“Our troubles are all the same . . .”
—Cheers THEME SONG
BARS: JEWEL-BOX HOTEL bars, dives, honky-tonks, pubs—some sleek or luxurious, some dingy, many with great names, all cozy. Because of the variety of establishments, straightaway I have to ask if the element that makes them united in coziness is the booze. I think we are obliged to name it and say yes. I get that it’s the place where everyone knows your name, and community is one of the four pillars of cozy, but possibly, it’s the drink. I have many friends who have wreaked havoc on themselves and others in the four walls of a bar. It seems irresponsible to include a chapter that could be triggering. And I’m thinking of that haunting folk song from the 1800s, “Come Home, Father,” about the little girl who is begging her dad to come home from the bar because she and her mother are nursing her sick and dying brother—who dies while the father drinks away the doomed night. So it’s not without hesitation that I want to plow ahead and say, BARS ARE COZY! Some of my most unseemly behavior was acted out in bars. I’m not an alcoholic, but I will divulge I had my hand in sloppiness, emotional dysregulation, and bad choices made in some dive or another in New York City, usually on the Lower East Side.
That said, bars are undeniably cozy. On some mornings, I’ll be walking down a street, scrubbed and ready for a day, and I’ll pass by a bar. It will be shut and quiet, but the resilient fragrance of stale beer loiters outside its door. The smell of wet, oaty brew from the previous night sparks a cozy feeling of belonging. The smell is a connection to a warm past of dancing, laughing, kissing, gossiping, being twenty-one, free, in a tribe, protected by a meaty bouncer or a devoted pack of sweaty friends, smoking, peeling labels off Budweisers, doing shots with the band, a jukebox. But even now, when I sidle up to the most civilized of bars to order ONE solidly fortysomething cocktail, I get a cozy feeling in me. It’s all about the sturdy mahogany to lean on, the hum and chatter, the bartender concentrating on mixing, the stool, the icy rocks glass, the other souls, and this very distinct awareness that I’m in the middle of a collective story. Maybe it’s civilization.
I didn’t have to travel to England to visit a pub, as there are two similar establishments (a college bar and a jazz club) within spitting distance of my apartment, but one imagines the very first pub was born on England’s mountains green. You can research and discover that tabernae are as old as the Roman empire, but even if you read every last book on the topic, pubs from time immemorial are simply places where a community gathers to eat and drink. The Fox and the Sword, The King’s Fiddle, The Raven’s Claw—names of pubs and bars are epic, even if the establishment is just called “bar.”
In London, my friend Mark and his brother Dom very kindly took me out on a pub crawl for this book. The surprisingly cozy part wasn’t the barkeeps out of central casting, or the scampi and peas on the hand-sized menu, or even the iconic pint glasses brimming with creamy Guinness—it was these brothers. As we slid into a wooden booth that looked like it had been there since Queen Victoria’s reign, and they, in a rather Hugh Grantian way, inquired what I would like to drink so one of them could go up and get it for me (classic English manners—I don’t care if it’s the accents, they all roundly seem to have been raised by Mary Poppins), I could sense their brotherhood. I don’t know if that particular pub was where they had found shelter from the dank English rain as young lads. Did they holler about a football game or cavort with university pals there? Was this the place they discussed marriage proposals, or worried about their parents? I felt it was intrusive to ask such personal questions, but it sure felt like we were on tried-and-true stomping grounds. The brothers were comfortable in there, as if it was something in their chemical makeup. They knew the language, rhythms, and traditions intrinsically.
Because it was their assignment of the evening, they dutifully regaled me with heritage and history of pubs in England, architectural characteristics of low ceilings and beams, assuring menus of scotch eggs and stout pies, ales and shandies (for the ladies, wink). But I barely listened because even though the assessments of what made pubs cozy to them were true and worth taking note of, it was the two of them in the setting that hit the chord. They could have been any brothers in any country of any race or creed. The point was they were together in their corner of the world. It was the connection that was cozy, the two of them with their pints and little bags of crisps.