My Dive

Freddies Bar & Lounge, Broadway, Louisville, KY

They are disappearing without fanfare or outcries of protest.  Memories of smoky and dark rooms,  thick with the musky scent of beer-soaked hardwood floors. The room is murky, like the 40 watt bare bulb that hangs above on a single strand of old fraying cord.  The jukebox’s pastel neon aura glows and flickers with a slight hum.  The regulars hunch and hunker on their stools as blue drifting trails of smoke lift from Luckies and Camels.

America’s dying treasure.  The Great American Dive.

My favorite is a world-class institution on Broadway in Downtown Louisville, Kentucky.  Freddie’s Bar & Lounge.  It is perfection for all five senses.  It has to be experienced should you ever even pass close to Louisville.

Freddie’s is dingy and dark, as all dives must be.  It has booths and stools — and a long bar adorned with countless mementos and souvenirs of the owner and others.  Sports trophies and boxing posters. Taped black & white pictures from days long gone.  Medals, military items and old ball caps.  Mugs and steins and flannel pennants.  And once a live cat, named Tinker, walked along the backboard and occasionally on the bar itself.  You were warned once: “don’t fuck with the cat.”

I found Freddie’s in 1999, while I was attending a convention and it ended up being the best thing that happened in three days.  In a matter of a few hours, truants dodging PowerPoint presentations and glad-handing suits followed me to Freddie’s.  The bar suddenly went from two, to five, to eight new faces.  The regulars nodded welcome without words.  At three in the afternoon it was already heavy with tobacco in the air.  God, I swear it was heaven.

Well-drinks were $2.  This was 1999 mind you, when a highball anywhere was $4 to $6 or more anywhere else.  “Eight bits” growled the bartender — a man with a perpetual cloth wiping the bar top or a whiskey glass.  The drinks were in glasses maybe 8 ounces — slightly bigger than a juice glass, holding five or six small ice cubes.  You could toss it down in a couple of gulps, but it was cheap and we loved it.

The booths were filled with men who had just stepped off interstate buses, all dusty and wrinkled.  Some young, most old.  Most had simple names like Will, Sam and Vince.  A few were black, most white.  You were careful chatting up these boys.  There was a bit of danger in their eyes and you did not ask questions.

One young, lanky fellow of maybe thirty years, was just out of the Indiana penitentiary.  His whiskey glass remained full and several of us bought him more.  Travis told stories flush with convict humor and some painted with violence.  He showed us scars on his forearm from a slashing he took from a monster from Chicago who was going to “make him his bitch.”  The scar was deep and white and ragged.  Travis never said how the fight finished, just that there was “a shit-load of blood.”

Sinatra, the Stones and occasionally, Otis Redding joined us.  The jukebox 45’s were scratchy and hissed.  We punched A10 and G12 and invited more of our favorite people to join us.  A few women, also bored with the seminars and speakers, dared to join us.  They were straight and conservative back at the conference — they took on an edgy and worldly aire while saddled up at the bar.  Even the most finicky found Tinker to be absolutely appropriate for the moment.

I had one sultry dance with a tall brunette heading back to Santa Monica in the morning.  We sat on the dock of the bay and the rhythm of her body lingers in the moonlit shadows of Louisville that occasionally drift through my memories.

Freddie himself shows up at midnight — never sooner.  In his seventies at that time, he looked like a five-foot Kirk Douglas, buff and muscular.  I knew he could kick any man’s ass in the place.  The bartender nodded at me, as I had asked when Freddie would arrive.  I said hello and he scowled at me with a snarl that made me shudder.  He had no interest in the new faces here, he came to count receipts.

I could see that the man was the same in the faded and torn black and white picture taped to the backboard mirror.  He was a young boxer then, probably in the early 1950s, a tough faced sailor who obviously had won a match and was being congratulated by his corner men.  His hands, covered with the big EVERLAST gloves, were raised above his snarling face.  The same gloves now hung above the bar.

We spent three days in Freddie’s.  I knew that Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty had spent a night here, laughing and smoking in one of the hard wooden booths, scamming and drinking beers.

How I wish I passed through Louisville more often in life.

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