RIP Codmother

Welcome back to the Pictures of Dives substack! This week guest writer Garrett writes an ode to his favorite bar in Washington DC. PoD will be back next week.

There’s a conflict in the city I live in between the old “DC” and the new “Washington.” “Washington” is the National Mall, the K Street lobbying firms, the Capitol building and the Lincoln Memorial. “DC,” however, is the punk music, and the theater, and the empanada restaurants. It’s the people who have lived here for decades who have to pick up and move further and further from the city center as rent prices go up, only to have their houses razed and replaced by huge glass condo buildings that nobody lives in. Those buildings are “Washington” too, and day by day, block by block, they’re pushing out a DC that’s fighting desperately to stay alive and thriving.

There’s a lot of examples of this in the city, but one of the biggest is the U Street Corridor, the beating heart of DC before the riots in the 60s, slowly built back by its residents in the years since. This is really skipping over decades (if you’re interested in DC history I can’t recommend Asch and Musgrove’s Chocolate City enough) but by the 2010s U Street had seen massive redevelopment as a desirable neighborhood for the city’s young professional class and for the most part, its drinking establishments reflected that change. I don’t hate every bar on the street, but while one may have tacos and another may have 100 beer taps it’s a solid bet they’ll all be expensive, and the music will more or less be the same, to the point where there’s few differences between them at the end of the day.

Except, of course, for the Codmother.

Codmother didn’t have to die, but like many dives in this country during the pandemic it was murdered by negligence. The bar - a one room, one entrance basement - never stood a chance, even though the thought of going back to it “after we get back to normal” carried me through some of the more depressing periods of early pandemic. It wasn’t old DC by any means, but it was way too weird to really be new Washington, either. It was too committed to its shtick and its extremely cheap Schlitz cans, rising rents on U Street be damned. Technically an English pub, with fish and chips and other fried foods on the menu in the sunlight hours, by 10pm on weekends Codmother transformed into DC’s most irreverent and bizarre institution. Surrounded on all sides by bars blasting top 40 remixes, the bar instead relied on a consistent playlist of wedding and karaoke music to bring in a devoted and loyal crowd. 

Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy” was my personal favorite Codmother song. “Like a Prayer” was another big hit. “Mr. Brightside.” “Stacy’s Mom.” “Don’t Stop Believin’.” “Ironic.” “Since U Been Gone.” “Shout,” with all of the requisite dropping to the floor at “a little bit softer now.” You get the picture.

By 11:30 Codmother was often already in the throes of chaos. There was no sitting at the bar’s six or seven tables - they were all pushed to the wall and people were standing on them. The walls and the ceilings, wiped clean during the day, were covered in chalk. The line at the C-shaped bar was four deep, bartenders pouring PBR and jagerbombs and the house whiskey (easily the most disgusting I have ever, and will ever, drink in my life). I have a very poor sense of smell, but a friend describes the scent of the place as a mix of piss, vomit, and musk.

By midnight, after every song, the chant for Lustra’s “Scotty Doesn’t Know” got louder. Just a room full of strangers, crammed into a small dark little bar, screaming their heads off for the song from Eurotrip. Eventually one of the bartenders would give in and queue it up, and the place absolutely lost its collective mind at the opening riff. After the song the chant continued and never let up, continuing the cycle until the lights came on. I don’t know why everyone wanted “Scotty Doesn’t Know” so badly, but I do know that no matter what night it was and who was there, the bar would chant and chant and chant for it.

But beyond the aesthetics and pure diveyness of the bar itself, Codmother brought its people together for a night into something of a family, as if we were all invited to the same party. As loud as the place was I never had a better time with strangers than at Codmother. I never saw any fights. I went there with my best friends from college, my best friends I met in the city, my girlfriend. It didn’t matter the makeup of the group by the time the tables were shoved to the wall - Codmother just had that charm that melted away the inhibitions and got you to forget about shitty stuff for a little bit, as all the best bars do. 

In May the staff posted a GoFundMe, asking for help from its family of longtime patrons. 

“We applied for the small business recovery grant and we were only given $1,000 to stay afloat, compared to the astronomical amounts corporate america received,” the post said. “We hate asking for help from the family we’ve built over the years. We’re all figuring this out together, and it is obviously not your job. But times really are tough. We had hoped that this wouldn’t last quite so long, but now it is projected to go on even longer.”

The fund hit its goal, but the pandemic, obviously, went on longer. Codmother finally succumbed to its injuries in October. It would maybe be back, the owners said, in 2022, as a place where people could bring their families, which means it’s never coming back, not really.

There may be bars like Codmother in other cities, but I don’t live in other cities. I live in this one, where my home loses just a little bit of its charm every day. Codmother was just a little bit of something different; daring enough to do its own thing in a neighborhood bit by bit becoming more sanitized and boring. It was nice to have Codmother there as something you could count on. What would have been a greater show of victory over COVID-19 than a triumphant return to standing on a rickety table screaming for “Scotty Doesn’t Know” in a stranger’s face?

Anyway, we don’t get to do that now and it really sucks. I will really miss the Codmother and I hope that once this actually does “end” that someone takes a little bit of risk and does something like it again, because it was really great.