Behind Bars

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer

by Justin Bauer

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Published: Jul 8, 2009

Tom Bonk, unwillingly taking over the family business from his deadbeat, absentee father, starts off with little but regrets. "My first thought was of my fellow college students who watched too many episodes of Cheers and thought owning a bar was a great way of life," the hero of Daniel Putkowski's Bonk's Bar (Hawser, June 23) narrates. "To them it was a never-ending stream of witty jokes, impossible love affairs and plenty of cash to support it all. Maybe there were places in Philadelphia that were like that. Bonk's Bar wasn't."

Bonk does his level best, though. With more than a little Horatio Alger bootstrapping, he sets aside his college education, gets behind the rail and consoles himself with a cash business and crash coursework at the University of Life. And Bonk's Bar, much like its Port Richmond model, turns itself around with neighborhood grit and crab-and-a-beer specials.

Putkowski's story keeps its focus steadily on Bonk's learning curve. There's a little desperation and some heavy foreshadowing, some hassles from the law and the mob, a stack of debts and a handful of domestic disputes. But even with a real-life model at Richmond and Tioga, the bar's story is entirely Bonk's, and his hard work and good character provide the key ingredients in transforming a watered-booze dive into a packed draw, and a callow college kid into a businessman.

The act-of-will transformation that turns Bonk's around has its negative image in Patrick deWitt's Ablutions (Harcourt, Feb. 29), which drops its unnamed second-person bartender (that's right, you) right into a shame-spiral of free drinks, cheap drugs and liver damage. Ablutions is subtitled "Notes for a Novel," and proceeds in vignettes that most often begin with an injunction. "Discuss the regulars" is the first.

DeWitt's writing is clear-eyed and often beautiful; one character describes a drunk's walk as "like a cigarette thrown out of a car on the highway. You know, the way the cherry dances?" and another drunk as "open to greatness — there is potential for greatness in his eyes — only he was never actually visited by the greatness and so he speaks of what his life would have been like if he had been."

Even deWitt's lyricism, though, can't wash out the taste of contempt his narrator has for his customers, or erase the insurmountable gulf he sees between them. Like Putkowski's Bonk, who fashions a Cheers out of elbow grease and determination, deWitt's similarly self-involved narrator also keeps his focus behind the stick; he can't see past his own bile. Because of this, neither Putkowski nor deWitt gets past the solitary experience of a bartender to tap into the life a bar can have.

The portraits that make up Sarah Stolfa's The Regulars (Artisan, July 1) take this leap. Stolfa, from behind McGlinchey's bar, took a series of photos between 2004 and 2006 of solo patrons, each composed carefully to capture bar, shoulders and gaze, and each lit glowingly but unsentimentally. Stolfa's no stranger to deWitt's brand of discouragement — she describes herself in her introduction as "one of the surliest" of McGlinchey's bartenders, no small feat.

But The Regulars captures the range of characters that come to a bar to drink alone and freezes them in the timelessness of a dark bar. Without narrative, Stolfa's photos invite speculation, prompt their viewer to invent stories out of each picture's cues — Ed Taylor's walrus mustache and thick fingers, the shine of William Spearing's suit competing with hunched shoulders and misaligned tie.

More importantly, through these photographs, Stolfa takes the same position Bonk or deWitt's narrator does, but emerges with a considerably different story. The difference is not only due to the absence of narrative, or to the difference in medium between the novel and photography.

Instead, because her focus is directed outward, divided among all of these customers and veiled implied storylines, these photos taken all together show her bar as more than business opportunity or last resort. They illuminate the way this particular business, and her particular occupation, can bind all these disparate people and this particular place into a shared experience.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)

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