Distillations: Déjà vu at Clooney’s

I had forgotten that I’d ever been to Clooney’s, on Valencia and 25th streets, until I walked through the door. Then, perhaps because virtually nothing has changed in three years, I was capsized by a wave of memories from The Before Times. 

It was such a terrible time for me. In 2018, a close friend had died. I was one step ahead of a breakdown. I’d come to Clooney’s in January, 2019, to meet “Donna,” who had made a wooden box for me that I was going to give to Michael to add light and sound effects when it was opened for an art experience I was creating for a nonprofit auction. California was on fire, back when we didn’t realize that was to become an annual tragedy, and Donna had loaned her phone to a woman who was fleeing from the fires. The woman had forgotten to log out of her Messenger app on Donna’s phone. That’s how Donna learned the woman was a meth dealer, and she literally couldn’t put her phone down as more and more messages came in, and she got to spy on someone whose life she couldn’t imagine.

I wrote it all down here and, back then, it just felt like I was having a very weird day. Experiencing it now again, four years, a pandemic and 900,000 deaths later, it felt like a life that I was having trouble interpreting, a code that couldn’t be solved because the world had changed so much and the clues no longer referenced anything real.

How was that the life I lived?

I had to leave Clooney’s and walk up and down the block to come back to myself. To be here, now, in this world, where honestly I am happier than I was then but the world is so much more tragic. 

Shake it off. Shake it off.

I really don’t know if Clooney’s has changed at all. It’s a small, two-room affair with a horseshoe bar at the center of one room and a pool table at the center of the other. It’s still cash-only. The jukebox is still louder than I ever want it to be. There are five TVs, three of which are on: one to a basketball game, one to a black-and-white Western, and one to the Beijing Olympics. I’m pretty sure some of the people who were there four years ago are here now. 

The bartender isn’t wearing a mask, and sounds like he’s got a very sore throat. I would later hear that he’s recovering from something, and it’s a long process. The music is loud enough that it takes three tries for him to hear my order: a dark and stormy. Which I order, in part, because I know I didn’t have it last time. 

He nods, makes the drink, and it tastes oddly of sour citrus; did he put some kind of lemon syrup in it? It’s only $6.50 though, so as long as it doesn’t kill me, it’s a bargain. 

The bartender makes the rounds of the bar, and I see he’s given some customers a set of dice to play some kind of dice game. The customers put the dice in a container, roll them out, and then … nothing happens.

“It’s a one-shot,” the bartender explains to me when I ask about it. You get one chance per bartender to pay a dollar for a roll of the dice. If your dice make the same combination of numbers that is posted for everyone to see inside the bar, then you win 90 percent of all the money that people have paid in. The other 10 percent stays in to start the reward for the next set of numbers. 

“I don’t know why it’s legal, but it is,” he tells me. “It’s really for camaraderie. People who win tend to feel pretty generous for the room.”

I’m always in favor of bars doing things to get people to talk to one another, but Clooney’s doesn’t seem to need it. It’s got an unusually diverse crowd — majority minority, by my quick count, both old and young — and they all seem to know each other. They’re definitely talking to each other. 

On one end of the horseshoe, two guys are arguing (rather, one guy is loudly, drunkenly proclaiming) that Biden screwed up Afghanistan. That Trump only signed a deal, Biden screwed it up. That Google is a liberal news source. 

A minute later, they calm down as the jukebox stops playing and everyone starts staring at them. They slowly shift to talking about work. They figure out when each of them started in the union, and what their pension is going to be. 

New people come in and they greet the other customers by name, and the bartender. They ask him how his voice is. He asks them about their lives. 

There’s a pleasure to just hanging out at Clooney’s, which I remember from before. But it’s far more pronounced now. It feels “normal” in a way that makes me realize: I had forgotten what normal even felt like. This is what it was. 

The bartender and a customer near me get into a big argument about the Golden State Warriors; they’re not really disagreeing so much as they’re each putting forth a theory about how deep the team’s bench is. Across the bar, the two union guys are back on politics. “Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan used to drink bourbon together every week! Now we just shout at each other!” one shouts at the other. The two arguments weave in and out of each other in the room’s soundscape. 

“Do either of you guys play pool?” A newly arrived customer asks me and one of the guys arguing about basketball. We turn him down, so he keeps looking. But it’s not lost on me that I’ve been here a half hour and a regular has offered to include me in something. Just sit here, and you belong. 

I tell the bartender I’m ready to re-up, and I ask if he has a favorite drink with three ingredients. He tells me he has been experimenting with a Washington’s Apple (Crown Royal, apple schnapps, cranberry juice) but with Fireball instead of Crown Royal and hot sauce added. 

“If I do it right, it tastes like a Red Hot candy,” he says. 

Sure, let’s go with that.

It takes him a while to make it — there are so many different conversations happening around him, and he’s part of them all — but eventually he puts a shot glass down in front of me and offers me a lime to suck on before shooting it.

The Warriors score as I take the shot. And it’s good! I’m not usually one for stunt drinks, but yeah, this is totally worth my $5.50. Hell yes. 

Since I ordered it and liked it, one of the regulars orders it, too. Then, since it tastes like a Red Hot, some of the regulars start debating what other drinks that taste like candy the bartender could theoretically make. Junior Mints? Mounds? 

“We’re coming up with the next new millennium fad!” a guy to my right says. 

“Starts on Halloween!” one to my left says.

We’re really starting to get into it, and I’m arguing it with them. What about licorice? Red and black? What about Milky Ways? What about Snickers?

When I get up to go, the bartender offers me his name and asks for mine. So do some of the other regulars. That’s how easy it is to find a crowd here. If I hadn’t been so tired from the year 2018, I might have stayed longer.

Back then, I wrote that Clooney’s was a bar that had utterly defied gentrification. It still has. God bless it. I have changed much more than it has. Sitting around the bar, however, I was momentarily convinced that everything will take care of itself.

Déjà vu:

Distillations: Clooney’s is a neighborhood bar in a neighborhood that, at times, no longer feels like one

by Benjamin Wachs January 18, 2019, 10:30 amSeptember 29, 2020, 3:44 am