If the Columbus police have any more to say about it, we all might have to spend our Saturday nights bowling for Jesus and Bob Taft, chaperoned and miserable. Or maybe they’ll just stick us all in a school dance, segregated by gender alongside a punchbowl.
The police finally rang the death knell for Notal Too’s, which closed its doors at midnight on Friday for at least a year, making the score a depressingly lopsided Mean-Old-Square-World 10,000, Students 6. True, they’ve already closed some of the best campus hot-spots — Panini’s South, Notal’s Pub, the Spot and Sloe Moe’s. But this one hurts bad: a loss so great that I don’t want to think about what it will mean for the future.
It was a great loss, and an unfortunate one — another victim of legal battles and a case of bad luck and even worse timing. It makes a sad scene around campus: an obvious lack of places to go, a feeling of desolation running along High Street from 10th to 17th and an odd foreboding that things will never be the same.
Thus, the mood at Too’s was dark, and rightly so. I arrived at 4 p.m., a time usually set aside for only the most dedicated — the lifestyle drinkers — but now one for loyal patrons, past and present. We were all a bit disillusioned, reminiscent; people listening to “Sweet Home Alabama,” toasting the past and trying to figure out where else to go in the future.
“It’s just not right,” a longtime bartender said to me. No, it’s not, and we badly needed a drink.
Luckily, we were at the right place: a place that had seemed right to a huge cross-section of the OSU population for the last 12 years. And it was fun while it lasted, as the activities there were transformed from routine into campus legend and lore: Happy hour. Tuesdays that were so packed you could barely move but came anyway. Friday afternoons with free wings. Uncle Paul. The big TV with the funny-looking splotch. The 21st birthdays…
On the right night (and there were many), Too’s was a Coors Light commercial, a state championship high school pep rally and a Stones concert all rolled into one. There was an energy there — a pulsing vibe to the entire place — with a lack of pretensions and a sense of excitement not found in many other places.
Plus, it was the best-located campus bar, directly centered amid student housing and next to the two things necessary for solid partying: Bank machines and a 24-hour Steak ‘n’ Shake.
What a great place: A tiny storefront next to a flower shop leading to some basement dive that no one cared was bare and dirty. Before last Friday, it would always be there when you needed it most.
Special times, the care and concern, the worry and burden fading away as you walked in. It was a place for the release that students need. It was a bar for all those “Oh, man, you should have been there last night!” memories everyone tells over and over because they’re funny and crazy — the once-in-a-lifetime occurrances of good luck and entertainment that never come as often as you’d like.
If the college years are when memories are made, then Too’s was where so many went to make them. Memories one never expected to ever happen, making them that much more exciting when they did. Memories amid a crowd with similar problems, working through them by enjoying the same interests of music and drink, friends and fun.
It was a place so well-suited to its environment that its absence cannot be understood with any simple logic.
Because looking back, Too’s made sense. But maybe it was a sense that one had to go there to understand — an experience that escapes description. So when I went there for the last time, I was sad to leave everything: the kids I had met, the bartenders; even the damp smell of cigarettes and stale beer.
I knew I didn’t want to trek back up those tiled stairs to leave a place of comfort for a cold winter night and a world that doesn’t make nearly as much sense as some basement bar, full of good times that no one will forget anytime soon.
And I sure don’t want to wait a whole year to go back.
John Ross is a senior in comparative studies and can be reached for comment at [email protected].
