#1 Elvis' teeth are faded pearly gray. The smoke, has torn black holes in an otherwise pink ceiling. The bartender's second front tooth is missing, and you dare asking him where he got it knocked out. "Right here." Next question. Their beer coasters are so soaked with hops your drink wonders where it's suppose to sweat. The TV's fuzzy and silent The martini glasses are scratched like old, recycled beer goggles. Lez Paul guitars rock the bionic jukebox speakers and lovers kiss tongues in the blackout corners. Chests heave exhaled cigarettes in methadone days long since forgotten, while neon lights squiggle their unusual shapes in high-velocity colors. This is the dingiest chrome-plated bar you've ever lost a Wednesday night in, and who's counting their beers slapping thumb-flipped tops all over the tables? The damage is manifest in People's smiles. Have you ever watched a patron pull a coat on and step out into the rain? She didn't go with him. He'll infect the poor passerby with nowhere to sleep. Did you know the drink before last call always fills itself fullest? One hundred proof dregs line the sidewalks where the bartender's knuckles are bloody. BASHED. Doctors will treat the incident hoping to find its cure. Broken ribs and bruised internals won't respond to drugs, where longer-drawled events conspired to make us who we are. "Young children's hearing is sensitive enough to catch what we deaden-out later." Can't hear that? Lez Paul's too loud. A woman with the hands of a man, gently fingers an ample shot of whiskey. She recounts the stories every night secure in unending overlap. Her listener smiles: I hear you; do you hear yourself? She slides her drink over the table's edge with one deft elbow. Crash!! Reflections suck. She's a clothing designer with more good ideas than will ever reach fabric. He's a gigolo with satin-smooth skin that inspires her towards nothing. Together they oppose their world. "Thanks Shannon." "See you Mark." The mechanical hands wave ordinary signals. "What do you think?" "I don't." sits the log on the centuries-old streambed. Led Zeppelin loud overcomes all listening difficulties. She stumbled, menthol "quality" cigarette leaning between her other two fingers. #2 The police come in and the lady with the skirt too-expensive for her schizophrenic tastes bolts silently out the back door. The bartenders are so obnoxiously loud, they scare off all the would-be cultured patients, yelling their infantile wares in witless cliché aphorisms. NO bare tops, bare bottoms, bare feet Open 24 hours a day Marvin Gaye says, "Don't you know how wonder-ful, life can be?" ten times a quarter-tune night. Sorry, No Checks. No Exceptions. Coca Colas aren't sold here. We refuse the right to not serve anyone we damn-well please. Huh? No Dancing No Loitering after 2 am. And then you realize it's a joke. Thank you for smoking. You've read it twice. (Laughter.) Under it, Surgeon General's Warning: Harassing me about smoking could be hazardous to your health. The carved woman in the corner looks at the painted wood Indian and misses its humor completely. There isn't any room on the side that's a bar, so they'll serve you your drink amidst french-fry indigo juice-drinking weirdoes; and low to behold you're one of them. Two students sucking up to Calculus, look so star-struck people squint at them. "Freaks." said the man with too-dark hair. He's got a web of multicolored spiders walking abruptly across his arm. "Nice tat." the girl sides. Trouble wears a black Yukon Jack shirt and screams at anything that looks like a response, while a guy named obnoxious, is living up to it. He bumps the vixen in everyone and waits for its bite. He's a black-shirt in big white sleeves. He's a ruddy-faced incident without a knuckle sandwich to eat. He's a regular, and for that he's tolerated. He likes to poke fun at the man with no teeth. A lady asks the two students to leave. "You're being too-damned quiet. Liven up!" The music is a torrent pouring through the thick-smoke air. It'd produce a fantastic picture. (If anyone were allowed to take pictures, that is.) NO PICTURES AND WE MEAN IT! Lets the general public know the last place to be law-abiding is right here. The TV shows a closed-circuit of the wash-room two flights over. Don't ask anyone why. To the left, a man slurps six cups of cream-laden coffee in ten jittery-nerved minutes. He's gaunt to the point of shakes-in-his-sleep, and writes napkins with an indecipherable language of twenty-five centuries past. I ask him what it means. "See this? Common denominator do you study quasars? Do you know how they evaporate?" He hasn't got any teeth either, thus I struggle to rally his words to ear. "There's a culture that's measured with a radium dial..." I must have missed something important. I'm trying really hard, because this writing looks to be some kind of genius just waiting to be discovered. "Like Skunk cabbage, do you know what it smells like?" "Yea." I hear that all right. "Smell corresponds to light, right here." he points at a hastily drawn squiggle that could be a subatomic equation. "Less-than, check the correlation... see this, here?" Profound, I'm sure of it. All I need is the fifth gear on my four speed transmission to understand. "Don't let him tell you about the bodies." the bartender warns me. And he grins. "Last night he got so far as telling me where the bodies were hidden, and I had to stuff my ears." (He wasn't grinning. The super-intelligent coffee guzzler was.) Hesitantly, I point to a parturition of the known universe and ask: "Who did it?" He follows down two lines and circles the most unintelligible thing I've ever seen. Nothing English about it. "Whose language is this?" "Mine." Received from the dead? "I had to create what couldn't be created here." I'm worried he's the bottom line. "And what dies to get here?" (Ego? Entropy?) It was entirely the wrong tact to take. His lesbian girlfriend bodybuilder roared in on a giant cafe motorcycle resurrected from cheap seventy's trash. They smile and wink as she nuzzles the petite student clawing her impotent mate. "What'smattr sistr? Ain't you ever been w-a wooman before?" and the bar knew she meant it. #3 She'll tell you its history, if the other tables aren't too demanding. "He got in at three o'clock in the morning and kept cooking till noon. His voice was so excited, he just kept saying, 'I think I've got it...this is it, I'm sure of it!', and one day later it's on the menu. You can order it right here in the bar, if you wish. Can you imagine? Being that wrapped-up with your idea, you'll drag yourself out of bed, and drive all the way to work to try it out?" "That's an artist." "Exactly what my boss said." and she begins to whisk away. "Be right back." For being so interested, Thai curry penne pasta with dungeness crab basil chiffonade and grilled scallops is delivered in a tiny china dish. "Here, I had a little extra." From Mary's own plate, should you? "Why, thanks!" Her tip goes up. "'There's a dish you've just got to try.'" someone said. It's the whole reason I came here. They sent me. "I tried it." He's gonna ask what I thought. "She's beautiful." I love double innuendoes. The giant Marlin porpoises over a lair dark with whispered cooing, as red corvettes and un-keyed luxury cars force attendants to park where there simply isn't room. Yellow tiger lilies droop over square crystal vases sprouting elegant birds of paradise, and everyone is as sophisticated, and cool as possible, while still radiating that, I'm relaxing after a hard day at the office feel. Names are dripping subtly all over the floors the models unofficially parade down. Congratulations are said, more to confirm the perpetrator's need to follow rules' step, than warm yourself by their fire. All shoes stay on, and nobody's noticed even if they didn't look to see Jonny married-man with his knowhow secretary getting a lonesome smile. Nobody's suppose to comment out of whisper why secret's contained in a paper shredding machine. Outside, their secret dialogues embrace the need to curb their adulteries inside. Bar tab fifty bucks for shirtsleeves drawn through the appetizer raving at the 3am forget-me-not will pose an unwanted phenomena later, when the crystal haze wears off. Mr.s and Mrs.s notice these shocking subtle details. We dally in the longevity of an unhindered stare, as pinstriped lads and lasses find their respective transport, fumbling with keys so practiced, you can almost choreograph their routine. These are the respectable drinkers. "Shall we cross the tracks?" "Tally-ho!" A bowl of stinky purple hydroponic bud dispenses itself through a ceramic penis pipe on a calamari burp's vacuum over a canal looking back, yawning two breeches of land. Two fruity pints of beer followed dark red cabernet crossing the bridge from one side to its inevitable other. #4 It's a bright sunny day in ________, _____ ________. The bar is romping with Sunday military pool-shooters, and old-salt fishermen reminiscing while the rest of the God-fearing folks recover from church. Deep fried mushrooms spuds and shrimp pour from the brown-stained scoop as tasteless lite beer counts calories on guts already bulged at tender young ages. The houses that remember 1730 (when the Spanish invaded) groan their artificial lives under new wood, paint and prosperous relatives of Yankees who never dreamt they'd live here. Giant shrimp frisk their last earthly moments in roiling-boil pans as cues slide markers across stretched steel cables, and hands yank chalk counterbalanced, to used fishing line. Shaved heads, baseball caps and jeans mark their own version of conformity trying to be relaxed in an uptight, do-eat-dog world America says is right, and just makes might. Amen. The pool tables are weak with flexing pride, leaning one bun on their shoulders where green rides fade to fuzzless brown-ripple wash. It's the only place that's open. What else can a military man do when the chaplin sticks your head up your arse and says: "Breathe deeply. That's where your soul's-goin, boy." The place was packed. #5 White twinkling Christmas lights line corrugated tin-veneer shining six blue TVs. They're all on different channels, shouting silently to zombie-eyed beer drinks drowning sorrows of a three-day beach disaster. Carley Simon music lulls minds to sleep past low-luminosity plastic plants hanging from baskets that belong on little girls' bicycles. Goodie 300 car racing dominates the mauve tables' seam of bartender traffic carrying over-filled platters of whipped cream strawberry daiquiris watched by butter-bellies, with matching three carat Cubic Zirconium gold rings. There's a little electronic gizmo you rent to stare at inane movie questions other people in many untold bars are competing for; you'll see your score as the evening progresses through six more lite beers worth of, "I knew that! I did too!" as the waitress does commentary through her Valentines day letdown date, narrating a quit-smoking survey through each question while patrons line the outside door. How much do I want a cigarette? What mood am I in? What time is it? Why am I smoking right now? Because I bloody-well need one doesn't sound like someone who wants to quit much. The promised live-music band calls six minutes before they're suppose to go on, to cancel. "Sorry, I need to stay home with the kids." "Coudn't-yi kindle-a sitter?" (As if they burn.) "What-bout yur-other members?!" As if she's heartbroken her ears won't hurt and the sloppy dancers won't spill her platter of drinks. Hell with-ya. "We on-fer next week den?" (he says hopefully.) "Yea. Sure." Everyone's waiting for the big wreck in the end NBC sports highlights spoiled 'cause-a the time difference that spilled the sponsor's portion of prime-time knee-jerk buying prerecorded for your convenience. Car racing is big down south. What better reason to drink? "Car crashes man, not racing." That's the bottom line. Who'd watch hockey without the fights? 19 laps to go and miraculously, the band turns up. "Did you know they're sold out for next year already?" "No!" "Yup. One hundred fifty thousand people, or-sumthing." "People love-them high speed crashed-up shows." The people slowly move closer to the television and the musician narrates the roaring engines with his six-string guitar. [Pilfered from a book called : Snatches of States.] #6 Dark wood books everywhere pitchers of pale frothy suds things tacked to the smoke pallor ceiling horses on the television nobody's' looking to notice the green-hatted pool player? He's cleaning the table of balls. Old trophies and cupie dolls forgotten in corners festering stick pins from posters long since decomposed. Opera night degenerates to Grateful death music, another glass lifts as slips fall to the cash register*script money begs tips who turned the music down? Tips are pools' cues for mastering the one stick shot while a lady on her sixth bag of Rancho chips looks on, impressed as hell. Bud, the King of Beers baseball hat patron white-outs a tragic piece of literature 'cause it's too sad while his bad-breath fried chicken friend bares all his teeth in an evil howl. Buddy Holly overcomes the dictator's music choice because somebody always complains about change, no matter how atrocious what was playing could be. Beaten-down wood, dark-stained by people trying to overcome their tragedies, absorbs the blue Neon light where waterstains spoke a twice-leaky roof in a town that rarely stops raining. Twitching two-pints Charlee orders his third one, touches the lady's ass next to him, and licks his finger* like it's too hoarse to say anything intelligible without a little spit prompt. "Buy me a beer?" "What do you mean, can I buy you a beer?! You've got a full beer there!" "Ah, that's only a temporary situation." the regular customer crowed. The man's laughter is rancid. It reeks of too few joyful moments and too much Sunday night whiskey. When he asks a table to pitch in for a pitcher of beer, they balk their complaints by not listening. "I don't give a shit what you're thinking about!" He's obsessed with his unquenchable thirst. Somebody else's get-up-early life has little to no consequence to his next empty glass. "Did you know...?" Theo the poet used to hang out here? He's famous now. Did you never want to know all the whose-who hung out here at one time or their other? Sports jackets' fake satin sheen reflect the poor complexion of most unblossomed poets gracing the static-rhymed world. They pour more money in jukeboxes' pool tables, and swear coarse words in perfect, unending array. . . . So many people have carved their eventual fame in the walls, there's hardly any room for more? Then we'll carve into the carvings. #7 It's exceedingly dark. A hollow light shines severely in its ten lumen festivity way at the back of the bar. All the beer is served in rotted styrofoam cozies like you find in the outback. Someone took a bite out of mine, but that added to the darkness. The bar is so appropriately named, it casts your mind to the pit the story pulled itself from. A morphine addict cruises the ten paces from theory, to a cold sweaty can, kicks your chair and doesn't even know it. The atmosphere is too trippy for the average do-good; they told me so leaving in dismay. Their mothering instincts were offended. People shouldn't end like this. Nobody's ending anything. Their lives prolong it- the name, that is. Of this place. The music is Hendrix. The talk is slipping to the stuff that makes people talk about places like this in their golden ages. People on the edge of living something different contaminate the greatest bars. They come in and hoover all the atmosphere then let it take its toll inside them back at home. No one comes here without provocation. Something in their soul drives them here. This is the end of the world. It ended here, and started again. They tried to contaminate the tourists who came with their guidebooks, they insisted: You won't put our name in there too late. Money won eyes used to shiny black paint covering the walls all over. The pool table is one-third of the space. You can buy your T-shirts to prove you're one of the dippy tourists who had to say they were here. #8 The tragically prancing hipsters (of nose rings, tattoos and leathers) look like they don't give a flying shit about anything. They spent an hour primping the two hours after thinking about it to dress, on preening the perfect "Who cares?" They spent six weeks' wages on the garbage that's suppose to look like real garbage because originally somebody tried to make a statement after someone who didn't care already did. His fingernails are so neatly trimmed, he couldn't be what his clothing suggests. The place is full of twisted, fucked-up broken pieces of personalities. Why are they the most interesting? Some try to be different while some just are. "She's" not. He's pretending she is. part of her masculinity is discerning why women don't matter any more after a certain age. The woman behind the bar is a lesbian's nightmare. She's the perfect follower of female rebellion. Her attitude is butch-dyke testimonial; she looks and acts its perfect part. What's wrong with this picture? #9 10:00--Ten men and six women. 12:15--Sixteen women and sixteen men. paint and caulk-stained Levis Cigarette smoke marked dollars for the disk machine Barley wine pint glasses Shot glasses dropped in small beer reservoirs Old drunks and college dropouts Nardoowells Aspiring writers and dead-end junkies Planter's peanuts free if the bartender likes you. It's the bar with more people than money. It's a bar who closes, with two people off their stools napping in its corner. It's a Tuesday (as if it matters much) Hammered brays compete with latest music between old sixties tunes. People day-job them come here to nightshift. They give beer away. Customers pay and customers don't. It's like gambling, coming here. Nobody's picking anybody up. "That's prettyboy shit." They come here to drink and relax. "Fucking's work." Party line. Janis Joplin is very popular. So is pool. Paunches prevail. Arms are big but so are bellies. The boys play hard every single night. 2:10--"How many are regulars?" I ask. "You aren't." she said. #10 Dense smoke on one side, clear air on the other. Extra-loud ambiance jazz blows from the pillow- covered stage, where people look by walking, wishing they could fit in with out being seen. Five beers on tap pull tall dark glasses of top foam not more than one inch displacing precious liquid somebody's yelling but it isn't that fight sort of thing. Huge black and white triangles dialysize they eyes while patrons cross their legs, waiting subservient to lines in the mens lane. Ladies, they love it. There's food all right. Each day is all you can eat something. Waffles, soup, cookies . . .you never know. A deaf man feels the vibes through the plate glass wall, and comes inside. They move, when they notice he can't see the urinal. Intimate conversation drowns itself out, as static stars twinkle in a three foot repetitive frieze trimmed by black, then pink again. Lamps and circle couches are similar but entirely different. Velum curtains whisk aside whenever the door slams open. Vo ve play? The drunk patron whispers to his mistress would-be. Plates clank cow bells before smashing to the bloodless ground. "Fuck you and don't even bother asking again!" She was excitable. It wasn't cool to separate the jazz from its raw-edged ambiance. #11 They know each other so well, first name basis is an unnecessary cliché. Plastic flowers grow all winter long and patrons watch them dutifully for any-n-all signs of decay. Beards get longer and fleeced with wile to better catch foamy suds sloshed from too-full glasses. The restrooms claim Does and Bucks, for animals sometimes block newcomers' way, and then, "Is it safer to piss outside?" becomes the question no lips pass to the stony-faced bartender. Burgers in every flavor of BIG, sizzle on the antique grill locked in a kitchen time practically forgot. Waitress Belle serves groceries, gas, food, and hospitality, baking pies and mopping in-between milkshakes and deep fried taters. At least the phone that doesn't exist never rings when the owner's watching the world not move from his broken back porch. She scours her feet on the groove-worn floors from early till later-than-hell. Her yellowed bison photo surveys the slow-motion wreckage accumulating needs as people parting with small sums of their hard-earned cash. Checkered picnic table throws are wiped and wiped down again, casting strange series ire to wastelands of dreams for opera houses, mansions, and skylines. Their founding fathers hacked the mountains with far-flung possibilities, erecting their rough log cabins in glimmering shades of gold. Rickety fifty-five gallon drums howl, as simple valley winds carouse treetops- their brittle ashes cold with everyone's forgetfulness that winter can be so harsh. Wood slab thick as pretty girls' thighs make the elbow-resting bar; and time crawls slow across their warp. Outside, rusty implements of another age entirely warn the casual passerby things change quietly here. The giant two-man chainsaw grins its still-standing victory dripping 1940s oil like it was just used yesterday. People aren't happy you're there. Fist fights are common, when they aren't. Long hair's okay if you're big, and blistered to horn-hard callous. Don't get in the way of the dart board. They throw from so far back, you won't even know where it arrived from. The menu's prices are old. The fireplace is all bricked in. Don't ask. The last thing nobody mentions is the lampshade decorated which-way-round with kids' felt pens to look like real stained glass. It's the end of the road in paradise. You won't possibly get lost. One path in goes all the way 'round- comin' out the out of the buck's other side. #12 Dora presides over a ramshackle slant-walled shack filled overflowing with phallic momentos of tree branches. You grab your own beer from her yellowed 1950s refrigerator and put a mark on the paper by the seven plays for a half dollar jukebox filled with scratchy early sixties records. Stuffed fish, brown with wrinkled age fall perpetually to the felt of the Brunswick pool table crammed in a pine-log ceiling afterthought of a momento-strewn side room. Dirty hand-drawn cartoons from eras long dead line the tinny-speakered pressboard. Where ever do places like this go? You ask no one in paticular. Dora was from Germany, and moved to this nowhere place in 1958, locking it securely in the backwoods backwater time seemed content to overlook. Two sheep shearers from Peru lurch in the door, spouting irretrievably bad english the eighty-nine year-old wrinkles on her face don't flinch for. With a modest gesture, she points at the immortal clattering of an old refrigerator's forgetting it shouldn't have worked so long. In between her haggard setting and the instant gratification it invoked, were untold secrets towards too many years to count. Antique bottles' pickled eggs' ceremony floated obscenely by great grandsun's pool cue, scraps of orange shag carpet, and bulging, overstuffed couches' tattered throws. There isn't a square corner in the entire household. Old paintings drip their gravity sublimely, as the stories of movie stars dropping in, or Sun Valley's opening-day stay closed, in an unread, unmoving book. Penis coffee mugs usurp the old cane fishing poles' droopings, as if they were weighed with bordello curtains. X-rated memorabilia yells its whisper of much softer times, poised by the long- drawn spaces between the old cash register's clang, and the next eventful sale. She'll tell you secretly about the first onerous pagan deity-her most precious piece of useless firewood. Her LOGWOOD NEWARK 225 stove was growing less than comfortable. She's grappled a long hard member by its bone-dry stock, and opening its cavernous grate . . . "Wait!" a lone patron yelled. "For what?" she asked by the orange-glow embers. "Lemme have that. I'll do something with it." "Suit yourself." she addled, and grabbed another block. A week later, it had a tuft of hair, and a carved head. She laughed the indiscretion of someone finally too old to care. "I love it." And the locals laughed the slit-eyed knowledge everyone thought alike. Some miners felled a giant tree, and discovered a prime-rib midsection there. It became her favorite patron, who always sat in the corner, flown in by their bigger is better need to illicit some baleful laughter. Thirty six years later, she acquired enough gifts to build another room, and send miners outside to piss on, ' . . .dat old woodpile.' "Women's much bett'r shots.", she'd tell any man point-blank, when he got used to her sure-fire ways. (You're slow, if that took three minutes.) What bar in the U.S. tells its patrons to do it outside? The Peruvians get too drunk to drawl correctly, one fresh from the outdoors breaks into a piece of relatively inobscure English. They've been in the back country six months. He's happy to meet us. Wouldn't we, like to sit and eat one of her special pickle sausages? We make $900. in a month. We have plenty for you to eat some too. Locals used to ski for free in Sun Valley. Clint Eastwood had a hard time smiling. She came to the country in 1929. She has too many excursions into Nostalgia to interest their endless beautiful details. You can't miss this one, if you don't look sideways in a maximal wind. "See you next year!" we told her. "If I'm still alive!" she repeats every time. #13 Naidine says its the best fishin', huntin' an' lazin' around. She will belt you out a tune at 1 AM you will never forget. At the only place around-there's "The Cheapest Gas for a Hundred Miles" right where the pavement "plum-ends", and they've got cabins for heavy drinkers (and slackers claiming otherwise) that are so well heated you've got to throw open the windows and doors hoping the sweat on their sheets will dry. "Women always win here!" Naidine says. "I told a lady who works here, 'You better beat him,' when she sat down to play chess with a customer, 'or you're fired.'" "Well. Did she?" a patron yelled. "What?" "Beat 'em!" he thumped the table for emphasis. "Shore did! Whipped his ass. Poor fellow din't-even get to move." The lady with the cute blond hair serving the inevitably next beer, shyly smiled. "Didn't ya honey?!" "Tore him to pieces." she said softly. "That's my girl." There's a decent pool table, a couple of bearskin rugs, a bobcat throw, and lots of burbot in well- wound fishermen's stories. Naidine brags there's "Never in 25 years been a fight.", and you tend to believe her. Don't ask why that's true, because nobody's at-all sure. "My husband's father homesteaded this place in the fifties." she yells from the back room. "He had to mush in everything, 'cause there weren't nothin' an' no roads too." Her Hamms beer can plane sways slightly, with the increased breeze of the deep fryer's exhaust fan. Its rigid eight blade prop, and tundra can-bottom tires bears testimonial to someone's got more time than materials or things to do lifestyle. She rounds the floor-worn corner with a fresh plate of gratis fish for desert, and people she's barely met wolf it wordlessly down. Your basic moose antler lamp glows its anemic bulb of a time before Caterpillar generators, while a diesel mechanic gold miner from Montana's flathead lakes drinks, and belches peacefully into the old jukebox, winding down archaic music. Naidine is ready to create the lyrics to another song. People clap, the 500 gallon tank of heating oil bubbles, and Red in the corner recounts the hunting collaboration that filled this year's freezer with meat. Suddenly, it's one o'clock in the morning, and someone's welking a bulldozer from a large pit of sand. The generator in the sagging, inverted military-surplus barracks half-pipe, tirelessly drones AMs to PMs and back again, without recollecting either. Naidine gives her best 1952 rendition of I left my heart in San Francisco, then recites canine poetry in the husky voice of a mountain lady. The starry-eyes waitress everyone likes to death watches the sky at the end of her shirt- soaked shift. It begins again at 5:30 AM, not . . .too long to go. Her mother wrote a short story for children about her. Misty, the sled dog. Two AM-three hunters emerge from the night covered with mud, gleaming success. "Time for one more round?!" They hit the bell each once, then ,"Hit it agin Sam!" "Fer luck tomorrow." he said afterwards. The break in the silence is filled by jukebox's Colorado Kool-aide, and someone says. . . "When's the last time you heard that song?" "Last time I was here, an' that was two years ago." a fellow stumbled over his tongue. An hour later it was closing time. The original track of It's hard to be humble spurred the question to life all over again. In the end, hard frost drives their patrons to bed, where windows dreamily gaze out at 1940s Sno Cats, broken mining equipment, and boats with holes in their sides. Their heaters are made for much colder nights, you discover, when setting one of three turns the red-glowing corners of cast iron frame to a dull one-ten simmer, both windows wide, and the floor cooled from the ample crack in the door. Not even the chilled wind could subdue the BTU monster. In the morning . . . nobody moves 6 AM quickly-but they move; and if you're lucky, Naidine will delight you with blueberries in pancakes she got from Tom-Sawyering a whole bus- load of Germans to a picking contest. "One'ov the best ideers I ever had." she said. "Now you eat up son, so I can make you another." They were so big, three would have made the average human stay one more night #14 One bar's a hand-painted mosaic of fired fractured tiles. One bar's got a mannequin with its leg sticking out, twirling round and round. There's a scrabble puzzle on the door double-word sorting the early, from the last time you'll be served. 50s kitsch is everywhere. Artists, dock workers and old ladies warily congregate, unsure of where whom and who this place "officially" caters to. There's a green alum-haired brush cut musician strumming a comix guitar, while a magnified-screen TV history snows its partially-legible picture. Guinness Stout pours black "Next there!" start sooner his schooner is empty by the sleepy bear RPM motor oil flyer. Cowgirls on horses, matadors, Jesus, and tacky doll posters frame the restaurant's lime-green walls. Each glass-topped table is a decor in and out of itself. Mohair seat covers fluff lightly in the oscillation-fan wind. Their sound system is a mystery. You never know what's up next. Rave music, Frankie Avalon, pan pipe, native African chanting, hardcore punk, or Elvis? Naturally. The older patrons can hardly stand it, but they're fascinated too. This is a large sprawling view spot for a small little town, the coffee's bottomless, cheap pancakes the size of bedroom mirrors happen all the time, and it'll often fully-tilted from Thursday morning to Sunday night. 24 hours of lunacy, if someone's in the right mood. 24 times three if your lucky. Voluptuously 40s bathing beauties drinking Coca-Cola twirl around their pillars. Elvira is serving you, draping black lace to high heel panties, fish-netted for poise. She smirks at your nitroglycerine cocktail. "Bottoms' up." she dares. A peacock glares steadily into a wall of mirrors. Mustard squeezers and Wrigley gum boxes for giants grace the corners of their rooms. Foofy, fuzzy-sweatered patrons apply overladen faces with even more mock-makeup. Liberachi pinkies some far-out keys and somebody shouts because it's their birthday. It's a creative place. Bonuses are based on art from everyday life, decades ago. Two people are intimating French-one has a gold steel bracelet that's so shimmery, it distracts you from the fake gray streak in his girlfriend's hair. They were fortunate only in being too-cool for rhetoric any un-urbane surroundings fostered. They sat in percolate individuality, gleaning the I wishes leeching from the less-hip, wanting to be so much more. They were nonetheless welcomed. Blue lights, and negatives livened between sheets of thinking rests for drinks alleviated the need to stare at the walls with too much caution. People came and went, talking the speeches gathered ogling migraines, rap-sheets, and two-pack days. They absently scrutinize a collection of Kraft Foods 1960s refrigerator magnets, the squirrel ashtray, and Drink Master Rolidex, then make their abstracted selections. The blond bikini martini mixing girl does the shimmy with D-sized batteries underneath, drawing motion from the paint-by-numbers ballerinas kitty-corner in blatant 2-D frames. More famous cowgirls and their old-time horses glare out from under a soft neon flicker at the marching lines of poodle-dog cream dispensers gleaned from God only knows what fraternity of bad coffee wholesalers. The incredible mishmash of excellent lounge furniture prays on every human's need to sit down, and drunkenly relax. #15a Penis post cards pictures from famous rock stars dead lives too mirrored shelves of high-octane fun glasses lining wood warped bar scratched with clamorous banging making points lost on too many obscurities Conan the Barbarian holds sword next to Jack Nicholson's Shining grin across from Morrison's who cares Jimmi Bob Marley naked scratching Blues Brothers Burning down the house, breaking the Berlin wall famous canine pets in dim Polaroid snapshots-David Bowie Stones Elephants candids Star Trek shorts Nirvana old Brits cackling loss of youth "Where's the birds?!" dirty old codgers' remembrance of London Manchester Beatles clubs smoky alcoholic haze. Emptied ashtrays Jamaican white-toothed smiles at your burning fag trashed dart board dark mahogany look-alike benches riddling with jabbering/slavering pussy-seekers . . .Canned music goes on louder, "Boys are baack in town, boys are baack in town . . ." and more drinks get poured. #15a "Boys are baack in town..." echoes in the distance. Footsteps scuff the timeless cobblestoned streets-Hello! There are big glowing spaceships in every corner. One is piloted by the space-jock bartenders. Stars and big-lipped rolling sometimes stoned moody moons peer back at you. Almond Joys are the spiel of happy hour's chalkboard where no musical requests are allowed, and a route 66 sign is covered with the perpetual haze of punctiliously boutiqued incense of handrolled hashed vortex cigarettes. The surging eyes watch the surfing championships, hooting recognition of every close up wiggle out of painted-on shirts, shorts and oh never mind the tube crashing, there's the cameraman at it again and how do you know it's a 'man'? Men just know their way around these things. Is it time to go already? #15c There are Barbie Dolls in the floor. Bamboo and bricks. Water. The seats are bongo drums. Aren't they? Dead fish are floating in the harbor. postscript#? I mend the rent in my brain with the thick needle and thread of remembering "Jesus was an acid head.", carved in the wall of . . . was it the first, or the last place's toilet? Random walk two. #16a He slapped his guitar wit a spatula, holding it in front of the scratched and broken amplifier in relentless carved-note mischief. Earplug Boy was living up to its name. Glittering stars rotated slowly in the stale cigarette air as twinkling drum lights from an abandoned Christmas tree winkied happily around the head-ringing string distortion brain bashing off key singing watched by velvet Jesus's and sad road runners perpetually scrutinized by arch (ever-hungry) enemy Wily Bee. People gave up screaming their conversations and showed how artificially tough they were by not running out or covering their heads with their arms continuing to pretend it WASN'T SO LOUD! #16b Forty seconds walk down the street there's a strange venue for food, drink and sound. It's a cozy den of iniquity, with belly dancers, costumed servants, stucco-terraced walls, Turkish cushions, and deep velvet slouching couches. There are tapestries and ceiling fans strange lacquers, hookahs, and gypsy tunes. Candles burn, and rugs are plentiful and thick. Incense curls the warm, viscous air. Little flecks of mirror punctuate woven vests copper hangings, big knurled tables and people's make-up. Watches' gold jangles gingerly fall, tinkling the whatever time it is, is the right time rhythm, one more drink maintains. #16a They were feeding back like nobody's business, but none of the deadpanned patrons seemed disturbed. The Dick's Deluxe-shirted bare chest wanna-be bartender spills cider all over someone wearing the rattiest clothing you could imagine, and the guy's actually perturbed! The bartender makes him pay for the next beer, because there's a wall of impenetrable sound not even the wetness gets through. Volume = music, in some circles' lexicon. You've got to plug your ears to even register there's music playing. #16c It was very crowded, and their first move was to throw down an ample pile of chips and mildly hot salsa. There were streamers hanging thick from the ceiling, the cheesy smells from right next door. We waited while the neat 70's glitter gag balls swirled through the air, and the Mexican band marched through, upsetting our Tequila. #16a They've got natty hair, dark tattoos and pierces, overcoats, ripped clothing, painted eyebrows and unisex fingernail polish. They're pouring in the doors paying three bucks each for the grand band of the night, Zen Gorilla. Popcorn's spilling on the floor and one of the bartenders pertly denies not bringing any change three times in a row. You can see a joker named Max who's real name is something else drawing figured cartoon comix that look so totally professional you yak it up to see if you can be his agent. Dude's madder than the mad hatter, creating nonlinear strips out of crumpled half-torn sheets of 8X10 paper other people distributed. He gabs incessantly in that, you'll certainly be paying top dollar for one of these make your own sense of it comicks one or another of these decades. I get him angry, which surprises everyone. "What's the deal?" "I treated him like he was normal." It made him very angry to see there's someone who takes him seriously. He threatens me with a big maul fist and I leave. #16d I seem to remember a pool table people had islanded their butts on. There was a seat next to a pale faced gold braceletted babe who's so cool she's a product of ice. There were a lot of gold chains, and some pop music hits in Spanish. I sat there, and ordered a Dos-Something. #16e It seemed like a very long walk. In actuality, it wasn't. A couple of blocks can seem like miles sometimes. Not too many people. Nothing special. Lots of regulars. People ordered vodka things. These were professionals. Their bar was their home base. The booze came strong, in big bulbous plastic jugs. I bailed (too late). #17 There's a 3'x5' Air Force satellite control facility award plaque (bedecked with shiny engraved 1967 metal names) converted into a cupboard door round the corner by the handheld (blurry) camera snaps of the too-close-for-comfort grizzly mamma bears, scarfing salmon. Outside, eagles strafe wrecked trucks, polishing foggy air with large black wings, in search of their hyperactive rodents, who hide underneath. There's a grungy fisherman's refuse corner soon as you yank the stuck door open. Wipe your feet in the brown Astroturf, enter the warmth and put your right hand on the good luck grizzly, sneering taxidermied fangs at your crotch. The ceiling's been taped and plastered again so many times they've given up. it sags it's off-white water damage absorbing winter ages of hard-wind cigarettes and coffee steam. Moose horns support brightly-colored baseball hats behind the multi-used bar, where hand-drawn posters fade inelegantly to 1970's-tuned diffidence rising morbidly from the "full seafood menu" deep fryer. The flip-calendar leaves are so warn, you can hardly read the date; the sturdy ship's bell beckons vagaries-strong fishermen's arms of big-haul, big-bucks nets. "Rounds for everyone!" the silence ghosts, while white rum and Coke hits the empty cook's stomach in a ton-o-bricks, early morning haze at three o'clock in the afternoon. The waitress (though she'd like nothing better than a nip in her mug) sticks to coffee and cigarettes. "It's safer that way." she sides, to no one in particular. We all laugh. The french bread cheeseburger is as big as the biggest fish tale your grandfather ever told. It dislocates your eyes, just imagining trying to wrap your mouth around it. In the other hand, she has your free side of stew-a hearty meal in itself. #18 They say it's the smallest bar in Alaska. There's a melee of signs on the outside, making you wonder whether its'a construction shack, or . . . The combined space of the two restrooms is about the space of the floor where six chairs and two small tables cohabit. You know why there's a nice scale in the mens, and not the women's? "Say now, Coke and coffee's free. Sit right down'n 'ave a cup." Couldn't be nicer. Read about he fisherman who clung to the rock face for four hours with a seventy degree (world record breaking) core temperature. Now that's a man with guts! the answers: 1 The Mecca (grunge music's central) 2 The Five Point (ditto mecca's owner, seattle) 3 Ponte's (Yuppie latte central) 4 guess. (It's in Beauford, North Carolina) 5 The Jolly Roger ("first in flight"s nc sand spit) 6 The Blue Moon (Emerald city, 1934*infinity) 7 Heart of Darkness (Phnom phen, Cambodia) 8 The Rat and Raven (24th street, noi valley, san fran) 9 San Francisco (could be anywhere, huh?) 10 Jitters bar and coffeehouse (minneapolis, mn) 11 Yellow Pine's bar (********* mountains, Idaho) 12 beaver creek bar (near smiley creek, idaho) 13 tangle river inn (tangle lakes, denali highway, Alaska) 14 The friendly toast (kittery, maine) 15a stones (lagos, portugal) 15b bad moon rising " " 15c "amurah" (something like that) " " 16A Cameleon (on Valencia, San Fran) 16B Arabian nights " " " 16C la rondalla cocktail lounge " " " 16D Latin America club " " " 16e clooney's " " " 17 The road's end (Chiniak. Alaska) 18 diamond jims (Kodiak, Alaska) 19 20 . . .