In the winter of 2013 I was invited to a banquet for martial arts people. I did not know many of these people and was not sure what my function would be. It turned out my function was to vet a fighter and drink tequila with the host—so a good night was had by all, except for the fighter I exposed as wanting.

Next door was a non-descript bar over top of which I had rented the couch in a rooftop apartment in 1981 when I first moved to Baltimore. The bar was owned by a pro football player named Timmy who my Uncle Fred had coached in college—and I had no idea about that until last month, a good ten years after Timmy passed.

I noticed that the bar served a mixed-race clientele who self segregated and tended to about 50 years of age. People this age have stories to tell. Also, the blacks would, in many cases, remember moving up from Georgia and the Carolinas in the ‘Great Migration.’ This was important to me as I had just outlined the novel Hurt Stoker, which was set in Maryland in an alternate reality where the Confederacy won the Civil War. In listening to these older men—the eldest of which, Mister Al, was a former employee of mine—tell their tales great and small, I would be able to check my dialogue for authenticity. And then I saw the Floyd Money inquest and was hooked on these old fellas; a likeable bunch of working men who had mostly spent time in college, did not drink for effect, argued about sports at the drop of a beer coaster, and discussed literature as well.

I began sitting at the ‘fifty yard line’ the right place for a race traitor to sit in a mixed-race sports bar. But the whites up front—nice as they might be—only talked sports unless compelled under duress to do otherwise.

Eventually, among a handful of the older black patrons I began to notice traces of an old European tradition from the Colonial Era, the heated discussion circle where men of action and men of letters tested each other’s knowledge and character as well.

After my first brief stop for a National Boh draft and a shot of Captain Morgan I would have cause to return, and be glad I did. Many younger suburban readers might only understand a bar as a place to go, at night or on weekends, to get drunk, watch a major sports event, or meet a hopefully loose woman. But the neighborhood urban bar serves those needs only in the breach. Primarily, the urban American bar is a place where the weary, but not yet broken, working man, stops to forget what he can with the help of a drink, and remember what he must with the help of a friend.