Lease Old And Own Lush

Tom’s Little Havana closed in Halifax this March after 22 years. I remember all the nights I spent there.

Halifax is a city in name only, in a lot of ways. I’m not one of those people that just slags it off for fun, I genuinely like it here, but that’s reality. We’ve only got a couple hundred thousand in the city proper, we lack the amenities that larger cities draw to them by virtue of the population density, and getting a decent band to travel here for a concert costs an arm and a leg and your life savings (trust me, I’m still paying it off). But we’re the eastern hub of our country, we’re the capital city of the Maritimes, arguably, and that leads us to straddle the definition somewhat. We get some big city things, but we keep some of the small town charm. Fewer shootings, more stabbings, that kind of thing. And the best part of being a small town that pretends to be a big city is that things stay the same. Not all the things, that would suck, things need to change, evolve, get with the times. But certain things you need to stay the same. To keep them as psychic anchors. To make sure you have one place to run when you just need a minute.

Tom’s was that kind of place.

“Tom’s Little Havana” isn’t what anyone who goes there has called it in a dozen years or so, but that’s what it was originally. A Cuban themed cigar bar, tucked into a narrow, high ceiling’d slot in an old department of education building on Doyle Street. For those of you too young to remember smoking in bars, I will tell you three things: smoking is stupid and will kill you, I haven’t smoked in over a year, and if you told me this second I could light a cigarette or cigar at my table at whatever bar I was in I would immediately find one to light. Call it nostalgia I guess, but this is a eulogy for a bar. They had this big humidor and you could nab a Cuban and smoke it with your scotch or beer. Sometimes you couldn’t smoke cigarettes. Sometimes you could. Depended on who was working.

I don’t think I ever went there when all the toilets were working at once. One time I went into the men’s room and a guy was standing by the sink with his dick out, peeing into the stall and the toilet about seven feet away. The urinal was covered with a garbage bag. The spare stall was open, adorned with a printer paper sign, originally saying ‘Please Hold Down To Flush’. In pen, someone had changed it to ‘Lease Old And Own Lush’.

You read about dive bars that people loved, either journalists or literary figures or barflies, and they talk in this reverential tone that I never properly understood. They talked of the dirty floor tiles and the chipped tables and the cracking leather on the stool like it was a holy land they were hoping to visit again someday. I liked going to Toms, sure, but I wasn’t about to pray at the altar. But then I realized all these people were writing about bars that didn’t exist anymore. No one laments something that’s still there.

Tom’s shut down the original location because of development, and moved to the space on Birmingham. It was a converted mall front space, which was a little weird for sure, but it was weird as hell to me because part of it occupied the same space as a wine store I spent a year unhappily working in before changing my entire life and going back to school. So it felt like kismet to me. They brought the wall mural and booths and tables to the new space, so if you got enough of a drunk on it was like a weird dream. Like someone was making a film about the old Tom’s with a slightly better budget.

They lost a lot of casual customers on that initial move to the new space, but the core regulars were there first day first pour. I bartended for four years, worked in liquor stores for 5 before that, the regulars at Toms are real regulars. Gus’ Pub has them too. Charlie’s has them. Characters. Backstories. Feuds. Someone chatted up the other's ex-wife sixteen years ago and I’ll be damned if I share a bar with him, unless he’s buying.

The reason they have real regulars is because of their real bartenders. Ian, Angie, Crusher, Mark, a dozen others I can’t remember because I always just nodded to them and never needed to order a drink. To work a room like that alone takes a lot of skill. In the industry we referred to Tom’s as Bartender Retirement, because no one could possibly work there before running through the gamut of every problem there is and end up a master of juggling tasks and people. I never once gave a bartender a credit card for a tab at Tom’s, and my bill was more or less accurate. Well. It was never more than I had. It was frequently less, especially in the old days. With a nod and a wink.

My pals became my friends became my family at Tom’s. Tom Collins with Conor, scotch with Tristan, endless pints with Jeremy (IPA) and Kris (Keith’s with a sidecar of lime cordial from a bottle they kept behind the bar for him). I celebrated parts of four birthdays at Tom’s. I made the stupidest financial decision of my life at Tom’s. I drank off two very bad break-ups at Tom’s, one for a night and the other for three months.

A girl I used to know told me about a first date she went on at the old Tom’s. They tucked into a quiet table around the back corner. He told her he was kind of broke, but he had brought a bottle of wine in his backpack and if they could just get glasses, he could open it with a pen. I think that’s fucking beautiful.

Being nostalgic about the places you used to get drunk and make stupid life choices is incredibly ugly behavior I’m sure, in anyone but yourself. But you still drift off into those Facebook photos after a few glasses of wine. Thinking about what it was like to be so young, or so thin, or so stressed, or so free. When I think about Tom’s I don’t think of ‘good’ memories. I think of memories. It’s like a first house. Tom’s was the first place I felt at home, that I felt like anyone could be at home. Tom’s didn’t judge. It’s Tuesday at 3 pm and you need a beer, haven’t seen you in two months but let’s talk about that fantasy novel I recommended, how’s your dad?

I said I love you to my friends more times at Tom’s than I think in any other room in this world. That’s just what Tom’s was for. It was for backgammon and card games and a coffee with something in it and talking about the play or the novel or the music festival or the movie or the new job or the new love or the new life you were working on. It was about eulogies and congratulations, hope and despair, laughter and tears.

It’s a stupid sickness I have, to care so much about brick and mortar and kegs and table cloths. But the quiet comfort of that one solitary booth was everything to me when I needed it. That one stolen glance, that laughter echoing off every wall and reverberating in your chest, that sparkle of energy at 9pm on a Friday night telling you ‘yes, this is real, this is good, this is your life, and you belong here’.

-M

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