I think that a bar should smell like a bar. It’s the first thing I noticed when I walked into that place. It didn’t.
Before my eyes had a chance to investigate my nose had already made its mind up. I wasn’t going to like this place. It smelled like spice. I don’t know which. Doesn’t matter. It wasn’t club soda. Not the syrup you mix with water to make the fountain Pepsi that shoots out of that wonderful gun. It didn’t smell like the 40th anniversary of cigar smoke and cue chalk.
It smelled nothing like leftover buttered-toast on my chin. The best toast I’ve ever had. It smelled nothing like strawberry jelly on my brother’s breath. Nothing like the ash-littered, sun-baked, road-tested fabric seats in my grandfather’s Lincoln that might as well have been a Panzer Tank. And it was. And it was the Batmobile. And it was fast. And I was immortal and a ninja turtle. And the wind was perfect.
This place smelled not at all like those mornings, when I still so young, and grandpa was still a superhero, and we would make the rounds. First to the O.T.B. for breakfast and bets, and then to the bar, so I could play pool with my hands and shoot Pepsi out of that miraculous Pepsi gun until I couldn’t stand another glass. Which was never. There has never been, nor will there ever be enough Pepsi.
Things being things, because that’s the way they are, I’m not so young anymore, Grandpa is somewhere drinking scotch and Metamucil with Jesus (not really, he’s dead) and that bar is gone. The O.T.B? Can’t say. Probably in ruins like the rest of the West End.
When my eyes caught up it was about as bright as 8am, when the sun sneaks past your blinds, crawls up your bed, sits on your face, and whispers in your ear, “you have shit to do.” In terms of available light, this isn’t very different from the dusty concussion that was the West End Club, but when you put it together with the smell you realize that you are underdressed. And I was. And so was she. But we didn’t care. So there was hope.
Maybe I was going to like this place.
But then everybody died of mouth AIDS quite suddenly and I was the last person left on Earth.
