Singles Going Steady: Stevie Wonder, "I Was Made to Love Her"

Dave Chandler was on time like clockwork: He came in to Archie's Alley everyday at five-o'clock when we opened. Usually, he was waiting at the door to the marina because he liked to feed the ducks along the Olentangy River, but sometimes he was already inside the bar, head on the table, taking a nap, waiting for one of us to unlock the TV cabinet and give him the remote. I don't remember when Dave started coming to the bar, he was just always there. And everyone seemed to know the routine, as it concerned him: Dave comes in, you give him the remote, a beer, and a cup of water. If he wants to change the channel, great. If he wants another beer, fine.

Dave was retired. I asked him once from what, and he said he'd been a schoolteacher. He said he'd roamed around the south in the sixties with other teachers, looking for jobs, but it had been slow going because he was black. "Chasing education. We were chasing education," he said with a laugh. "I'm still chasing, it man." I loved his laugh, but it freaked me out when he opened his mouth that wide because one of Dave's front teeth was a tooth no more. In its place was a tiny metal rod. Maybe there had been a tooth around it at one time, but if so, it was very long ago.

There was no smoking in the bar because it was a campus building, but it never stopped Dave. Time and time again, Chaz, one of the student building managers, would come down and say, "Dave, you know you can't smoke in here." And Dave would say, "Right, right," and stub it out, only to relight it as soon as Chaz left. After a while, we started smoking in there, too, but when other people tried it—customers, people who weren't our friends—Dave was our no-smoking ambassador, yelling at them, "Hey! You can't smoke in here! S'matter with you, knuckleheads?" They would look around, like, "The fuck?" because as he said this, Dave kept smoking, as did we. But they always put out their cigarettes.

We played music in the bar all the time, which, given how possessive of the TV Dave was, you'd think he'd want to hear it, as well as see it, but no. He just wanted to stare at the picture from time to time, no matter that there was no closed-captioning. He simply liked having it on. And when he wasn't watching it, he was reading one of many newspapers he always brought with him. And if he got bored with both, he'd comment on whatever CD was blaring away in the background. "What's this noise?" He'd ask? "It's The Pixies, Dave," or "It's Gang Starr." He'd smash up his face and say, "In my day"—and yes, he really did start sentences like that—"music was music and funk was funk. And this is garbage! Don't you have something with soul? Some real music?" And so, we started bringing things we thought he would like. I played Stevie Wonder's "I Was Made to Love Her," one evening and Dave lit up—or, as much as someone like Dave could light up—and said, "Ha! Yeah! That's some real music, ain't it?"

On football Saturdays, when the bar opened early, Dave would come down and bring us breakfast. He volunteered at a soup kitchen in the mornings and was always bringing leftover things like, a food-service-size box of Pop Tarts. "What kind of Pop Tarts you like?" he'd ask, "We got everything." Or a huge bowl of scrambled eggs. Or some candy bars.

And this is how it went, every week, for two-and-a-half-years.

After I graduated, I worked at Archie's Alley for one more quarter while I got my shit together. There were rumors that the Student Union folks were looking to close down the bar because nobody ever came in and "profits are excessively low compared with the volume of alcoholic beverages consumed each quarter," i.e., we gave away all the beer to our friends and kept all the money as tips. A new manager started working there and he was not having any of Dave's shenanigans. "Dude," we said, "he's an old man! He's been coming here forever. Can't you cut him a break?" "No," we were told, "We're trying to turn a profit and we can't have any freeloaders. And don't you guys know there's a no smoking policy for all campus buildings?"

Eventually, probably after being denied entrance to the building one too many times, Dave stopped showing up. And not too long after, I quit the bar and got a real job. And shortly after that, Archie's Alley closed, and based on what I can—or in this case, can't—find on Ohio State's Web site, it never reopened.

The whole reason I wrote this entry is because I was sorting through my CDs and came across that Stevie Wonder one I so often took to the bar, which made me think of Dave. I wonder whatever happened to him, if he's even still alive. I'd like to tell him how much I enjoyed his company all those years. In lieu of that, this is my little love note to Dave Chandler: Hope you're still chasing education, wherever you are.

Stevie Wonder, "I Was Made to Love Her"
From the album, Motown Legends
Released Spring of 1995
Purchased at Used Kids Records, Columbus, Ohio