The Stage Coach Inn, is a dive bar on the other side of the tracks in “downtown” Attica, NY, a seedy watering hole whose façade is so uninviting and interior so unkempt, that you take your life in your hands by putting your lips to the drink. It is the kind of place that spit-shines their tumblers and dims the lights so you cannot tell.

To the non-believers, dive bars like Stage Coach Inn beat the hell out of stale localities like McMonkeez. They offer so much by way of unexpected characters and personality. With the Chippewa or any molded corporate bars, you know what you are going to get—high prices and assholes.

Approaching Stage Coach Inn with any formulations or pretensions means you are in for a surprise. The neon beer advertisement in the window suggests that it is a bar, as does the gravel lot for customers to park. However, all signs hereinafter, from the deteriorating couch on the sloping porch to the pile of old laundry detergent greeting you in the foyer, make you believe anything else.

Patrons literally are walking into someone’s house. But rather than climbing the stairs into their bedrooms or taking a left into the family room, customers are corralled, by way of garbage, into the “bar.” Here, “bar” is a very loose term. To make it clear, you know you have reached the bar room when you pass the shelf of mildew-encrusted children’s toys and trash bags full of holes with their contents poking out.

The trash motif does not end there. Tables that line the perimeter of the room and, well, most everything else, seem to have gathered an impressive collection of debris. There are piles of papers and an assortment of items deemed ready for a garage sale set about the stools and counter top.

My initial impression was that I had walked into a thrift store that decided from day one not to ever clean anything, and they kept a beer sign in the window just because. However, by this point, the whole room was staring at us, so we felt a certain obligation to clear off a seat and imbibe on the local libations.

I still had my reservations about whether or not this place was an actual bar, so I asked. “No shithead, we just serve beer here,” was the reply the gruff owner really wanted to tell me. In that case, we bought the bar—all two fellers—a round of beer and things loosened right up. I later implored unto the specials, and frankly, Stage Coach Inn offers dollar beers all the time. That’s the special.

As for entertainment and live acts, there ain’t a chance in Hell.

To get to Stage Coach Inn, use a map to drive to Attica. The bar is on Exchange Street, just off of Main Street near the post office.