Sometimes, in the early part of the day, a faint smell licks out from within a building I’m passing. It’s not the smell of one thing but of many: fried onions, cigarette smoke, old carpet. I can almost touch the stickiness of last night’s beer on plastic-topped tables, can almost see the barflies adjusting their sports coats for the stagger home at 2 am. I hear too-loud laughter and pockets of change jingling as patrons play the jukebox, the pulltabs and make pay-phone calls from the dark hallway that also houses the bathrooms, where one toilet is always blocked.
A wist comes over me and I want to pound on the door where the smell came from until someone lets me in, lets me sit, lets me drink the day away with friends. I remember every single afternoon, evening and night spent in the many neighbourhood bars we used to frequent; I remember the guy with the knife and the guy with the broken bottle, the order of the songs on all of the jukeboxes and the cost of a pint of dark or light, what night was karaoke night and what night was very bad cover band night.
I’m not an alcoholic. My love of a good bar has to do with its sense of community, its inclusiveness – notice I said good bar not nightclub or Ultralounge (incidentally, did you see that reporter’s HAIR?) – and the way anyone can walk in, sit down and have a beer next to anyone else. Probably, the two will end up having a conversation. And then the two becomes three and pretty soon you’re a whole section. And when you win $500 at the pulltabs, you really DO buy a round for the bar, even though you’ve never seen some of those people before.
And if you had the same experience on a bus, it might be creepy. But in a bar it’s OK because everyone is equal at the bar. (Well, except that cute young girls often get free drinks. Hell, sometimes they even just get MONEY to buy themselves drinks. But that’s a whole other topic. Let’s not interrupt this happy traipsing.)
When I was pregnant, I didn’t have smell aversions like some women do. (Except to the catt food.) Everything smelled normal but in the last few months I did experience a strange attraction to clean smells like other peoples’ laundry and bars of soap. When one of my most annoying co-workers surprise-hugged me goodbye on my last day at work, all I could think was “Mm. Smells So Clean.” I also developed an affinity for rubber smells like the parking garage under our building and Canadian Tire. (True. All that going on about buying a shower head? That was just so I could spend more time at Canadian Tire, inhaling the sweet aroma of motor oil, air mattresses and tiny camp stoves and fingering my wads of Canadian Tire money like a pregnant, fake-drug dealer.)
It was while I was pregnant that we moved to our current neighbourhood; a place where either you can still smoke in bars or they don’t have enough money to paint and replace their carpets because the smell I described in the first paragraph? It’s everywhere. Now, I would have expected that my unusual attraction to bars of Ivory would have made the stale beer & cigarette smell turn my stomach. But, as was evidenced by Saint Aardvark having to drag me by the hair up 6th Ave. while I sniffed doorways like a horny pomeranian, there is room in my nose’s heart for both the smells of cleanliness and filth. (And tires. My nose’s heart is more vast than anyone could have guessed.)
These days, when I pass the Royal Canadian Legion #2 (meat draw!) on my morning walk, I smell the bar and feel a little tug at my nostalgion. Someday, I say to its dark windows (it is, after all, usually 10 am), someday we will drink you in.
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