This time last year I was drunk. Too often to remember it completely and too frequently to forget it was.
There were two attempted meetings. At the end of the second — when mostly middle-aged alcoholics chain-smoked outside — the group leader did the one thing men are explicitly told not to do to women: he asked my age.
“Nineteen, almost 20,” I answered.
He was probably in his late 60s, a reformed-hippie type. He said something like, ‘Wow! Alcohol’s already done a number on you!’
It wasn’t the age inquiry that hindered future AA attendance. Or the genuine shock of his reaction. It was the room for denial it provided. Maybe old friends were right, everyone drinks in college. Maybe I was just lonely, looking for attention. Going to a meeting to confirm the age-induced belief something was inherently wrong with me. Maybe alcohol hadn’t done a number on me. Maybe I drank just as much as the next 19-year-old.
We all do it, right?
Well, no. Not like that.
On our 20th birthday, we aren’t all driving high to an unincorporated town alone and in an attempt to achieve some Fear and Loathing-esque bender. With a cooler full of ice and questionably obtained bottles of sake, soju, and prosecco in the back. For an overnight trip.
This time last year, that was me. The experience is documented in a column for The Express and in the 365 days between birthdays, things changed. I drink considerably less. I got distracted by living.
And here it was still — this time a 21st-birthday drive to an unincorporated town. For an overnight trip. The differences between this year and last were such. I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t high (yet). I wasn’t bearing liquor and ice. The intended goal wasn’t a bender.
However, if that was the goal, this time would be legal.
Sometimes, you’re pulled back to a place you’ve already been by something other than relatives, high school reunions or a timeshare. Like, there’s a part of you only accessible there. Or because the ghost of a previous self there needs exorcising.
For me, at this stage in my life, it is Locke — an unincorporated town on the California Delta.
Maybe I went back to commune with the ghost of birthday’s past. Maybe I just went because I love Locke. Either way, I got my Christmas Carol — I saw the ghost of birthdays yet to come.
First-time bar attendance gave a premonition: a lifelong affinity for the establishments. For dives. For the conversations overheard and had with bartenders and bar-sitters. For the potential columns, too: “Overheard at American dive bars,” or something. You’d be reading that column now if I didn’t forget exactly what — in a Locke saloon — was said.
Locke’s main street pavement is the width of two cars and the length of the 12 clapboard buildings lining its east and west sides. They’re composed of decaying wood, tin roofs and sagging second-floor decks. Most are set up to operate a ground-level business with an apartment on top. All but about four of the operations, depending on the month, are decommissioned.
Chinese immigrants who worked on the Union Pacific Railroad, in local agriculture or were contracted to build out the Delta’s levees and tunnels, settled here at the turn of the 20th century.
Immigrants established Locke as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was enabling the general hostility toward Chinese people in America who endured poorer conditions and a lack of upward mobility.
Immigrants who — in what was then called Lockeport — opened a Chinese Language school, herb and fish markets, gambling halls, opium dens, an opera house and silent-film theatre, brothels, speakeasies and a hotel. Whose businesses supported a population of nearly 1,500 during the late 1910s into the 1920s.
For its illicit enterprises, Locke was named “Monte Carlo of the state” in The Sacramento Bee headline dated 1919.
A single main street bar remains.
The first business in Locke not run by Chinese proprietors is Al the Wop’s (an anti-Italian slur meaning mafia-affiliated or scoundrel) was founded in 1934. Al Adami was an alleged prohibition-era bootlegger whose proceeds funded the creation of his namesake bar.
The building is painted white with red trim. Its windows are horizontal and narrow — covered in stickers from past patrons. There are benches and a water fountain out front with a post-leaning sign that reads: “Save Water, Drink Beer.”
My self and romantic companion walked in at 9 p.m. We were immediately greeted by a counter and stools. By the five people already dispersed at them — a couple and trio of friends. And the bartender called Dokker.
There’s a room in the back with booths, separated from the main bar by an open doorway. The interior walls are covered in antique hangings, old photos of locals and decapitated animal heads. A mounted bison dome had a bra stretched over its horns. The floor and ceiling are thin wood planks with the latter tacked in dollar bills. We added a signed one by closing time at 10.
Between 9:15 and then: a combined six drinks, two bar games and one encounter with a drunk local. He was evaluating our Shut the Box and ring-and-hook techniques.
The intimidation of ordering your first bar drink is palpable. Do you feed the college-associated cliché and get a vodka cranberry? Or do you feign experience and get dark liquor? These options escaped me at 9:15.
“Cosmopolitan,” I announced.
Dokker returned with pink in a martini glass. He’s been working at Al’s for several years. Al’s manager had seen him at another local bar — Tony’s, in nearby Walnut Grove — and given him a job.
The first Cosmo was succeeded by another. Somewhere around when it arrived a different drunk local — this one entirely wasted — was leaving Al’s on his friends’ shoulders. They left almost immediately after their collective ordering of a “Swazye.”
Curious, my companion asked Dokker what it was. “Redbull, cranberry juice and whip cream vodka,” he said. We got two and downed the shots together — and with Dokker, who’d made his own.
It was romantic. The subtly slurred sweet nothings over a game of Shut the Box. The dim, warm lighting of Al’s illuminating off-mounted buck horns. The nostalgia produced by a neighborhood bar one cigarette away from burning down.
Addiction, however, isn’t romantic. It’s not the sentimental overnight trip to an unincorporated town. It’s not the application of Fear and Loathing principles to a 20th birthday. It’s not even the eclectic dive bar on your 21st. It’s the parents worried sick at home — who feel they don’t even know their kid after finding at least a dozen empty bottles in her closet. It’s spiritually vandalizing.
This time last year I realized it. That it’s a waste. Of time. Of energy. Of potential. That as much as you pour is as much as it sucks from you.
But I still drink. I still went back to Locke for a weekend birthday trip. No parental intervention waiting at home, no bender. But there still.
I have no clue what’ll happen. If in 20 years I’ll be sprawled around empty bottles on the floor of a dilapidating Locke apartment. If I’ll have mythically learned to manage it completely. Or if I’ll be accepting some AA chip.
I’m not even sure I can determine my precise relationship to alcohol, if the word addiction even fits. If I even know its meaning. If it really has been a college phase only intensified by self-absorption and a lack of non-suburban experience.
I just know I love bars. Maybe it’s an early-20s infatuation. A newfound novelty.
If not, let this be a time capsule for future accountability. For the sake of spiritual and physical preservation and the attainment of potential column subject matter. For this promise to myself: when I do go to bars, that I should never get too tipsy to miss an eavesdropping or conversation opportunity, that I should stay sober enough to remember what I heard, and that I should always start with a Cosmo.
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TOP PHOTO: A second trip to Locke proves revelatory for a newly minted 21-year-old and her relationship with alcohol. (Photo Ian Kapsalis/The Express)
Olivia Fitts is the News Editor and Features Editor for The Express. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter @OLIVIAFITTS2.
