I took the job at the Black Notch Tavern because my thesis adviser told me I needed to stop living inside my own head, which is a thing academics say that usually means go outside but which in this case came with a specific address on Route 9 and a phone number and the explanation that his cousin Vic owned the place and needed summer help.
I was twenty-six, finishing a graduate degree in cultural anthropology, and I had written a thirty-eight-page paper about community formation in working-class male spaces without ever having spent meaningful time in one. My adviser, Professor Halloran, who was one of the sharpest people I’ve ever met and also one of the most infuriating, had read all thirty-eight pages and said: This is technically proficient and completely wrong. Go work for Vic for the summer.
So I called Vic.
Vic was a short, bald man of about fifty-five who had the absolute opposite of the aesthetic I’d expected from a biker bar owner — he looked like a junior high school math teacher, soft-spoken, slightly rumpled, wire-rimmed glasses. He’d owned the Black Notch for twelve years. His regulars were predominantly members and associates of three motorcycle clubs who used the bar as something between a neutral territory meeting ground and a second living room, plus a rotating population of locals, truckers, and travelers who stumbled in from Route 9. He told me the hourly rate, which was fine, and that I’d make better money on tips than on the wage, which was true, and that I should never ask anyone their legal name unless I needed it for a tab, which was advice I didn’t fully understand until about my third week.
I was not, on paper, a natural fit for this environment. I am a small woman — five-four, at the time I weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds — with, in that period of my life, the particular energy of someone who had spent six straight years in educational institutions and whose social calibration was therefore set for seminars and faculty parties. I wore, on my first day, a button-down shirt with small flowers on it, which Vic looked at once and then looked away from in the manner of a man exercising significant self-control.
I lasted about four days in the floral shirt. Not because anyone said anything. But because I am a quick learner.
The thing about tending bar in a place like that, I discovered quickly, is that the actual skill of bartending — which I’d done briefly in college — is maybe thirty percent of the job. The other seventy percent is social engineering, which in an academic context I would have called navigating complex group dynamics within a bounded social space, and which in the Black Notch context meant learning to read a room about fifteen minutes before the room needed to be read.
The first club I got comfortable with was the Gravel Kings, because they had a Tuesday night regular table that was always the same five men and they ordered the same things in the same order and they talked to me like I was a person, which I understood only gradually was not universal. The de facto leader of the Tuesday table was a man named Opes — I never learned the origin of this, and true to Vic’s advice I never asked — who was somewhere between fifty and seventy depending on which photo you caught him in, with a face like a topographic map and hands that looked like they’d built things and broken things in roughly equal measure. Opes drank bourbon neat, ordered the same burger every week, and had read, I discovered accidentally, almost every major anthropology text I’d studied in grad school.
This came out because I left a copy of Clifford Geertz’s Local Knowledge on the bar while I was on break. Opes picked it up, read the back, opened to a random page, and was still reading it when I came back. He looked up and said, without particular affect, “Geertz is better on Bali than on anything else. His later work gets too clever.”
I stared at him for a second.
“You know Geertz,” I said. Not a question, exactly.
“I did two years of graduate school in the seventies,” he said. “Sociology, not anthro. Dropped out when my father got sick. Never went back.” He handed me the book. “You studying?”
“Finishing,” I said. “Dissertation.”
“On what?”
I hesitated, then told him.
He looked at me for a long, flat moment. Then something in his expression shifted into what I can only describe as a very controlled form of amusement.
“You’re writing about community formation in spaces like this,” he said, “and you’re working in a place like this.”
“My adviser’s idea,” I said.
“Smart man,” said Opes.
I could fill a book with what I learned that summer. I will try to give you the shape of it in less than a book.
The first thing I learned is that the culture of a biker club is densely, almost obsessively codified in ways that outsiders never see because they’re looking at the surface. The patches mean specific things. The seating arrangements mean specific things. Who speaks first at a table, who pays for whose drinks, who stands by the door and who sits with their back to it — all of it carries information, if you know how to read it. It is, and I say this as someone who has since published actual peer-reviewed research on the subject, one of the most complex social semiotics I have ever encountered outside of a formal religious institution. The rules are unwritten but they are precise, they are enforced, and they are, in most cases, there for specific historical reasons that made sense when they were created and have survived because they continue to make sense.
The second thing I learned is that the violence, when it existed, was a great deal more disciplined than I’d expected and a great deal less casual than popular culture suggests. In four months at the Black Notch, I witnessed one fight. One. It was brief, it was between people who knew each other, it was over in under forty seconds, and it was followed by both parties sitting down at separate tables and Vic bringing them each a drink and no one calling the police. Violence, in that world, operates within a cost-benefit framework that is as rational as any other cost-benefit framework — more rational, in my observation, than the violence I’d seen at graduate school parties, which sounds like a joke but isn’t.
The third thing I learned is harder to articulate, and I’ve been trying to write it correctly in academic language for several years without success, so I’ll try just in plain language here: the men at the Black Notch were, as a group, among the most genuinely loyal people I have ever encountered. Not loyal in the abstract, philosophical sense — in the operational sense. When one of the Gravel Kings had a stroke in September, he had seven men at the hospital within two hours and a rotating schedule of visitors for the next three weeks. When a woman who drank at the bar on Fridays — not connected to any club, just a local — lost her job and couldn’t make her car payment, there was a collection at the bar one Thursday that I wasn’t told about in advance, and the amount collected was enough to cover her payments for four months. Nobody made a speech about it. It was just done.
Opes and I talked about this, one quiet Tuesday in August.
“Why does it work?” I asked him. “The loyalty. Where does it come from?”
He thought about it for a long time, which was his habit — long silences that weren’t empty, just occupied with actual thinking.
“You know what most of these guys had before the club?” he said. “A lot of nothing. Families that fell apart. Jobs that used them up and discarded them. Systems that didn’t work for them. And then they found a place where the rule is: you show up, you’re stood by. You prove yourself, you’re trusted. You keep your word, your word means something.” He looked at his bourbon. “That’s not complicated. That’s just what people need. Most people are never offered it, so they don’t know what they’d do with it. These guys found it here.”
I wrote that down later that night, verbatim, in the notebook I kept that summer. It’s on page forty-seven. It is, I’ll say without false modesty, the clearest single articulation of my dissertation’s central argument, and it was delivered over bourbon by a man who dropped out of sociology in 1978 and runs a motorcycle club.
Professor Halloran, when I read it to him in September, was quiet for a moment and then said: “That’s the whole paper.”
He was right.
I finished the summer and went back to school and finished my degree. I’ve published three articles and one book chapter that grow, directly or indirectly, from that summer. I’m on the faculty now at a midsize university in the northeast, which is about as far from the Black Notch Tavern as a ZIP code can be.
I went back once, two years after the summer, to drop off a copy of the paper I’d written. Vic took it with the slightly skeptical look he gives everything, flipped to a random page, read for a moment, and then nodded in a way that might have been approval.
Opes wasn’t there that night. His health had gotten complicated, Vic told me. But Vic gave him the paper, and I got a letter from him three weeks later. Two pages, longhand, genuine engagement with the argument, two substantive critiques, one of which I think is correct and have been trying to incorporate into the book I’m working on.
At the bottom, in a postscript, he wrote: You got the loyalty right. Most people don’t. The error most outsiders make is thinking loyalty is a feeling. It isn’t. It’s a practice. It’s what you do on the days when the feeling isn’t there. Most people in comfortable lives never have to find out if they’d practice it or not. We found out.
I keep that letter in the same folder as my dissertation.