Raucous grads bump regulars for a night
What makes placid 2AM Club crazy when kids are home from college?
The patrons are young, and they’re descending from all angles. They traipse over from the 7-Eleven on Miller Avenue in Mill Valley, stopping to finish soda bottles with questionable contents. A group of three spills out of an idling Mercedes, thanking someone’s older sister for the ride.
They join the mob of 70-plus other Tamalpais High School grads already gathered on the sidewalk outside the 2AM Club in a cacophony of greetings: squeals and high fives, the fit of elbows and backslaps that is the bro hug.
Inside, gripping red plastic cups, are roughly 200 more of their former classmates. They are mostly college students, or in their early to mid-20s. They shed layers, flirt brazenly, shout indiscriminate catchphrases over each other. Squint, and it’s an episode of “Animal Planet.”
Three hundred and sixty-four days a year, the 2AM Club — or “the Deuce” — is just a casual neighborhood watering hole in an area where those are hard to find. It’s a place to watch the game, shoot some pool and throw back some beers in a charmingly simple space. Serious drinkers can drink here in peace, but “rowdy” and “insane” are not normally descriptors for this establishment. Three hundred and sixty-four nights a year, the Mill Valley Police Department does not station officers on the corner outside the bar, just in case.
The other night is tonight: the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Here in Mill Valley, it’s known as Black Wednesday.
In Lafayette, I hear it’s the Roundup. In Larkspur, it’s the Silver Peso. In Palo Alto, I’m told it’s the Old Pro or Antonio’s Nut House — depending on your age bracket or, perhaps, your standard of cleanliness
required.
In the city, parsing the go-to reunion spot gets more difficult: Plentiful watering holes mean you’re less likely to find yourself in a “don’t look now but our entire high school is at the bar” situation than out in the burbs. Still, the Philosophers’ Club in West Portal seems a perennial favorite for San Francisco natives, especially if you’re trying to stake out a former flame from Lick-Wilmerding or Sacred Heart.
Yes, the home-for-the-holidays bar: the spot where your drunken, unofficial high school reunions take place a few key evenings each year. The ideal venue should be cheap, no doubt: No one’s trying to act happy to see Jeff, the bully from gym class, over $18 martinis. It should be warm and unpretentious, and it helps if the bar has some history in its bones — black-and-white photographs of the high school basketball team from three generations ago can give a more recent graduate a sense of legacy, if not necessarily pride.
Still, when I started asking Bay Area natives for their seasonal high school meet-up bars, I suppose I was expecting to find a common denominator — some secret ingredient that correlates with the perfect dark barstool from which to escape one’s family. What factors make the best backdrop for that intoxicating mix of drunken regression and course-correcting potential? You might make out with that guy you had a crush on in 10th grade, after all. The nerd might go home with the prom queen!
Never mind that the last Thanksgiving I went to the Mallard (the meet-up spot for Albany High School and at least some of Berkeley High), my most memorable run-in was with a classmate who told me, in a congratulatory way — as our first interaction in 12 years — that he still remembered the time in fourth grade when I threw up in the middle of class. Yep, right on my desk. (I’ve been good, how about you?)
No, the high school meet-up bar is truly about possibility more than reality — which helps explain why, speaking with the Tam High grads packed densely into the 2AM Club this past Black Wednesday, I keep getting the funny feeling that no one can actually explain why they’ve come. They hadn’t wanted to exactly, but not coming also didn’t seem like an option. They’ve all been compelled by some invisible force.
“Everyone pre-parties a lot beforehand,” a young San Diego State student who identifies herself as a Tam High ’15 grad tells me — or, rather, yells at me, over the sounds of E40’s “Tell Me When to Go” — around 11 p.m.
“You’re a little nervous about who you’re gonna see, but it’s really the only bar in Mill Valley,” explains her friend, who is home from NYU, with a shrug. “It’s literally the only option. Our friend over there? His mom went to Tam High and she used to come here in, like, the ’80s.”
And there’s yet another way a bar can become the default reunion spot: The 2AM Club is the only dive bar in Mill Valley. Some would say it’s the only bar. It has been on this corner in one form or another since 1906, according to the Mill Valley Historical Society, when the bar first opened as a saloon called the Brown Jug. It became a grain and feed store during Prohibition, then reopened as a watering hole in 1933.
The bar was officially renamed the 2AM Club in 1940, after the longtime nickname it had earned thanks to its closing time: Then just outside Mill Valley’s city limits, the bar was the only one in the area that stayed open until 2, as opposed to 10 p.m. or midnight.
Its more recent history is well-known, at least in these parts: In 1983, Mill Valley kid Huey Lewis chose the interior for a cover shot of Huey Lewis and the News’ breakout album “Sports,” which went platinum thanks to the No. 1 Billboard single “I Want a New Drug.” (Also in that cover shot: a guitar made from a toilet seat, an original made by local inventor and unofficial Mill Valley mayor Charlie Deal, who died in 2007. The guitar still hangs behind the bar, alongside trophies, standard bar kitsch and a few pieces of taxidermy.)
In 2010, longtime owners Steve Powers and Dirk Payne sold the place to longtime bartenders Amanda Solloway and Dave Marshall, and the pair gave it a face-lift: new paint, a half-dozen flat-screen TVs, and much-needed upgrades for the bathrooms. Still, most nights of the year it’s a homey, laid-back place.
Tonight is not one of those nights.
As I travel across the room on Black Wednesday — a journey that takes 10 minutes as I squeeze mosh-pit style past the layer of humans nearest the bar — I watch a guy in a MICHIGAN shirt enact a ritual with a series of three guys in various college shirts over the course of 10 minutes. The look of surprise to see one another, the shout-grunt, the backslap. “Is __ here?” If I stand here long enough, I figure, I might see into Michigan Guy’s soul, his past, learn which tics mean he’s actually happy to run into someone versus faking it. Is there someone special he is hoping to see?
But then I decide we’ve been creepy enough, my mid-30s friend and I here at this bar full of 22-year-olds, so we decide to head up the street to the 7-Eleven for some chips. (When in Rome?) On our way out, a girl is arguing with the door guy for not letting her in using a photo on her phone of her passport as an ID.
It’s a little past 1 a.m. when we head home, a drive I spend thinking on those 300 Tam High grads. How many of them will be getting what they set out for this Thanksgiving eve? Will their pounding hangovers the next day, surrounded by parents and aunties and family friends asking about their major, be tinged with smug joy or regret or some combination? Will any of them be swearing off the place, saying they’ll never set foot inside the 2AM Club again?
Of course, there’s always Christmas.