Bar District
Sunday, October 19th, 2008
By the back entrance to the bars and pizzerias, some abandoned railroad lines run aground in the asphalt. The freight trains that once crossed here are barely noticeable save for the bronze metal that reflects the glow from streetlamps. Once unobstructed, the rail path now follows a sidestreet up a slight incline and curves through an intersection toward a parking lot and these old ghostly buildings where the thirst for alcohol and sex derailed the cargo carriers decades ago.
A few of the inebriated souls wander this district believing themselves to be braver or possibly invincible under the influence and try to put their hands through the glass in shops window or pick fights with groups of sober bodies or kiss the wrong women – ones that belong to someone else – and do so inconspicuosly.
The fate that befalls the drunks is usually not ideal, but in this dirstrict comprised of the city’s oldest bars and where the college kids come in groups to meet up and watch the games and drink and shoot the shit, the drunks are often forgiven. “Oh, he’s just drunk” is a phrase that often passes as an explanation for irradic behavior. Someone vomits in the alleys here every night. People meet and sleep together and never talk again. Someone else falls in love and it stays – and it works – and it’s true.
Most advances are clumsy and fail as a result and someone ends up drunk, his mind attuned to random details and so he notices the aborted rail line staggering from bar door to bar door, from cover charge to cover charge, until hunched over those tracks wondering if his stomach is going to empty out. But the failure is worth the long shot at unexpected happiness in the bar district – the girls here for fun and the boys for the chance at meeting them.
The bars are the great encouragers of all behaviors. The beer and the whisky could flow under the streets because there are so many places to get it, as common as tap water. The owners can be alcoholics, too, except now they drink at home by themselves with their properties in the charge of other drunks who don’t drink when they work, but instead start in when the bar stools are stacked and the patrons gone.
Anything is permissible on the streets here on Saturday. If history couldn’t temporarily be put aside, no one would come back. The love that seldom works out in the drunken crowd would turn the rarest successes into rampant lies. Freight trains rolled through here once with power and quiet glory that needs to be forgotten.
