Land of No Bars By Mike Roselle

People, I am in Berkeley and you know what that means. No bars!

A wiser man than me once said, “Berkeley is a nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit there.” It’s so true. I was visiting at the “Compound,” a collection of back yards in North Berkeley inhabited by the types of dangerous radicals you would expect in this part of the country. I was the houseguest of Andre Caruthers, who is always working on something or other and he had some e-mail to type so I wanted to walk to the nearest tavern and watch the ballgame. I had my teeth drilled on for three hours the day before and needed a beer.  And, therefore, a bar.

I had things to think about. Like meeting with my fifth wife on Tuesday. Our marriage wasn’t working out and now our divorce is falling on its face. We plan to drive up the California coast in the El Camino and sell it to a redneck that would hopefully total out this gas hog in a spectacular but injury free crash. Or maybe we will just give it to the hippies in the Siskiyou. I have an agreement with my exes and ex-exes that I refer to them by number in chronological order. Sarah will always be number five, and she is the best fifth wife a guy could ever ask for. But I am not the second husband she may have had in mind when we got married.

Choices are limited when it comes to bars in Berkeley. There is a bar in North Berkeley called Beckett’s. You know, after the famous Irish writer dude. But it is as dull as the name implies, which is no fault of the great playwright. I had a few beers there with number one wife and number two wife last week. And also with major Lowbagger Poet Dude, Dennis Fritzinger. Beckett’s is not really a bar but they do serve liquor and expensive appetizers. Ramon was buying, so what the hell. Besides Beckett’s you can forget about bars in North Berkeley. You need South Berkeley. So I decided to walk down to Spenger’s, which people in North Berkeley don’t usually do because the food is bad and expensive. It’s also the site of an unsolved labor dispute in 1923. But it does have a television, which is, after all, needed to watch baseball games that are sometimes played thousands of miles away.

Like I was saying, yesterday Floyd and I got brand new teeth in L.A. from Dr. Bob. On the way to Spenger’s I just happened by Everett and Jones Barbecue on San Pablo Avenue. I swear at the time barbeque was not on my mind. But the smell! Anyway, I am not a vegan. I am not a vegetarian. Most of the time I’m not even a meat eater, and generally Bay Area barbeque is nothing to howl about. But I had to check out the new teeth so I sat down at the counter I read a column by Mumia Abdul Jamal in the local Socialist Newspaper and had some bones. The bones were tough, but tasty. But what? Only one small paper napkin? I had to wipe my chin with a piece of wonder bread! No one comes here for the meat so much as the atmosphere, and the teeth passed the bone test and it was cheaper than eating at Spenger’s. But Everett and Jones have no beer.

Spenger’s is probably the oldest bar in Berkeley along with Brennan’s across the Street. They are both hidden under the freeway by the Railroad tracks. I guess this is because the Berkeley city council is trying to hide them. I went there on dates with my first wife over twenty-five years ago and once during my birthday I found a pearl in an oyster. We were having dinner that night with folksingers Mary McCaslin and Jim Ringer after a benefit they did for Earth First! After the show Mary was trying to sell her guitar for gas money back to Mendocino, so wife number one bought it for me. Andre has the guitar now but I’m not sure how that happened.

My second and third wife didn’t much care for Spenger’s, but my fourth and fifth wife liked the bar, with its maritime theme, dark wooden interior and its famous Happy Hour. Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness, even for just an hour, is an inalienable right, meaning that it can neither be given nor taken away. During the Scottish Enlightenment, the idea developed that happiness was something everybody was entitled to, not just the privileged and wealthy. This was a time when the Christians were always at war over religion. It was better to drink. Happiness meant that life was more than bread alone. Governments and society had no right to make laws or rules that infringed on your right to happiness. It was important enough that the writers of the Declaration of Independence put it in the first paragraph. Ok, it was a BIG paragraph. It might be important to note that both the Scottish Enlightenment and the American Revolution were hatched in bars. Google it if you don’t believe me.

Happiness was also associated with solitude, and Thoreau wrote quite a bit about that. “What good are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?” Ed Abbey liked solitude but was also suspicious of any town that had more churches than bars. More than Thoreau, Abbey popularized the value of solitude, and partly because of this solitude is getting hard to come by in the very canyons that were the source of his inspirations. But almost as sad is the loss of what few good bars there were in Utah. One night I sat in a bar in Utah with Cactus Ed and asked him if he had any regrets. He said he should have taken better care of his teeth. At the time he thought he might have cancer. He said the only thing good about cancer is that you no longer have to floss your teeth.

Anyway, as I’ve mentioned, I just got here from L.A. Floyd and I had our teeth fixed by Dr. Bob. Our teeth are the only part of our heads that can be fixed. I can’t find my reading glasses without my reading glasses. I put them on, as Cecil Garland once said, when my curiosity overcomes my vanity. My ears are shot from too many Who concerts. Actually too many Who concerts is impossible but I can warn you not to stand next to the speakers or take the orange pill from the dude who looks like a biker. If you do, don’t go home to your parent’s house. I lost my sense of smell in the oil field from off-rig nasal related activities. The teeth are pretty much the only way to improve my head short of Botox and a chin implant.

A small road block appeared during the dentistry adventure, though. Dr. Bob works with Gwen, who is pregnant, so Floyd couldn’t get any gas because he said it is not good for the baby. Floyd was uncomfortable with this and refused to open his mouth. Dr. Bob told him to take a valium and go next door to the bar and have a beer. Ramon and I left him grinning in the dentist chair and drove to the beach, and then up to San Francisco.

Dr. Bob had done Ramon’s teeth a few years earlier when he threatened to sell the Cove/Mallard Base Camp land that bordered the Wilderness. He needed a small fortune to get his teeth fixed, and he wanted me to raise the money. Twilly knew a good dentist, and we called Dr. Bob who agreed to do it pro dento, thus no land sale. Later Pentecostal faith healers would rename Dixie Closer To Heaven and surround the land with cracker-box houses and television satellite dishes. Our piece of land was at the highest elevation, therefore our dilapidated trailer and seven junk vehicles left over from the Cove/Mallard campaign of ten years past sat in the middle of their sacred sanctuary, and was even closer to Heaven. In this way, Dr. Bob made it possible for three hundred dusky-footed wood rats to keep their mountain home, and for us to maintain the immoral high ground in the Pentecostal community of Closer to Heaven. Last year, they 86-ed Ramon, Floyd and I from the bar, restaurant and the only motel in Dixie.

I know what you are thinking. Nagasaki, you are spending too much time in bars drinking beer. But if there were no bars, there would be no revolution. There certainly would be no Hank Williams, or Hank Williams Jr. Some have written to me and suggested it is bad to glorify drinking when alcohol has caused so much harm in the world. Others have said that they think it’s refreshing that somebody is standing up to this creeping prudishness that threatens to squash our right to sit in a pub with a few chums and have a many-thousands-of-year-old beverage enjoyed throughout the world since humans realized that a gourd or human skull could be made into a mug. Okay, no one really said that.

But this is the real irony. My cell phone won’t work in Spenger’s. It won’t work anywhere in Berkeley. It works all over the country, in the woods and even in places I wish it wouldn’t work. But it does not work in Berkeley, home of the University of California; stones throw from Silicon Valley and across the Bay from San Francisco (where it does work). The reason: No Bars. If I see that “Can you hear me now,” dude in Berkeley, I’m gonna kick his ass.

Even with a new set of teeth, Mike Roselle still thinks that Red-State bars afford more freedom, if not also happiness and solitude.