{"id":1808,"date":"2013-12-19T10:36:10","date_gmt":"2013-12-19T09:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=1808"},"modified":"2013-12-19T13:59:30","modified_gmt":"2013-12-19T12:59:30","slug":"corner-bar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=1808","title":{"rendered":"Corner Bar"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"the<\/a>I am heading home for the Christmas holidays and making my mental list of things to glut upon. There\u2019s the holiday food, of course, the peanut butter, the cheese steaks, the meatball sandwiches, and free tap water at restaurants.<\/p>\n

But when I come home, I crave something that\u2019s specific to that trip. Each time I come back to the U.S it\u2019s different. Last summer it was grocery stores and baseball on TV. Two Christmases ago it was driving and good pizza. Two summers ago it was the Atlantic Ocean and funnel cake.<\/p>\n

This Christmas it\u2019s my corner bar: The Langhorne. The Langhorne is about seventy feet from my parent\u2019s front door, an aspect which surely adds to its attractiveness. It sits right there on the corner of Maple and Bellevue where a black sign tells me it\u2019s been there since 1764. There are neon beer signs in the windows, Open Sunday signs, and a Bud Light banner. It\u2019s been a corner bar for 250 years.<\/p>\n

I fantasize about walking through its creaky screen door this week. There are rough wooden walls and Budweiser promoted Nascar posters. The Christmas lights have been hung in a pattern suggesting its inclusion in a drinking game. There are three televisions. One will be, and always is, showing a sport: baseball, football, gymnastics, curling. I don\u2019t know what the others will be showing, since they rotate among several programming formats. Depending on the time of day and situation it could be Friends, Wheel of Fortune<\/i>, or the news. Any major Philadelphia sports team trumps any of those.<\/p>\n

When I get there I am going to do something I never get to do in the Czech Republic \u2013 I will belly up to the bar and sit on a stool. Bars in the Czech Republic are where waiters pour beer; people sit at the tables.<\/p>\n

The Langhorne\u2019s bar will be sticky from some rail whiskey or Yukon Jack. I\u2019ll order a Miller High Life and maybe a Rumpleminz. And then I\u2019m going to look at the person next to me and talk about sports. Any sport. Any sport but soccer. And I will slowly begin to feel like a character in a Tom Waits song.<\/p>\n

There are five bartenders and they all know me. They\u2019ll be excited and chat with me about life overseas, buy me a shot. Even if it\u2019s a bartender I don\u2019t know, they\u2019ll chat with me after cracking my beer and ask what I\u2019m doing these days. They\u2019ll hand me a menu and I will not order something until enough beers blur the line between sensible and risky behavior. Do I really want to spend the next day on the toilet? My dad argues in favor of the Langhorne\u2019s food. My brother, sisters, and I suggest that my dad\u2019s love of it exists in its proximity to our house.<\/p>\n

There are games and machines I can\u2019t wait to use. We will throw darts at the electric board. There is the Megatouch machine which beckons my brother and I until we finally cave after about six Millers. We\u2019ll play Photo Hunt, and the crossword game that get more difficult with each sip of beer and each shot. There\u2019s the jukebox which wins our money persistently because it automatically plays either a shit country tune or a shit R&B tune after fifteen minutes of torpor. And for that reason $10 a night goes to fending off this offensive ear noise with classic rock.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m even looking forward to seeing the one customer of the Langhorne who I loathe to an irrational degree. Surely, he\u2019ll be there with his stupid face and his stupid baseball hat and his stupid seashore T-shirt and I will loathe him as he chucks darts and acts like the fattest carp in a tire tread puddle. I can deal with him and diarrhea twice a year.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong, the Czechs know how to put on a pub. There is funk (but Moe, the funk!), stale air, and the stereotypical drunks at tables. Oh, and the golden liquid that pours out of the taps is ambrosia. But you can\u2019t sit at the bar in Czech pubs, and it\u2019s very unusual for customers to engage each other in conversation. There is not really a bartender, and the waiters drop off your beer and then disappear. There are usually no bar games, no jukebox, and there is no suspense: the food gives you diarrhea.<\/p>\n

At the end of the night, when I\u2019ve had enough, I\u2019ll buy an ill-advised six-pack and walk across the street to open a beer and plop into bed. This activity will take all of four minutes.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the old man\u2019s onto something; maybe the draw of the Langhorne is that it\u2019s so close to home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am heading home for the Christmas holidays and making my mental list of things to glut upon. There\u2019s the holiday food, of course, the peanut butter, the cheese steaks, the meatball sandwiches, and free tap water at restaurants. But when I come home, I crave something that\u2019s specific to that trip. Each time I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1EvEu-ta","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1808"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1811,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808\/revisions\/1811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}