Basement Bars are Low Places

Saturday night, we walked down the stairs at Capone’s Cellar in Edgerton, WI (pop. ~5600) and crashed the 53rd birthday party of one Robert Johnson. The birthday boy’s actual name came in one ear and went out the other, but Robert Johnson is the most popular name in the state, so we can use that. There may well be four of them in Edgerton.

My friends and I rang in vaccinated white pants season with a Memorial Day trip to visit my friend Ben in Wisconsin, where we would drink Spotted Cow, eat cheese curds, and lounge near a lake. The house we rented was a bit farther from Madison than planned, and the lake was calf-deep. As we drove in, a cornfield gave way to a neighborhood of ranch homes, each with either a pickup truck, trampoline, or a boat in the front yard.

Rocking chairs dotted front porches, but on a rainy, cold day, they sat empty. Steady rain, deserted streets, and a looming, run-down three-story brick building—I would refer to it as the orphanage—set the scene for an unfortunate tale of city boys lost in one of those parts of the country they never deigned to understand.

Capone’s Cellar, a bar beneath a split-level home around the corner, seemed like the kind of place where the jukebox would cut out as soon as we crept in. Were it not for the Pabst Blue Ribbon sign hanging outside, this could have been a home invasion. Many are the home with a liquor closet, fridge, pool table, and neon sign in the basement.

Luckily, we had already broken the ice during our first visit, which took place the evening before, on Friday night. Friday, we walked a half hour across the entire community to the Anchor Inn. Folks don’t seem to walk much round here, but they had a live band, and nobody would commit to driving home.

The tall, curly-haired bartender looked back with confusion when we asked him to switch to TNT, which was showing the hit series Bones. Requesting a long-running crime procedural may well have been less eye-catching than asking to watch the Knicks game, which was actually on ESPN. Sadly, it’s the playoffs, so we had no choice. Not from around here, huh?

Gradually, we worked up the courage to head to the dance floor and enjoy the musical stylings of the evening’s band. Flannel shirts, cowboy hats, a slide guitar, and a singer capable of impressive Shania Twain covers made us forget that everybody in the joint, boogying to the country radio hits of yesterday and today, had a Wisconsin accent.

The singer and a babyfaced guitarist were the only two band members under 40, it seemed. She sipped black cherry White Claw between songs, and he wore crisp, clean Timberlands, neither of which struck me as particularly Wisconsin things to do. No disrespect to the rhythm section or slide guitarist, but these two were the highlights. When I looked over to Ben to shout “He’s so good” after a particularly exacting guitar solo, the singer caught my eye and nodded knowingly. Having read my lips, she mouthed “I know.” They could rock, they were country, but were they Wisconsin?

20 minutes into the trek home from the Anchor, a couple of us decided we had better stop at Capone’s. One bearded Wisconsinite bewilderingly wore a Chicago Bears shirt in Packers country. Thrilled to meet another outsider, we began debating whether Justin Fields would be the next Mitchell Trubisky, and not in a good way. We shared a few other conversations over an unimpressive billiards game and left feeling bold enough to come back.

The next night, a couple of Robert’s friends offered for us to help ourselves to the brisket, chips, and shrimp cocktail in the corner the instant we walked in. One of us went right for it, but the rest hemmed and hawed about not intruding, like burglars worried a glass of water is an imposition. He insisted he didn’t “want to take any of that shit home with him. It’s great, you should have some.” After singing a bit of backup to the karaoke, we became comfortable enough to accept the genuine hospitality.

We quickly made friends with Pork Chop, an aptly-named bulldog with cropped ears and a gentle soul, who strode around the bar with no visible owner. We got a couple winks and hoots from a table of middle-aged women, so we indulged and made the walk to the bar into a runway. I offered an unsolicited twirl.

Pork Chop loitered under me, hoping I'd drop part of my brisket slider on a Hawaiian roll. I bit my tongue when a woman announced “I can’t believe my shrimp still isn’t finished!” How many hours it had sat next to the pickles I didn’t ask. A friend winked at me when I pointed aghast at the three tails on his plate.

Robert Johnson wore a gray Milwaukee Brewers away jersey. Traditionally, MLB away jerseys are gray and bear the city’s name, rather than the team’s nickname, across the chest, but Robert’s said “Brewers” and not “Milwaukee.” Robert Johnson and a friend focused their attention a bit too keenly on the only two women in our group, who were many years their junior. A game of guess-your-age flirted with disaster when our friends, justifiably, put this freshly minted 53 year old in the 65 year old bucket.

Robert Johnson made a series of uncomfortable comments he considered to be compliments, revealing the gulf in our definitions of respect. He guffawed when they said they grew up in Milwaukee. He didn’t much care for the place. He suggested they lock their doors, roll up their windows, and spend their time elsewhere.

Jay-Z’s Yankees hat stands for more than the Bronx Bombers. It stands for the entire city of New York and all the pride he associates with where he came from. Robert’s baseball jersey, conversely, separates the team logo from the city. It’s as though the Brewers and their fans don't want the Cardinals to ask where they came from when they get off the bus in St. Louis. They want nothing to do with the city at all.

The city is just under 40% Black, has a median income of just over $40,000, and roughly 25% of its citizens experience poverty. With enormous turnout, the citizens of Milwaukee helped carry the state for Biden in 2020. Robert may not have explicitly used such words, but he made it clear that his contempt for Milwaukee was racially motivated.

Another barfly, perhaps David Johnson—Wisconsin’s second-most common name—noticed the Bucky the Badger shirt I’d gotten at the University of Wisconsin store in Madison, and offered some choice words about Madison. The cheese curds there, you see, they do not squeak.

On my first trip to Wisconsin, Ben picked me up from a coffee shop, which remains one of my favorite ever, near the train station in Milwaukee. I, latte-sipper, was once amazed to find that Madison had great food, from poke to paneer, in addition to brats, cheese curds, and beer. Madison has a Google office, and like other large college towns, it boasts at least one of many things one might find in a major city.

I’ve enjoyed espresso drinks in the soft Edison bulb glow, sitting at unfinished wood tables, in coffeeshops across eight timezones. This has been a front row seat to the oft-bemoaned global urban monoculture, that invisible force that allowed one friend say a certain Madison street corner felt like Madrid and mean it. Sometimes, it’s disappointed me as I crave novelty. Other times, it’s comforted me because enough with the novelty already.

When considering the urban-rural divide, the tendency is to consider the rural as connected to localized, idiosyncratic heritage and tradition while the urban marches forward toward a monolithic future of intersectional socialist robots, legal pot, and loose morals. The trope is that we in the city accept people who come from an increasingly wide array of backgrounds, doing our best to meet them where they are and make them comfortable being themselves, provided they eat sushi and hide any country accents.

The rock climbing gym we’d visited in Madison had menstrual products in all the restrooms, including the Men’s room, as people may need them regardless of their gender. This is open minded. Yet, as my friends and I walked through the neighborhood on our way to the Anchor, we baselessly agreed that the jovial hellos from various porches were eery and threatening.

We projected our discomfort and claimed the answer to “Which way’s the Anchor?” would be “Back the way you came.” In doing so, we revealed our snobbery and created tension where perhaps there was none. Meanwhile, the residents of Edgerton listened to music made in a Nashville lab and ate barbecue brisket, a Texas staple. I, the caricaturist, thought tradition meant they’d listen to polka and eat bratwurst. As for the warm shrimp cocktail from the landlocked Piggly Wiggly, I’m not sure which group claims responsibility.

The criticism is that we abandon our heritage, sacrificing wistful regard for the America of Theodore “The Beaver” Cleaver and “traditional values.” The radio country and the brisket, alongside the homes with contradictory-but-not “don’t tread on me” Gadsden flags and “thin blue line” flags, point to the development of a rural monoculture that can be even more divorced from local heritage than the urban one. I haven’t seen them all, but I don’t recall the episode where The Beaver goes to his state capitol with a semiautomatic weapon.

Shortly before our exit from Capone’s, Robert Johnson took over the karaoke—a Japanese loanword—to sing “Friends in Low Places,” which we’d danced to at the Anchor the prior evening. A good song choice didn’t let him off the hook, but I couldn’t resist singing along like the rest of the bar did, with an affected Garth Brooks accent.

Sunday night, we ventured into Madison for a breath of more familiar air. “Friends in Low Places” came on again while we sat at a place popular with the UW crowd and the town’s young professionals. The song is about feeling like an outsider and being not that classy. You’d be amazed how many people out there feel like outsiders and are not that classy.