If you want to know what animals roam your land after sunset, you’ll need a drift fence, a sampling technique biologists favor. A drift fence is a fence of canvas or aluminum flashing, 18 inches or so high and as long as you like. Along the fence’s length, every fifteen feet, you need to sink five-gallon buckets flush with the ground. When animals drift through the forest pursuing their animal quests, the fence herds them along its edge. As they make their way along the fence, they drop into a bucket.
Every morning the biologist checks his buckets. He identifies and records what animals live in the woods. There are drift fences for people too. People wander throughout the evening and drop in them all the time. We call them bars.
Now you can take a puritanical stance and condemn bars as juke joints for drunks and losers, but that simply isn’t the case. So, no hand wringing please. A restaurant/bar where locals convene offers a strong sense of community and a special art flourishes there, the art of conversation.
Quite a cast of characters drifts into bars, each with a story to tell. Some are raconteurs—great story tellers—and some are quiet, but all are fighting off an affliction called loneliness as Billy Joel’s, “Piano Man,” poignantly underscores: “Yes, they’re sharing a drink they call loneliness, but it’s better than drinking alone.” The song moves on saying they’re here “to forget about life for a while,” and that is as close to the truth as anything.
People open up in restaurant/bars like no other place. For one thing, that’s why they come: to talk about life and to hear about yours. And they’ll talk to you like they’ve known you for years. An instant rapport takes place. You’ll hear confessions, and you’ll be witness to events far beyond your world.
One night I was having dinner with a woman at a nightspot when a man who looked like Jack Nicklaus sat next to us. Like Nicklaus, he was from Ohio. We began to talk. Turns out he was a diver, and what tales he told.
He and a co-worker had dove deep into the North Sea working on an oil production platform when a deep, thundering rumble began. The noise grew in intensity, louder and louder and the men didn’t know what to make of it. Was it an undersea earthquake? Whatever it was, they knew it wasn’t good. On it came, closer and closer and louder until their heavy diving suits trembled. Then, materializing from the cold, dense seawater, an apparition glided by mere feet beyond their lifelines: a Russian nuclear club, its red star unmistakable on the conning tower.
“Fast Eddie,” as I came to call him, then turned to treasure hunting in the Caribbean. He had salvaged Spanish doubloons, swords, and cannon balls. “I’d love to see some Spanish doubloons,” I told him, thinking he was a fraud after that wild submarine tale. In a flash, he was out the door. A few minutes later he came back and spread doubloons, a sea-encrusted sword and cannon balls on the counter, all of it the real deal.
On another occasion, I met a fellow I’ve written about before, Paolo Bazzoni, a native of Milan. When we first met, it was a chance meeting while we each were having dinner. We began to meet and talk about life here and life in Italy, and our conversations revealed new worlds to each of us. We made it a habit to meet often.
Paolo, like many Italian men, loves discussing his adoration for women. One night he told me that he especially liked women with … hmmmm, how do I put this? Let me be polite and say large derrières. As he talked, I spied a large-bottomed woman across the restaurant leaning over to talk to a friend at a table.
“So, Paolo,” I said, “how about that lady? She has a large _____. Is she your type?”
Paolo put down his fork and gazed intently at the woman. He studied her and cocked his head east and west as he continued to examine her. Then, in his heavy Italian accent, he said, as earnest as a preacher, “Noooooooo, eet does not have the prop-er ten-sion.”
I could only stop laughing after nearby women shot me glares. Of course, not all moments in the human version of drift fences are so adventurous or humorous. There’s an iconic painting by Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, one of American art’s most recognizable paintings, a painting of a couple and a man sitting at the bar of an all-night diner. The people have spent a long night out on the town. It’s late. Very late. Something about that painting portrays loneliness and if you’ve never seen it, you need to. Hopper admitted that “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”
When I see Nighthawks I think of some lonely women I know. You generally meet people who are happy in pubs, sports bars, the old speakeasies of years gone by, but you meet sad people too. You meet hapless souls, emotional drifters. The saddest, the ill-starred, are women in their 40s and early 50s who woke up one day to find themselves stranded like shipwrecked sailors. Their husbands died way too soon, abandoning them in the prime of their life. For one, it was a heart attack. For another, a stroke, and another, a car wreck.
A sort of pleasant desperation cloaks these women. Life is forcing them to begin anew, but alas, time is short, so they try too hard. Carol told me, “I never thought, at my age, that I’d be alone. I’m scared and I don’t know what to do. I really don’t want to date again but I don’t want to be alone.” Tears welled up in her blue eyes, and all I could do was to tell her she was beautiful.
Like autumn leaves, some of these women are stunning but soon to fall, coming down to earth in more ways than one, and some day they know, like fallen autumn leaves, they’ll wither. For these women jolted by love’s sudden loss, life is like walking through a city razed by war. Their world is unrecognizable now, but they are survivors, hopeful of another chance, sharing a drink they call loneliness.
So, go ahead and label people that go to bars as bums, losers, alcoholics even, but know that that is wrong. These same people go to church and hold professional, essential jobs. They have children, grandchildren even, but they’re scattered across the South. To be human is to need the company of other humans, and life alone night after night extracts a toll. “Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.” Mother Teresa was dead on right. If you live alone, you know what she meant.
I know that Lincolnton has but one bar, the American Legion, but it’s private. I can guarantee you, though, that if a few pubs, bars–whatever you want to call them–sprang up, people eager to break loneliness’ stranglehold would show up. Conversations would flow like wine, and lonely souls would find a tonic for their loneliness. The parking lot would be full night after night. Life would be fuller, too, in a place offering haven from the cold world of loners, drifters, and nighthawks.
