The Elegy for a Dive Series, Pt. 3

Dusting off this recurring segment which actually recurs, a couple of years later. Thanks to OBX Dave for contributing the elegy for one of his College Park haunts. To the rest of you . . . sod off.

The "Elegy for a Dive" Series

Wherein we pay tribute to dingy bars of yesteryear which served us well on many long-forgotten nights of revelry-cum-debauchery.  Three at a time, like shots of Jäger.

The Texas-Wisconsin Border Café
Richmond, VA
Closed 1999

Ah, the Tex-Wis. The cream of the crop in dive bars in The Fan in the 90's. Lone Star beer in the bottle, widow-maker chili in the bowl. Badger-State-born VCU Arts school profs (later a Dean) and Texan named Donna built a place where you could get Tex-Mex plus brats and cheese and all the cheap swill you could guzzle, Animal heads and license plates adorned the walls, and they had bands quite a bit. It was written that "The Texas-Wisconsin Border Cafe’s divey, eccentric nature attracted everyone from musicians to judges, and rockabilly and blues bands, including Drive-By Truckers, played for cash and unlimited PBR."

We used to go in there for the cheap suds and the chicken-fried steak.  The place was often packed, always loud, and you could count on getting yelled at by the waitresses. Our buddy Coby was a budding attorney then, and this was his dive of choice. He's a partner with a large national firm now, and he'd give quite a bit to have this gem still nestled in the edge of the Fan. 

So sad, the Texas-Wis
A place that we all miss
Though our arteries do not
With Rolling Rock on tap
Lord, I hated that crap
Especially served hot

Whitlow's on Wilson
Arlington, VA
Closed 2021

WOW! That's what the mugs they'd give you used to say. Whitlow's-On-Wilson. This staple of the Clarendon neighborhood of Arlington was a good little family bar . . . that kept buying up parts of the block and expanding until it was a big one. It was a strange combo of seeming a half-step up from our greasy spoon super-dives but never really classy in the least. It was a plain old neighborhood bar. And often packed to the gills.

Rob and I spent a good amount of time there. We shot lousy stick and talked to a (very) few females with lousier shtick. Our Cowboy barkeep Manny quit the 'boy in the early 2000's and defected to Whitlow's, where our fraternity brother Jay's fiancée was already catching shifts. Hence, our increased attendance there. Thursday nights were Mug Nights, $5 for the mug and $2 refills on the cheap stuff all night. 

Whitlow's was never one of my favorite DC area bars, but it was always solid, and it was always there. Any people I'd meet who lived up that way in the 17 years since I vacated the area would always have been Whitlow's drinkers at some point. It was a mainstay . . . or at least it was until a year ago.

So sad, my Whitlow's mug
And the beer that I would chug
Gone for evermore
I'll miss the drunk times spent
But I shall not lament
That long line out the door

The Weeping Radish Brewery
Manteo, NC Grandy, NC
Closed 2022

Okay, okay. So the Radish was never a dive per se. It was a brewery, and it was a German restaurant, and it happened to have a little barroom. That little room was our dive, a hideaway in which you could congregate a group of knuckleheads once a year to drink between 1 and 3 liters of rather strong German beer, throw darts, play Ms. Pac-Man, gather in a circle for a xenophobic drinking game, and ultimately fall down and get pinned under a tiny cup of horseradish made of lead. You know, the usual kind of joint.

Dave, rob, and others spent the summer of '91 in Nags Head, and they came back with stories about this microbrewery (North Carolina's oldest, 1986) with super strong beer, and you drink a big mug of it and get hammered. Real juvenile stuff. So then we graduated from college and got jobs and girlfriends and came down for a summer vacation with friends . . . and drank big mugs of the super strong beer and got hammered. Dave like the Blach Radish blend, while Rob and I enjoyed the Fest. Lesser palates would get the Corolla Gold. Evan asked for PBR every year.

Oh, the stories. Many too esoteric to enjoy, but just know that the 12-24 of us would leave the comfy confines of the Martha Wood deck mid-sunny afternoon -- after drinking for hours -- to drive over the bridge into Manteo, annex the barroom, and drink a couple of beers before returning home. Wrecked. On those special occasions, we wouldn't go straight home, as the go-karts were en route, but we wised up after a handful near-incarceration/death experiences. One year, we traipsed in to hear the bartender say, "Oh, lord, has it been a year already?" It was a ritual.

Sometime around the turn of the millennium, about the same time that a sect within the OBFT crowd called Brothers Against the Radish (BAR) won favor and negated our annual death sojourn, the Weeping Radish moved out of Manteo and full-time into its farmhouse on the mainland in Grandy. We never went. And this article I read yesterday indicates that the Radish is closing its doors for good. Fare ye well, Radish Weepers, and keep 'er between the lines on the way home.

The Radish packed a punch
One time rob e'en lost his lunch
Liter mug in hand
The tale we'd later tell
We told the Radish, go to hell
We were actually banned

The Elegy for a Dive Series, Pt. 2 (A Dave Fairbank Joint)

Rendezvous Inn
College Park, Md.
Closed 1996

At its heart, the Rendezvous Inn was a dive. A popular dive, but still a dive. It promised nothing more than cheap beer to college kids with little money. It was a social hive with alcohol, and while at the University of Maryland I spent an unhealthy amount of time there.

The ‘Vous, as it was known, was located just off the southeastern edge of campus, at the corner of Route 1 and Knox Road, a nondescript block building with windows on one side. It was a no-frills, rectangular space that held 500-600 people, with the bar in the middle of the room, a jukebox in front and booths against the walls. The drinking age in Maryland was 18 when I went to school and wasn’t raised to 21 until 1982.

The smell was the first thing that hit you when you entered, an unmistakable wave of stale beer and bodily fluids that permeated the floor, the seats, the walls, the ceiling, everything. In cold weather, the smell of damp wool and heavy clothing mixed with beer created its own unique aroma.

Patrons often had a separate pair of “’Vous shoes” because the terracotta floor routinely had a film of beer that ruined regular shoes. If someone vomited, it was standard practice to rinse the area with beer or water and continue drinking.

As one alumna told the school newspaper, the Diamondback: “Envision everything like black wood and sticky. Like no joke, the tables were sticky, the floors were sticky, the bar was sticky, everything was sticky with beer because (there) was just constantly beer thrown all over the floor. It was gross, it was absolutely gross, but that was where we’d go.”

Bathrooms were downstairs and best approached with a HAZMAT suit and flamethrower. Urinals in the men’s room were routinely broken or absent, leaving guys to simply pee into holes in the wall. Management wised up and installed a stainless steel trough that was no less disgusting but far more durable.

The ‘Vous opened as early as 8 a.m. on snow days, and there was a saying: Two to two at the ‘Vous. Plenty of people on Fridays arrived at 2 p.m. and stayed until closing at 2 a.m. As I recall, pitchers were $1.75 during Happy Hour, and they might have doubled during regular hours. The owner said in one story that they went through 200 kegs and 2,000 cases of beer per week.

Of course, behavior and hygiene were questionable. People regularly poured beer into and drank out of each other’s shoes. There was something called a butt pour. Someone would drop their pants and bend forward. A pitcher was poured over his or her butt, with empty cups underneath to catch the spillage, which was then consumed. Occasionally, guys would engage in a beer slide if the floor was particularly slick and filmy. They’d take off their shirts, and sometimes their pants, and folks would clear a path. They’d get a short running start and dive and slide on their chests, to see how far they could go.

My dad met me at the ‘Vous one evening during my senior year. Said he wanted to see the place I’d mentioned and so many other College Park denizens talked about. We went in and secured a booth. As the evening progressed, friends trickled in after class, study sessions, bong hits, whatever. When they approached the booth, I said, I’d like you to meet my dad. They laughed. You see, it wasn’t unusual for older gents to wander in and find a seat at the bar for a few beers among the kids. Students often struck up conversations with them, and they became one more drinking buddy for the evening.

Anyway, they laughed and I said, no, really, this is my dad. He pulled out his driver’s license to prove it. Much cheering and applause. He hung with us for the next couple of hours, buying pitchers and telling stories and being the center of attention. He reveled in it. I’m certain he should not have driven home that night. But it being the late ‘70s-early ‘80s, and it not being his first rodeo, he made it safely.

The ‘Vous closed its 37-year-run in Dec. 1996, as Route 1 and areas around campus developed, and kids began to gravitate toward cleaner, more upscale bars and eateries. That it lasted as long as it did is a marvel. Sort of.

Raise a glass, make a toast

Cheers! Kanpai! Slainte! Prost!

A watering hole with filth and germs

Lifted spirits and dismissed gloom

And possessed the power to affirm

It’s not where you drink, but with whom

The Elegy for a Dive Series, Pt. 1

Peter Meinke is from Mountain Lakes, NJ. He is an author, a professor, a Florida resident, and an American poet of some acclaim. According to Wikipedia, from 2003 through 2005, he held the Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University here in Norfolk.

In 1983, he composed "Elegy for a Diver," a piece oft-referenced online, which begins:

Jacknife swandive gainer twist
High off the board you’d pierce the sky
And split the apple of the devil sun
And spit in the sun’s fierce eye.
When you were young you never missed,
Archer-diver who flew too high
So everything later became undone.

Lovely and blue, as Ryan Adams would say.

The elegy, as most of you probably remember from English class and Dave could possibly tell you, is a poetic lament for the dead. Surely you recall Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" or Walt Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" for my buddy Abe.

Fans of the underrated 1994 classic Four Weddings and a Funeral undoubtedly remember this dusted-off elegy in the film's saddest moment.

Anyway...

I come here not to bury you with English Lit, but to praise long-lost loves. Like an elegy.  Understand, good people, that:

"For modern and contemporary poets, the elegy is a poem that deals with the subjects of death or mortality, but has no set form, meter, or rhyme scheme."

Well then. Smell the smell-egy. The lame lament. Enjoy my bloggy version of what is another recurring segment destined not to recur:

The "Elegy for a Dive" Series

Wherein we pay tribute to dingy bars of yesteryear which served us well on many long-forgotten nights of revelry-cum-debauchery.  Three at a time, like shots of Jäger.

The Village Idiot
New York, NY
Closed 2004

First in Greenwich Village, obviously, but then in the Meatpacking District.  I was introduced to this joint a couple of decades ago by Dave's professor buddies, a crew of elders who'd perform their own elegiac tribute to a fallen comrade with a bar crawl down Broadway. Like all the way down Broadway and then some, ending in Battery Park. Along the way, the Idiot was a stop. Oh, my.

PBR in the can before it returned to glory. 70's porn on the TV in the corner of the bar. Smoke in the air before it got banned -- a death knell for the Village Idiot, since it smelled of upchuck. My dad once pleaded with my sister not to let me go there, as he'd read a review that called it a "vomitorium." Sorry, Dad. Leave your credit cards at home. Leave your bra in the rafters. For several years, this was home whenever I was in NYC. May my friend the Idiot rest in peace, as they'll say when I'm gone.

Lord, what a pity it
Is to hear the Idiot
Is finally closing her doors
Wretched refuse cast asunder
That pungent Pabst chunder
Lost for evermore.

The Dixie Grill
Washington, DC
Closed 1996

I moved to DC in the fall of 1993 and took a job that paid $11.53 an hour. I had it made. Three of us split rent of $1000 (somehow Rob got the big room), and we ate cheaply, (more than) occasionally splurging on Cowboy Cafe burgers or Lost Dog sandwiches.  For beers, we drank Natty Lights at home with Sega, Beavis, and Butt-Head, and when we went out we looked for deals. And then we stumbled upon an extraordinary one.  The Dixie Grill, 10th and F across from the Ford's Theatre (you know, where what happened gave Walt Whitman an elegy to write).

Pitchers of Pabst, before its return to commercial success (recurring theme) were $4.In DC! That's what pitchers at the College Delly had been when we started college. (Dean jacked up prices to $4.50 and beyond after that.) They had crappy pool tables, dirtbag decor, country music, and those cheap suds. And drunk people, naturally. More than one among our enthusiastic group of Dixie Grill fans went home with a bad idea and a good story. Well, some months later, prices got shifted, PBR turned to something even swillier, and it just faded out of our rotation. A couple of years later, it was gone. But for a brief instant, it was too good to be true, and we were all over it.

Lord, what a travesty
A place with zero majesty
Has ceased to open its taps
Hard not to think of Lincoln
At Dixie with $4 drinkin'
Still, I won't miss the craps

The Atlantis
Nags Head, NC
Closed 1996

The very first Outer Banks Fishing Trip was in 1994. 17 jackelopes from various points elsewhere
descended on a stretch of beachy community that I had known growing up; that many of us had visited for Beach Weeks; and that Dave, Rob, and others had called home one dingy college summer. The locale is blissful anyway. Pack in our merry band of misfits, and it's unbeatable. Add in some rock and roll music in a beachfront dive bar, and you truly have yourself somethin' special. The Atlantis.

This article appeared last weekend, and it's what prompted this post. A grimy music venue that hosted the likes of Dave Matthews Band, Widespread Panic, and yes, Blue Oyster Cult, were among the acts that played there. I usually made it there for lesser-knowns like the All Mighty Senators, Awareness Art Ensemble, maybe the Poetics or Connells. Much was consumed there, and the stories flowed like wine. The OBFT II tale is one for the ages, best resurrected over a cold one on the deck. I'm not sure I'll come across another joint quite like the Atlantis. Lo, she is missed.

Lord, what a tale of woe
The Atlantis, not here no mo'
Beach life's become more dismal
The ladies, lewd but leggy
My rap, over low-fi reggae
Was even more abysmal


So begins this segment. Reflect with me, shed a tear, share a story, crack a beer. I fear we are going to lose a few more of my favorites this year.