exposure to this sort of next wave dive bar, I have grown accustomed to the reincarnation of the genre and have almost come to expect it in any bar I go to where you don't need a blazer and closed toed shoes, on one hand, or where backwards facing baseball hats are forbidden (as they are in ganglands Waco) on the other. These nouveau dive bars, in other words, are a perfectly culturally comfortable place for yours truly to spend the evening.

But then came Gilly’s.

The evening started out innocuously enough. I was enjoying a lovely night with a good friend at Kindred in San Diego, which, in my opinion very badly, positions itself as a “vegan rocker bar.” It is definitely vegan, and there is definitely a bar. But beyond that, things get fuzzy. The atmospherics are highly refined in the Parisian bistro mode, made contemporary with a Louis Quinze (I think) patterned pink wallpaper, a mirrored ceiling criss-crossed with painted white beams, and an overall bouginess that even aging rockers might find too comfortable for the rebelliousness they still think they retain from their youth. And it was bright, yes, brightly lit throughout. And if sex is the handmaiden of rock music, and light is the enemy of sex, then for a rocker bar, drugs or no, this was, Q.E.D., one of the least sexy places on earth.

Nonetheless, there were rocker “accents,” with a giant, papier-mâché demon head coming out of the wall and a couple of Ozzy Ozbourne portraits in the bathrooms (which were painted black, perhaps indicating where the sex was supposed to happen. That you could actually reach through the sink wall to the ladies’ room sink certainly evoked some interesting possibilities). And though the bartenders wore some sort of latter-day metal shirts, these were completely drowned out by the overall fussiness of the place and the prissiness of the cocktails and (admittedly delicious) menu.

But, as with the typical hipster dive bar, it was a cultural milieu into which I could sink effortlessly. It was a nice place. I got it, they got me, we were good.

And then my friend’s phone rang, and feeling social, I allowed myself, oh so innocently, to be drawn across town to “Gilly’s.”

“It’s a dive bar,” my friend said, to which I replied self-assuredly, “Cool!”

20 minutes later, as we made it effortlessly past the bouncer at Gilly’s, the door opened, and even though no one was smoking inside, a waft of extremely stale cigarette smoke welcomed us and managed to nest itself deep into the fibers of the blazer I was wearing, where it would remain for the whole of the following week. But with an open and expectant posture, I strode into Gilly’s, eager to see the twist on a theme this iteration of the now familiar trend had to show me.

It took a minute.

My friend ordered a beer, and my gaze passed over the taps to see which local specialties their master beer curator had selected, to pick out the innocuous yet deliberately placed nostalgic 80s figurines and tchotchkes lining the back wall, to size up the female barkeeps for homespun yet inexplicably sexy outfits. Well, one often sees what one wants to see in such situations, but eventually it becomes impossible to see what is not there. Gilly’s was not playing by the right rules. In fact, it was not even playing at all.

Gilly’s was an unreconstructed dive bar of the old school, the kind of place you’d find in down and out corners of the rust belt or Appalachia, though admittedly more lively. It was uninhibitedly, unapologetically gross- where gross people come to do gross things.

And as my eyes lifted from the bar “decor” to survey the landscape of patronage, I realized how right I was.

In all honesty, I didn’t think they allowed people this ugly to live in San Diego. San Diego is filled to the brim with beautiful, trim, healthy, glowing people. Of dizzying diversity and origin, the inner health of the paradise-inhabitant shines through no matter what. These are not the glossy people that our neighbors to the north export worldwide, nor the perfect people they keep for themselves, but just plain old beautiful people. There would, after all, be no point in living in paradise if you didn’t do something to jiggle the fat cells out of your body, whether it be surfing, skating, or sun salutating. And with high quality foods wherever you go, there is no need to get bogged down in the heaviness of the bologna and cheese diet that sustains the people that modern dive bar inhabitants are meant to emulate but not actually be.

But at Gilly’s, be they were. They were everywhere. Enormous, misshapen, and often quite obviously diseased in ways you don’t see outside of actual medical facilities or the deeper crevices of Las Vegas at 4am. Where did these people come from? And how did they all find each other here? Was there a hidden stash somewhere past the 805 that descended into the cool part of town to help bring balance to the force? I wasn’t sure.

My first experience with an already drunk bar guy wasn’t so bad. As he talked to us, my friend visibly stiffened. She was *not* into it. But being a polite mofo, I entertained the man’s truly boring conversational topics, and smiled and responded politely as I was raised to. The man was about 5’6”, hailed from Houston, which he assumed, without explaining why, somehow bonded us, and was of indeterminate ethnic origin somewhere between Filipino, Aztec, and Hawaiian. In that, and in that only, he was hard to pin down. But with the minimal voltage drain his conversation had on my brain, I had plenty of excess capacity to think about other possible combinations.

But his most distinctive and memorable feature was a rotted tooth stem where his lower incisor should have been. No matter how well I was raised, it was impossible to ignore every time he opened his mouth (and since he was doing most of the talking, that was oftener than I would have preferred), and yes I stared and stared, vainly searching for beauty in the disgusting and, almost equally as vainly, trying to inhibit my gag reflex. It was difficult. The “tooth,” what was left of it now had the diameter of a thin nail. It was rust brown, moist, and clearly still infected. The bottom of the nail-tooth sloped down 360 degrees, the way the great mesas of Monument Valley do, into a brown and almost bubbling socket that was alive with disease every bit as much as the man’s mouth was alive with the smell of vile bacteria.

Pleasant it was not, and as I tried to distract myself from the experience, a moment flittered by when I mused nostalgically for the dive bar in Williamsburg where no one looked like this and everyone was at least passably interesting to talk to. But then I was sucked back as the man asked me an urgent question that I could not simply brush off with an “uh-huh” the way I had for the past 5 minutes. I needed to compose a response that wouldn’t reveal how truly bored, disengaged, or grossed out I was. In honesty, I can’t remember what I said, but thankfully, I don’t think it worked, and eventually, after asking him several times, the man’s karaoke song popped up and he had to get up and go.

Oh, did I mention Gilly’s was a karaoke bar? I’m not sure I have the strength to go there. . . The array of talent was actually not entirely talentless, and the soul (as is often the case in these situations) usually went well beyond what the flesh would allow. I didn’t recognize any of the songs or raps, but when a certain type of spergy and amorphous person lights up with the passions of life, it isn’t something that necessarily inspires, but actually kind of unnerves.

These are people you want to be repressed and keep control of themselves. Because there is no productive use for the boiling cauldron of rage that builds up in such a soul over 30 years of life. Spits of lava blob out at times during heightened expression, and you can see flashes of the satanic spree that would launch full borne, should they actually “let loose,” and it is at those moments where you make sure there is a clear line to the exits in case that’s when the shooting starts.

So as I was doing my best to ignore my ex-interlocutor’s turn at the stage, I looked around for a distraction to take my attention to a happier place. Surveilling the crowd, I found none. While, almost any group of people has a “belle of the ball” or at least someone who had at least *visited* your “world,” and whom you might count on to have your back if things turned sideways, besides my friend (who now owes me 7 drinks at Kindred), there was no one.

And as I continued to gaze away from the karaoke stage, the greater of two evils showed up in the face of an old, old man with some sort of veterans group or Elk’s club baseball hat squarely perched on his head and one size too small on the snaps, so it perched awkwardly like a Christmas ornament on the top of his head. His face was lit up and animated, delighted to make a new friend. The cigarette smoke anticipated his arrival by a full 30 seconds, and the smell of drunkenness backed it up a few seconds later as if to say, "Wait for me!" as he came within talking distance.

And you’re going to think I am making this up, but I am not: When he spoke, the sound that came out was, “Rah Rah Rah Rah Rah Rah Rah Rah. . ..” That was the one syllable he could pronounce. It went up, it went down, but within it, not a human word could be discerned. And yet the earnestness with which he spoke, the inflection, the repositioning of the eyes and forehead conveyed all the expression of a Shakespearean actor, and the man was totally oblivious to the fact that he was singing a one note samba without the back up band, and I literally could have discerned more linguistic nuance from a Chihuahua.

Several times, he ended on a high note, which in most cases indicates a question is being asked. He would pause, confirming my ascertation, and I would do my best to come up with a reply that could be an answer to anything, whether the square root of 4, the hydrogen density on Jupiter, or your favorite Journey song. This isn’t as easy as it looks, and it doesn’t look that easy.

I did my best with grunts, ‘Uh-Huhs,” “Rights,” “Rights??” “Right Ons!” and “Yups.” In all cases, the man was interested in my response, head cocked, eyebrow raised, ready to soak in the counterpoint to his thoughts made flesh. And in a couple of instances, he looked at me bewildered with my response and must have thought I was an idiot. But he was raised right too and was so polite about it that I barely noticed. He was happy to keep up the conversation, and not knowing what he was saying, it was very hard for me to segue out of it or make my excuses. So I endured for what seemed like the entire month, as the man laughed an emphysematic laugh, made points with his fingers, and self-satisfiedly drew conclusions, all with his monosyllabic sing-song. (Please try to understand that I am not exaggerating one iota when I say he uttered nothing but a growly, pirate’s “Rah Rah” the entire time).

I think it went very well, and in the end, as he walked away for a smoke break (without even saying goodbye. Rude!), I really felt that he had left a better man. And as I tried to process the whole thing, I realized there was always the possibility that I was indeed the idiot and the man’s cipher was simply lost on my uninitiated mind. Wouldn’t it be ironic if this man and tooth guy were hanging out without me in the bunker when the zombie apocalypse come. Who’s the monosyllabic pirate *then,* college boy? Hmph.

Anyway, after commiserating with my friends, wondering if I’d ever get the stench out of my jacket and coming to terms with the fact that I might not be able to hang around long enough to hear their karaoke songs come up, I started formulating an exit plan.

No one seemed to miss us or notice us much when we left. Even tooth guy had moved on to other friends and had his back turned as the door swung closed behind us and we breathed the fresh, cleansing air that purged San Diegans daily from their occasional descents into the truly filthy corners of their otherwise beautiful environs.

I don’t like to write off experiences as having no value, I don’t like shunning corners of the world just because I don’t belong in them, and there are almost no experiences I can recount that, after years of reflection, I truly wish I had never had. Still, with Gilly’s it was hard to avoid all of these options entirely, so noxious was its environment to my, admittedly froo-froo sensibilities. So I will give it time to sink in and hopefully sink out and let the rosy hue of nostalgia eventually replace the glaring view of fatness, triple-oversized bosoms, and lumpen disfigurement that now clogs my memory holes of the place.

We drove back to pick up my van outside of Kindred, where I did one quick pass to use the restroom and recalibrate my aesthetics before heading off to bed. My friends’ company made the night worth it in the end and makes me ever grateful for the people I can still be with and feel right at home.