"People who say life isn't fair are usually trying to screw you," Sam told me, early into his first beer. "If someone has to explain that life isn't fair, they're probably the ones causing the trouble."
We're sitting in longtime Excelsior dive bar, Pissed Off Pete's, which comes across as a bar that time forgot. It's an attractive quality in dive bars, which exist in spite of trends, not because of them. A "hip" dive bar is a contradiction in terms: a bunch of kids enthusiastically playing at being disaffected. Like "faking sincerity," hip dive bars can't be what they're pretending to be.
People have been letting Sam down, and it seems like all the good work he's done and the respect he's earned isn't enough to get him a cup of coffee in this town, once he actually needs something.
You can have this kind of conversation in a bar that serves $14 cocktails with fresh ingredients and young waitresses in stupid uniforms, but it lacks gravitas. It's like a Google vice president commiserating about the cost of kicking public teachers out of the multiunit home he just bought.
But that same vice president can't have that conversation in a bar where people throw punches. A bar where people are getting drunk on what they can afford will not tolerate it for very long. That's why we need dive bars, and their refusals to be trendy: Refusing to be trendy is the beginning of a moral compass. It's why hipsters and techies insist that morality is relative. The one because they want to be trendy, the other because they place the efficiency of the trivial over the success of the meaningful.
Neither can get what they want in a world with real standards.
Pissed Off Pete's one concession to San Francisco gentrification just might be what I'm told is a very impressive kitchen in the back — the beer brined pork chops and butternut squash ravioli have been getting raves, among other things. Sadly, it was closed during our visit. Instead, we walked into the room and ordered a Rodenbach Grand Cru for me, and an Anchor Steam for Sam.
The bartender gave me a look. "You know that beer is $8, right?" God bless him. After making the pour, he decided the tap didn't have enough left in it to make a solid glass, so he charged me $6 instead.
Pete's is an old-school wooden long bar — clean and nice, except for a men's room that is so awful (if still hygienic) that it must be a point of pride. There's a little stage area that works great for bands and for comedy nights; a nicely spacious poolroom in the back that is plain, but very serviceable; and a long line of Giants player bobbleheads keeping watch above the bar, between the four TVs. It's one of those rare bars that could transform into a strong event venue in a snap. The bar takes advantage of it with regular gigs.
But if somebody had been performing that night, we wouldn't have gone there. Over a round of Speakeasy Payback Porter, I reminded Sam that at some point in their lives, people he admires in this world have been put in the position he's in now. I told him about the times I've been down and out — about the time I couldn't pay rent and had one more car payment left in my bank account and my parents said I couldn't come home because they thought I wasn't "trying hard enough" to find a job. I made them choke on those words for years, when I finally got back on my feet.
I told him what somebody I admired had once said to me. "At least some of your heroes should be alive now," I said, repeating the words just as I'd heard them. "Because we deify the dead. We think their lives were inevitable, and we forget how much they struggled. But if your heroes are alive, you'll see firsthand how good people, even great people, have the wheel of life turn on them, and end up on the bottom as much as the top. Knowing they were there first helps keep you sane, when it happens to you."
It's the best I had to offer. It seemed to help. We left in a much better mood than we came in — what else is a dive bar for?
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