Fenway Park, a dying bar, and finding comfort in strangers

I am on my way to a bar. It’s 11 a.m. on a Saturday, and I’m sitting in a mostly empty New York City subway car as a Nor’easter whips the wind into a frenzy outside, and my brain feels like it was scooped out of my skull with a dull melon baller while I slept. I can’t really remember what specifically was happening at midnight, or 2 a.m., or anywhere in between, but I do know that at 3:35 a.m., a marathon baseball game finally ended after 18 innings and allowed everyone who stayed up to witness it to go to bed.

As I sit staring into the middle distance and question why I’m doing this after breaking my brain with seven-plus hours of baseball, it is not lost on me that this usually happens in the reverse order. You go out on a Friday, things get a little fuzzy late into the night, but you haul yourself out of bed to go watch sports the next day because your team is playing a rival, or your parents want you to go to a tailgate.

This Saturday though, it’s about the bar. Tortilla Flats to be specific — a neighborhood bar on Manhattan’s West Side that is closing after 35 years of serving cheap drinks and questionable food (Nancy the bartender yells to the crowd three hours into a 17-hour final shift when someone questions the nachos: “You get what you pay for, or are you new here?”). Saturday is the last day before the place closes for good due to drastic rent increases that have shuttered businesses all around the city, and the atmosphere feels like a sporting event from the moment people settle in.

Fifteen minutes before opening, there is already a small group of people huddled under umbrellas as the coastal storm batters the city, but not one person complains. A few have crossed state lines to be here, so being damp is not too high a price to say goodbye to Flats properly. The wake has lasted all week, packing the bar every night and requiring emergency deliveries of alcohol some mornings to make sure there’s enough to sate the next night’s crowd.

Later tonight, I’ll settle on my couch with a blanket and my computer and cover the Red Sox in the World Series, a surreal privilege I don’t take for granted. But October has been draining. Watching your own team strive for a ring without actually getting to experience each win with fans — whether at a local bar catering to Boston expats, or back home near Fenway — has been harder than expected this year. The month has been surprisingly isolating at points, and postseason excitement can’t make up for that, or the crushing anxiety reverberating through most other parts of life in 2018. Sometimes you need to feel like you’re in Fenway even when you can’t be, surrounded by strangers with the same focus.

Today, unexpectedly and perfectly, Flats has the vibe of sitting in those cheap seats. I came here to clear my mind and say goodbye to a fun bar I’ve frequented over the years. Yet, the combination of the weather outside, the occasion (though a bittersweet one), and the people envelops me and provides the very feeling of being in the thick of a group of baseball fans that I needed most.

A seemingly random cross-section of ages, origins, and backgrounds are settled on their barstools and at the cluster of tables. You’ve never seen these people before, and you’ll probably never see them again, so just like at a game, the stories start flowing immediately.

There’s Deirdre Duggan and Howard Cohen, a couple in their 60s who met as two shy patrons decades ago, set up by the bartender during a dice game. They eloped less than a year after meeting at Flats, and not more than 20 minutes after the conversation starts, their wedding song, Frank Sinatra’s “Summer Wind”, comes on over the speakers. There’s no jukebox and the bar back on duty had no idea it was their song, so the fact it’s playing feels like fate. Howard, in shock, swears up and down they didn’t ask anyone to play the song for them, and they reminisce about eloping to the islands. They show me a picture of their then-infant twins — now 17 and deciding on which quaint New England colleges they’d like to attend — in the arms of one of the owners the summer before 9/11.

Carolina Ramirez lives down the block and blew off work to give her favorite watering hole a proper send off. The lone TV is set to Fox, and as a commercial comes on for tonight’s World Series game between the Red Sox and Dodgers, she shouts, “I fucking hate the Red Sox but I always fucking love Boston people.” She once dated a Red Sox fan, but they broke up shortly after the 2003 ALCS.

Anita, also still living in the neighborhood, got laid off this week and came right to the bar afterward to get her usual order of tortilla soup and a margarita. Then she came the next day, and the next. Another margarita appears and she swears she didn’t order it, but she drinks it happily, anyway. There’s the one middle-aged guy who just wants to appreciate the place without talking to anyone, downing two quick margaritas on the rocks before heading out into the storm again.

Because we’re at an extended farewell party for a bar, there’s a cloudy understanding that nothing really matters. The conversation and the $4 beers are the real focus. The more you talk, the more you don’t have to think about the morose reason you’re actually there, that a valued place like this can just be taken away from you.

Flats was kitschy if you loved it, tacky if you didn’t. It was the most energizing type of stylized dive, with beer company-branded flags draped colorfully from the ceiling like neon clotheslines. Framed photos of Elvis, old beer ads, and Christmas lights took Flats to the next level. In one corner, a dirty plaque commemorating Sammy Sosa’s 66th home run in 1998 hung on the wall. No real reason why.

Everyone here was once a 20-something from the neighborhood who appreciated this place in their own way, who made pilgrimages whenever they had $20 to spend and a night free. But they’re not that age anymore. They have homes instead of cramped apartments.

In the same way you’d reminisce about the area around your favorite stadium or park, there’s talk of how the neighborhood has changed for the better or worse. In the same way you’d complain about a GM making mistakes, patrons moan about how the guys in charge might have been able to save the place if only they’d made some changes earlier. The landlord, that faceless villain, is like the callous team owners willing to take a community away from everyone. One of the owners is going around table to table and telling people to “Talk, drink, but don’t text,” evoking the old guard in any sport that is disappointed in younger fans for not paying attention to every moment of a game. Flats is a reminder, like sports and the rest of life, that even the things that prove to be the best distractions can be taken away from you without warning.

And because everyone feels the same desire for much-needed escapism, bonds are forming even more rapidly than they would among random people posted up at any ol’ bar. People are striking up conversations with each other in the same way they would with someone who lended a hand by passing your cash down the row to the CrackerJack vendor. Suddenly you start talking — about where your kids go to school, and the best parts of a recent vacation, and the worst parts of your boss — and for a few hours you’re best friends simply because you’re on the same side.

There’s the same ebb and flow of park conversation at Flats, too. You know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever befriended half a row while watching a game. Close your eyes and you can practically feel it happening. Something happens to draw the place’s attention — today that happens to be five drunk men singing and pouring more tequila into the margarita mixer, but it could easily be a hit off the Green Monster or a flashy double play — and as soon as it’s over you go right back to the rhythms of getting to know people and relaxing into the company.

Bars and sports are therapeutic in all sorts of ways, but the conversation is my outlet. For someone not quite ready to open the door to therapy, I get a lot out of talking and sharing and laughing with strangers.

When there’s a finite end to a connection, a guarantee that you almost certainly won’t see these people again, the way you can tell stories and what you’ll say is freeing. Maybe nothing embarrassing or appalling, the limits of living in society still apply, but there’s a pop to anecdotes that are normally calibrated to within an inch of their lives when told anywhere else. The nervousness about being judged for what comes out of your mouth when among friends is gone. When you live your life worrying that one errant text or dumb comment could bring your happiness to a halt, it’s liberating to know you can be yourself.

In the corner of Flats, a man in an Uncle Sam costume dances with a group of friends. He’s not even celebrating Halloween, he’s just dressed that way. A drunk Uncle Sam is certainly not going to question your worthiness as a functioning human being or laugh at you for slipping up and saying something stupid. He’s a tequila-drunk man in an Uncle Sam suit.

The disagreements that happen during bar chatter are being magically glossed over, too. At one point 47-year-old Martin Kynastan, a Londoner nursing a rugby injury that keeps him from raising his hands over his head, proclaims he’s all for Brexit because he knows his job will be safe after the transition out of the EU. He and his wife’s first date was at Flats, so instead of engaging him about politics, everyone just ignores the statement. There’s only so much time left, only so much time to appreciate this place and this feeling, so let’s talk about England’s rugby team instead. The value of keeping things light today seems at the forefront of everyone’s mind — how dare you try to pierce the veil of therapeutic reinvigoration in the air?

I capture this feeling a few times a year, at most, and it’s always tucked away in a stadium seat somewhere. I came to say goodbye to a dive bar and got the surprise of feeling, for once, that unique openness without being surrounding by thousands of people. Even though I’ll be sleep deprived and fractured for a couple more days after this, I can feel my mind being knotted back together just enough to get me through the last bit of this particular stretch.

There are other bars, ones I go to far more often than this one. Ones that are more special, where I’ve made better friends with the regulars. Sometimes it’s nice to know exactly what door you need to walk through to feel like you’re okay — Gate E at Fenway right off of Lansdowne, the New England bar in the East Village, your boyfriend’s apartment, your local soccer pub where you can barely understand half the accents — but sometimes it’s even better to be surprised.

Flats closing doesn’t mean that feeling will be impossible to grasp again. But it is a reminder that for every Fenway that will be there for the foreseeable future, ready to take you in again, there are havens that can be taken from you at any moment. Seasons end, teams lose, and you have to wait until next year to capture that precise mood again. Inherently knowing good things don’t last doesn’t make it any easier when they’re gone. Especially when, while you wait to find that feeling again, there are so many awful, devastating moments that you need distraction from.

Game 4 of the World Series will start in a few hours, and if it’s an 18-inning record breaker again, the bar will be closed by the time the winning run crosses the plate. There will be people in the stands striking up random conversations between innings, and finding kindred spirits for a few hours while they avoid the stress and tension caused by what’s happening in the world, or in their lives.

An excited Dodgers fan at Flats, fully decked out in an LA hat, jacket, and shirt, waves goodbye to Nancy the bartender, now in her sixth hour of that 17-hour slog. “I’m heading out but might be back later!” the fan yells, “we can come back for dinner and the game!” Nancy tells her they might not even be open by the time she returns, they could close at any time that night if the alcohol runs out — the shelves full of Herradura tequila are emptying fast and they’ve been out of bar napkins for three days now. Even the most well-planned goodbyes can be cut short, and even the most well-played seasons can end in misery. The most effective comforts sometimes go away before they’re done fully healing you.

Baseball will be back next year. Flats won’t, but for a day they were intertwined in an unexpected way, and it made all the difference. Nothing is in our control, but sometimes throwing your hands up and saying “nothing matters” feels good. I’ll find another door to go through to find that atmosphere before April, I’m almost sure of it. But in case I don’t, the Red Sox will pick things up again in the spring and Fenway will be there with them. I know that, at least.