It’s a Tuesday night, and we’re looking for something to do. It’s dark, and we’re dry, so we head to a little local bar called Checker’s. This is the kind of place where the characters go with a ton of stories to tell. There’s a picture on the wall of a bunch of guys in rugby shirts from the 80s. 20 or so years later, and they’re still here. The bartender tells me one of the guys in the photo is an old news anchor who still owes him money. There’re a couple neon signs in the window. Everyone’s got a beer-gut. Frank gets an amber beer, and I get some brown water. First one’s on me. I find a stool to sit on, and Frank leans on the bar. It’s been a long day. We find out it’s someone’s birthday, their fifty-second, and I believe it. My dad’s age. Being here makes getting older seem miserable, which it probably is.
At the end of the bar, there’re a few guys who seem to be having a good time. One of them’s got this voice, like the sound of the engine of an old car that won’t start, like a handful of nails in his throat. This voice makes Tom Waits seem like a prepubescent schoolboy and Johnny Cash like a chihuahua named Teacup. I can only make out a few of the words he growls. A couple seats open up at the corner of the bar, so Frank and I grab our drinks and move there.
I end up sitting next to the scary-voiced fella. He looks thoroughly sauced up. He’s drinking 100 proof peppermint schnapps on the rocks. There’s a pack of Marb Lights, a cellphone, and a couple bucks next to his glass. There’s a handbar mustache curling down the sides of his mouth. His eyes are squinted, and he’s got the face of a bulldog. His blondish hair is in a crazy ponytail. On his shirt is the emblem of the fire department. He’s with a couple guys, one about his same age and the other who’s much younger. The drunk fireman’s barking a story to the boys, incoherently. Sitting next to him makes me feel a little uneasy.
“Don’t I know you from somwhere?” the fireman says to Frank. Frank tells him he might.
“I know you. You ever been to...uh...Elmwood...the Pink? I did security there.” Frank tells him he might recognize him from the Pink, mostly just to appease the fireman. “They thought they could watch me while I was there, but now I’m free.”
“Maybe you know my kids,” the fireman says.
“Oh yeah? What’re their names?”
“Uh...well...uh...maybe my sister’s kids. Uh...hmmm...what names would you know them by?”
The drunk fireman turns to me, “Did I tell you I like your shades? Real ‘50s beatnik thing goin’ on.” I tell him thanks. “Bring me any six guys ya know, and I could take ‘em.” I tell him I bet he could. Frank and I get up to go check out the jukebox. It’s a new digital one. We start looking through the on-screen catalogue. We stop at the artists we like. I put a dollar in. I pick “Karen” by The National, and Frank picks a song by Crosby, Stills and Nash. While Frank goes to take a piss, I start playing the Street Fighter arcade game next to the jukebox. I lose.
Frank comes back. He wins, then I win, then I lose again.
We go back to our seat at the corner of the bar. This fireman’s still howling away. He starts telling us this story about one of the times he got arrested. He was driving a van full of tools with his wife somewhere near North Campus, when a bunch of cop cars surround the van. The cops come up to the van with their guns drawn. The fireman has his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel. The entire street was filled with cop cars.
“They were all pimple-faces. They looked scared. Like they couldn’t grow a beard. I asked the one to stop pointing his gun at my wife.” So the officer in charge asks the other to lower his weapon. They take the fireman back to the police station. He makes some calls, but no one’s around. The fireman’s stuck in his cell for awhile. Finally, a cop comes by and says they’re going to let him go, still with no way home.
“Just point me in the direction of Buffalo. I’ll walk through the swamp.” The cops tell him that he’s not walking through their swamp. “Alright, just leave me where you picked me up. They tell me, ‘You ain’t walkin’ through our town.’” Eventually, he gets a friend, the bartender, to pick him up from the station. He comes home to an empty house. Later, his wife walks in, and he asks where she was, she says her father picked her up.
The fireman turns to the bartender. “Fran, you remember that night?”
“Yeah, I didn’t know where the hell I was.”
The fireman laughs like a grizzly bear that swallowed shards of glass. “He was the least drunk one outta these bastards.”
He gets back to his story and says they went to the impoundment lot to get back his van. He finds out it would cost more to get the hunk of junk out than it’s actually worth. He pays his $500 fine and decides to leave the van there, but first attempts to get his tools from the back only to find that they weren’t there anymore. “I opened up the doors and...empty. The van was worth 200 bucks, but the tools were worth thousands.” Everyone at the bar has a good laugh.
Helluva story.
Frank gets an important phone call and goes outside to take it. I’m sitting there waiting for my song to play. I want to hear my favorite lines: “Karen, put me in a chair, fuck me and make a drink.” Aaah, pure poetry.
The fireman starts to get a little rowdy. “Bet I can lift up the bar.” He stands up, turns around, grabs the bar-top, and bends his kness to start lifting. Fran, the bartender laughs and asks him to quit it.
“Billy, come on. Don’t.”
“Alright, but ya know I could.”
Billy, the drunk fireman sits back down and starts to tells me about the work he’s done.
“You ever pulled 50 people outta a basement?”
“No.”
“Well, I have.”
He begins to tell stories of working on the sites of plane crashes. “We found whole rows of seats. All torsos. Some had heads. Some didn’t. None of them had arms or legs.” He tells me, usually at plane crashes only pieces are found all over, but since the plane fell straight down instead of coming in at an angle, there was a lot left. They found the husband.
“They pulled him out early. Burned up.”
He was at Ground Zero. I ask him how it was. I mention how a lot of people there got sick from the shit in the air. He mentions pieces again.
“A lotta the guys there didn’t come back the same.”
Frank comes back in and takes his seat. The phone call was good news. He gets the second round. We’re still waiting for our songs. The fireman squints at Frank: “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
