Popination Conflagration
a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: Sundown Saloon
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Back when I shared the first guest post authored by my partner (pen name of Seamus), I explained our old shared exercise in creative nonfiction, called Parallel Bars. Since that blog was written all at bars, I’ve yoinked and adapted some of my own work for a Popination in case I don’t get to a fresh one, and Seamus’ guest post, A Tear For Paris, was a little tribute of sorts to the Paris Olympics that we were watching idly at the time.
This weekend was so full and required me to be so ‘on’ that I didn’t get to church or to popinate at all. And so I thought I’d share this guest post by Seamus, of an old infamous dive bar in Boulder, called Sundown Saloon. And that’s fitting, actually, as it was way more of a regular haunt for his young barfly days than it ever was mine—I’d been there a couple times but he was a real regular. In his essay, it’s been renamed Underworld which feels like an even better name for the place, somehow. Though ‘saloon’ is in its name, I’d definitely call this a dive bar, based on all the Dive Bar Dick’s criteria.
So. Here’s another stellar guest post by my partner!—let me know if you’d like to continue to have some more pieces of his sprinkled in here as a treat, at times when I need a break. All errors and typos are to be blamed on him (though I did try to proofread it briefly). Please to enjoy.
Bars of Yore: The Underworld
by Seamus, 2017
***
The bar had two entrances – one on the street, which was a pedestrian mall now, and one on the alley behind. Both had long straight stairs that went down into the fermented dark, so that one had the sense of being in a sort of permanent trough between waves of regular life. Inside was a cavernous and dingy room which was usually bustling with whatever volatile mix of college kids and street denizens had decided to convene there whenever you happened to show up.
***
The weather is warm and the girl I’m with isn’t Peony,1 this being somewhere in the first half of our 25-year interregnum. I’ve got a black suit on, sharp, and she’s wearing a short red dress made of that shiny Madam Butterfly stuff, even though she’s Italian. In heels she’s my height and we draw stares. It’s got to be a Saturday night – the whole town is out and there’s an urgency in the air like you get on a real summer night around here. Turning into the alley I can already see that the bar will be a scene. You could smoke inside back then but people had spilled out into the alley anyway and were perched up and down the stairs and on the railings. As we walked up she turned to me and said, “Let’s pretend.”
“Pretend what?”
“Pretend this is like, a busy, kind of dangerous port town, and this is a cutthroat sailor’s bar, and you’re a mysterious traveler and I’m a lady of the night.”
Damned if her eyes weren’t sparkling then. And I found that I could do it. I couldn’t do it now but we were still mostly just kids and I could do it then. The ocean seemed somewhere just beyond the buildings and the air was shifted. Walking down the stairs to the smoke and smell and noise of the bar, some bearded kid, now one of our sailors, on the stairs said, “You can’t come in here. You guys look too nice to come in here.”
“Watch,” I growled.
***
Another night: I’m peeling the paper labels off bottles of Budweiser one by one, very carefully and with a great deal of concentration. It’s late and the night and the drinking have smoothed out together, consciousness diffusing out into the general hum and motion of the bar. The place is full but not packed. The waitress stops for a shot at the next table over and one of my drinking partners gets lost in the tattoo that covers most of her visible back. He stares a long time but he doesn’t say a word. Every table has an ash can with a “no smoking” sticker on it and I light a cigarette. There are several empty shot glasses on the table and I’m right where I want to be – I don’t want or need anything more than what I’ve got. I could go home, I could stay. It’s not up to me. It’s up to the collective hum and buzz. Seems like I’ve been peeling those labels for a long time.
As I’m considering this, a rhythmic thumping starts up at a table over my shoulder. Not gradually, but all at once, just “bang” and then a sort of complex beat, hands on a table top, glasses shaking a little. Not violent, but deliberate and sustained. There’s a shot-down looking group of five or six native guys sitting there, men of no particular age, seeming to be deep in an impenetrable conversation that didn’t necessarily involve speech. But by some sort of agreement they had now begun to sing, or chant or whatever it is, in their nearly-dead language. And the hum in the bar, it doesn’t stop so much as coalesce around this. Like they’ve just picked up the fabric being woven in the big, dark, subterranean room and decided to stitch their own story into it for a minute.
When they stop, as abruptly as they started, they neither move nor look around, and a little wave goes through the room. Maybe somebody claps, but that doesn’t catch, and some jackass war-whoops and gets shut down, and then there’s a kind of trough in the hum, and then it rises back up and smooths out again and I fall back into it. And nothing else happens because nothing else needs to.
***
Another night: it’s me and a good crew, a fine body of men and women, and we’ve got a pool table and though only a couple of us are competent players we’re still holding off challengers and we’ve got a stack of quarters and everybody’s getting loose in the right way. A good brother of mine is there, good guy – let’s call him Big John. A musician, former bodybuilder, heart big as the rest of him. And we’re talking – because of course we are – about one or another of the infinite permutations of dick. I crack a joke and he laughs hard, and he’s a guy with a loud falsetto laugh that cuts through the room. As he does so, a guy nearby imitates it, louder and in a way I don’t like one bit. Now me, I’m a little shit at this point in my life, not big, but I’m mean and I’m dumb, so I get set to harden up. But my brother, he sees more than I do. Ignoring my bullshit he approaches the guy with only the slightest narrowing of his eyes. The guy in questions is another big fella, with some kind of strange mullet-mohawk thing going on.
“Dude!” says my friend. “You’re doing my laugh!”
“I am!” says the guy. “I’m…I’m doing your laugh man.”
Now my friend in his own right isn’t a guy to be fucked with, but he sees something in this man’s eyes, and instead of posting up, he goes suddenly gentle. He laughs a little, but kindly. “What’s up with that, man?”
Our new friend looks at my buddy for a minute, and his eyes start to well. “Can I tell you a secret, man? You can’t tell any cops, is the thing.”
“We don’t truck with cops here. What’s going on?”
“Man…I’m tripping balls, man! I ate these mushrooms, and it’s out of hand, you know? It’s like, it’s out of hand, and…”
Ah. So just that simple, we’re all good friends again. Our mullet buddy is a kid in need of care, that’s all – second childhood by way of psilocybin. Big John puts a heavy arm, the arm of a bear, around our friend and talks him through the maze, helps him find an exit out of the fear corner he got stuck in, so he can journey on. Mullet man relaxes and goes cosmic. His trip comes back around for him and we realize we’ve got him with us for the night, but it’s okay.
Somebody’s messing around with the jukebox and Willie Nelson comes on, doing “Always on My Mind.” I see some people giggling behind their hands and pointing, and I look over to see a One-Percenter-looking biker guy, bandana around his head, leather vest (though no patch I recognize), ancient tats, those heavy rings you don’t want to get hit with, all that, on his knees before the lighted jukebox for all the world like one before an altar. His arms are held high and tears stream down his cheeks. But his own crew is with him. They watch over him and that’s okay too. This is permitted. For one evening at least we’ll all take care of each other, down here in the underworld, and we’ll get through another night in a long-gone version of Boulder.
My pen name on Parallel Bars was Peony. The ‘interregnum’ he refers to (which I find delightful) defines the time between our high school graduation and our reunion and dating nearly 30 years later. So when we say we were high school sweethearts, needs must remember the long interregnum.