My First Local

“My Local” has a meaning to people like me that can’t really be figured out through Google. It’s short for “my local pub,” but it’s not just the pub up the street where you take your coworkers once a quarter for the office happy hour. A Local is a special place; indeed, it is a home. If you know Cheers, it’s like that.

Your local truly is the place you go where everybody knows your name. And they’re always glad you came! My Local – and I always have one no matter where I live – is an alcohol-serving establishment at which I am a regular and where I can always walk in alone and find friends (at a minimum, the bartender).

A certain kind of person establishes deep friendships at the Local. Not everyone fits into the Local scene, and sometimes people who don’t really get what a Local is have difficulty wrapping their heads around the concept.

Back when I worked a regular 8-5, I went out to my car one morning to find that the battery was dead. I took the bus to work and explained to my boss that I’d have to go take care of my car as soon as I tracked down a friend with a car and jumper cables. He was sympathetic; he’d have done it himself if he’d had the cables.

When I informed my boss that I was heading out to take care of my car, he said, “OK. One of your rugby friends came through?”

“No,” I replied. “One of my friends from the bar.”

He was baffled. To him, the bar was a place where you went with friends, not a place you met them. During our brief exchange I was unable to make him understand that this is a person that I met at the bar, hung out with at the bar, and am still close to.

I need a local in my life. I discovered this when I found peace at my first local, the crappy campus pub in the basement of the Chemistry building at my alma mater.
I could go there anytime, alone or with friends from the bar or elsewhere, and I would always be welcome. Many of the other regulars were current graduate students; others were alumni or community members otherwise connected to someone associated with the bar.

Because the bar was considered a graduate student amenity offered by the university, it maintained nonprofit status. The bar management, usually one manager or two co-managers, was elected from the graduate student population each year and took the reins of the pub in an elaborate spring ceremony involving a broken toilet and dozens of pies. A twelve-ounce plastic cup of shitty beer cost seventy-five cents to the public, or fifty cents if you were a bartender. Bartenders were current graduate students and other bar regulars who typically worked one or two hours a week in exchange for an equivalent amount of time during which they could drink at the bar for a penny per drink. 

Occasionally, the legend went, the bar would make too much money and its nonprofit status would be jeopardized, so it would have “negative ten-cent beer night,” where the bar would give customers a dime for every beer they drank. Now that I understand business organizations and what it really means to be nonprofit, none of that makes sense and I’m sure it was much more complicated than that. Regardless, it was the diviest of dives and the sanctuary for so many who didn’t fit in anywhere else.

After I graduated, I moved back to my hometown, but returned to my college city less than a year later. My local was the first place I visited. I stayed in town for another three years, and though I cheated on my local once or twice - even having a full-fledged relationship with another pub - I always returned. 

I was there when Hurricane Allison flooded us until I swam home with a friend (from the bar) who lived nearby. I enjoyed one of the best parties of my lifetime with friends from that bar when we all met in Belgium. I sought refuge there after I accidentally went to a party that was way too fancy for me. I met so many of my dates there. And when I left town for good, I threw my going-away party there. 

I happened to be back in town for the first time in years a few months ago, and my local is still there. Fewer faces were familiar. The courtyard outside the basement bar is nicer than it used to be. The prices have gone up a bit but you can still get a plastic cup of crappy beer for less than a dollar. The vibe is the same. 

My current Local differs from my original in that it has thirty microbrews on tap, wait staff, and a full menu; but the spirit is essentially the same. I always know what's going on with the regulars' jobs and the bartenders' kids.

My local. My home.