Heaven’s a Dive Bar: ‘Cheers’ and ‘Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets’

There are plenty of good reasons to stop drinking. It’s bad for you, and you might be bad for others. It can be expensive, and it can be costly, which, when drinking, can be totally different things. It leads to more deaths in the United States each year than all other drugs and car crashes combined. And it’s basically poison. There’s every reason not to drink, yet we do it anyway. All good things, in moderation, I suppose.

As Gen Z, the generation unfortunately taking over the world, slows down their drinking, I can see why. I can’t exactly see why they aren’t having sex, but that’s another essay. Drinking less is probably good for general health and safety, but it makes me terrified for one thing: the neighborhood bar.

We can’t complain about not having third places, that spot in between work and home, if we don’t go to those spaces, and there’s no better third place than your local dive bar. A beer-and-a-shot deal, a warm pretzel with mustard and/or cheese, and good company. Other people. Conversation. Connection.

Bars used to be so important to the daily habits of Americans that, after spending happy hour at the bar, we would go home and watch a television show where a bunch of people hung out at the bar, like when we made Cheers the number one show on television. But now, these neighborhood institutions are neglected and closing. As depicted in the pseudo-documentary Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, we have no place to see other people in the real world. We need these places.  

“I think heaven’s a dive bar filled up with my friends

It’s got a nice quiet backyard and good local bands

Hot food in the kitchen, cold beer in a can” – Darryl Rahn

“The band in Heaven

They play my favorite song

Play it once again

Play it all night long” – Talking Heads

Cheers, the NBC sitcom that ran from 1982-1993, is the perfect insomnia show —  I know from experience. When I’m feeling restless, I move from the bed to the couch and turn on the Cheers channel on Pluto TV. It’s all Cheers, all the time. It is especially Cheers at 3:00 am. I discovered it for the first time during one of those sleepless nights, and after getting over the fact that there’s a show set in a Boston bar owned by an alcoholic former Red Sox relief pitcher and no one told me I should watch it (seriously guys, what the hell?), I fell in love with it. Everyone falls in love with Cheers, both the show and the titular bar, because it’s cozy and warm. It’s the place where everybody knows your name. 

The show thrived, just as your local dive bar does, thanks to a winning ensemble. Behind the bar is former Sox flamethrower Sam Malone (Ted Danson), the promiscuous womanizer. For the first five seasons, he has an on-again, off-again relationship with Diane (Shelley Long), the fussy intellectual to his laid-back barkeep. In the show’s back half, he goes down the same rocky road with Rebecca (Kirstie Alley), the hardworking businesswoman to his regular Joe. 

Also working at Cheers was Coach (Nicholas Colasanto), Sam’s pitching coach in Boston and their minor league affiliate, Pawtucket. After Coach passed away, Sam’s bartending battery was completed with Woody (a young Woody Harrelson), a dim-witted do-gooder. Carla (Rhea Perlman), a waitress at the bar, was a wise-cracking firecracker. 

No bar is complete without the regulars, the barflies who hang around and hang on. Cliff (John Ratzenberger, the most recognizable voice for the Pixar generation) was the know-it-all, the keeper of fun facts and useless expertise. (“It’s a little-known fact that the tan became popular in what is known as the Bronze Age.” Cliff would have loved this new golden age of bar trivia.) Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer), initially a love interest for Diane before meeting his well-matched bride, Lilith Sternin, M.D., Ph.D., Ed.D., A.P.A. (the inimitable Bebe Neuwirth), was but a regular at the Boston bar before his (shocking) spin-off show sent him to Seattle. 

And then there’s Norm. (NORM! Norman!) Played by the late George Wendt, Norm was always seated at the corner of the bar, ready for an ice-cold beer (“Just the usual, Coach. I’ll have a froth of beer and a snorkel.”), and never really in a rush to get home to his wife, the never-seen Vera. He had a number of jobs over the course of the show, from accountant to interior decorator to house painter, but the one stable thing in his life was Cheers. He never ordered any brand or label, just beer. And, unsurprisingly, he’s the sitcom character I’d most like to have a beer with. 

As they proudly boast at the beginning of most episodes, Cheers was filmed in front of a live studio audience. Most of the time, the late, great Jim Burrows was behind the camera, and he used minimal takes to keep the show lively and fresh. With that consistent, cozy three-act structure, the show often feels like a stage play, playing out right in front of you, as if you’re there in the room with them. Cheers feels like a real place: a regular bar where people hang out, make friends, and celebrate milestones. A good place to waste time. It’s a place to find the love of your life, or a new best friend, or even just a house-sitter when you’re out of town. Tuesday is Darts Night. Thursday is Poker Night. 

At my watering hole of choice, Wednesday is Quesadilla Night. The quesadillas are good (and even better when they’re discounted), but we normally get the nachos with chili on the side instead. I like the Caesar salad (no cukes) with the tuna steak cooked medium. They have a habit of undercooking whatever you request, so my medium order always comes out medium-rare, which is what I want. I’ll have two or three beers. On a few occasions, birthdays and such (shots appeared for the whole bar during my last birthday), I’ll have a few more than two or three. One of the waitresses is our dog sitter. On Halloween, we walk our pup by the bar in his costume, and he struts his stuff for anyone who wants to come out and see him. The best little free library in the city is right down the block. 

As the theme song goes, “Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came.” Cheers reminds me of my bar, and my bar reminds me of Cheers, because both places feel like home to me. 

My fiancé and I go to our bar on Thursdays, usually about once a month. Thursdays are when our favorite crew is working (one of the waitresses reminds me so much of Carla on Cheers, or maybe Carla reminds me of her), and most of the regulars seem to pass through at some point on Thursdays as well.

One of those regulars was an older gentleman named Bill, who looked like Santa Claus if he’d never taken up a career in toymaking and instead worked, like Norm, painting apartments. Bill — always dressed in his all-white painting clothes, having come straight from work — usually ordered the chili, sometimes a cup, sometimes a bowl, so he would have some extra to take home. And then I usually saw him order whatever that night’s special was, occasionally joined by a drink or two.

We always liked Bill, and he seemed to like us. Our combined ages wouldn’t add up to Bill’s, but that age provided him a particular wisdom. Or maybe it’s just that his long white beard reminded me of Gandalf. He would speak vaguely of a childhood trauma he endured, one that must’ve taken place before my parents were even born, that he was still working hard to overcome. That was the only word he would use to describe it. Trauma. One night, he brought human anatomy flash cards to the bar. He explained that he was trying to better understand his own brain and how his brain commanded the rest of his body. He also spoke extensively about his upcoming knee replacement. A few folks at the bar were to assist in his recovery. I admired that about him. Whatever it was that gnawed at him before, he was determined to do something about it. At his age, he was still determined to do better and be better.

One Thursday afternoon, the bar posted a picture on Facebook of a bowl of chili served to an empty seat at an empty table. The caption read, “For you, Bill. You will be missed.”

We were devastated. Bill…died? The guy working so hard to better the rest of his life no longer had a life to live? It just felt wrong. Undeserved. We ignored the defrosted chicken breast in the fridge and decided to have dinner at the bar that night. We wanted to see everyone, find out more information, and make sure we were kept updated on any funeral plans.

When we got there, everyone working and everyone sitting at the bar seemed to be in good spirits. Jovial, even. We didn’t want to be the ones to bring up the bad news, so we talked with everyone and quickly decided in whispers that we would wait for someone else to bring him up. Everyone copes in their own way, naturally, and we didn’t want our sadness to hurt someone else. But no one brought him up. It was weird.

With only a few bites of Caesar and tuna steak left on my plate, the bar door opened. Just over my left shoulder, the light from outside shone right in my face, and I turned, as I often do, to see who was coming in. Appearing in that halo, dressed in a heavenly white, was Bill. I saw an angel, and he visited me at the bar.

Bill was alive. Totally alive and perfectly fine. Healthy as a horse. Turns out, there was another regular named Bill who also ordered the chili on Thursday nights, and we had never spoken to that guy. That Bill died; our Bill was fine. Dressed in all white, not because he was an angel, but because he just got off work. That’s obviously good news (well, not for the other Bill), but I didn’t take it well. I was pretty rattled. I mean, I thought I had seen a fucking ghost. I couldn’t speak to our Bill. I had to wait until the next Thursday. 

“Heaven

Heaven is a place

A place where nothing

Nothing ever happens” – Talking Heads

“I think heaven’s a dive bar with plenty of space

Where the doors open early and stay open late

And the minutes move slower the more that you waste” – Darryl Rahn

The minutes move slowly, and nothing ever seems to happen in Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, the 2020 “documentary” from Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross. It’s the story of a Las Vegas dive bar, The Roaring 20s, on its final night before it closes forever. The regular crowd shuffles in, the bartenders clock in for one last shift, and everyone parties the night away. I put the word “documentary” in quotation marks because the film is considerably not a documentary; the Ross brothers just try to pass it off as one. Featuring a mix of professional, semi-professional, and amateur actors, and filmed in a bar outside of New Orleans, it is nothing more than the fabrication of one such night. 

But it does feel real. If you’ve seen the film and were fooled, don’t blame yourself. They pull it off pretty well. The actors play characters with the same name — Michael Martin plays the barfly Michael; Shay Walker, a real-life pancake house waitress, plays the bartender Shay — and basically improvised all of their dialogue and actually drank all of that booze, so you do have to wonder what’s actually real and what’s just acting. It’s a mockumentary that mocks absolutely nothing and no one. I particularly love the line, “You think I’m better than Fireball? I’m not.” We’ve all been at that point in our lives. Please don’t ask me about the time I thought I was better than Fireball. 

They talk about the kinds of things you talk about in bars, like the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, or a comment about whatever’s playing on the TV at the moment. Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler,” one of the quintessential shitty bar songs, plays from the jukebox. (You have to assume that one of the reasons they’ve tried to pass this off as a documentary is to use music both freely and royalty-free.) John Prine plays, and people sing along. The Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” plays and people boogie in their seats.

As the booze flows, some people get sweet or flirty. One woman offers to flash her “sixty-year-old titties” (her words, not mine) to a younger man at the bar, and then she does. Then she tells him, “I divorced a man one time because his nutsack hung down past his dick. It was the saggiest fucking nuts I ever saw.” I guess if you’re drinking, that feels like flirting to you. It’s better than the guy who hits on Shay by saying, “I’m a pretty good stepdad…usually.” 

Others get mean and bitter. Michael, who sleeps at the bar (he sings the Folgers jingle but fibs it, “The best part of waking up…is bourbon in your cup”) and shaves in the bathroom sink, is anxious that his only bit of stability is disappearing for good. He warns a young man to avoid places like this, saying “I used to be an actor, and I used to be pretty good at it…and now I just come to the bar.” The way that he looks at it, at least he didn’t become a drunk until after he was already a failure. He gets cranky with some of the other people there, and he’s downright despondent when he’s the last person to leave the next morning. 

Everyone feels that way to some degree, of course. Their spot will no longer be their spot. They have lost their gathering place, the hub of their community. No one puts it more plainly than Bruce, a Black Vietnam veteran, a man who understands what it means to be shoved to the margins of society in more ways than one, when he says, “When you get lonely, you have no friends, you can always come to this bar and feel like family. I fit in here.” This is a guy who, for maybe the first time since his platoon, felt like he belonged to something, even if it was a shithole bar in the Las Vegas desert. And now that place will be a Sprint or something equally shitty.

It is no coincidence that the bar is called The Roaring 20s, as that was the last big party America threw before the Great Depression hit and wiped everything away. Now, this party is also over. The great bar song, the only 2:00 am tune, “Closing Time,” goes, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” But what if the bar is home? What then?

I never met Michael Martin, who played the character of Michael in Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, before his death in 2021, but I did know him. We were Facebook friends. 

Michael and I had some mutual friends on Facebook, people I did know in real life. Actors, playwrights, the kinds of people in our kinds of circles. One day, Michael added me as a friend, even though we had never spoken, never actually met. I learned later that this was something he did. If he found someone interesting, he added them as a friend. He considered you a friend. And if Facebook is any indication, he had almost 4,000 of them. 

He would “like” just about anything my mother tagged me in, the closest to posting I ever got. I watched his daily musings, which sometimes reached four or five a day, for a few years. He would write things like, “Third day of doing more or less what I planned to do more or less when I planned to do it. So weird” and “Breakthrough! In the last two hours I’ve transitioned out of my vaguely depressed mood into my don’t-fuck-with-me mood” and “Next the Democrats should introduce a bill requiring Americans to be nice to their pets for the pleasure of forcing the Republicans to vote against it.”

Some while later, when I started a company, I hit the “invite all to like” button on the Facebook business page. I knew that would annoy some of the people I hadn’t spoken to since middle school, but I get enough of them myself that it seemed like common practice. I currently have 39 pending invites, advertising businesses from pizza places to natural soaps to a clothing brand to an apartment complex in a city (in a state, for that matter) in which I don’t even live. 

Michael immediately unfriended me. He sent me a message, the very first between us on Messenger, that said, “My status update yesterday. Take care.” He forwarded the status, and it said, “If we’ve never shared a word together, don’t invite me to like your page. I’ll unfriend you.”

I felt bad. I didn’t mean to upset him in any way. If only I had seen his post the day before, perhaps I could have gotten to know someone it seems so many loved dearly. People still post on his Facebook wall to this day, writing things like “There are so many things I wish I could talk to you about,” “I miss your poignant postings and snarky remarks,” and “Facebook isn’t Facebook without you.”

On April 17, 2021, he posted, “Man I hope I haven’t reached my final form.” He died on April 26. I finally got up the courage to watch Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, a movie I had heard such good things about from our mutual friends, for the first time on April 29. It was the first time I actually heard his voice. 

“I think heaven’s a dive bar that’s right down the block

It’s got pinball and pool, and I sink every shot

The TV’s playing westerns and old baseball games

And all the bartenders remember my name

When I go on a bender, I never feel shame” – Darryl Rahn

“Everyone is trying

To get to the bar

The name of the bar

The bar is called Heaven” – Talking Heads

In Soho, there’s a dive bar that advertises “Boneless Young Chicken Dinner $1.” If you pay that buck, they’ll bring you a hard-boiled egg. At the American Legion Post in Chandler, Arizona, just like so many Posts across the country, there’s a sticker of Jane Fonda in all of the urinals. That way, those veterans can piss right on Hanoi Jane after a few Kilt Lifters from Four Peaks Brewing. At an Irish pub in Georgetown, there’s a sign above the bar that says, “An Irishman is the only man in the world who will step over the bodies of a dozen naked women to get to a bottle of stout.”

It’s good to become a regular at places like this. Sit next to someone you don’t know and strike up a conversation. Learn your bartender’s quirks (my guy absolutely cannot pour a Guinness to save his life), and they’ll learn your regular order (no cukes); slowly but surely, that’s how you get to know real people in the real world. Play darts with them on Tuesday and poker with them on Thursday. Order quesadillas on Wednesdays. Watch a football game or the local news or Ghostbusters II and talk about it. 

Time was, bars were the best places to meet. To gather. Neighborhood bars put the neighborhood first. It’s not about the beer (well, sometimes it’s about the beer) or the booze; it’s about the belonging. Cheers was one of those places. So was The Roaring 20s. I have my spot. If you don’t have one, you need one. The third space. The place you can always go when you need it. A place with hot food and cold beer. A place with pinball and pool. A place where you never feel shame. 

Here’s hoping heaven is a dive bar. 

Essay Courtesy of Patrick J. Regal

Feature Image Credit to NBC