It’s a small hole-in-the-wall place, somewhere that doesn’t even make it into Google Maps results. There’s no sign lit outside, no open sign in the window, just a few neon lights and a handful of cars in the gravel lot when I pull over on the county highway.
I’m in rural Ohio, the eastern part, and have been driving around for an hour trying to find a place to get a beer. Or a drink. Or anything really — a far cry from Wisconsin, where there’s a bar on every corner.
When I walk in, I pass a handful of smokers on the porch, who pause their conversation and turn to look at me. Crossing the threshold, I’m met with dim white lights overhead, the aftermath of a child’s birthday party on a line of pushed-together vinyl tables, and a long bar.
I pick an open seat next to a woman with a black sweatshirt and a raven ponytail, and strike up a conversation with a man sitting around the corner of the bar. He’s frequently hopping up and going behind the dark wood counter, serving up beers and shots when the bartender moves between the bar, kitchen and tables.
It’s a family affair, I soon learn.
The bartender’s parents’ own the place, and the man jumping in is her boyfriend. (They’ve been together for 6 or 7 years, but he’s still tentative to put a ring on it, he reluctantly admits. He likes things the way they are and doesn’t want to ruin it.) The birthday party was another daughter of the owners, and there are handful of cousins playing around the vinyl tables. Other generations of family, grandmothers and aunts, sit at the tables, still littered with paper plates and leftover cake.
It feels as though I’m intruding on a private party, unwittingly having stumbled into that kind of bar where everyone knows your name. Except mine, because it’s quickly determined that I’m not from around there — less of an accusation and more of an oddity.
We don’t get many strangers around these parts, the boyfriend explains. A man seated a few down, one of the smokers from the patio, agrees: we were wondering where you were from.
The night continues, much like most when I enter a new town. I explain the project, which is most often met with some version of “why the hell did you end up here?” We commiserate about the lack of bars and I start peppering them with questions about the area, their lives and what people actually do around here.
It’s how I miss the original incident, but am jarred by the immediate commotion.
A flurry of activity; banging on a door, raised voices, and the bartender rushing between the bathrooms, kitchen and bar. What’s going on, the boyfriend asks, having settled himself back into the corner seat as we talked.
The bartender is flustered, pacing and typing furiously on her phone. A girl, the cook, is not responding from the bathroom. The woman next to me jumps up to bang on the door while from the back, someone calls the fire department, who will send volunteers out that way.
It’s suspected she overdosed.
The bartender tries to get ahold of the cook’s parents, switching between calling and venting to her boyfriend. The cook, I learn, has been clean for almost a year; at one point, someone gets reprimanded for letting her go to the bathroom with her purse.
The spare key is found and the door is opened. She’s unresponsive and pulled out into the back of the restaurant, where tables have been pushed for when the EMTs arrive. In they come, one hoisting a black canvas duffle bag as they assess the situation. Flashing blue and red lights mirror off the windows outside and the attitude remains closer to “what the hell” than “is she ok?”
It’s an attitude that grows over the next half hour, as the lead EMT becomes increasingly frustrated with the cook, who’s somewhat awake but not coherent and refuses to admit to what she’s taken.
“What did you take,” he asks.
She shakes her head, murmuring nothing, nothing.
“Don’t lie to me,” he says, voice raised with authority. “What did you take?”
The song-and-dance continues, as the EMTs try to determine what happened and what to do next. The commotion fills the whole bar, shaking my own ribs as I try to make sense of the scene behind me, staying extraordinarily still as an attempt to melt right into the tile bar.
Narcan is administered, which brings the entire din of the room up a notch as she fills with adrenaline and starts to fight. (A normal reaction to the med, I learned.)
She’s placed on a board and carried out the front door to the awaiting ambulance, a face-off in both fury and frustration between the cook and the EMTs. And then — the bar goes eerily quiet.
It’s then when I realize my heart sitting in my throat. I run my fingers around the bottle sitting in front of me, unable to leave with the flashing lights outside anyway. The woman with the raven hair sits back down, and the bartender moves back behind the bar.
In an odd way, it starts to return to, well, normal.
The bartender closes off the women’s bathroom and sighs to her boyfriend. The kids start playing again, but it’s more refined this time. Someone offers me a leftover cupcake.
“I just can’t believe she threw away everything,” the bartender says, exasperated. “And for what?”
Mark, a local volunteer firefighter who was off-duty that night, sits down and introduces himself. These kids, he says, will give up everything to get high. She didn’t think about it, but she just lost everything — they trusted her, they gave her a chance, and now she lost it. Her job, everything.
“This doesn’t normally happen here, you know,” they reassure me.
Within the next hour, a half dozen more made their way to talk to me, assuring me that this shouldn’t be my takeaway about eastern Ohio. That this doesn’t usually happen here and it’s not normally like this. An immediate othering, a “them, not us” attitude. Frustrated by the crisis, exhausted by the fallout.
“I trust you,” I say, repeatedly. But in my head I was thinking, but what about the girl? Is SHE okay?
A beer later, I cashed out my tab and walked across the linoleum floor over the threshold. It is quiet, the beaming flashing lights faded long into the distance. Sweeping bright stars, twinkling in the 10 o’clock night.
A handful of smokers, once again on the porch.
