My Memory Palace is a Dive Bar

The passage of time is a hell of a drug.

What a feeling, to be in your fifth decade, still kicking around and feeling roughly the same as you did in your third. I mean…vibe-wise. On a metaphysical level. Obviously things have changed. You’ve grown, emotionally and physically. You’ve become more familiar with your own internal ebbs and flows and you’ve gotten more efficient at weathering them. Your cells are turned over completely every 7 years or whatever, but your rhythm is the same. You’re just the same guy.

I spent 23 of my 41 years in Seattle (that’s like 3 cellular turnovers!), and spent my childhood orbiting around it, and I spend a lot of time wondering if cities age like people. Does the vibe persist while the landscape and the population move through iterations, or is a city nothing but a physical body and its human gut biome?

I was sitting on the couch with Mike last week and telling him about a game I’ve been playing with myself lately, where I try to conjure up spaces I’ve occupied and visualize as many details of them as possible. Older memories are more fun, and something about mundane spaces are extra satisfying. The Rite Aid on the corner of Broadway and John in the year 2001. Benson’s corner store on Pike and Belmont. Bauhaus coffee when it was on the corner of Melrose and Pine and they sold bright red kool aid in cold brew cups for a dollar. Kincora, with the huge plate glass windows and the Coffee Messiah bathroom, where the walls were painted deep red and covered in a garden of earthly delights themed pop culture collage. Not to sound crotchety but this was back in the day when a quarter dropped into a box on a bathroom wall could still buy you 5 blissful minutes in disco hell.

(Quick aside: Mike pointed out to me that what I’m doing is essentially the memory palace thing, and why don’t I try throwing some useful stuff in there while I’m at it, so I did. I made a whole room in my mind dedicated to remembering my friends’ birthdays, which has always been somehow IMPOSSIBLE for me. It’s working great so far! Highly recommended!)

Most of the places I used to haunt are gone now, so this visualization game I’ve been doing feels sweet and sad. It’s like time travel. I move around these spaces I used to spend time in and sometimes when I really get it right I can plug into the sense memories. The dingy carpet at the Canterbury on 15th and the way it felt when my knuckles grazed it as I was grabbing my bag. The dusty dark wood tudor accents and the yellowing walls and the cramped path past the bar to get to the bathroom. The sticky stall doors. The smell of industrial supply soap and stale cigarettes. The pool tables in the back and the big round table by the windows and the way air was hot and thick and sweaty in the summer, and in the winter too, when they cranked up the heat and left a space heater running in the room on the Northwest corner where we always sat (middle booth on the west wall). I can see my sister, drunk, perched on the space heater like it was a little bench, and toppling over backwards, shrieking.

We watched that Hellraiser remake that came out a couple years ago and it was okay, but when we were finished we considered it for a moment and agreed: not dirty enough, not gross enough, way too dry. These are not the moist nasty freaks I know and love.

That’s how I feel about the latest few incarnations of Seattle, I think. Not dirty enough, not gross enough, way too dry. Seattle used to be filled with dingy dive bars. Weird little shops you could lose yourself in with secret treasure for those in the know. The best chai was at Travelers on Pine. Hot and spicy and perfect for sipping while you browsed hand mixed herbal teas and painted tapestries and prayer flags. The Baranof on Greenwood Ave always put their soup of the day out on a little table in the hallway once the kitchen closed. A worn, vintage looking crockpot full of free potato corn chowder or minestrone you could ladle into paper cups and eat while you watched drunks sing karaoke and men in high-vis vests and steel toe boots sip after-work bottles of Rainier at the bar.

For a brief moment, the best lunch deal in town was at the Cuff, when they did 2 for 1 burgers on Thursdays. We would show up with a mob 7 or 8 deep and they would set us up at the biggest table they had, an 8 foot long dark wood mammoth in the middle of the room. They’d leave the lights turned up and bright so you could see the black velvet paintings of mardi gras clowns in all their glory, normally shrouded in the comfortable nighttime darkness of a well-established leather bar. They loomed over us, smiling and bright, and everything was deep purples and dark wood and bright reds and the vibe was unsettling as hell because—turns out—nighttime spaces don’t become daytime spaces with the simple addition of overhead lighting, they just become spaces that feel inappropriately exposed. Like a sacred chapel where something terrible has happened and is now being illuminated by the glaring, invasive light of a police investigation.

The Cuff should be left to its swaddling darkness, and I’m glad it still exists, at least. Those burgers were tasty though. And not long for this world because—as our server explained the last time we showed up—we were the only ones who ever came and the buy one get one free deal was an unsustainable proposition. We were eating them into the red.

Anyway, a lot of this is gone, and a lot of it has been razed to make way for townhomes and condos and sanitized poke bars and Whole Foods and those Amazon groceries where you can feel the thrill of walking out of a store without paying, courtesy of what I assume is some big brothery form of bio-scanning. It’s easy to blame Amazon for what’s been lost but I wonder a lot if we’re also to blame. Did we take things for granted the way we did the Cuff’s BOGO burger deal? Did we eat the Seattle we loved into the red?

You’re not buying the open face turkey sandwich if you’re eating the free soup every night, you know what I mean? And the Hurricanes of the world can’t stay open selling midnight plates of fries and black coffees to tables full of chain smoking punks. Back then the only way to experience the thrill of walking out of a store without paying was to walk out of a store without paying. Everyone I know had strong ethical lines drawn around which stores, but who knows what anyone else was getting up to…

We were eternally fishing crumpled dollars out of our pockets and looking for the cheapest way to survive, and maybe that was kicking the can down the road, but maybe that’s also how it’s always meant to work. We weren’t thinking of it this way, but there’s always got to be someone older and better established, who’s ping-ponging around life a little less, who is buying the full meal deal.

Now that I’ve reached my 40s I guess I am that guy. And now that I’ve reached my 40s, I live in Tacoma, where this sort of aging punk economy still feels real and possible. So I’ll go to the weirdest cutest dingiest spots I can find and I’ll pay full price for a bunch of food so hopefully some ratty teen can camp at a table picking at a plate of fries for 2 hours without putting them out of business. Maybe that’s the best attempt we can make at preserving the vibe of a place over generations. And maybe in 20 years when I am officially an ELDER I can play the time travel game and remember those spaces too, and remember that I tried to honor them while they were still around.