Metro Pulse/Gamut/Gryphon's

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Always open, Gryphon's was a neighborhood bar to all comers

by Jay Hardwig

Let us now sing the praises of the neighborhood watering hole.

Inviting, confiding, communal, and cheap, they give us a place to rest our weary elbows and drink a cold beer in the name of all that is true and good. In my life and travels, I've known and loved a few: The Town Pump in Black Mountain, N. C.; Elsie's in Santa Barbara, Calif.; the Deep Eddy Cabaret and Ginny's Little Longhorn in Austin, Texas—all deserve praise as exemplars of the form. But for my money none can match the frayed charm of Knoxville's own humble entrant, Burt's Coin Laundry & Lounge.

Housed in a squat brick building on the corner of Highland and 20th, Burt's offered suds and solace to the raffish denizens of Fort Sanders and the greater world throughout my youth and into my drinking years. It had once been called Smiley's, then Burt's, but by the time I was a regular, the name had changed to Gryphon's—recalling the mythic griffin, a fabulous beast with the wings of an eagle and the head of a lion. A fancy name, but the joint remained decidedly low-rent. (And I have a stubborn attachment to the old name.) A boil on the skin of a changing Fort, it took its last lance in 1997; the building contains offices today.

To those of nobler persuasions Burt's may have seemed a sad and squalid little dump, a flagrant, fragrant dive housing as egregious a collection of drunks and misfits as Knoxville could muster on any given night. There is some truth in that. Like many of its patrons, Burt's was shabby or worse, worn at the edges and not much to look at, a solid 30 years past its prime. The lighting was bad, the furniture shot, and rusty pipes ran the length of the place. If Burt's had had eyes, they would have been bloodshot; if it had joints, they would have ached when it rained. Its teeth would have been broken and crooked, stained by cigarettes and bad coffee, and if it had drawn a pension, it would have spent it on its own barstools, whiling away the nights clutching cold Budweisers, telling the same sad stories to anyone who would listen.

Yet there was magic there. Burt's was by turns bawdy, comical, giddy, serene, melancholy, raucous, sentimental, and lewd, often on the same night. When it was drunk, it did drunk right; when it was sober...well, it never was sober. Not that I saw. Above all it had spirit, a brash embrace of life and its particulars; there was goodwill within those walls, and laughter and forgetting as well. That spirit flowed through the beerlines and into the air; it resounded in the crack of pool balls and the slap on the back of old friends; it hummed in the jukebox and in the keys of Burt's beat-up cabinet grand; most importantly, it made no distinction between regulars and strangers. There was none of the fierce provincialism so common to neighborhood bars; anyone was welcome there, as long as they were civil. Burt's was populated on any given night by a spry and curious assortment of lefties, rednecks, transsexuals, teenage lovers, graduate students, philistines, zealots, poets, bikers, and professional alcoholics. Suitable topics for discussion ranged from politics to pinball to Heidegger to Haggard to Guernseys to gonorrhea to lost love and back. When Burt's closed its doors for good, the casualty of Knoxville Beer Board footdragging, Knoxville may well have lost its most democratic watering hole.

There was, at any rate, an appreciation of both the high and low arts at Burt's, a genuine respect for both the solid satisfaction of carnal pleasures and the finer rewards of creativity and high learning. That the students felt so is obvious—with their heads stuck in Borges and Blake all day, how else could it be?—but the regulars fancied themselves artists as well, participants in the great American folk tradition, hardscrabble aesthetes who, by chance or choice or untoward fate, proclaimed their strange visions from the tops of well-warmed barstools rather than the lecture halls on the other side of Cumberland. They were the transient literati, and Burt's was their stage.

I saw poetry there, I saw bluegrass, I saw punk. I saw the blues, both real and imagined. (I played them there too, by God I did. More than once I sat my drunk ass down in front of that battered old piano and pounded on it 'til my fingers bled.) I saw some mean chess matches, some solid guitar picking, and as nifty a deconstruction of John Wayne as one can rightfully expect from a man with five beers under his belt. I saw a 14-year-old girl get served there, although in the barkeep's defense I must admit that the so-called Boom Boom was a precocious young gal, and didn't look a day under 16. (Boom Boom, wherever you are, I wish you well.) I had the most vivid discussion of the crabs that I ever hope to have, told in three-part harmony and full technicolor detail, and afterwards resolved to wrap myself that night, whether I was going to have sex or not. I still shudder at the thought.

It was not all so pretty. I saw dissolution and grief, bad luck and bad decisions, and bitter blue streaks in the eyes of forgotten men. I saw grown men fall off of barstools and angry wives come calling for missing husbands. I saw punches and kicks and, once, the butt-end of a pool cue swung with stomach-turning force into the mouth of a drunken brawler. Lives lived on the margins are not without violence—even in my barfly romanticism I know as much—but at Burt's violence was the exception and not the rule.

My friend Joe McGowan tells the story of the infamous night when out-of-town skinheads paid a visit to Knoxville and laid unholy waste to the Snakesnatch Lounge on Market Square. They came to Burt's first. They came, Joe recalls, "to whoop up on the Jewish bartender [and known transsexuals] in the place. And the bikers and hillbillies ran them the fuck off with honest aggression. I know. I was one of them. Afterwards, a biker showed me his SS tattoo. He said, 'I got that in jail. Jail is jail but this is the world and this place is our perfect world and there ain't no damn room for that Nazi shit or unkind words in here. We can't let it be that way. In here, everybody's one of us.'"

And it was true. Burt's was not just a beerhall but a de facto community center, home to poetry readings, live music, a regular poker game, and the best damn football board in town. There was, indeed, the coin laundry, but it was a poor sap who was reduced to actually washing his clothes there. The machines were famously cantankerous, and your fresh-washed clothes came home smelling of spilled beer and cigarette smoke. A man could eat, drink, sleep, joke, scheme, scam, philosophize, and flirt at Burt's, and on a good night he might catch wind of a good series of dirty limericks. It was the nexus for a far-flung social network that encompassed not just the dilapidated Victorian indolence of the old Fort Sanders, but the rescue missions and $5 flophouses just down the hill; it is likely that many of Burt's patrons had nowhere else to go.

Not that they had to go anywhere. Burt's Coin Laundry and Lounge never closed. It was a 24-hour joint, and you could order yourself a by-god cold beer for 22 of those hours. Your average night owl knows that Knoxville's blue laws cut off beer sales at 3 a.m.; Burt's patrons knew that those same laws allow the taps to open again at 5. For the thirstiest among them, the hours between 3 and 5 were the longest two hours of the day, a dismal grind relieved only slightly by a cup of hot coffee and Burt's famous $2 "Bowl of Food" (chili, cheese, corn chips, and whatever else could be found in the barback fridge). My friend Joe once worked the graveyard shift at Burt's; on certain nights, he recalls, the time between 5 and 5:30 a.m. was his busiest half-hour, as he served both the hangers-on and those who had wandered in meanwhile (sometimes bartenders from Knoxville's other nightspots; sometimes Joe Punchclocks who came in for a couple before heading to work). My brother Bill tells of going to Burt's to shoot pool with friends until "7 or 8," and it always takes a few moments before it sinks in that he's talking about 7 or 8 in the morning. But Burt's long hours did more than simply facilitate the regular consumption of cheap American beer; they fostered a sense of community, a sense of safety, a sense of home: no matter the circumstance, no matter the condition, no matter the hour, Burt's would be there. And it would be open.

Not anymore, of course: Burt's is closed, seemingly for good. It is unfortunate, and sad, but it is also fitting. Burt's Coin Laundry and Lounge was, at root, a neighborhood bar, and the neighborhood it served is no longer there. The Fort Sanders I knew has been swept away, burned down, and bulldozed, its indolent beauty replaced by bland urgency as Victorian homes with weeds in the yard give way to late-model cars, designer landscaping, and people who lock their doors at night. Things change, and whenever they do, somebody sighs. Now it is my turn to sigh.

Still it does my heart good to know that a few ghosts remain, both living and dead, wandering the streets and rattling their chains, keeping the old spirit alive. It does my heart good to think that a few of the old-timers may gather, now and then, to drink a few cold quarts in the shadows of 20th and Highland. When they do, if they do, I hope they raise a toast to Burt's Coin Laundry and Lounge, and the fine and decent times they had there. I know I do.