At first glance, Slick’s Alternative Bar in Northeast Minneapolis might not seem much different from other such establishments. Like most bars, it offers music, dancing, and socializing. But there’s an atmosphere—and an absence—at Slick’s that sets it apart and keeps its patrons coming back for more.
Parts of the bar’s decor offer clues that it isn’t the typical watering hole: coffee cups bearing customers’ names are set in rows; paintings done by patrons hang throughout the room; personalized keepsakes from grateful visitors are all proudly displayed. Along the high walls hang more than 150 cowboy hats contributed by customers who took owners Diane and Bob Slick’s invitation to heart when they said, “Hang your hat and call it home.”
But what really sets Slick’s Alternative Bar apart is what is missing: liquor. Slick’s is one of only two “dry bars” in Minnesota, which helps explain why patrons have come from Wisconsin, Iowa, the Dakotas—even England—just for the company. This nonalcoholic bar and the few like it around the country are fast becoming popular gathering places for recovering alcoholics and nonalcoholics alike.
“This place saved my life,” says one regular at Slick’s. “First the [Alcoholics Anonymous] program saved my life from chemicals. Then the Alternative saved my life from being socially isolated. Without it I might have gone back to chemicals just to fill the terrible emptiness I was feeling.”
In fact, many alcoholics “fall off the wagon” when they return to their old haunts and friends, searching for the social life and atmosphere. While the ideal for recovering alcoholics is to break completely from past habits, including a “bar and booze” mentality that sets them up for another drink, many cannot make such a “clean” jump. For those, say the Slicks, the Alternative is “one step away from the next drink.”
Join The Family
Slick’s has few rules: no one under 18; no alcohol or mood-altering chemicals used, sold, or allowed; a four-dollar cover charge on Fridays and Saturdays (to cover the cost of the live band); and a “come-on-in-join-the-family” attitude that draws 200 to 300 people every weekend night.
Bill Brownlee, nicknamed “Doc,” has been coming to Slick’s for five or six nights a week for the past five years. Perched on a bar stool, he and Bob Slick trade barbs and reminisce. Doc needs little encouragement to tell what the place means to him. Brownlee had been out of treatment about a year, yet missed the social environment of a bar.
“From the first night I walked in, Bob nicknamed me ‘Doc,’ ” he says. “The name and this place have been part of my life ever since. Bob likes to call the Alternative ‘family,’ and I do think that a lot of people like myself who come here all the time really feel like family. It’s a good feeling.”
Doc, like many Alternative customers, attends weekly meetings at AA. “I frequently bring new people [from AA] here because they often say, ‘But how can you have fun anymore if you can’t drink?’ Once they come out here on a Friday or Saturday night and see how much fun people really can have without liquor, they’re surprised and just love to come.”
“The tension, the fights, the pretenses, and the pressures found at places serving alcohol are not at a place like this,” says Steve, another Alternative family member. Dressed in a T-shirt and a black leather vest, with a large tattoo on one arm, he jokes and teases with Diane Slick as he plays pool with another Wednesday-night regular.
“What keeps me coming is the people. I’ve got to be around people; but if I want to stay sober, I have to hang around with sober people. If you hang around sick people, you’re going to get sick too.
“It’s not the bar atmosphere that is the threat to sobriety,” he says. “It’s the people in that alcoholic bar that threaten the recovering alcoholic.”
Respect And Rapport
It doesn’t take long to see the special relationship and respect between customers and owners at the Alternative. On busy nights, it is not unusual to see customers pitch in and help out. “How many other bars would want their clients collecting money, mixing drinks, and waiting tables?” Bob asks. “Not many; but we trust our people.”
Bob’s own past as a drinker, he says, gives him a unique rapport with the recovering alcoholics who come in.
“I’ve been there. I hurt a lot of people. I messed up and I know how it feels to climb out of all of that. I don’t have to go home and look up in a book what these people are talking about. I’ve been the whole nine yards myself,” he says.
Married in 1964, Bob and Diane separated in 1976. Bob’s drinking was the prime reason for the split. They divorced two years later—the same year Bob sought help at Saint Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis, which specializes in chemical dependency treatment.
After Bob’s treatment, Diane and their two children, Lisa and Jim, began to see a real change in him. A renewed courtship began, and in 1980 they were remarried.
“I know it’s because of our faith and the many people who prayed for us—especially my family—that we’re together today.” Neither Diane nor her family lost faith in their prayers for Bob’s recovery from alcoholism and his return to the family.
Early in 1983, Bob’s father suggested they open a dry bar after he had visited one. It seemed to be the answer for the Slicks and for so many others like them. But making the answer a reality was another matter.
At the time, Bob was unemployed. They had little cash or collateral for such a risky venture. But Bob made one visit to see a dry bar in operation and knew it was what he wanted to do.
“Some may talk about being a savior and all that stuff, but it wasn’t that. I really just felt it was something I had to do. I had faith from day one. I didn’t even consider we could fail,” he says. “I honestly felt God wanted this place here for a reason.
“I asked God to give us the strength to do this. If it wasn’t meant to be then that was okay, too. Whatever we were supposed to do, I just wanted the strength and his guidance.”
Not So Grand Opening
The transformation of a former carpet store to a country and western bar took lots of elbow grease and commitment from the whole family. Days, nights, and weekends were spent washing and painting walls, varnishing second-hand tables and a large wooden bar, as well as securing the needed permits to provide food, parking, and live music.
The location hardly seemed promising: the dry bar sat in the middle of a semivacant shopping center, which had two discount liquor stores and a bar at each end of the parking lot. The grand opening held on September 16, 1983, was anything but grand. Each week dragged the Slicks deeper in debt.
“I used to sit on the barstool near the door to take tickets on Friday and Saturday, and I would pray every time I saw a car drive into the shopping center, hoping it was coming to our place and not the liquor stores across the lot,” Diane says.
By the end of January 1984, the place was catching on, the crowds were growing larger, and the owners were no longer seeing “red” at the end of each week’s tally sheet. A big break came when the bar hosted a local gathering for the Jerry Lewis Telethon for Muscular Dystrophy. The televised event brought publicity and customers. Now, the Alternative customers outnumber the other establishments in the center ten to one on weekends.
Each weekend Bob awards “Alternative Medallions” to those who have reached a mark in their sobriety—be it three weeks, three months, years, or “whatever it takes to let them know we support them.” The gold piece bearing the Serenity Prayer on one side and the Alternative horseshoe logo on the other has caused more than a few to choke up in gratitude and is proudly worn by many entering Slick’s.
Bob and Diane are quick to point out that not all of the efforts made by the Alternative family have happy endings. “Most people who come in here,” Bob says, “are working on their problems and are really trying to climb out from under. But there are those who haven’t made that decision to change their lives, and that can be frustrating and depressing to see them fall back time and time again.” Bob, an obvious optimist, concedes, “There are a lot of broken promises, broken hearts, and broken lives that come in here.”
The Slicks may never get rich running the Alternative, but Diane and Bob say that was never their goal. “We wanted to make a difference in peoples’ lives, to offer a little hope, faith, and an alternative to the way they had been living,” Diane says.
“When we opened up we thought it was just going to be a business, but it’s not,” Diane says. “These people are our friends. They would help us, and we them, in any way that we can.”
“And the reward of seeing even a few make it,” Bob adds, “means more than anything money could buy.”
By Mary Ann Kuharski, a free-lance writer in Minneapolis.
