On the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, we (me, HP, and the HP’s sister Kate) went to a wedding in South Bend, Indiana, home of that Catholic college of which I am not a fan. The wedding was in a log cabin chapel on campus and the reception was at a sports bar on campus. The groom had on his dress blues and the bride was all done up in white, and although I didn’t know either of them very well, I had a pretty good time. When the reception was over, we were making plans to go find some hamburgers or a pizza, because the reception had all been sports bar finger food, and how many fried cheese sticks can one girl eat?
Instead, somehow we were waylaid by the bride and groom and convinced to go to the local Notre Dame college bar. When we arrived there in our cab, it took me a few minutes to realize why everything seemed so familiar and yet so strange. Finally I realized that I was in a time warp. From the cover charge at the door (that apparently was the fee required to take up space inside, since there was no band), to the underage kids screaming along to Living on a Prayer, to the shots in the little plastic medicine cups (more on that another day) - I was not in a bar, I was in a college bar.
Long ago when I was in college, we had an on campus pub that served beer and lite beer, and we had a local bar that occasionally tolerated the college kids, but my true college bar was called Maguire’s. In warm weather, if we were drunk and motivated enough, we’d walk the two miles to the bar, but in the cold weather when we were drunk and unmotivated, we’d take a cab. Maguire’s was basically an empty wooden rectangle, with a bar along one side, four tables along the other side, and a juke box and a cigarette machine along the back wall. It was about the size of a small living room, and it was always overly packed and steaming hot. The bathrooms were renovated during my college years, so although they were usually disgusting by the end of the night, we took comfort in the fact that technically they were new enough to be cleanable, and thus might have been clean at some point.
The sole purpose of Maguire’s was to serve alcohol to the underaged. They did not sell any food; they did not book any entertainment; and they did not attempt to provide atmosphere or decor to entice the average city resident to come in for a drink. The management ran the bar like an Asian subway car, stripped down to the bare bones to cram in as many people as possible. To help them bring in the desired crowd, they paid an off-duty policeman to stand in uniform at the door. He never checked IDs, he just stood there drinking soda (I guess?) and gazing over our heads when we ponied up our fake IDs. He also never enforced the fire code, and usually if it was too full to fit one more person into the building, someone would open the fire door in the back and people would stand outside behind the bar near the railroad tracks.
When I started to write this little description, I was going to say I hadn’t been there since I graduated, but I’m sorry to say that I was drunk and standing by those railroad tracks just two summers ago for during my 15th reunion. There I was, innocently sitting on a bench on campus after the reunion dinner, talking to the HP on the phone, when I found someone’s camera. About 10 minutes later, a car screeched to a halt in front of me and a frantic woman in town for her 5th reunion ran over and asked if I’d seen a camera. I handed it to her, and she was so grateful that she insisted that that my friends and I come to Maguire’s with her for a drink. We rounded up as many old people as we could find and headed out for the bar. While most of the campus has changed since I graduated, and Worcester had certainly made a comeback, as far as I could tell Maguire’s has not changed at all.
Except that Maguire’s has changed in one important way, and the Notre Dame college bar has probably changed too. The main difference between a college bar in 2007 and a college bar in 1988, is that now there is no smoking - the cigarette machine is gone.
As I got into the shower Saturday morning, after my night as the old lady in the college bar, I realized that I didn’t have to prepare myself for that distinctive wretch-inducing smell that rises up when the warm water hits the stale smoke that permeates your hair after a long night out. And I thought to myself that if my daughters decide to live somewhere other than Virginia or Kentucky, they might never have to smell that smell at all. And that made me happy, to have finally discovered one small way that the world they grow up in will be a little bit better than mine.
