My favorite place for a quiet beer in Dayton, Ohio, is a closet. It’s about 3’ x 4’, with a small bench on one side that can seat two people who know each other very well and a tiny seat in the opposite corner to set one’s beers upon. I guess it could fit a third person, but that’s up to you and the particular boundaries of your friendships.
A single, dim lightbulb illuminates the red walls and black floor, and the two walls opposite the bench each display a framed poster—one a Bourbon County Stout release poster signed by Greg Hall, and the other a movie poster for “Bottle Shock” signed by much of the movie’s cast and crew, including the late Alan Rickman. An accordion glass door separates it from the room it adjoins and, to add some Twister-esque fun to the already cramped space, opens in toward the closet.
My wife and I refer to it as “the phone booth,” and it’s only one of the things we love about The Barrel House, a beer bar run by a lovable bunch of ragamuffins with dirty mouths and tender hearts. The Barrel House is our local, and the phone booth is our refuge on the days or nights when we need the world to stay out there and the only things in here to be us and our beers.
The phone booth almost never gets used from what I can tell. I can’t recall ever seeing someone else hide away in this little space, and the best-friend’s-apartment assortment of overstuffed furniture in the main bar area is even sometimes moved to block it. This is irritating at times, but the room’s hidden-in-plain-sight status protects it from being a coveted hot seat. It’s always there waiting for us, and nothing beats popping back out of the accordion door and having unsuspecting drinkers look at you like you just fell out of the wardrobe into Narnia. You can hear them whispering to each other: “Where the hell did they come from?”
The Barrel House is busy and often loud. Staff members DJ vinyl throughout the week, and on Wednesdays the bar plays old-school hip hop, and plays it loud. Wu-Tang Wednesdays have taken on a life of their own, and members of the titular rap group have even advertised the event on social media. The crowds drawn in by the music give the space life and the owners money to keep the doors open, and both of those are good things, but the noise can often be too much for us. There’s nothing quite like winding our way through the crowded space with beer in hand and the music pounding and then closing that glass door behind us. The party is still right there, so close, but we’re not quite a part of it, like those nights years ago when you and a new friend—or something more?—would talk on the landing of the stairs above the party, oblivious to the clamor.
When my daughter was young, she wanted me to play music on the record player in the living room while she fell asleep in her bed. It wasn’t because the music itself comforted her; the music let her know I was still out there, still awake, still close by. She could still feel like a part of the household, even as she drifted off. The phone booth is kind of like that on a loud night.
And then there are the days we just want to hide away in a cocoon of silence. On New Year’s Eve a few weeks back we came in in the afternoon, ordered small pours of beers that would take time to sip through, and retreated to the silence of the phone booth. Another year over. A new one just begun. There are years when that statement has so much more fatigue laced through it than it does excitement. We sat on the bench, our All-Stars kicked up against the opposite wall, and our heads leaned against each other. We had no plans for New Year’s Eve beyond each other, some good beer, and a movie or two. Anything else felt like more than we could face. Another year. Mercy.
We passed a few hours in the phone booth, and then we left. We wished The Barrel House staff “Happy New Year!” on the way out, and stepped back into the encompassing gray of an Ohio winter. In a way, it’s its own kind of shelter.
