Six years ago, I wrote a story about how the University Pub had boxes of Plan B for sale in its vending machine. A few things have changed in America over that time, but my Google AI Overview claims that you can still buy Plan B in Texas. Do your own research on that, because one of the things that has changed since 2019 is my faith in the veracity of anything I read online, which is why I didn’t initially believe the rumor I’d heard that the University Pub was closing. I overheard it from across the bar top, which gave it even less gravity. But when I saw that the news came from Bud Kennedy, I allowed the rumor a lot more weight — like a 98:2 ratio of truth to my refusal to accept reality.
The Pub is closing, baby, that’s a fact. It will open its doors for the last time on Saturday, and the final “last call!” will be yelled around 1:45am on May 18. According to the Star-Telegram, next-door neighbor Buffalo Bros has taken over the lease to expand its dining room. Buffalo Bros owner Jon Bonnell told the paper that he rented the space when it became available, then in a comment on the Pub’s own farewell post on its Instagram account, Bonnell added, “The Pub is not closing because of Buffalo Bros. … We’re sad to see them go as well, been great neighbors for many years.”
I guess you’d have to do your own research on that, as well, and I’m not going to read between any lines, although the other point of that old column about the Pub was that it had beef with the chicken wing restaurant when the latter starting hosting bar trivia on the same night as the Pub (Tuesdays, a detail that, in the fullness of time, feels insignificant yet sticks out in my head — like trivia!). Great neighbors or no, one is taking over the space of the other, and that hurts no matter what.
Indulge me here, because I’m literally copy-pasting from my Plan B story: “I first set foot in the University Pub 20 years ago. It was in August of 1999, the summer I turned 21, right before classes started at TCU. For the next few years, the bar would be the setting for some of my giddiest highs and cringiest lows, across a litany of drunken episodes running the gamut between hilariously triumphant and indisputably lamentable. Balls were busted and noses were tweaked as pitchers were drained and livers were pummeled. I remember perusing the wall of Polaroids that first night, drinking in the drunken revelers who’d been regulars before my time, and I watched with pride as the months turned over and pictures of my own social circle began to fill a section of wall, blurry weekend by blurry weekend. By blurry weekend.
“I raised beers at the Pub on a warm night in May of 2000 to celebrate my diploma. Some 17 months later, on a similarly warm night, I stared at the bottom of a glass in grief because that morning I’d watched the Twin Towers crumble into history. I could go on and on, kicking the can down Memory Lane, a stroll rowdy with laughter and clinking glasses, of jukebox singalongs to Bocefus, Buffett, and Mr. Bojangles, and Jerry Jeff, Def Leppard, and Robert Earl Keen, to boot. I was young. For all I knew, the road did go on forever, and the party would never end.”
Really? “Some 17 months later”? How about “17 months later”? That line isn’t exactly a “low,” but I am cringing all the same. Anyway, I pulled that column up while sitting at the Pub’s bar at the end where the retaining wall is and wondered which Polaroids were newest. How long had the place had had a POS? I noticed the Stars were behind the Jets 0-1, and that reminded me how I watched them lose to the Devils in the 2000 Stanley Cup Finals, standing around that same corner. Add to all those memories above an afternoon in the fall of 2021, when I gathered with a group of fellow Sig Eps to toast the memory of a brother who had died in a freak accident a couple of weeks before. And the night I took my girlfriend there a few weeks after that, because she wanted to see all my college haunts. Those and more rolled around in my head like half-empty Bud bottles in the bottom of a trash can. Friday night was one of those perfect mid-spring evenings, and the combination really took me back.
I feel like at my age, about a month away from 47 and feeling increasingly baffled at how the present has become the way it is, nostalgia is best avoided, because 46 is too old to be crying at the Pub, but if it happened, I reminded myself, it wouldn’t be the first time. And as I pondered that, pushing down memories as if they were peeling strips of wallpaper, I started to tear up.
Thinking about Matt V is what did it, and if he were here, he’d call me a pussy, and I’d tell him that was uppity from someone who liked Erasure as much as he did. I’m sitting there, trying not to cry about my dead friend, Alice in Chains’ “Down in a Hole” started playing, then Pink Floyd’s “Brick in the Wall,” then “It’s Been Awhile” by Stain’d, and on down a playlist of things I probably heard on the jukebox in 2001. I got up to leave, because I was getting too sad.
The Pub, as anyone who went there will tell you, was a TCU staple. “Shithoused since ’81,” reads its famous T-shirt. Buffalo Bros is not too far from their 20th anniversary, so I suppose they’ll have their own legacy-noting shirt as well. I thought about that while sitting across the street from Jon’s Grill, the Berry Street traffic whizzing by, the Stars game deep within the restaurant yet clearly visible on its enormous TVs. It’s not that the TCU area is no longer recognizable, because a lot of the buildings are mostly unchanged, even if their tenants have. But even the tenant turnover is not so much unrecognizable as it is shifted — after all, Jon’s Grille used to be on the same block as the Pub until relatively recently. People I graduated with have kids in college now, also. I texted a couple of those people. We all felt varying degrees of old and sad. But that’s what happens. The world moves on. Kids grow up, go to college, drink cheap beer at a dive bar for a couple of formative years before they get jobs, get married, and have kids, who grow up, go to college, and if they’re lucky, get to go to the same bar their parents got drunk at in the days before they got jobs, got married, and so on. Maybe one of the people in that cycle is you. If it is, I hope you get to grab one more beer at the Pub before it’s gone.
