THE BAR

PART I

ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE

My life was going nowhere, and so I figured I'd make it worse by buying a bar. Things had stalled out and I was badly in need of a change. Honestly though, it didn't look all that hard: all you did was hand people drinks all day and collect the money afterwards. Even I couldn't screw that up. There was nothing to it, I'd just sit back and rake in all the dough. It was going to be a breeze.

First I read a book on how to run a bar. They talked about inventory management and the size of the glasses to use and all sorts of other bullshit, I was still sure it was going to be easy. Then I started looking around in the papers to see what was available. There wasn't much going on nearby and so I broadened my search. I saw an advertisement for a place out in Denver which was affordable and had live music, that sounded pretty good. I booked myself a flight and flew out to see how it looked. It was a dive bar, dingy and dark and just the way I liked it. I went home, called the guy up and told him I wanted it. He sounded surprised.

I put my house up for sale, threw all my stuff into a truck and moved out to Denver. The apartment was in a place called Aurora, in a fairly working class part of town. The exterior was made entirely of wood and it was a bit odd-looking, it almost resembled a ski lodge or something. The building was surrounded by pine trees and there was a swimming pool in the courtyard which was always in shade, and consequently too cold. In back of the complex there sprawled a spacious public park with paths and benches and things. It wasn't paradise or anything but it would do the job.

I went to meet with the current owner at the lawyer's office downtown. They walked me through the details and showed me some paperwork. They were being shady about the incorporation part, they wanted to keep me on the hook for any liabilities. And the rent alone was enough to make your head spin: I had no idea how I was supposed to sell enough beer to cover all that. It didn't sound like such a great deal and I had the vague suspicion that they were taking me for a ride, but who cared, I was ready to jump in anyway. All I knew was that I wanted a bar - buy it, and the rest would follow. Or not. If it didn't work out, I'd just walk the street like a bum for the rest of my life. They stared at me with their reptilian eyes as I signed on the dotted line. I was now the proud owner of a fucking bar.

A few days later I had to go to the town hall to fill out some more paperwork. It was an endless series of documents and signatures: there was the transfer of the liquor license, the rental agreement and a bunch of other stuff, I barely know what most of it was. I was already beginning to feel like I'd just sold my soul to the devil, and it was a most unsettling sensation. Afterwards I went to take a little drive round town. Denver was nice, it agreed with me. To the west you could see the snowcapped Rockies rising up in the distance, right from the city streets you could see it. It was utterly strange being out west. There were almost no trees, the wind was blowing all the time and there was way too much open space. I felt like I'd landed on the moon.

On Sunday night I went down to the bar to do a little spywork, to check things out and see how business was going. It wasn't packed but there was a decent crowd in there. They were having an open mic and some crazy chick was up on the stage, swinging around on the mic stand wailing away unintelligibly like some sort of nut, like a whirling dervish stuck in slow motion. When she was finished, she came over and sat down next to me at the bar. She told me her name was Katie and I told her mine. She had a weathered face and pockmarked cheeks, she wasn't all that good-looking but I didn't really care. Her body looked all right.

Katie was easy, she didn't need too much encouragement. Within an hour we were headed back to my place. The moving truck hadn't arrived yet so the rooms were all empty - no furniture of any kind, no couch, no bed, no nothing. I pulled out a sleeping bag and an air mattress and threw them on the floor.

"Sorry, I'm still moving in," I said. "That's the best I can do for now." It looked suspicious as hell, I was aware of that.

Katie looked around the room nervously. "Is there a camera in here, or something?"

"No, no cameras," I said.

She laid down on her back and I settled on top of her. I kissed her neck and sucked on her tits but I was too drunk, nothing was happening. I went down to play around with her feet but still no dice, the situation hadn't improved. I got up and went to the fridge instead.

"Want a beer?" I asked her.

There was to be an initial delay before I could take over the bar, final details to iron out and all that, so in the meantime I went looking around for things to do. The moving truck had arrived and I had all my stuff now. I'd made an appointment to see a dominatrix but had gotten so tied up with unpacking the boxes that I'd forgotten all about it and missed the session completely. I called the girl up to apologize.

"Don't bother calling us again," she said, and hung up the phone. I was burning bridges already, something I was good at.

There were still a few days left and so I figured I'd take a little road trip and do some exploring. I was closer to Mexico than I'd been in a while, I figured maybe I'd give that a try. I hopped in the car and headed south and about six hundred miles later I was in El Paso, sitting in a motel room only a few steps from the border. I got a good night's sleep and then made my way across on foot. I'd done this before, and so knew from past experience - there was always something of an ominous overtone whenever you walked into Mexico, like something was about to happen to you at any moment. I cleared security, walked down the footpath and eased my way into Juarez. I'd never been there before but had heard some pretty bad things about it. The drug cartels were supposedly everywhere, people were being killed in the streets in broad daylight. And the reality resembled the rumor, the town was a mess. The streets were full of rubble and debris and everything was covered in a thick layer of dust, the place was like a warzone. I felt decidedly unsafe, as uneasy as I'd ever been, and as I moved about going from one spot to another I found myself looking over my shoulder the entire time. To the Mexicans it was just another day in paradise, they were all going about their business as if nothing was wrong. It took guts to live in a place like that. Then again, they didn't really know any better, which probably made it easier.

I slowly made my way along the main drag, 16th of September or something it was called, then sat down at an outdoor patio to have a beer and get my bearings. It was part of a little open square and there was a fair bit of activity there. A big fat gringo was sitting at a table with two local girls on his lap. He was Mr. Big Shot, drunk and ordering people around, and for a moment I thought I saw a gun strapped to his belt. Then I watched as a grungy-looking fellow across the street started pulling bottles of liquor out from under a sewer grate. It was the five o'clock rush and there were people milling everywhere but no one seemed to even take notice. It was the fucking Wild West down there, I couldn't decide if I liked it or not. The people all looked indifferent, harried, worn to the bone and tired of the routine. I supposed it wasn't all that different from the States in that regard.

After a couple of beers, I went down the street until I came to a large dance club of some sort. The music was blaring loudly but it was completely empty, I was the only customer in there. I ordered a beer and stood by myself sipping from the bottle, turning my back to lean against the bar. The bartender noticed my sullen stare and came over to reassure me.

"Cheer up, this is Mexico," he said, giving me a pat on the back.

It didn't help. No one else had shown up, it was way too early yet. I got out of there and went to find a more suitable place to get drunk. I was a solitary creature in general but I could drink by myself at the motel if I wanted, this wasn't my idea of a good time. I ducked into a hole-in-the-wall place that had Mexican music blasting the doors off the hinges, squeezed myself in at the bar and managed to get a bottle of Sol. It was packed with people and way too loud in there - I was suffocating, I could barely hear myself think. I went back outside, continuing down the road until I found a quieter spot.

By nine or ten I was back out on the street, wandering without purpose, like some kind of local bum. I passed a pool hall and went in to check it out. A young kid came up to me and asked if I wanted to play, I said sure. The guys in there were a surly bunch, all the dead beady black eyes watching me as I bent over to take my shots. I felt surrounded, outnumbered. The kid was friendly enough though and so I stayed there drinking until midnight. When I came out I was hammered. One of the desperados caught wind of it and came over to test the waters. He was babbling in Spanish and I had no idea what he was saying, but I figured he wanted a dollar or something - what the hell, I'd give it to him. I got my wallet out and drunkenly started flipping through it, pulling out a twenty dollar bill instead of a single. The guy's face lit up like a Christmas tree and he made a grab for it. I resisted, and now we each had hold of one end, he pulled and I pulled and the bill ripped in half. Now each of us had a ten.

The desperado scampered off. It took a second for it to sink in, what had just happened. Now I was pissed off. I stumbled back towards the border ranting and raving, cursing the evil fates intent on assailing me, my long hair flying everywhere, in my face and eyes, yelling and screaming like a lunatic the entire way. I was feeling wild, deranged. I was the one in the vulnerable spot but it was the locals who were most likely terrified. I made it back to the border in one piece, having sobered up just enough to trundle myself through the checkpoint without any further trouble, located the motel again and went inside to sleep it off.

After Mexico, I drove out to California to see my aunt and uncle in LA, shooting down the dry desolate highway with the river on my left for days without end, until one night the gaudy, smog-rimmed lights of the city rose up on the horizon to greet me once more. Los Angeles was the same as I'd left it, it had nothing for me. My Uncle Ed was a great guy though, one of my favorite people in the family. He was a lawyer by trade, witty and smart and yet mellow at the same time - a mellow lawyer, if you could believe that. But it was true. They lived in a huge fancy house just outside of Hollywood, with a sweeping foyer and a Porsche in the garage and a nice pool in back, all the trappings of wealth, a real success story out there in all that bright Cali sunshine. I got the allure of the place, for sure, but for some reason had never been able to make it work for myself. Too many Hollywood types out there, too many loudmouths and assholes. Too much fucking smog and traffic too. Oh, and football games on at ten o' clock in the morning, there was that on top of it. I paid my aunt and uncle a short visit and then pointed the car east again, this time to blaze a path through Vegas on the way to the Rockies. I shot through Vegas without stopping; I had even less use for that place than LA.

At the base of the mountains, I made a little pit stop just outside a town called Grand Junction. There was a small green park with picnic tables there and so I got out to eat my sandwich and rest for a spell. A pair of homeless people were sitting in the grass nearby, a man and a woman, a couple by the looks of it. They came over to join me, scruffy-looking characters lugging backpacks and swaddled in dirty clothes. Both had bad teeth and smelled a little but they were friendly enough and I was glad to have the company.

The couple settled in and began to tell me a little about themselves. They'd been trying to hitch a ride to California to see the guy's sick father but hadn't had any luck yet. The girl was originally from England, where a drunk driver had killed her husband and kids a long time ago; she'd returned the favor with a baseball bat and done ten years in jail. She'd been raped and beaten a few times while in prison (she showed me the scar on her forehead to prove it) and suffered no end of other assorted trials and tribulations. After she got out, she'd hitchhiked her way around Europe for a while, then moved to the States to make a go of it there. The story stalled out at that point but obviously things had taken another wrong turn or two along the way. They told me they'd tried sleeping in the park the other night and the cops had woken them up in the morning and thrown them in jail for ten days straight. The sheriff was a real cowboy, 'we don't like vagrants around here' he'd told them. They'd been in lockdown twenty-one hours a day while in jail, being allowed to spend the other three walking in circles in a little concrete box with a small window on the sky. It was a seriously sad story. Just as they were wrapping it up, the sprinklers came on in the park and sprayed us all down as we sat there at the picnic table.

"They come on every few hours at night so that no one can sleep here," they told me.

They said they hadn't eaten in a day or more and so I went to the car and brought out some leftovers for them to eat. Then I told them I had to go, wished them well and got back in the car to begin the long arduous climb to the pass. The sun was beginning to set, I wanted to get back to Denver before it got real late. But the homeless couple stayed on my mind for quite some time. I thought about them all the way home. I wondered what they would do next, what would happen to them, how many more nights in jail were in their near future. I found myself hating the world just a little bit more, all the comfortable snide bastards hiding away in their homes, sneering at things through the curtains. On and on I drove and all I saw were the endless miles of barbed wire fences, unbroken lines stretching in all directions as far as the eye could see, the whole world cordoned off and divvied up, bought and sold, everything forbidden, forever reserved for someone else, the masters of the universe lording over their limitless frontiers and daring anyone to step over any given line. And there in the park were my new friends, huddled miserably on the one tiny patch of land still available to them, and being tormented on a daily basis for having the nerve to try to go to sleep. Who was I to try to fix the world, but some things were pretty black and white. The human race needed a serious bitch-slapping.

I went back and wasted some more time. Wandering around, I'd come across a thrift store and bought myself a couple of shirts, included a purple thing with an open neck that looked kind of like a shroud or something. I'd been wearing the crap I'd gotten for Christmas for practically my entire life, it felt good to be dressing myself for a change.

A few days later, they handed me the keys and I could finally get started. The bar was on the outskirts of town, in a strip mall off of a busy multi-lane road, next to a beauty salon and a motorcycle dealer and right across from a fried chicken place. The location wasn't great, it was too far from downtown, and I was worried about where the crowds would come from. I hoped that the saving grace would be the apartment complex across the street, which was like a housing project full of bottom-rung degenerates: I figured they might drink a lot, and all they'd have to do was cross the street to get there.

The bar was dark and dingy and it smelled, it was a real piece of shit. I liked dive bars but it was one of the worst I'd seen. In all honesty, my first choice might have been something just a little less extreme - I'd envisioned a peaceful little place somewhere where I could play DJ up in the booth, spin the music I liked all day long while the guys down below took care of business, some quirky little hideaway where anyone could come and relax, no matter who they were or what they looked like, a communal experience of sorts, a social experiment if you like. This was decidedly different. For one thing it was so dark in there you could barely see what you were doing. The circular island bar dominating the center of the room looked like it was on the verge of collapse, and the barstools were even worse, they creaked horribly and leaned back at obscene angles, threatening to dump all over the floor anyone foolish enough to actually try sitting in one of them. At the far end of the room sat a stage where the bands would play, a dark cavelike space littered with monitors and mic stands, complete with overhead light machine and adjacent sound booth, the only area of the bar that looked even remotely serviceable. Scattered around the room was a haphazard collection of rickety tables, chairs and stools in varying stages of disrepair. Off in the corner a pool table had been squeezed in too close to the wall, rendering it basically unplayable, alongside of which sat a foosball table maintained sporadically by some dirty young kid with blond dreadlocks and a mangy look about him who was known to disappear into the bathroom from time to time to drink his own urine (they'd warned me about this kid in advance). The scant lighting provided almost exclusively by a series of tacky fluorescent beer signs strung along the walls illuminated spots of graffiti here and there, at least in the spots where the paint hadn't yet flaked away. Everything about the place reeked of decay and dysfunction. It was a dreary dismal scene, one of the most depressing things I'd ever seen. And the basement was even worse, you should have seen the basement. It took the chaos to an entirely different level - a sprawling space absolutely filled to the brim with useless crap, like some kind of graveyard for inanimate objects, dilapidated furniture covered in dusty canvas tarps, old broken-down appliances, bar supplies, building materials, truck wheels, paintings, sculptures: you name it, it was down there. The kegs were down there as well, a series of them all neatly lined up in a refrigerated closet, you had to weave your way through all the crap in order to get to them. From the minute I set eyes on the mess, I knew that I'd never sort it all out, that it was all just destined to stay as it lay. I stood there on the first day, looking around, wondering what exactly I'd gotten myself into. What the hell had I been thinking, I must have been crazy to have even considered trying this.

The bar was going to live or die by the music it brought in, that much was clear from the outset. Live music was mainly on Friday and Saturday nights, mostly metal and punk - not my kind of music, but everything couldn't be perfect. It was going to be a pretty rough crowd. The previous owners had experimented with certain things, they'd tried this and that, they'd tried a hip hop night at one point but the crowd had gotten even rougher and they'd had to shut it down. I couldn't imagine anything working in a shithole like this, to be honest, I mean you had to be an animal to want to drink in a place this bad. Like I said I liked dive bars and all but there were limits to human tolerance and this place was approaching a few of them.

It was an intriguing cast of characters down at the bar. The previous owners were Mel and Cristy. Mel had agreed to hold my hand for a time until I got my legs under me and so he was still going to be in the picture for a while. He was a fat dumpy Jew with limp hair, a swarthy complexion and a nasal whiny voice. It almost hurt to hear him speak, it was so annoying, I cringed whenever he did it. His wife Cristy was short and frenetic and had rough weathered skin and wild crazy eyes and looked much older than her years. Cristy liked her drugs. She was clearly unstable, the word was that she'd once been in a mental institution. One night at the bar she'd attacked someone with a knife. She'd been cutting up lemon slices for drinks, one of the locals had made a comment she didn't care for and so she'd lashed out and stabbed him in the hand, like a viper snapping at prey. And from the sound of it, Mel was almost as bad, or at least complicit in the overall strangeness - one of the bartenders had gotten a look at their apartment once and said it was an unholy mess, it looked like they were full-blown hoarders or something.

The main bartenders were Ryan and Kayla, who were married. There was also some guy named Mick who I hadn't met yet. Ryan was a stocky, pale-skinned kid with a blond mohawk, who was originally from Philly and had played bass in a band at some point in the not-so-distant past. Kayla was large and loud. Everything about her was oversized, she was big-boned and large-featured and made a whole lot of noise. Both were big fans of punk and dressed the part. The punks had a uniform of their own that was almost as fastidiously well-arranged as the one the corporate stooges wore, but they wanted to have their cake and eat it too, they wanted to be the dropouts and misfits of the world whilst still playing their version of dress-up at the same time. The whole thing just looked ridiculous to me. Everyone had their game to play, this was just another one. And the feeling appeared mutual. Ryan and Kayla took one look at me and I could immediately tell they weren't impressed. I was a young kid like they were, with my hair halfway down my back, and in my flannel shirt and jeans I didn't exactly look like I meant business, I didn't exactly inspire confidence. Furthermore I was offering very little input, right off the bat, as I basically had none. They could both see right away that I was going to be useless. If they were looking to me for any sort of guidance or leadership, they were coming to the wrong place. Hopefully everything would work out fine, but if it did I certainly wasn't going to be the deciding factor, at least not in any positive sense. We were all at the mercy of the forces around us. What else was new.

I'd inherited the bar starting on a Wednesday. The first couple of nights were slow and then it was time for Friday night. I met the rest of the crew as they came filtering in through the door. There was Greg the sound man, a big burly guy with a beard and glasses, a bit on the quiet side. He had the look of a frat boy a few years past his prime and didn't really fit in with the rest, but they seemed to like him all the same. Then there was the bouncer, a kid fresh out of school named Lenny. He was pudgy and a bit small for the job, I thought, but I didn't say anything about it. Maybe he did karate in his spare time. And there was Matt the doorman, a tall rangy kid with tats on his neck and giant holes in his earlobes who played drums in a local metal band, who was also a small time coke dealer on the side (or so they told me) and had been Cristy's main connection back in the day. A ragtag band if I'd ever seen one, to be sure. I wondered what would become of this motley stew.

Mel was there that night, ready to oversee things. Just before the crowds had come rushing in, he'd said to me, "Are you ready to do this thing?" It had put the fear of God in me - up until that point, I hadn't really been nervous. Perhaps this wasn't going to be as easy as I'd originally thought. However, I reassured myself by remembering that if Mel could make it work, then so could I. It seemed like a reasonable yardstick by which to predict my own success, at least in my mind.

Very quickly the festivities got started in earnest. People were pouring in through the door, the band began to play and the night was soon buzzing. The bar was busy and the money was rolling in, drinks were flowing and everyone was having a good time. It was a beehive of activity in there, it became overwhelming after awhile and so I stepped outside for a moment to clear my head. I stood in the parking lot, taking a breath, staring up at the stars. Maybe this just might work out after all, I said to myself. There hadn't been much hope in my life in a long time, the feeling was decidedly unfamiliar. The rent was still high though, we were going to have to have an awful lot of good nights. I was shaken from my reverie by the sounds of scuffling coming from over by the front door. To my astonishment, Ryan and Mel had gotten into a fight. Ryan was screaming in Mel's face as his wife tried to restrain him from behind. Kayla managed to get Ryan in an awkward wrestling hold and began slowly dragging him backwards, away from the scene.

"It's what he wants! Don't you see it's what he wants??" she was crying. It was all such high drama, I wondered what in the world it was all about.

The next morning, they explained it to me. The story was that Greg, Ryan and Kayla had been in the process of trying to buy the bar themselves before I had shown up on the scene, and now they felt betrayed that Mel had gone and sold it to someone else behind their backs. It was a whole lot of additional bullshit I really didn't need. However, it opened up some future possibilities.

"Don't worry, I've got money," Greg told me. "If you ever want to turn this place over again, I'll be right here waiting."

It was nice having a backup plan of sorts, in the event that things went south. It took a little of the pressure off, I supposed.

Saturday night was more of the same. The band was decent, the crowd was good and the money kept coming in. The days passed as we all started to settle into our new roles. Mel wasn't going to be around much anymore, that went without saying. Ryan and Kayla told me that Mel and Cristy had chased a lot of people off over the course of time with their increasingly erratic behavior, and that we needed to put an 'Under New Management' sign up over the door. I said it sounded like a good idea.

Things were slow during the week. Mondays and Tuesdays were dead quiet, then little by little things began to pick up as the weekend approached. Ryan and Kayla had a sizeable circle of punk friends that came by the bar to hang out with them. They were an angry bunch who hated the world and wanted everyone to know, who went around posturing aggressively and sneering at anything that moved. They strutted around in their shitty clothes playing their shitty music, puffing their chests out for each other, it was all rather tiresome - they were trying so hard to stand apart from the others and there they were, all looking exactly the same. It was just another routine to me, another code of conduct, but whatever, they could do what they liked as long as they were spending money. The problem was, they weren't: these kids would come in, spend three dollars on a beer and sit there watching it for the rest of the night. I didn't consider it a terribly good sign of things to come. Three bucks apiece wasn't going to get me very far.

Kayla was the matriarch of the group. She watched over her brood like a mother hen as they sat around drinking their cans of PBR. I got the impression that she hadn't had much of a family life growing up and that this was some sort of belated surrogate for her. She would come in wearing a T-shirt with 'Fuck you, ya fuckin fuck' plastered all over the front, which was supposed to be funny. A real classy broad. She and Ryan were know-it-alls, the rest of the world was shit and they were the only ones who'd figured everything out. On top of it, they were musical snobs, as well - if it wasn't some discordant snarling punk-sounding thing, it was pure garbage and they made sure you knew it. Kayla told me with pride that Ryan had once been a bassist in a touring band, but that they'd screwed him over some songs he'd written and now he'd forsaken the industry entirely, he'd quit in protest and refused to engage anymore. She said he was the best bassist ever, that no one else held a candle to him, that he was better than all the others combined. Ryan stood nearby listening modestly, neither confirming nor denying. He didn't seem like such a bad guy all in all, he had a quiet modesty about him, a certain laid-back blue collar style. His wife however was a different story.

On the off nights, we'd sit around killing time. Kayla had invented the 'dollar shot': you would put a dollar down, she'd read the first three digits off the serial number on the bill, she would use the numbers to choose three different liquors from the shelf and then mix them all together in one nasty rancid shot which you'd have to slug down. The three liquors were invariably the three that went together the worst. It was always tough to get down, and more than once I almost brought the whole thing back up. When not doing shots, we sat around, shooting the shit, watching TV, listening to tunes, eating bad bar pizza. There were nights when the time absolutely crawled but we made it through all the same.

From the outset, I'd planned on doing some bartending myself (at least part time), but I quickly discovered that, on top of the fact that I didn't know what I was doing, I had little or no motivation to stand back there all day and serve people drinks. So I decided to leave that to Ryan and Kayla and just sit at the bar drinking beer instead. It was a far easier job. The third bartender was a tough old guy named Mick who was constantly in a bad mood. You could tell he didn't want to be there, and sure enough, after a while he just stopped showing up. Ryan and Kayla told me they knew this other kid who could take his place. The new kid was named Don. He was a rather odd-looking fellow who dyed his hair red and green and who was supposedly the singer in one of the goofy punk outfits the others were so fond of. Ryan told me Don's story, it sounded like he'd had a pretty rough time of it - he'd been arrested, gone homeless for a time, done a lot of drugs, the whole nine yards. He was another lost soul, just the sort Kayla loved to take under her wing and add to her collection of misfits and castaways. Don had a spaced-out way about him, a far off look in his eye placed there most likely by the aforementioned trauma he'd suffered. He'd clearly had it with the real world and was now content to lurk permanently along the fringes. I was of a similar mind, but I'd never been on the street before so we were coming from somewhat different places. We were never going to be kindred spirits or anything but at least it seemed like we'd get along fine.

Don had his own circle of buddies who started making appearances on a regular basis. He had this freaky alternative stalker chick who followed him around everywhere, who liked to sit at the bar for hours and just ogle him while he worked. One night the stalker chick was there and she'd brought a friend with her. The bar was completely deserted that night, it was just the four of us sitting there. This girl was the sister of someone Don knew, one of his good friends, and she was about the cutest thing I'd ever seen, all wispy curves and long silken hair, with a pair of bewitching almond eyes that just about took your breath away. The girl was sitting next to me and occasionally she'd throw an oblique glance over her shoulder to get a peek at me, but as usual I was powerless to move an inch. I was cursed that way, I'd never been able to function properly in the presence of really good-looking women. She sat there tormenting me for an hour or so and then the stalker chick got up and the two of them left together. I always felt a momentary pang of agonized despair whenever a girl like that made her exit, a second's teetering panic as the air rushed back into the room.

So things progressed. One day led into the next. The bands were going to be something of a challenge, I could see that in advance. I was going to be doing all the bookings myself and just that fact alone gave me a fair bit of heartburn. Mel had given me a big binder full of contacts and I was going to have to call the bands up in order to get them to come play. It sounded like a daunting task, and it was: I sat there on the phone for hours, endlessly cycling through the list and getting nowhere fast. The reception was decidedly lukewarm, and with so many slots to fill I had to pretty much take whatever I could get. The Fillmore, we were not. East nor West.

The bands came and went on the weekends, two or three a night on average. Most of them were terrible but a few of them were okay. There was one band that Mel had taken a particular liking to, who used no distortion at all and had a nice clean sound and who were actually quite good. But the majority of them were mediocre at best, and to top it off they were a bunch of complete pricks, prima donnas who strutted around like rock stars while playing to crowds of four or five, three of whom were friends and family. They pranced and preened like peacocks, feathers waving in the air, they posed for the adoring masses, they demanded the royal treatment, expecting to be coddled and catered to, no extravagance spared, free shots all night long and all the attention we could lavish on them. Most were loud as shit, and every now and then one of them would try to really blow the doors off - the people at the bar would start using cocktail napkins for earplugs, the regulars would run for cover, even Kayla had her fingers in her ears. The whole thing was a free-for-all, and I was just along for the ride.

I did the sound myself on the off nights, even though I had no idea how to do it. Greg had given me a crash course one night, quickly spinning me through all the twisty knobs and buttons and things, but it hadn't really helped. The levels were always all wrong and there was feedback all over the place and the whole thing was just a certified disaster. However given the fact that the crowds were virtually nonexistent, it didn't really matter too much.

We had a regular act on Monday nights, a reggae band that wasn't all that bad. The leader was a tall skinny black dude they called Slim, with giant bug eyes and an ever-present smile that practically split his face in two. The drummer was pretty damn good, he slapped away at the toms and cymbals and put down a good Bob Marley beat, but the keyboard player they were breaking in couldn't play to save his life, and he exacerbated the problem by turning up way too loud. If you could ignore the keyboards, they actually sounded all right, but in spite of that fact no one ever came to see them - usually it was just me, the band and the bartenders. My presence in the booth wasn't helping matters any, that went without saying. I sat up there, fucking up the sound and listening to the horrific squeals and screeches emitting from the stage, utterly at a loss.

One night a young girl came over while I was up in the sound booth, a real wild child, with mayhem dancing in her eyes and crazy hair all over her face. I'd seen her once or twice before and had formed the impression that she and her guy were swingers. All of a sudden she went down on the floor to do a handstand, throwing an inverted split up in my face, her crotch about three feet from my bewildered gape. Someone had told her I was the owner and apparently she was trying to make an impression, and it was working. Chicks always liked the guy in charge - they'd throw themselves at the money, wherever it happened to be. There was a real possibility of getting laid there at the bar. A little free booze and coke never hurt, either. A few weeks of practice and experimentation and I'd be a bonafide sleazebag in no time flat.

The regulars were an interesting lot. There was Joe, a fairly young kid who'd been in some sort of accident a while back and who now spoke very slowly and with great effort. Joe was like part of the furniture, he was in there all the time and drank beer like a fish. He'd been running up a tab for quite some time but no one ever bothered him about it. There was Jake, an older guy with glasses, long grey hair, a droopy moustache and a big red nose, who worked at the gas station next door and would come in at precisely midnight every night to down about five scotches as fast as humanly possible. Jake had owned a bar himself back in his younger days but the drinking and drugs had done him in. He'd gotten pretty well hooked on heroin and things had gone off the rails for a time, but he'd pulled himself together and now was back to just scotch and water again. Jake roomed with a guy named Paulie. Paulie was a rotund fellow with a penchant for babbling who worked across the street at the pool hall as a short order cook and who would pop in from time to time on his break. And then there was Tom, the hardcore cokehead who had trouble getting his words out most nights. I almost never saw him sober, he was always either high or actively looking for his next fix. Tom pestered me night and day for free drinks. He was forever insisting he would clean the urinals in exchange for these drinks and then would somehow never get around to doing it.

There was a whole host of others who came in only semi-regularly. Sue was a young attractive girl with cerebral palsy, who also happened to be a raging drunk. She would stumble in, have a bunch of drinks, start falling all over the place and cry discrimination if anyone dared to stop serving her. Frankie was a gay lead singer who would try to kiss me whenever he got the chance. Fortunately for me we didn't see a whole lot of him. And there was another guy named Zack, a mysterious fellow with long shaggy locks and beard to match, who would sit at the bar with a bandana on his head scribbling poems into a little notebook he carried around in his pocket. Zack was an interesting character but he was tight-lipped about things, we had to pump him for information to learn anything about him. What we did find out was pretty interesting stuff. He'd grown up in Hawaii and then moved to Alaska, where he'd hoped to play guitar in a band but wound up pumping gas instead. Nowadays he didn't do too much, he was sort of a man stuck in time, quiet and sad, content to sit for hours just staring off into space, reflecting on the past. He wouldn't tell us much but it had something to do with a girl.

When I wasn't busy with the bar, I went exploring. Downtown was a bit too upscale for me and so I went searching along the outskirts for other diversions, for options less antiseptic and soulless. I found what I was looking for on Colfax Avenue, the main east-west thoroughfare that split the city in half, running for miles in both directions. Colfax was the end of the world. It reeked of desperation and despair. It was one long chain of broken-down dive bars, one seedier than the next. The places were all full of reeling drunks and chain-smoking degenerates, stumbling around guzzling drinks and scoring drugs, talking shit and starting fights. It was exactly what I was after. It became my new home, I went from bar to bar, drinking beer and watching the action. At first I was hesitant about going in anywhere; I hadn't really been barhopping since my college days, but my initial reservations faded very quickly and then very quickly after that I found myself hopelessly hooked. I went to Colfax as often as I could, disappearing from my own bar for hours, then nights at a time. Those bars were somehow better than my own - no one bothered me as much there, I could just drink in peace and be left alone.

One afternoon I was going up and down the street, stopping in at practically every bar and meeting stranger and stranger characters everywhere I went. One of the places smelled like puke, it was a heavy cloying smell but it didn't seem to put the locals off too much. I guessed they were just used to it by now. I was sitting next to a guy who said he'd been in the special forces in Vietnam, he'd stabbed someone there and gotten shot as well. The guy sat there with beer running down his shirt, going on and on. His best story was the one about how he'd totaled his car once while getting a blowjob. As we were talking, a little black girl came in the front door, crying to herself with little piteous mewlings.

"That's Candy," the guy told me. "She's a crackhead, she comes in here all the time. She lures all the white boys in with that crying thing she's doing, they all come running. Then she goes out with them afterwards and takes all their money."

After awhile I got tired of the conversation and went up the street. A few blocks down was a boxy little place called the Lion's Lair, a dark cavelike space with a tiny stage in the corner, a real hard-luck place, only the lowest of the low. A couple of biker types were in there that day, pulling on drinks and sulking in the gloom. The bigger guy had a walrus mustache, white hair protruding from his back and oxygen tubes stuck up his nose. We chatted for a bit, he was from Jersey like me. I asked the bartender if they had live music often. She didn't feel like answering.

The next place was a white-washed building on the corner with a sign saying 'Lounge' over the door. Inside were two comfortable blonde twenty-somethings and a whole host of comfy couches. There was a well-maintained pool table in the corner, too well-maintained, it looked like no one ever used it. The bartender was a diminutive well-dressed little shit. They were all a bunch of snobs. I got a beer and went over and shot some stick by myself, listening to the fashionable artsy new wave ambient/techno music droning over the speakers and watching the white people make love to themselves, drinking their martinis or whatever the fuck they were drinking. I didn't last long in there. The 'Lounge' was making me sick. Back out on the street, it was getting dark now. A wacky looking guy came running up out of nowhere, a mad scientist with bushy black hair and a beard and oversized glasses that protruded way beyond his face.

"HEY MAN, WHAT'S GOIN ON!" he screamed at me, scampering alongside like a dog.

"Nothing much," I replied.

"WHERE YA GOIN, MAN?"

"To the next bar." I knew something was up.

"You smoke rock, man?" he asked, a bit quieter now. Thar she blows. I told the mad scientist no politely and went on my way. He looked offended for some reason, and for a second I thought he was going to hit me. There was no accounting for the behavior of the human race.

Now into another little joint, a brightly-lit cubicle of a room with a pool table and a jukebox and only Charles Manson sitting at the bar. The bartender was a sheer mountain of a man, bald with a goatee. I sat down and Charles Manson immediately joined me for some chit-chat, it looked like he'd been waiting all day for it. He told me he used to play baseball back when he was in high school. I was skeptical; it looked like he would have had trouble even lifting his arms, much less throwing a ball. I supposed one had to make allowances for the ravages of time.

"And see that fellar there?" he asked with one eye closed, pointing at the bartender. "He used to play hockey hisself."

I looked at the big guy quizzically, he shook his head yes. We got to talking, he was an amiable enough fellow. He told me a few stories, he was a minor leaguer who'd gotten in a lot of fights, in fact had been suspended from multiple leagues at once. He said he wasn't very happy with his job there and so I told him he could come work for me if he liked. He seemed pleased with the idea and gave me his number. He'd come in handy when breaking up bar fights, that was for sure.

I got up to play some more pool, just to kill time, then a series of stragglers began to drift in from the street. First was a twisted pretzel of a fellow with deformed hands and crooked teeth, who was blind but wore no glasses and managed to get around on his own power somehow. He babbled insanely at me for a time, oblivious to whether I was listening or not, and when I got up to use the bathroom he slipped out again. A fellow on crutches came in and took his place. His movements were extremely slow and he wasn't saying much. He ordered a beer. I looked over at him, he didn't look well. First he was slouching on his stool and then it seemed like he was slowly winding down, he continued his swoon and soon was slumped face first on the bar, completely motionless.

"I gotta call detox," the bartender said. He made the call as a couple of the regulars carried the guy to a booth and laid him down.

"Man, you're gonna have to sit up!" the bartender said to him, but the guy was unresponsive, he was out cold. Every so often he would start to come around but his eyes were googly and his movements were all over the place. Around this time, a Native American chick with long dark hair walked in and sat down at the bar. She was middle-aged and quite attractive, especially by beer goggle standards. She cozied up to the bartender, they stroked each other's backs. It appeared they were acquainted.

"Hi Chris," she cooed, then got on her cell phone. "It's my daughter, say hi," she said to me.

I got on and said hello, then handed the phone back. I'd been feeding the jukebox periodically, it was a great selection and my mood was improving by the minute. The girl and I chatted for a spell, smiling at each other and getting more and more friendly. Then she told me she wanted to leave. Chris the giant bartender looked none too pleased but I was drunk and didn't give a shit. There was always some reason why things never worked out, some obstacle forever in the way. Maybe he'd kill me and maybe not, but I was prepared to risk my life this time.

We got out of there without incident, and snagged a cab which took us to her place. She was staying at her twenty-year-old daughter's house in the projects. Her daughter and her friends were sprawled out on the floor watching TV as we came in. We went upstairs, got undressed and started screwing around, but as always I was too drunk to do much. She told me she liked being spanked, I spanked her for a little while as she lay there on top of me, the slap echoing around the room.

"WE CAN HEAR YOU UP THERE!" the little bitch downstairs was shrieking.

I got up and went down into the kitchen. "Hey, how come you don't have any beer in here?" I yelled up, looking in the fridge. In stomped the bitch.

"I WANT HIM OUT OF HERE!" she screeched.

I went upstairs to put my shoes on, then the girl and I went out on the stoop to wait for the cab. Her name was Jean, I'd only found out a few minutes before. Two little black kids were sitting in the bushes nearby, watching us in the dark.

"I don't give a shit, I'll go sleep in the park!" Jean said. Apparently she'd been thrown out as well.

"You don't have to do that, you can come back with me," I said.

She climbed in the cab with me and we went back to my place. My fridge had beer in it. We drank it all, smoked some cigarettes on the balcony and then passed out on the bed.

The bar was chugging along, I was starting to get into the rhythm of things. Every day I opened up at three, sat with the bartenders waiting for the evening crowd and then drank amongst them until closing time. Friday and Saturday nights were crazy, the rest of the week was light. Sometimes it felt like I never left the place, that I was destined to remain trapped there for the rest of my life. It was an unsettling sensation. The bar had no kitchen and so the food options were less than stellar - frozen pizza courtesy of the little countertop oven tucked behind the bar, the Taco Bell across the street or the fried chicken place next door. I could already feel my health going straight to hell.

I was still in the process of exploring the boundaries of my new environment. One day I took a drive down Colfax and made a right on Colorado, heading out of town. There was a little neighborhood bar sitting at one of the major intersections, and on a whim I went inside, just to check the place out, to see how other people were running their operations. It was too early in the day for a crowd, it was just me, the bartender and a tiny Asian lady who was obviously the owner, who was on her way out the door as I was coming in. She was asking the bartender a series of questions, checking on inventory, asking about the schedule, various business-related things. This lady was really in control, she sounded like she knew what the hell she was talking about. I needed to become like her. I wondered how long it took to get to that point, where you felt like you had everything all squared away. Probably years. I'd have to catch up fast.

Then on the way back, I passed a homeless girl sitting on the corner, begging for change with a little cardboard sign next to her. She was young and thin, quite pretty actually underneath the tangled mass of hair, the odd assortment of baggy clothes. For a split second, I had the crazy idea of inviting her into the car, taking her home with me and making her my girlfriend. I knew it wasn't a good thought to have. Anyway, she'd probably rob me the first chance she got, or even worse, stab me in my sleep or something. Women weren't very good to me, they practically spit on sight, and whatever bad could happen inevitably did. Considering my track record, it was safe to assume that even the homeless chicks would react the same way. I was like rancid meat, wolfsbane, anathema to the object of my desire. Then again, who knew, maybe this girl would have been happy to have a hot meal and a place to crash for the night. I laughed at myself inwardly - as if my motives were in any way altruistic. Who was I kidding, I was a rat like the rest of them, just looking for the next piece of cheese. I passed on the idea and kept driving.

Wednesday was my day off. Sometimes I'd just crash at the apartment, or other times I'd go over to Colfax, or south on Havana down to the local poolhall. It was a big wide brightly-lit space with dozens of well-groomed tables, a nice little haven for anyone who took their pool seriously. Down at the far end of the room, the sharks swam in circles trying to outhustle each other, whilst closer in towards the bar, my fellow scrubs and I hunched over our tables, huddled in relative safety. The pool hall had become one of my favorite spots in town. I was spending so much time in there the fat waitress even knew my drink. She looked pleased that she knew it, and wasted no time getting it for me whenever I walked in. It was nice being known somewhere.

One afternoon I was out and about. It was my day off, I'd been rambling a bit and found myself at a different poolhall just around the corner, this one far smaller than the usual one. There were little pockets of people standing around socializing in hushed conspiratorial tones. I went over to the jukebox to peruse the song list. 'Lonely Stranger' was on there, I played that one first. The soulful strains wafted through the air while I stood there soaking it in, feeling every word. No one else was paying any attention to it. No one felt my pain. I was a stranger in a strange land, out there with the mountains and the plains, a pilgrim without a path, with no clue in the world as to what I was doing. I stood there staring out the window, looking out over all the strange and unusual places I'd never fit in with, listening to the sounds of all the things I'd never be a part of. I'd rarely felt so alone before.

Scott Taylor hails from Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a writer and a musician, and an avid world traveler. His short stories and poetry have appeared in numerous print and online publications, including Vast Chasm, Adelaide Literary, Unlikely Stories, Literary Hatchet and Swifts and Slows. His novels 'Chasing Your Tail' and 'Screwed' have been released with Silver Bow Publishing, and his novellas 'Freak' and 'Ernie and the Golden Egg' are slated for inclusion in an upcoming anthology with Running Wild Press. He graduated from Cornell University and was a computer programmer in a past life."