"People have been helicopter parenting for a long time now and we grow up in these places that are so controlled that we need risk. "Maybe as human beings we need a little danger," Giuffre says. You can love a dive bar, even think of it as home, but still be disgusted by it-and maybe that's why you love it in the first place. Giuffre still has a recurring nightmare about the Cave where she's being forced to put her bare feet on the bar's dirty floor. "It's going to be really sad when there aren't places where a 20-year-old and a 70-year-old can just sit around a table and shoot the breeze."ĭives don't generally make an effort to appeal to cleanliness. The core clientele of a dive bar, according to Cline, is always the lowest rung of society-they may be open to everyone, but traditionally these spaces are reserved for the working classes. His fascination with dives began at these places in rural Illinois, where he giddily remembers ordering Old Milwaukees with impunity while rubbing elbows with roughnecks. He's hulking and bearded, and was big and hairy enough in high school that he could get into biker bars, no questions asked. "A real dive wouldn't call itself a dive, the same way you wouldn't say, 'I'm a degenerate alcoholic.'"Ĭline has a PhD in American studies, but his real qualification comes from the hours he's logged in those kinds of places. "To me, a dive bar is a place you don't want people to know that you are going to," John Cline tells me. There's a folk etymology as well––going in meant you were headed out of sight and into a zone of ill repute. The term dive bar entered the lexicon in the 19th century as a way to describe a bar or opium den that was literally subterranean. Photo by Christian Patterson, from his 'Sound Affects' series There are few places you can go to meet new people when you've just blown into a new city: Your choices are basically just church or a bar, and I know which one I'd pick. She tells me that the concept of a third place is possibly even more important than ever as people migrate away from their hometowns. They're hubs where people from different backgrounds can freely exchange ideas, a fact that perhaps explains why many of the people accused of witchcraft in Salem were either tavern owners or related to them, according to Giuffre. Think the Agora in ancient Athens, coffee houses in pre-Revolutionary Paris, and whatever parking lot goth teens congregate in after school. His idea was that home is the first place, work is the second, and any place where you can build community counts as a third. She wrote a novel fictionalizing the watering hole, and today studies "third places" like the Cave.Ī third place is a term coined by a sociologist named Ray Oldenberg. At the time she was in her 20s, a transplant who didn't know anyone, so she started chatting up the regulars there, and eventually started working for the bar since she was there all the time anyway. Giuffre is now a sociologist at Colorado College, but in a past life she was a denizen of a bar in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, called the Cave. If you're wearing pants, you're good," is how Kathy Giuffre describes dives, and she would know. ![]() "It's cheap and there's no question when you walk in about whether you're dressed well enough. What makes a dive a dive? I kind of felt the same way that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously felt about the concept of obscenity––I knew it when I saw it. You could talk to people about catching catfish with their bare hands, sit quietly in the corner and play the naked version of Photo Hunt without anyone bothering you, or show up to eat a buffet-style meal prepared by the bartender on Thanksgiving if you didn't have anywhere else to go.īut when you try to turn those recollections into a definition, separate the dives from the ordinary bars, words fail. Growing up in central Florida, I remember dives as spots where you could get dollar drafts, play pool, and smoke inside––a crucial lure, because there was no smoking in my parents' house. You know what a dive is-maybe you have your own dive memories, your own recollections of scuffed counters and spilled beers. I ignored them, went inside the bar, and grabbed a set of pliers so I could work on getting that shank removed.Ĭhurchill's sometimes had better music than most dives, but it was unquestionably a dive. When I showed up to deal with all that, the locals demanded payment for "protecting my car" all night. They left a shank broken off in the ignition and a Stephen King book in the backseat. ![]() ![]() One time, someone stole my car and drove it into Churchill's-as in, crashed it against the back of the bar. Local crackheads don reflective vests in order to convince motorists they're parking attendants and trick them out of a buck or a cigarette. It's the kind of place where anything can happen.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |