Interview: Dave Housley

Dave Housley's essay "Dim Lights, Thick Smoke" appears in our December 2009 issue. His collection of short fiction, Ryan Seacrest is Famous, was published in 2007 by Impetus Press. His work has appeared in Columbia, Nerve, Pindeldyboz, Wigleaf, and some other places. He's one of the founding editors and all around do-stuff people at Barrelhouse magazine. He keeps his stuff at davehousley.com.

1. Can you talk about the inspiration for "Dim Lights, Thick Smoke"? What was on your mind while you were writing this essay?

Barrelhouse (where I’m an editor) ran a dive bar contest maybe three issues ago, and in the process of reading the submissions I got an idea for my own dive bar essay, and it was one of those rare ones, at least for me, where the first few sentences just kind of pop in and they feel just right: “Kelly Lee Bohn was our name. All of us.” Of course, that meant that I was writing an essay specifically for a contest that was already over, for literally the only market in the world where I am flatly ineligible to be published (we agreed early on that we wouldn’t publish our own stuff). So from the get-go maybe this wasn’t such a smart move on my part.

Still, I kind of pecked away at it because I liked some of the language, and the voice of the thing, and I also do have this core group of friends, most of whom I’ve known since well before high school, that I still hang out with, and, well, we generally like to go to dive bars. At the same time, it seemed like we were all having/adopting babies and moving around and doing a little more growing up than we had in the previous few decades, so the opportunity to get together, especially at dive bars, seemed to be diminishing a bit.

I should add that the funniest part of the driver’s license story didn’t really fit into the essay: we spelled Pennsylvania wrong. On the big posterboard thing we stood next to, and the licenses we made from it, our home state was spelled “Pennsyvania.” None of us noticed until a bouncer in Fort Lauderdale handed my friend Jeff’s license back to him and said, “tell your buddy he spelled Pennsylvania wrong.” So obviously, my early career as an editor and proofreader did not work out very well.

2. Since your essay is about dive bars, let's talk about those first. I recently moved to a new city after living in one area for my entire drinking life, and I was somewhat dismayed to realize I was going to have to replace all my bars. The closest dive bar to my house is fairly good, and I've already cut off there once, so I feel like part of the regular crowd (apparently bartenders don't appreciate being told loudly that "people never pay for drinks on their birthdays"). You've also moved around a bit in the last few years. How do you find a new dive bar? How do you break it in and make yourself at home?

I’d say the first rule is simple: follow the old men. Single old men who are still working but probably shouldn’t be -- they know where the dive bars are. You may have to follow them at two in the afternoon, and they may be watching soap operas on the TV and eating pickled eggs out of one of those giant jars for lunch, and talking about how rogueishly hot Sarah Palin is, or how goddamn much their hips hurt, but they will be doing all of that in a dive bar, and a good one. Don’t be afraid of Asian restaurants. They can have fantastic, crazy-ass, mind-bending dive bars. A dive bar that serves you a shitload of rum in a makeshift coconut is not a bad thing.  If you know somebody who loves to smoke, that person will generally know if there’s a bar that allows smoking. That bar will probably be a dive bar. And a great one.  If you live in a state where you can’t smoke in bars anymore, there’s probably a bar that was awesome when you could, and is not doing so well now, and that will be a really good dive bar. If you know somebody you’d classify as a “striving douchebag” or just a douchebag, and there’s a bar that that person is actively afraid of – like, “are you kidding me, I’d never step foot in that place” – then that is a dive bar that is worth checking out.  If there’s a place with a parking lot that has a lot of utility vans, pickup trucks with landscaping equipment strapped onto the back, anything that indicates a trade was learned and is being applied for money, then that’s a dive bar worth checking out.

A good dive bar should look a little scary. You should be able to tell that they sell alcohol – there should be a beer sign around there somewhere – but maybe not that they’re open and actively selling it at that particular time. For instance, Dan’s in DC has a sign that was probably painted thirty years ago, no neon beer signs outside, and no windows. You could walk right by it ten times and never know that you can walk inside, order a jack and coke, and be handed a large glass (it used to be a half-pint, but they had to switch to the glass), a can of soda, an empty glass, and a thing of ice. Walking in the door of a good dive bar, you should feel a little nervous, wary of getting your ass kicked. This feeling should last for at least one beer. Your greeting should best be described as “grudging,” if there’s a greeting at all.

I should note that if you do get your ass kicked, that was probably not a great dive bar. Great dive bars are like distant grandfathers – collegial, gruff, but after a few pops, they have a heart of gold, and you never know what they’re going to say.

I think the best way to make yourself at home is or order whatever is on tap and then keep your mouth shut. For god’s sake, don’t order a mixed drink, unless you’re just going to drink whiskey straight, which I guess is not a mixed drink. Don’t order a microbrew. My wife ordered a glass of wine at a dive bar a month or so ago (I should say that, to her credit, this was after a few hours in the bar, and she got to that point where she just couldn’t drink beer anymore), and I had to watch the waitress try track down a bottle of wine, then find an opener, then open it, then search around for a glass, then (of course) clean the glass, then pour it, and then ask five people what a glass of wine cost.  So, no wine. Order a glass of whatever it is they have on tap. Note: do not do this “ironically.” Okay, an addendum to the note about dive bars and getting your ass kicked: the best way to get your ass kicked at a dive bar is to do anything ironically. A list of things not to do ironically would include: walking in the door, being there, talking to people, ordering things, or playing the jukebox. I think irony is just about the only way to get your ass kicked at a dive bar. Well, that and when literary magazine editors shout “everybody gets free drinks on their birthday!”

The best way to fit in at a dive bar is to basically order your drink and shut your mouth. Speak when spoken to. And to do that a lot, regularly. And tip well. Sink into the place. For some reason, in answering this question, I’m picturing a dive bar at like two in the afternoon. The rules are somewhat different at night, I believe. But still, they all kind of narrow down to “be there a lot, but don’t be an asshole.”

3. One of the topics we discussed during the editing process was that some of the language here perhaps teetered on being cliché, and also whether that was a problem. One of the phrases we talked about was "children of suburbia," which you claimed as being exactly how it had felt, and therefore accurate. I've been thinking about that idea: Is it possible that in our quest to make our art "new" we sometimes also make it inaccurate by passing over the most appropriate language, that which just feels right to the actual remembered experience?

I think the most important thing that came out of that exchange is the launch of our new grunge band, “Children of Suburbia,” starring me as Dave Grohl, you as Krist Novoselic, and Matt Kirkpatrick in the Curt Cobain role. I’m tearing the sleeves off the flannel and ready to tour, dude.

Seriously, that was an interesting conversation, and I don’t know if I went the right way with it or not. It is probably a clichéd phrase, but when I thought about those people I went to college with, most of them really were from the suburbs, and that was very different to my experience growing up in pretty rural central Pennsylvania.  For instance, I had no idea that lacrosse or private schools existed outside the movies.  And then all of the sudden I was surrounded by lacrosse playing private school kids with fifteen starched white shirts in their dorm room closet. It was very strange. So I did think the phrase was true to my experience, and an accurate  description of that group of people, especially in relation to the other group of people, the collective “we” that narrates the essay.  It’s interesting because I don’t think I would use that phrase in a story, but I tend to write stories and essays in very different voices, I think, probably because the few essays I’ve written have been about, in some way, the idea of growing older and having to come to grips with all the shitty realities that accompany that process.

I think you’re right that sometimes we make something less accurate by struggling with language that tries a little too hard to be new or inventive. I’m also generally not a lyrical kind of writer – I think I’m workmanlike and amusing, at best – so I might be more inclined, especially in an essay, to go with something that cuts as close to the truth as possible, hopefully without being clichéd. And hopefully if that is a little clichéd, it’s one of the only parts of that piece of writing that feel that way.  I think it’s pretty true to the voice of the piece, at least, and that voice also maybe edges toward being a little dewy at points. What can I say? When I talk about dive bars, I just get all sentimental.

4. You're one of the founding editors of Barrelhouse, a magazine whose tag line has always been "Fiction. Poetry. Pop flotsam. Cultural jetsam," a description that I think fits your own work as well as what's in the magazine. I've been considering the impulse to start a literary magazine, and how its perhaps inevitable that we start the magazine that we'd most want to read, if it could somehow already exist in the world. How is Barrelhouse the magazine you wanted as a reader? How has what you want it to be changed over the past few years?

We always said that we started the magazine we wanted to read, and I think that’s still true. Speaking for myself, I felt like a lot of the magazines I had come into contact with at that point in time (this is about five years ago) were just really no fun at all. Very serious. Very literature with a capital L. Like you know how every now and then you’re at a party and you meet somebody who says, quite proudly, “I don’t own a television, I just think TV is awful…” It seemed like all of those people were running literary magazines. We wanted to counter that, to embrace pop culture because it’s important to us, and we thought it was important to a lot of other smart, literate people as well.

I think Barrelhouse has changed a little bit, but not a heck of a lot. One thing I want to do is get back to publishing interviews with interesting (non-writer) people. We’ve interviewed Ian MacKaye, the Hold Steady, Malcolm Gladwell, Patterson Hood of the Drive by Truckers, and lots of other interesting people. The upcoming issue has an interview with the Luna Brothers, who are awesome comic artists. That’s one thing I think we need to work a little harder on – it’s hard to schedule these things, because we don’t know anybody famous, so we kind of have to rely on tracking down email addresses or somehow connecting with these people on the phone.

5. What other writing projects are you currently working on?

I’m finishing up a group of stories that I hope to pull into a collection, shine up, and see if anybody wants to publish them. They all center in one way or another on rock and roll. I think the collection will be called The Jerry Garcia Finger. Is that gross? Or stupid? Maybe both.

6. What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?

I loved Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr. I think he’s really one of the best out there right now, and I look forward to whatever he does next. Same goes for Patrick Somerville, whose The Cradle is just a wonderful little novel. That was one of my favorites from last year. I also just finished up Dan Nester’s How to be Inappropriate, which was alternately hilarious and touching, which is not an easy thing to be at all. Plus, it came with a free whoopee cushion, and my son thinks it’s just about the funniest thing he’s ever seen. I’m in the middle of Richard Lange’s Dead Boys right now, and I’m really loving it. His stories are literate, but they also have balls, and that’s not something you find every day.