Beatnik Bar Report

This is something older, written one night after leaving the bar… obviously.

Staci kept moving the bouncer’s beer.

The bouncer was an ex-army ranger, cut like a man who will still feel comfortable in fatigues when he finally found himself in the nursing home, his bullshit power-plays being patronized by the hired help in their clean white uniforms.

Every time I came to the bar he’d ask me if I was going to cause any trouble that night, half the time he’d ask to see my ID with the next breath even though he obviously remembered me from all the times I’d been in there brewing up my own particular brand of trouble.

I always grin at the question and then give a little

• what me? cause trouble? come on.

To which he lets me in, making a pretty good show of reluctance, tossing out some admonishment regarding proper tavern behavior. But I always tell him..

- what me? cause trouble? come on.

Which means –yes, of course i’m going to do damn near whatever it is that comes into my foolish head when those two dollar Guinness pints start treating me proper!

Which is why Staci kept moving the ex-ranger bouncer’s beer and shouting

- Do You People Know You’re Alive?

at the top of his lungs while the rest of us beat on the table to keep time with the jig-punk that made the whole bar bounce and huffing down to holy hooch to keep our minds good and limber, that’s what I call trouble.

Somewhere in the dark-wooden, smoky air of that bar I found an ad that said “Get High and Wake Up In Ireland” and I plastered it to the window with me own spit, already incomprehensible as I rambled in that odd Irish lilt the place always gives me.

It was truly a beat moment. I think Keroac would have been wowed, and Cassidy would have made that table sing with his fists, drunk the place dry and gone home with one of the lost looking little girls that dotted the place, call it kicks or maybe just living.

me, i just laughed and breathed those wild free lungfuls of something that only seems to be around when the mind is truly limber, i just stood on the booth and rubbed at my head, thinking about ecstatic ballets and dug the damn groove of it all, that’s what i call trouble, there come these moments of euphoria when you can just relax into your own wild hi-jinks in a circle of deeply there spirits and become nothing more than that table in the corner, the one making all that noise.

There is a satisfaction that comes from those kicks, the comments shared about the fools in suits and designer hog-wash that just don’t get it, don’t dig the whole spit on the window, fists on the wood scene of mad euphoric life, the ones who don’t seem to realize that they are alive and in this wacked little bar with the ex-army bouncer and the beautiful waitresses weaving through the press of humanity in tight khaki pants with trays of pure liquid night air in two dollar pint glasses, who could resist wheeling out into the true and final night to see who can skip the fastest down the street with the wind in their ears and some vision of eternity right in front of eyes blurred with exertion and the mad joy of it all.

It’s like the joy of a sentence that doesn’t want to stop, it would be perfectly happy to run and run and flow and paint its trails of illumination across those moments that loom timeless and never leave.

That’s what I call trouble, an ongoing statement of the patently absurd woven into the urban night.

When we left the bar there was a small system of Guinness lakes running across the table, soaking into the newspaper from where I’d found that ad. Flipping open the sodden pages revealed another ad.. “What a Trip!” it said, and that one was moist enough to stick to the window all on it’s own.