On Trying to Find a Happy Place
Lily’s at Night, Credit- Henry Richards
“Meet me at the station, don’t be late;
I need to spend some money and it just won’t wait.
Take me to the dance and hold me tight,
I want to see the bright lights tonight.”
-Linda & Richard Thompson
“Here come some bikers,” Tyler Gramer, a barman at Lily’s Snack Bar, said. “Some of them don’t like our flags and signs.”
A pride-like 'ABIDE NO HATRED' flag hung in one of the bar’s front windows and a sticker showing a red cross through a swastika was displayed on the glass front door. As I ate at the mottled grey concrete bar, a Cheerwine in front of me, the bikers ordered a round of drinks and food and paid as they should.
Lily’s motto is “A Real Cool Time,” or as the orange, pink, and turquoise posters in both bathrooms say “A Real Safe Time.”
Sitting in my usual place in front of the bar’s wooden shelves which are covered with glasses, a spring rain shower falling outside, a crowd beginning to form in time for Tuesday night karaoke, and the Billy Strings song “Know it all” playing over the bar’s speakers I asked Brook Sweeney, one of Lily’s bar staff, how she would describe the bar to someone who has never been there.
She stood there thinking, one hand on her hip.
“Basically it’s a dive bar where you don’t have to worry about getting picked on by a lot of the people who frequent the traditional dive bars,” Brook said.
“What about the regulars, how would you describe them?” I asked.
“You’ve got what everyone refers to as ‘True Players’ that are going to be the river guide fishing guys,” Brook replied. “They are largely a lot of people who are friends with or who are really tight with the people that work here or that own the place.”
I’m not sure where the term "True Players" came from but, like the assorted beer paraphernalia that litters Lily’s walls, the term is ever present in the bar; “True Players only” is after all the second bar commandment on the sandwich board to the right of the bar. To become a “True Player” it seems you have to be friendly with Matt Groce, a friend who was one of the original bartenders at Lily’s.
Most of the nights I spent in Lily’s were spent alongside one or a group of these “True Players.” Matt with his pint of Guinness and shot of fernet or Trevor McKenzie with his Guinness or Miller High Life.
Brook also told me that these regulars are different from the other crowds that come through the door of what she described as the “unofficial queer bar in town.”
Despite this fact these regulars don’t cause any trouble.
“The client base we have are such unique and open minded people, and in general lovely,” Ocea Symmes, another bartender at the Lily’s and Matt’s girlfriend, told me. “Our first meeting before we even opened was an Oasis training meeting to recognise sexual harassment in bars.”
Inside Lily’s, Credit- Henry Richards
I never felt unsafe in Lily’s. But despite the atmosphere and the list of reasons why Lily’s should have been the best for me, it didn’t turn out that way.
Collections of four or five days would go by and, every evening, I would sit reading The White Album by Joan Didion or doing school work below the white light of the lightbox-menu above the bar. I would talk to the regulars whose ranks I slowly began to join and engage with the topics of conversation among the bar staff. I became as much a feature of Lily’s as the yellow grabber arcade machine filled with Fun Dip and Love Bullets or the psychedelically decorated bathrooms.
I did as I should. I was polite and tipped at least 20 percent to my bartenders. I said thank you to anyone who bought me a drink and bought them for others. I tried to go under the radar as much as a new regular in a bar is able to.
The far right portion of the bar, that would often become overcome by the True Players, soon became a second home to me. I would settle down in my usual place at four or five, before the evening rush began, and wait for faces I recognised to come through the door to give me a reason to stay another drink longer.
The stress of school work, rejection from a graduate training scheme at a major media outlet that I had begun to imagine myself doing and the unexpected death of a friend who I had been close with in my first year of college, that I felt I didn’t have a right to mourn as much as others, were weighing down on me.
But all those things felt distant and abstract; part of a different and less real life. The lives my friends and family were leading at home were real lives. I was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean supposed to be having the time of my life.
Polling from 2020 and 2021 Gallup Global Emotions research shows that, as a planet, the percentage of people having positive experiences has been levelling off between 68 and 71 percent of people since 2006 and in 2020 the number of people who said they had experienced feelings of sadness for ‘a lot of the day’ increased by 4 points to 27 percent. I counted myself among that 27 percent, at least for a little while.
I would spend weekends in bed, every random thought leading me towards an even greater chance of crying. If I wasn’t in bed I would be in front of the bar at Lily's, distracted until the moment I crossed Blowing Rock Road and began the walk back to my dorm. I pushed people away that were there for me and when they were upset I tried to avoid the situation in the hope that it would resolve itself.
But among those walls of aged wood and corrugated iron I found friends who led me to places and people that have made my life better. With friends like Matt Groce I have presented community radio shows, cleaned up creeks, sat in the green room of the Carter Fold, and eaten my fair share of barbecue.
A study included in the Journal of Psychology of Addictive Behaviour claims that 10 percent of students surveyed drunk ‘to the point of passing out, missing classes, feeling guilty or bad about themselves due to their drinking, finding themselves in a dangerous situation they would not have been in if sober, and alcohol-related injuries.’ This was not my experience, at least not all the time.
Ray Milland (left) as Birnam and Howard Da Silva (right) as Nat in Billy Wilder’s 1945 adaptation of Jackson’s novel, Credit- Wilder
I wasn't good at having a drinking problem. I was no Don Birnam from Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend, hiding bottles of rye away from the prying eyes of those who didn’t understand my problems and hoped to cure me of a disease I refused to diagnose myself as having.
Not once, after drinking at Lily’s did I drink to the point where I threw up, nor did I attempt dangerous or foolish things that a sober me would have cast off as ridiculous. I missed morning classes because I didn’t feel up to it or I was still tired and recovering from the night before.
If anything, the drinking allowed me to let go. It filled my head, for the moment, with something other than the way I was really feeling.
Examples of drinking in unhealthy ways are hardly surprising to anyone who has spent more than an evening in a college town. A 2017 study of university students conducted by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism found that 19 percent of students between 18 and 24 ‘met the criteria for alcohol abuse or dependence.’ This doesn’t account for research done by the Journal of American College Health that concludes ‘international students were found to have higher level depressive symptoms than domestic students.’
In the first line of The White Album Joan Didion writes that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I told myself I was drinking to maintain friendships, to see people I had grown to love spending time with; I was really drinking to distract myself from the way I was feeling.
But make friends I did; the type of friends you plan the future with no matter how imagined and improbable that future is. The drinking wasn’t good but the friends were.
I wouldn’t trade the friendships I made while drinking and nor would I trade the feeling of being welcomed wholeheartedly into a new community. Lily’s was my happy place despite all the sadness I was feeling but now, looking back, I know it wasn’t a happy place that I needed.
“You can be a gambler that never drew a hand.
You can be a sailor who never left dry land.
You can be Lord Jesus; all the world will understand,
Down where the drunkards roll
Down where the drunkards roll.”
-Linda & Richard Thompson