On May 26 2023, Fuel and Fuddle Closes

...So Shut Up and Drink

In late 1996 I went for a job interview at a restaurant-pub opening in Oakland, Pittsburgh. Though freshly 21, I had been visiting the pubs in Oakland for four years on the veracity of an Ohio fake ID and inside men who’d let a 5’6, peach-fuzzed, 130 pound (until my junior year Cambrian explosion) fool through the door with a minute-long wink and a nod.     

Oakland was rife with bars. Zelda’s, CJ Barney’s, Peter’s Pub, The Attic, The Decade. In a pinch down Atwood there was Babylon and Denny’s. Each place had character. Zelda’s was a demilitarized zone, but had a big garden and a 25-cent beer special on Thursday nights. CJ Barney’s had booths and, while grimy AF, it looked less as though an actual murder had occurred there that day, so this is where I wore my collared shirt. Babylon was run by a friendly Asian family and it had air conditioning. I spent the nightmarishly hot summer of 1994 throwing darts there. When they began bringing me free bowls of pretzels, I vowed to never leave. The yet-to-be opened pub I walked into that afternoon for my interview had been another: Caleco’s. A lean orange cartoon cat had slunk up its narrow sign from probably the mid-1980s until around 1994. We used to go there to see a band which, despite an unfortunate attachment to Rush, played music near beer. Sign me up.

Though these pubs had character, and perks and novel excitement aside, I didn’t understand pubs for what they were. I did not yet have a pub. So as I walked into this place in its saw-whine-in-the-distance, plastic-tarped embryonic stage of reconstruction, I felt that though I had been there before, there was something new about this place. I was interviewed by a Ned Flanders lookalike. He told me about west coast bar food with a twist (1996 me: What the fuck is that? 2023 me: What the fuck was that?) and ten beers on tap (1996 me: Ten? Insane. Rock, Bud, Iron City, and IC Lite. What else is there?). The place was to be called Fuel and Fuddle and Ned Flanders (Vic) hired me on the integrity of an embarrassing story that went graphic. I left in a good mood, despite my feelings about the name. (A bar’s name requires a compound phrase the way tango dancing requires high heels. They may look nice, but they just get in the way when you’re drunk.)

Since Roman men pushed through the doorways of their local popinae after a long day of work (‘Normvs!’) people have understood the multifaceted importance of pubs. Taverns provided sustenance, safety, and gossip for travelers along the Roman road network. After the Plague the British pub rises out of the British home with comfort and coziness. Then in the New World pubs are community entertainment centers, places where people drink away the anxiety of their 89% chance of starving to death, shitting themselves to death, or being shot by arrows to death. Pubs in America become hubs of revolution, married to political progress, and centers of socializing between people from all over society. And though history points to the pub’s importance sociologically, it can’t quite capture the importance of the ideal pub for the everyday people who go to it.

But some smart people have tried. In his essay The Moon Under Water George Orwell spends 1056 words on the subject of a perfect pub. His favorite pub – The Moon Under Water – provides atmosphere along with the beer, barmaids that know everyone’s name and who take invested interest in their lives, strawberry-pink china glasses – because beer tastes better out of china. He waxes misty over the offered lunch, an uncompromisingly 19^th century, Victorian atmosphere, which means no glass-topped tables or other ‘modern miseries’. In the end he sets out a ten-point list for the ideal pub, which all pub-dwellers have based on their own criteria.   

Fuel and Fuddle quickly stood out as a special place. The waiters and bartenders and cooks created a community with the customers and regulars. They went to the Pirates’ opening day each April and tailgated for Steelers’ games. There was a brief, albeit ill-considered, softball league, but after the second call to 911 taking part in sports was removed from the table. We stuck to watching them on TV. And bowling. Regulars became part of the family. Sunday became Naked Sunday. The bar’s motto: Shut Up and Drink. We had shirts. Saturday Don Szejk played guitar and sang a set of classic standards. And everyone in the pub knew it was 1 am when bartender Joe Elliot became Lonesome Joe Elliot by stepping out from behind the bar, slamming a shot of Rumplemintz, and singing Folsom Prison Blues. The pub was open for 27 years and stories and legends are still told about every generation of the pub’s family. What about the time Jimmie Kuhl went sledding down Chesterfield on bus trays. Remember when those Canadian medics were here for the hockey playoffs!? Never drank so much Canadian Club in my life. Everyone in the Fuel and Fuddle gang knows all the stories. They belly laugh each time. They forgive the exaggerations - even if they involve them. Everyone reading this has similar memories about similar people. Your pub memories involve a Lonesome Joe Elliot and the antics of your own Jimmie Kuhl. Moreover, if we glimpsed the day-to-day of pubs throughout history, it would be the same. What about the time Marcus Aurelius got shitty and scratched those dirty meditations into the bathroom wall? Remember that time Franklin Delano had too many martinis and sang Balderdash and then told us all how to save the country again? It’s not hard to learn the pub’s influence on society, but much harder to capture is how pubs make people feel. The effect of being part of the gang.

The Moon Under Water only existed in Orwell’s mind, though he did find pubs that came close (in his words, fulfilling eight out of the ten points). But this ideal is becoming less common. Atmosphere? Character? A pub void of ‘modern miseries’? Pbbt. Skyrocketing rents and fallout from the pandemic have killed or are killing off pubs central to local communities. In the UK, pubs are closing at a rate of three a day. So what happens when we start caring only about money and  stop caring about the character and cultural health of our cities? Well, exactly what’s happening now. Real pubs with real character are disappearing in lieu of companies that have more money. It’s happening in Prague, where the pub has long reigned supreme as the center of social life. Where once stood a pub weathered with character, there now exists a place to get a poke bowl or a coffee that costs more than my rent. Sometimes they are replaced by gentrified pubs where Orwell’s modern miseries flourish, which have cookie cutter setups and slick tables and menus that doesn’t stick to anything. These pubs are fine, their beer is cold, but within the uniformity and clean uniforms there’s the impression that rather than winning their character, they had it shipped in. Like a Tiki Bar in Pittsburgh’s airport. Or an Irish pub at Disney World. Make believe.   

Fuel and Fuddle is another victim of the sky high rents. It closed on May 26 after 27 years of fueling and fuddling. In its last week in existence, it was visited by hundreds of current and former regulars and staff, some of whom travelled several hours to be there. This little bar that took up two floors next to a parking lot on Oakland Avenue and that teemed with memories and personal history was seen off by the people who loved it. Both sad and joyous, it was a wake. But it was an Irish wake. At 6 am on Sunday my phone sprang to life with a Facebook Messenger call. Once my heart stopped palpitating, I was thrilled to see that it was the gang from the bar. It was midnight there. As they’d been drinking for eight hours, not only were they in a different time zone, they were on a different plane of existence. The conversation was fast, loud and slurry. I got dizzy from being spun around and pointed at a series of cherry-faced friends. There were epithets (as I knew there’d be) and nudity (as I hoped there’d be). When they got off a few minutes later, I was sent sprawling down a rabbit hole of nostalgia. I declared to Burke that that Sunday would be a pub day. She groaned, but after telling her about Naked Sunday, suddenly a (clothed) pub day didn’t sound so bad.

I made a reservation online at one of our local neighborhood places, U Holečků. A place where becoming a regular had been a process. Czechs don’t let people in with the same immediacy as do Americans (especially if those people are annoying customers who speak your language like a drunk baby seal). On my first visit couple of visits, the waitress gave me a glare of open disdain and rolled her eyes at my Czech. After a few more visits, I got a nod and a stiff smile. A few more and I received an actual smile and she recalled my order: ‘Pivo a Becherokva?’ I was in. Now the waitresses bring my dog cookies and greet me with genuine smiles and light-hearted jokes about my Czech. Just like it should be.

When I arrive at U Holečků this Sunday, I am a bit depressed about Fuel and Fuddle. Like Orwell and my friends and former colleagues, I am celebrating and mourning something that is becoming all too rare: the ideal pub. And while I know it is stupid to tilt against the changing tides, I am still a bit bummed. Pretty soon, I think the world’s pubs will all be Costa Coffees and Sbarros. And let’s face it, those places aren’t so much fun to be drunk in.

Our waitress says hello – the one I won over – and she points me to my reserved table. She says “Pivo a Becherovka?” I nod yes, my mood lightens. A sign leans against a tree in the garden listing a drink special in green chalk. A bowl of water for dogs is next to it. Two waitresses do a shot as I walk by. (“Happy Sunday,” one says). I reach the four top, pockmarked, battle-torn, where sits the white slip of paper with my reservation. It reads: Američan (the American) above a smiley face. Okay, maybe there’s hope yet.

In lieu of a cocktail recipe today, you have an order: Tonight, go to your local pub, your favorite pub, your local dive and enjoy the hell out of it, have a few drinks, talk some shit, watch a baseball game, talk to people you don’t know, fuck with some Canadian medics, make friends until the game ends, and most of all – shut up and drink.