Clayton street shoots through downtown Athens, Georgia like an clogged artery, bringing into central downtown both the oxygen of consumers and the more primordial plasma of wares to be sold, but always doing so in a congested manner. There are bars, clothing stores, a few restaurants, music stores and more bars. Clayton street alone has fourteen bars, and most of them are packed on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. (Thursday nights exist as a kind of strained extension of the weekend, probably due to the fact that liquor and beer cannot be sold on Sundays in the state of Georgia.) It has been this way for hundreds of years. In the old black and white pictures of downtown hidden in the Spaghetti Store or Rocky’s one can see the kegs lined up in stacks on horse drawn carts before Prohibition.

The Clayton channel is different from the veins and arteries in a body though, because it accomplishes both tasks of push and pull. On any given afternoon, an onlooker can find the push of at least two beer trucks and a UPS van parked along its five block stretch. By five, the business men and women filter out of town, dispersing from the banks and shops, sometimes stopping in for happy hour somewhere before being pushed into the suburbs. There is a moment of calm before the storm then. A quiet afternoon requiem settles in around the dogwoods, oaks and old brick buildings before Clayton adjusts its flow and a sucking sound starts. Around seven, the push of the streets becomes a pull, and the drinkers and smokers and partyers of the evening begin to trickle in. By ten or eleven o’ clock, the downpour has begun. All parking in the city vanishes. The lights go down and the fun begins. The bars fill up and spill out onto the street as twenty-somethings in flocks of friends, gaggles of smartly dressed girls, and herds of late night gentleman thrill seekers, migrate from favored hang-out to favored hang-out.

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