Volume 3, Issue 10
May 10 - May 23, 2001

BOTTOMS UP!

Alex Neth

ACT YOUR AGE
@
DON'S CLUB TAVERN

There are young bars that act old. You know. They stock up on fake memorabilia, antique signs, cutesy-ass garbage all designed to distract from their uncomfortable newness. Shameful. Unfortunately for Denver's bargoing public, this particular trend has reached a point of crisis there are now so many callow bars pretending to be grizzled that it's difficult to tell who's real and who ain't. This, of course, is where I come in. I know you depend on me for this kind of information, boozy shut-in that you are, so here's the lowest of low-downs: when in Capitol Hill, avoid any-place except for Don's Club Tavern.

Sure, that means you'll miss the spectacle of Denver Joe at Cricket On The Hill, and whatever the hell they do at the Snake Pit, but your wallet will thank you for it. Don's is one of the cheapest bars in the city wells are $3, domestics $2.50, and the priciest hooch in the place runs a whopping $5.50. Those aren't Happy Hour prices either (although Don's recently began running specials on Sunday from 7 to 10 p. m.). This isn't the kind of place that runs ladies' nights or Budweiser promotions featuring bikini-clad 13-year-olds or Globbo, the beer-drinking Colobus monkey. This place has been in one spot, and owned by one guy Don Aymami for 47 years.

The tables have photographs under plastic documenting decades of changing hairstyles and bar wear. There are signs saying things like, "This Bar is Under Arrest," and, "In Heaven Ain't no Beer, Gotta Drink it Here." Hear, hear. There's a shuffleboard table here, and not one that looks as if was built in my lifetime. The cigarette machine was found intact in a Mayan ruin. About the only thing here that doesn't exude the heady, musty aroma of beer-sotted stasis is the bartender.

Will Dupree has been working here for a little over a year. And like many of Don's customers, he couldn't have found a more appropriate environment.

"It's a really cool place, really mellow," he said on a recent morning when the rain was slouching earthward like a three cunted cow pissing off a cliff onto a flat rock through a sieve (to borrow a phrase from a tiny crazy Texan I knew as a child). "In the days it's pretty dead, but we get a really good young crowd at night. It's the entire opposite of the club scene this is where you come if you want to be able to hear and talk to the people you're with, and not pay a fortune."

Dupree has been in Denver for 17 years and previously worked at one of LoDo's fancy schmancy cocktail bars, hustling $10 drinks to the downtown idiocy crowd. Don's, to his mind, is a far better deal overall.

"It really gets hoppin' on Friday and Saturday nights," he said. "We were voted best dive bar in Denver last year by Citysearch. But Don won't let us put the plaque up."

Don, still a hands-on owner in his mid 80s, hearkens to an earlier era, when "dive bar" wasn't a hip compliment; when, instead, it conjured up images of press gangs and sclerotic opium smokers. Even Dupree's best efforts to explain the change in definition have gone unappre-ciated.

"I tried to tell him, it doesn't mean the same thing anymore," he said. "Nowadays, I think it just kind of means bars that are old."

Old. Old is what? 47 years? That's pretty old, for a bar. Especially a bar that's only known one owner and location. There are other places in the metro area that have seniority The Blue Blaze, in unincorporated Adams County, and Joe's Cavern on Federal are two that spring to mind but there aren't many that wear their age as well. Don's successfully bridges the gap between the people who have been going there for years and the fashionable youngsters in the nearby apartments. It is a fixture, true (although that word is applied to just about every public-house and ale-room nowadays); but more importantly, it is a fixture that doesn't need fixing.

So, like I said. There's the scoop. The skinny. The hush-hush, brought to you on the DL. Word. When in Capitol Hill, swing on by Don's Club Tavern, or as it is alternately referred to on the faulty neon sign outside, Don's Mixed Drinks. Grab a bottle full of beer. Play some shuffle-board. Just don't call it a dive, or risk being pummeled senseless by a man three times your age.