Dive bars: If you frequent a dive bar now, you are drinking in a disney-fied version of one: it has all the low-cut trappings of a real one, but it probably has a “program”, mixing glasses and spoons from Cocktail Kingdom, a copy of PDT Drink manual next to a huge selection of agave or whiskey on the back bar and plenty of other people who look like you sitting around having dignified conversations with each other drinking well made Manhattans and Palomas. That’s not a dive bar.

A dive bar is when all eyes are on you and it ain’t cause they know you from Facebook.
A dive bar is where you’re a little bit afraid when you walk in and the relief from fear comes only after your first shot of VO served in one of those bottom heavy shot glasses that can also serve as an effective and deadly missile if thrown correctly.
A dive bar is the clack of pool balls being smacked around a beer-stained felt by 3 guys with cigarettes tucked behind their ears, who casually stand far enough away from the pool table to partially block your way to the rest rooms so that you’ll have to interact with them in a low-level form of intimidation.
A dive bar is not feeling around under the bar for a hook for your jacket.
A dive bar always has that guy at the end of the bar, staring into his beer in a slow-simmering quake of anxiety and menace. He’s the owner.
A dive bar has characters, like the guy who sits uninvited at your table with the big smile and offers you to bet that he can eat the beer glass he has in his hand in such a way that you’d be a fool not to throw down $20 to see it; not because you want to, but because he wants you to.
A dive bar is watching him take that first bite and casually chew it while looking into your eyes.
A dive bar is when a bar fight actually breaks out and the only image you leave with is of the post-wedding bride, still in white and grimacing with anger, who comes running past you with a half-filled pitcher of beer, cocked at her shoulder like a revolver before she takes a spill from slipping on spilled beer in front of the jukebox.
A dive bar is where the jukebox plays both Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Marlene Dietrich singing “Puff the Magic Dragon”.
A dive bar is where the bartender pulls a $20 out of the register for you because he knows you’re broke and doesn’t expect you to spend it there. Then he pours you both a shot of VO.
A dive bar has a jar of pickled eggs on the bar next to the SlimJims.
A dive bar is where all whisky is Canadian and all Canadian is rye.
A dive bar has old ladies sitting dignified at the bar wearing boufants and too much makeup, sipping a beer or having a whiskey sour with extra fruit, lipstick stains on the ends of their half-smoked Chesterfields. They always insist on a clean ashtray.
A dive bar has gravity taps for the Guinness with the barrels on the second floor, delivered through sweating cold copper pipes, where it takes the bartender a full 4 minutes to fill a pint that has a head you can float a half-dollar on.
A dive bar has a steam table with corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, noodles and that other thing you can’t identify but looks like its sweet; its always hot, its always clean and its the best food you’ve ever had in your life.
A dive bar has squeeky floors, squeeky doors and a cash register that rings.
A dive bar has loud guys with loud jackets drinking Dewars on the rocks, sales guys with extended bellies holding court, shifting their weight from one foot to the other like a bantamweight fighter who heard the bell from the previous fight above the locker room and is trying to psyche himself out his own fear.
A dive bar was Johnny White’s on St. Peter St in the French quarter across the street from Pat O’Briens, where the guys who came off the oil platforms in the Gulf sat by the window and stared down the Tulane kids who sucked up too many Hurricanes.
A dive bar was McCann’s on 10th Avenue in the last throes of the Westies, where Mickey Featherstone’s goons would come to plot, to wash the blood from the cuts on their knuckles, to celebrate or to just have a shot of Paddys and a Harp.
A dive bar was that place in Weirton, WVA that stunk of Formica, the place in Butler County with chronically overflowing sink, the place outside of Austin that had swinging doors opening up to a raised, wood-covered sidewalk.
A dive bar lasts the test of time.