In the Fall, we ran a bar series during which a group of writers shared stories and memories of a particular bar. Although the series has technically run its course, we are always happy to feature work by our contributors that’s related to our blog.

In last Sunday’s New York Times, Helene Stapinski wrote a piece about Max Fish, a Lower East Side bar that was scheduled  to close at the end of January. In her article, The Max Fish Magic: Will It Travel Well? Stapinski recounts her history as a regular at the 21-year-old establishment, and what specifically makes it such a special place.

“Will Max Fish still be Max Fish if it moves?” she writes. “Can the magic be recreated in another space? Is it the people and bartenders, or the walls and the windows and the tin ceiling, that make the place cool — or some mystical combination of them all?”

Read Helene Stapinski’s posts for Drinking Diaries here.

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For our bar story series, we have invited some of our contributors to share a story, an episode, an experience that took place at a particular bar–a place that they hold in their memory for one reason or another. We hope you will enjoy reading these stories as they appear each Monday.

by Christina Gombar

Freshman year in college, when Saturday Night Fever came to the tiny, provincial Pennsylvania town of my small, private, pseudo-elite college, my friends contemptuously declared that no one could possibly look and act like the people in that film. It had to be a gross exaggeration.

They were wrong.

Since the age of 14, I’d frequented a number of “theme” bars along the Post Road in Fairfield County, Connecticut, which catered to a disco clientele: a place where every table had a telephone, another with tiger-patterned rugs on the walls, a different one that sponsored dance contests. These discos were full of young men with driven-back hair, polyester shirts and flared designer jeans with contrasting threads and platform shoes. Girls donned “precision” blow-dry hair cuts, glittering green eye shadow, boob-baring Danskins, and heels hanging off their wooden Candies.

Goodtimes Café in Norwalk–located in the bottom half of the back of a strip mall far down the Post Road, at least forty minutes from my home town–inexplicably became an instant hit with people from New Haven to Brooklyn, mixing everyone from Bronx street kids to millionaires’ sons from Greenwich.

It was expensive, with a two dollar cover and $1.25 bar drinks, and you always had to wait in line, sometimes for hours, to get in. When you did, it was a nightmare of flashing lights, over-made up girls and scary men–the aura of Weimar Berlin with the added trauma of disco music blaring from speakers, or loud metal from a live band.

I only went because my friends wanted to go. I never actually met anyone I liked there, but I loved to dance. The few times I was persuaded to go out with one of the Tom, Jerry, or Elvises who accosted me, the dates were duds. Men who looked glamorous under the mirrored disco ball turned out to be policemen, factory workers or rich dull college boys-all wanting a real girlfriend.

I was there a minimum of three nights a week, every week, during the summer of 1979, arriving to stand in line as early as 7:00 p.m., and generally staying until it shut its doors to the strains of  My Sharona at 3:00 a.m.

Goodtimes wound down sometime in the mid-1980s and is now a fitness club, but it lives on in cumulative memory. Searching in vain for an historical Google image, I came upon a Facebook page titled, “I Partied My Single Life away at Goodtimes Café in Norwalk, CT.”

Thursday, 25-cent drinks. Wednesday-male stripper night. Closed Goodtimes and then it was off to Portchester NY ,to continue. Does anyone remember the X-rated hypnotist?

Ah, yes, I remember it well.

I think commentor Glen Keith’s experience best reflects my own: I was there so much, my parents had my mail forwarded. I remember such great times, and probably forgot even better ones.

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For our bar story series, we have invited some of our contributors to share a story, an episode, an experience that took place at a particular bar–a place that they hold in their memory for one reason or another. We hope you will enjoy reading these stories as they appear each Monday.

by Martha Frankel

Later the story would take on a life of its own— “Did’ja hear that Martha punched a state trooper at the Boiceville Inn and knocked him out? Everyone saw it!”

But it wasn’t like that at all.  Although I did shove a cop.  And he did fall.  And there were at least 60 people standing around, watching.

But history first.  The Boiceville Inn was next door to where we lived (in the back of my boyfriend’’s furniture store). We were hippies in a town that proudly wore its redneck tan, but we found our place at the B.I., as we called it.  It was cavernous and dark, and everyone went there–bikers and conservatives, cops and perps, young and old.  Donna Summer would be dimming all the lights, sweet darling, and people would crowd the dance floor, knocking back shots, dancing till they were slick with sweat, making out with their boyfriends and girlfriends, or with complete strangers.  It was that magic time between the Pill and AIDS, when anything could go, and at the B.I., everything did.

I remember that it was hot that night, and we had been at a party.  It was late, but not too late to stop for one more drink.  When Steve stopped to talk to someone outside, I told him I would meet him at the bar.  I knew from the amount of cars in the parking lot that the place was jammed, and although I didn’t expect the air-conditioning to freeze me out, I knew that blast of cold air was gonna feel great.

When I walked in, people at the bar turned my way.  Everyone seemed to smile.  I walked slowly down the 40-foot bar, hugging this one or that, saying hello to friends, shaking hands with people I had never seen.  I ordered a shot of Rock & Rye.  This was how new I was to drinking; I ordered that liquor because the bartender had told me one night that I should.  So I did.  I had never drank before and had no idea that you shouldn’’t have to hold your nose and gulp a shot.  So I held my nose, threw it back, and immediately  someone offered to buy me another.

The buyer was a local guy, whose three brothers were sitting on either side of him.  His hair was long and unkempt, his clothes stained with chainsaw oil.  I looked from brother to brother, trying to remember if this one was Greg or Hank, Billy or Todd.  He handed me the shot, I held my nose, and just like that the music throbbed within me and I started to dance.  Greg or Hank or Billy or Todd leaned forward and I kissed him square on the lips.  The other brothers started to clap.

That’s when someone grabbed my arm.  ”Gimme a kiss,” the guy slurred.  I tried to walk around him.  “C’mon, kiss me,” he said again, this time pressing his face too close to mine.  What the hell was his name?  All I could think of was his wife, who I had seen with a big bruise on her chin once, and a handprint on her upper arm at the local pool one day.  Was her name Heather?  What was his?  He stank of sweat and booze.  ”Ya kissed Greg, now kiss me,” he demanded.

I heard people saying hi to Steve, so I knew he was right behind me.  I wanted to turn but was afraid to take my eyes off the guy, who I suddenly realized was a local cop.  I wondered if he really terrorized his wife, and if she needed help.  I thought that I would call her the next day, but what to say:  ”Your husband’s a jerk, and you can come stay with me”?

I felt a rage boiling up inside me, and when he leaned in the next time, I put both of my forearms up in front of me. He grabbed at my shirt and again begged for a kiss.  I leaned in close.  ”I could blow every guy in this bar, but still I wouldn’t kiss you,” I  hissed. Only somehow the jukebox had stopped and my words reverberated off the walls.   Everything was deathly silent, then it exploded with noise.

I heard Steve say, “Omigod.” And then I pushed forward with my forearms at the same moment that the cop stepped forward, and somehow those two opposing elements sent him careening away from me.  He staggered back and landed with a loud thunk in front of the huge stone fireplace.

People bought me shots for the rest of the month.

Martha Frankel is the author of Hats and Eyeglasses: A Memoir, the co-author of Brazilian Sexy, and the executive director of the Woodstock Writers Fest. You can read the Drinking Diaries interview with Martha here.

For our bar story series, we have invited some of our contributors to share a story, an episode, an experience that took place at a particular bar–a place that they hold in their memory for one reason or another. We hope you will enjoy reading these stories as they appear each Monday.

by Ann Hood

The psychic looked at me and said: “You will go to a bar with sawdust on the floor. Someone will tap you on the shoulder and when you turn around you’ll find a man you knew in high school. He has dark hair and a mustache and will have on a very thin gold chain. You’re going to marry that man.”

I was 25 years old and had no interest in getting married. But a few months later, I was visiting my parents back in Rhode Island when my old friend Jane invited me to meet her at a bar called Alias Smith & Jones in East Greenwich, a small picturesque town on the bay.

It was a summer night, warm with a star studded sky. We sat at the bar and drank cold pints of beer. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around to find myself looking right at a guy I’d dated in high school. I’d really liked this guy back then. We’d gone dancing one night at a place near the beach, and afterward kissed in his convertible. But summer was ending and we’d gone off to different colleges. Now here he was, grinning at me from beneath his bushy mustache, the slightest glint of a gold chain showing through the hair on his chest.

I didn’t think of the psychic or his prediction right then. I was too caught up in how giddy this guy made me feel. We danced that night on the sawdust floor in that little bar in East Greenwich, and spent the next week catching up on the almost decade since we’d last kissed each other. Only after he was gone did I remember. I shivered. Surely he would come back, I thought. The prediction was too accurate to not come completely true.

In a fairy tale, or even some novels, he would return to that bar, to me, and we would indeed end up together. But in this story, we each married other people. It was winter when I saw him again 30 years later, but by then Alias Smith & Jones had long since closed.

Ann Hood is the author of 8 novels, including the bestsellers The Knitting Circle and Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine; two memoirs and a collection of short stories. Her most recent memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, was a NY Times Editor’s Choice and one of the top 10 non-fiction books of 2009 by Entertainment Weekly. Her new novel, The Red Thread, was published on May 1st.

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For our bar story series, we have invited some of our contributors to share a story, an episode, an experience that took place at a particular bar–a place that they hold in their memory for one reason or another. We hope you will enjoy reading these stories as they appear each Monday.

by Sari Botton

Bars and I didn’t get off to such a good start. The first time I went to one – the Buckboard in Baldwin, Long Island, in 1981 – I had to sit outside in a jappy classmate’s car the whole night while the other girls tossed back pitchers of kamikaze, thanks to my baby face and unconvincing fake I.D.

Weeks afterward, I managed to sneak into Speaks, a nightclub in my hometown of Island Park, only to be fished out half an hour later by a bouncer who knew my father, then a fifth grade teacher at the local elementary school.  With the drinking age repeatedly being raised every single time I became legal – 18, then 19, then 21, and with no grandfather clause – going out in college naturally became fraught with anxiety.

It wasn’t until I was 27 and going through a divorce that I found a watering hole I felt comfortable in, the Ludlow Street Café. I went to that Lower East Side dive for the first time in the early nineties, and kept going until the night it closed, in the summer of 1996, when I covered its shuttering for The New York Times.

The first time I went was in the final months of that first marriage. I dragged my husband on the LIRR from Long Beach to see an old camp friend of mine play with his band. It was just one more awkward step toward an uncomfortable but crucial awakening: my suburban life didn’t fit me, and, most painfully, neither did the college sweetheart I’d married too young.

Something about stepping inside the Ludlow Street Café that night button-holed it, and I don’t think it was just my growing fascination with my cute, womanizing musician friend, who often played – and drank too much – there.

Within the bar’s messy, poster-strewn walls, I felt instantly at ease in a way I’d never felt at college bars. The place was well worn like a favorite pair of shoes or faded denim. It had a classic old mahogany bar with an antique cash register, a beat-up floor and scratched-up wooden benches. There was something authentic about its shabbiness that somehow made me feel as if I could be authentic, too; so far I hadn’t felt authentic in my adult life. There didn’t seem to be any pretension in the mostly acoustic bands that played, like the country-rock act Beat Rodeo, nor in the grunge-chic crowd. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t much of a drinker, either; I still felt as if I belonged.

I have many fond memories of the place, even though I endured some painful evenings there with the musician. The worst was the snowy winter weeknight when only three other women showed up for a solo acoustic set, plus a couple of regulars at the bar.

I arrived late and ordered a Corona.

“How’d you like to play a round of my favorite game, ‘Guess who he’s fucking?’” asked one of the guys at the bar. I looked to both sides to make sure he was talking to me.

“It’s the only way I know how to tolerate singer-songwriter types like Mr. Sincerity over there,” he said, laughing. Mr. Game Show Host paid for my beer before I could. “Come on, let’s play,” he begged. “It’s easy – a dead-give away. These guys are all the same. They’ve got at least three women in every audience that they’re fucking, and often, those women are the only ones who show up, like right now. So, I’d say it’s safe to say he’s doing all three, but we could play to figure out which one’s the understanding girlfriend with low self-esteem and who just fits into his weekly rotation.”

I blanched, wondering how I might gracefully go over and sit down near the stage without that guy knowing I was one of the ones. “Thanks for the beer, and good luck with your game,” I said, as I slinked away.

It helped knowing that at the end of the show, the musician would drive me home and stay there with me. That’s what he’d done for the few months we’d been seeing each other. I had the distinction of being The One He Goes Home With After The Solo Shows, which made me officially less pathetic.

But then, at 11:30, he lifted the newish one, a tall, young blonde called Jessica, into his beat up van before helping me in with just a friendly hand. We’ll drop her off first, I thought.

No. That night, for the first time, my apartment was the first stop. Then the musician and Jessica were on their happy way. It took a little while before I could go back to the Ludlow Street Café, but I did, again and again.

Sari Botton’s articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, The Village Voice, MORE, Marie Claire, Self, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour and many other publications, as well as on WAMC radio and NPR. Her website is saribotton.com and she blogs at www.rosendaleramblings.com

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Le Pescadou

For a new series of essays (and poems), we have invited some of our contributors to share a story, an episode, an experience that took place at a particular bar–a place that they hold in their memory for one reason or another. We hope you will enjoy reading these stories as they appear each Monday.

by Camille Sweeney

The first time I stepped into Le Pescadou on the western edge of SoHo, it was love. It was Valentine’s Day and I was on a date. A saucy French wench (in drag) on stilts teetered up to us through the raucous bistro, playing an accordion, calling out, “Entrez, entrez vous!”

The mob at the bar hardly noticed us as we squeezed past them into a larger dining room in the back for dinner. I was smitten, but it would only be a matter of weeks before I had dispatched with my date – an entertainment lawyer with anger management issues – and years would go by before I would find my way back to the bar.

Maybe not so coincidentally, my return trip some time in the spring of 1999 was with Josh, the man who would become my husband. This time, I wasn’t marooned in the back room, furtively glancing at the doorway to the bar, but rather I was at the bar with Josh, drinking rounds of yellowy Pernod and meeting a whole new cast of characters.

It turned out Josh not only knew about the place, but also practically everyone in it.

“A local,” boomed Chuck, the owner from Montreal, passing through the front room, dispensing conviviality, bestowing on Josh the highest praise and fervently double-kissing his cheeks.

In fact, Le Pescadou was Josh’s living room. He lived only three doors away. As our relationship progressed, so did my relationship with the bar and all its strange inhabitants.

There was the Chinese-Irish tour guide, the indie filmmakers, the bullish English bondsman, the young widowed producer whose toddler scarfed down fries and toddled around playing choo choo train conductor, pretending to collect tickets (and sometimes real money) from the patrons. There were the trivia heads, the pop star and his tranny girlfriend, the aristocrats, some English, some Italian, some both. There was the former French race car driver and the former Czech model and the science editor and the jazz drummer and the record producer and the actor – all the actors – sharing the bar with the firemen whose firehouse was just up the block. (Those on duty, whipping back espressos, those off duty drinking the harder stuff, warming up before going “out out.”)

Rose, an old woman, who lived nearby, would make her way around the corner and stop to stare in the doorway. Age had baffled her about life but she was sure of one thing, she wanted a little glass of something at her neighborhood bar. Arms were always offered to help her get up the step.

At Le Pescadou, conversation was an art form. Arguments rose and were settled. Relationships bloomed and died. Advice was dispensed and predictions about life, love and the pursuit of happiness were made, some right, but just as often wrong. One man would travel over a hundred blocks to wile away an evening, drinking red wine and quoting Pound or Eliot or Shakespeare to whoever would listen—the drug dealer’s girlfriend, the electrician who moonlighted as a clown, the ad exec who kept a Town car and driver waiting at the corner ready to whisk him home to the suburbs.

Wherever else we’d go on New Year’s Eve, we’d start and end the night at Le Pescadou. Whenever we had cause to celebrate, we’d go there to share the news. Some fellow patrons drove over a hundred miles for our wedding upstate and some met our daughter in the maternity ward just after she was born. (Or, a week later when we brought her to the bar in her sling.)

When snow fell, we’d sit at the bar watching the drifts pile up and the city go quiet as we sipped whiskey neat. When the blackout flipped the switch on the East Coast one steamy August afternoon, we were part of a huge crowd, cheering and toasting Chuck, who’d somehow managed to keep the ice from melting and the drinks flowing late into the night by candlelight.

When tragedy struck, we’d gravitate to Le Pescadou as well. Chuck stayed open in the aftermath of 9/11 and the bar became a place where we mutually grieved and collectively healed. Some of our firemen never returned.

Financially, the place never fully recovered from 9/11. And, eventually, about mid-decade as with many small business owners, Chuck was forced to close. My husband and I would walk by, slowing down to peer into the papered windows, wondering how it could have happened and what would take its place. Inevitably, we’d spot someone else, another local, making his or her way past the empty bar, wondering like us, would life ever be the same?

Camille Sweeney, a MacDowell Arts Colony fellow, a somewhat repentant
initiate of the Rye Bucks Drinking Society at Kenyon College and one-time
blogger (The C Spot: A Guide to the Life Erotic), contributes frequently to
the New York Times and is at work on a novel.

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For a new series of essays (and poems), we have invited some of our contributors to share a story, an episode, an experience that took place at a particular bar–a place that they hold in their memory for one reason or another. We hope you will enjoy reading these stories as they appear each Monday.

by Leah Odze Epstein

I’ll never forget the first night I walked into the Royal Palm—or the Palms, as we called it. “New York, New York” played on the tabletop jukeboxes, reminding me of my favorite diner back home.

“Start spreadin’ the news, I’m leaving today. I want to be a part of it, New York, New York,” Frank Sinatra sang in his velvety voice, luring me in.  “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” This pretty much summed up how I felt about college.

After a high school career of pound-the-books nerd-dom, I’d decided that in college, academics would no longer take precedence (if my parents only knew…). I skipped the first few days of orientation to go to a Bruce Springsteen concert. Then I came in with a bang—greeted by the Leah Ooze sign on the door of my dorm room (my last name’s Odze), complete with a dripping puddle some helpful dorm-mate had drawn.

No matter. As I’ve detailed here at Drinking Diaries, I got drunk for the first time my first night of college. I blacked out, in fact. After that, I got a little smarter, but only a bit. Alcohol loosened my inhibitions, and by the second day, I took up with our helpful OC (orientation counselor). Call him Chaz.

Chaz was a junior, and by about night three, he began ushering me around to all the best campus sights: his apartment, his bedroom, and, when he realized he wasn’t going to get as lucky as he’d thought–his favorite bar.

I was thrilled that some guy wanted me. A junior, at that. And he wasn’t that bad- looking, if you could get past the nervous twitch. He was kind of bohemian and I liked that. I still wore acid-washed jeans, God love me, and pastels. My friend Julie soon put the kibosh on my wardrobe when she raised her eyebrow and said, “Pastels?” When I walked into the Palms, Julie’s words really hit home. From then on, I’d wear black and army green.

Did I mention that none of my fellow freshmen had ventured beyond the campus pub? I felt like a pioneer as I stepped into that smoky air, as if it were coating me with a new aura. Pool balls cracked, pinball machines plinked, but mostly, the place buzzed with constant conversation and beer bottles clinking, as if life at this bar were a constant toast to the fun of it all.

Kids sat four or six to a booth, head to head, at beat-up wooden tables with carvings and graffiti. And the smell. The Palms reeked of the beer that everyone drank—Rolling Rock in bottles, mostly—but also Budweiser and Gennee Cream Ale.

Chaz steered me to the back of the bar. Next to the pinball machines, a bald guy with a thin braid down his back sat cross-legged on top of a picnic table, holding court and smoking clove cigarettes, while people stood around him. One guy wore a beret, which thrilled me to no end, because trust me, no guy in suburban Maryland dared to wear a beret.

Yes, there were other Cornell bars, but as far as I was concerned, those weren’t for me. Let the boarding-school types and the upscale snobs have their chardonnay at Ruloff’s; let the jocks and the grunters line up their penny shots at Dunbars. From the day Chaz took me into the Royal Palm, the Palms–with its “I don’t care if you love me” attitude–was mine.

Perhaps I’m exaggerating (but not much) when I say I ended up there every night, after every party, after every study session or to avoid studying. Any excuse, and I was there, sharing a pitcher with my friends. Afterwards, we’d head to the corner deli to marvel drunkenly at the Potted Meat Food Product.

I met my first real boyfriend at the Palms. It was the one time I walked into the bar alone, over the summer, without the armor of my friends. I can’t remember why, but I walked right up to this guy and asked him if he was Swedish (he was). So was I (half). And that was that.

Years later, I went back to my twentieth reunion. My friend Julie and I made the Palms our first stop, in the middle of the day. I looked at her and said, “Thank God it’s the same.” The jukeboxes, the dartboard, the ceiling tiles, each one hand-painted by a Palms regular. We looked for things we’d scratched into the tables, or that had been scratched into the tables about us. At the Palms, you made your mark, literally, whether by writing on the walls or tables, or painting a ceiling tile. The bar belonged to me and Julie and everyone else who passed through.

The owners hadn’t changed a bit–they’d already aged, long ago, from all the cigarette smoke and beer. They seemed happy to see us, even the guy who’d caught me with my pants down in the men’s room one drunken night, when I had to pee and the ladies room was full. I remembered how he stood there relentlessly, refusing to get out, despite my hollering, holding the door open until I pulled up my pants and exited to the cheers of the growing crowd. Still, I forgave him. The grumpy owners added to the charm, and life in your late teens is so much more fun when you have authority figures to push against.

We visited again at night, and maybe that was our mistake, because once the people filled in, we could see they were all wrong: popular people with their fickle tastes, listening to current favorites instead of classics–“Living on a Prayer” blasted from the CD jukebox.

The crowd spilled out onto a back patio, which I never knew existed. Julie and I opted for the bar, where the crowd seemed older than the table sitters or the people milling around, walking up and down the aisles to see who was there. I almost joined them out of habit, before I realized that all our peers were long gone.

We sat down, and Julie whispered to me, “Don’t look now, but that townie guy’s staring you down.” I glanced over at Grizzly Adams to my left, preparing to tell him I was here to reminisce with my friend, so if he could kindly give us some space, I’d appreciate it, when he said, “Hey, Leah.”

“Um, hi?” I said, not wanting to be rude. I felt like I was back in college, at the dining hall after a drunken night, when a guy I didn’t know would say hi and I’d cringe, wondering what idiotic thing I’d done the previous night.

Well, this guy knew me, all right. He turned out to be the boyfriend. My first love. Sitting next to me at the bar. Unrecognizable, until he opened his mouth. Then, he became the same laid-back guy I remembered, minus the frat-boy attitude, plus a long beard and a tattooed girlfriend.

Different-looking. Southern sounding, even though he was from the North. But underneath, he had the same essential nature. Just like the Palms, which, I reminded myself, still had “New York, New York” on the jukebox, just waiting for someone like me to come along and press play.

Leah Odze Epstein is the co-editor of Drinking Diaries. She also writes middle grade and young adult fiction. You can follow her on twitter at @Leaheps.

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For a new series of essays (or poems), we have invited some of our contributors to share a story, an episode, an experience that took place at a particular bar–a place that they hold in their memory for one reason or another. We hope you will enjoy reading these stories as they appear each Monday.

by Laurie Lindeen

Trameri’s, Ralph’s, Liquor Lyle’s, Jonathan Swift’s,

So welcoming,

You belong to someone.

Stache’s, Aunt Ruth’s, Paul’s Club, Jimmy and Tai’s Wrigleyville Tap,

You’re a member of the family,

By Jiminy.

Lou’s Worry, Bud’s East, Chesty’s, and Jocko’s Rocket Ship, You’re on the edge,

Nothing personal.

The 400, The 602,The Fourth Quarter,

They’ve got your number.

The Kollege Klub, The Plaza, The Colonial, The Ritz, The CC Club,

You’re a member in good standing.

The Wagon Wheel, The Caribou, The Wharf, The Willy Bear, The Sea View, The Square Rigger

Until you’re out to sea, alone on the prairie

Falling down.

Laurie Lindeen’s essay, “Uncool, Not Cute,” was posted on Drinking Diaries in July, 2009. She is the author of Petal Pusher, A Rock and Roll Cinderella Story. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone’s anthology Altarockorama and the online magazine, The Morning News. Find her on the web at www.laurielindeen.com

For a new series of essays, we have invited some of our contributors to share a story, an episode, an experience that took place at a particular bar–a place that they hold in their memory for one reason or another. We hope you will enjoy reading these stories as they appear each Monday.

by Helene Stapinski

Dexter Roadhouse was a shack of a bar that sat 10 miles outside Nome, Alaska, on the Kougarok Road. On the way, you passed the old mining claims from the Gold Rush era — the scarred, but still immensely beautiful tundra flashing by in red, gold and rusty orange. The Sawtooth Mountains loomed in the distance, like ancient cathedrals waiting for you to stop in to say a prayer.

But you hit Dexter first, to worship at its old wooden bar. When I lived in Nome, it was the great equalizer, where everyone in town came to worship. The judge sat next to the man he just sentenced for DWI who sat next to his next door neighbor and her ex and somebody’s uncle.

It’s rumored that Wyatt Earp once owned Dexter. And that Hoagy Carmichael wrote “Stardust” here. But I never believed anything anyone ever told me in Nome, since most people were drunk when telling it to you.

The first time I visited Dexter was my first night in Nome. I had arrived earlier that day on an Alaska Airlines flight to serve my year with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps at a church-run radio station named KNOM (MONK spelled backwards). Nome was muddy and ugly and smelled bad, at least in our house. One of the former volunteers was cooking moose stew, which gave off a gamey, awful stench.

To get away from the smell, we went drinking at the local bars that night. There were quite a few. And when they closed, there were the after-hours roadhouses on the outskirts of town: Safety, at milepost 22 on the Council Road, and Dexter.

We took a drive out around 2 a.m. in the station vehicle — a blue, beaten Jimmy SUV, which on most nights, beginning in October, would be plugged into the house to keep the engine from freezing up.

But this was August. The sun had just set around midnight, so the last hints of twilight had been blotted out for good. The road to Dexter had no lights. A dark emptiness stretched for hundreds of miles, threatening to swallow us whole for eternity in its vast loneliness.

I wondered that night, from the crowded but silent back seat, why I had come here and thought maybe it was a mistake. Among a few darkened homesteads along the road, and the sleeping, blanketed mountains, Dexter was all there was out in the middle of all that nothingness. You could see it glowing in the dark, like a firefly hovering, warm and pulsing.

There were only a few stools left when we arrived. We climbed onto them, cowboys already weary at the beginning of a long journey, and steadied ourselves. Bill from Iron Creek, a gold miner, was tending bar and welcomed us with his crooked smile. “Welcome to Sin City,” he said.

From Bill, we learned to drink — and later mix — duck farts and BBC cocktails. But that’s not all Bill taught us. As the months unfolded, we would become regulars and then bartenders at Dexter — at least on the nights when the roads weren’t closed because of snow. The loneliness of those dark roads was replaced with a feeling of freedom mixed with a weird sense of community.

Lazy Sundays that following summer were spent not at church, but playing bean bags in the dirt outside the roadhouse, drinking long necked beers and staring at the silhouettes of those cathedrals in the distance, thinking maybe Hoagy really did write those words here:

The last time I was in Alaska, July 1996, I tended bar at Dexter with Bill for an overflowing crowd. Beanbags were in full throttle and Nome’s mayor danced around in a tall striped Dr. Seuss hat. Little did I know that it would be my last night inside Dexter, that six years later, the roadhouse would be replaced with a new, improved version, bigger, but not necessarily better.

As I drove away that night, twilight segueing into dawn, pinpricks of stars trying to take hold, I took a longing look at the roadhouse through my rearview mirror and prayed that Dexter would be there when I got back.

Helene Stapinski is the author of the bestselling memoir Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History, and Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair, with Music.  She has written articles for The New York Times, New York magazine, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure and Salon.

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This is the first of a new series of essays. We have invited some of our contributors to share a story, an episode, an experience that took place at a particular bar–a place that they hold in their memory for one reason or another. We hope you will enjoy reading these essays as they appear each Monday.

by Laura Vanderkam

Boxers was my second stop of the night.

I’d been out for dinner with friends on a cold February Saturday in 2003 when a friend from college called. She was at this Irish bar in the West Village with a man she’d recently started dating and roughly two dozen of his colleagues. Feeling outnumbered, she wanted moral support. So I went. The walls of the crowded space were covered with pictures of Irish writers. Some (Brendan Behan) were obscure. Others less so; as I was ordering a drink, a man asked me, “Now James Joyce – what did he write?”

The literature lover in me got flustered. “Um, Ulysses?” The man smiled, and as I started talking to him, it soon became clear he knew who James Joyce was. He knew a lot of things – more specifically, how to get a woman to start chatting about something substantial in a bar. He was tall, and I’d always gone for tall sorts. He was also handsome and eager to hear about my writing projects. He turned out to work at the same company as my friend’s new boyfriend (though not with him), so there was no awkward exchange of numbers as I soon ducked out of the bar to head home. He worked his channels and emailed me soon after. And for many, many days after that as we started talking, dating, getting engaged one year to the day after meeting in Boxers, getting married, becoming the parents of two little boys, and so forth.

Looking at my children now, I’ve often pondered the magnitude of a seemingly small decision. I could have not picked up the phone. I was having fun at that first restaurant; I could have told my friend we would make plans some other night. But bars are always, in some sense, about possibilities. Sometimes, in life, you are open to trying the second bar. You are open to talking with someone new, even if you can’t yet hear, in his laugh, the echo of your babies giggling years hence.

All you can do is trust that when you are, in general, open to such divine gifts, that is when wonderful things start to happen. Even in a bar. Why not? Jesus turned water into wine, not the other way around. Wherever people are talking and celebrating together is a good place for a little touch of some force larger than ourselves to join the party as well. It swoops down, changes everything, and then like Boxers the bar itself (now closed) is gone.

Laura Vanderkam, a New York City-based writer, is the author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think (Portfolio, May 27, 2010)

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