Chowderhead Bazoo

Dive-O-Rama: The Marine Club

Vancouver - On the nights when Frank was still pulling ‘em in with his musical stylings on the organ, the place could look like something out of an Otto Dix painting. Punks and would-be beatniks bent elbows next to stocky tattooed stevedores while aging greasers whose names were probably Joe or Bob or Rusty rolled dice with old gents in suits. There were the over-the-hill jazz dames, pageboy-bobbed, some wearing vintage hats, like hard luck flappers frozen in time, but melting a little bit around the edges. Half-cut rookie night-lifers looking vaguely dazzled in the orangey gloom plied decidedly utilitarian cocktails and cold-ish bottles of beer, maybe even smoking a cigarette or two as if required to get that phase out of their system.

Smiling Frank would be snaking and percolating his way through “Strangers in the Night” or some such Tin Pan Alley chestnut to the largely rapt audience, when some weird and wonderful moment might just hang in the air so perfectly that you might even call it transcendent. But maybe that’s just an echo of youthful romanticism bouncing back at me or due to the fact that I was one of those half-cut rookie night-lifers. And by half-cut, I mean diced to perfection.

Frank’s long gone and the Marine Club itself was only a couple of decades behind him, closing in 2007.  It opened in 1956, a second storey social club for merchant seamen that eventually became a hipster hideaway on the nowhere side of downtown. Leading up to the door where you had to buzz to get in, the long steep staircase was legendary, likely the host to many a stumble, if not a few slapstick ass-bounces. The interior was classic rec-room with the requisite wood paneling, vinyl chairs and blue collar dad-style décor heavy on the life rings and fishing nets. Long and narrow and low-ceilinged, the joint was also notorious for its tropical climate in summer months.

For years it seemed like the same cluster of guys sat at the small bar, ringed around the flagrantly indifferent bartender, the bare-bones booze supply and the metal chest full of strangely un-icy ice. They were slouched there through it all, quietly enduring all manner of noisy encroachment on their turf – punk, rockabilly, lowbrow art shows, burlesque nights, the gangs of drunken last-callers. Nothing seemed to faze them. The same might be said of the building itself, rooted in place like an old man sitting on a bench while some kinetic nightmare of time-lapse photography swirls around him. Yaletown and Railtown – whatever bullshit “towns” – started closing in, distracting a new breed of Vancouver hipster more likely to frequent some fussy, tinny lifestyle barn with a name like “Unit 42.”

Places like the Marine Club are pretty much gone now. There seems to be no middle ground anymore between the Unit 42’s and the skid row rubby bars of the East side. Downtown Vancouver has lost its Joes and Bobs and Rustys. They’re somewhere else now, somewhere less expensive no doubt, pushed out by the faux-hawks, the fusion tapas, the yoga, and of course, all of those phony-baloney places offering "Solutions." And that’s the problem.

Dive-O-Rama: Ernie Steele's

(Photo by Louis Chirillo)

Seattle - If you get on a plane and fly east, bounce across Europe, then on through Jordan to Thailand, and eventually to Tokyo, continuing east until you’re back where you started, you end up at Ernie Steele’s. At least that’s what happened to me.

I wasn’t living in Seattle yet. I wasn’t living anywhere, really. Trying to sort out all that had just happened and what to do next, Ernie Steele’s became my fortress of lassitude. As with the best American bars of a certain vintage, Ernie’s was a haven for the solitary drinker, for the untalkative daytime drifter looking for a dark corner and a place to be alone with other people, a place to kill time and watch it die. On the run, but really only walking.

It felt like being nowhere. The long bar, the taxidermal nightmares, the country and western and grunge on the jukebox, the faded promo junk pimping sports and beer and now a kind of promo junk museum - the perfect void. Like a sustained blue note in a greasy jazz tune, played through a cloud of cigarette smoke. The blurry mirror, the liquid hours, no right angles, everything bending. Let’s get lost.

Its daytime denizens moved through the murk like three-dimensional shadows. There was Maverick, the septuagenarian chain-smoker who came in at the same time every day to set up a tiny camp at the bar, white-gloved, bewigged, waiting politely for the nearest gentleman to light her cigarette. There was a cheery black guy in faded 70’s polyesters who loved country and western music and he’d take over the jukebox, providing a lo-fi soundtrack of George Jones, Johnny Cash, and Patsy Cline, the chugging, loping tempos setting the afternoon pace. Taxi hacks and postmen would pop in for a quick Bud or refreshing boilermaker.

After dark Ernie’s became a bit more eclectic, with the predictable smattering of jaded hipsters and slow-waking night owls, the soggy pros, and the slumming young party girls thirsting for hard free-pours and attention. Things would often get sloppy and stupid and it wasn’t my scene. And Jesus Christ - how many times can you listen to “Smells Like Teen Spirit?”

A visiting friend and I once fell into a conversation with Liz and Larry, a couple of ex-junkie hard cases passing through on their way to Alaska. Liz, tattooed, scarecrow-haired, sausage-fingered, was particularly gregarious. In broad New Yawkese she bragged about getting clean and sober, while piling back vodka, and telling us hair-raising tales of their stint as freelance body-retrievers and crime scene cleaners somewhere out on the east coast. Enjoying a receptive audience, they bought us drinks we didn’t want until we had to wobble out, unable to match their sobriety. Liz gave us hugs and some pencils.

Eventually Ernie’s became Ileen’s and the bar became the Ernie Room. The promo junk was updated, a bigger, cleaner TV installed, prices jacked, and worst of all, the foyer wall was removed, letting in way too much daylight. Then it just disappeared altogether, another victim of gentrification and skyrocketing real estate prices. In time, Seattle’s premier adult lush lairs would all go the way of the dodo – converted, upscaled, demolished, or made more everyone-friendly and bright and generic, all of the Mavericks forced out to make way for microbrew connoisseurs and paninis. By the time Ernie’s had become a ghost, I’d moved on anyway. But when the void called, you could still find a dark corner if you looked hard enough, but nowhere would ever be as nowhere.

Dive-O-Rama: The Kibitz Room

Los Angeles - The guy next to me at the urinals is making a big production out of it. Lots of “ahhhh”s and “ughhhh”s – like he’s been holding it for days and the release is just too sweet not to vocalize. One of those guys.

“You ever notice women don’t – ahhhhh - appreciate a good piss the way we do?” the guy asks.

I look around hoping that he’s talking to someone else. I’m already on my way to the sink, looking back at him in the mirror as he makes a ham-bone show out of zipping up, as if instead of a penis, he has a flapping free-range chicken in need of much forceful wrangling.

“No,” I say. I got nothing. But I manufacture a smile. He’s behind me now waiting for the sink, big goofy grin, half-assed spiky afro.

“It’s crazy,” he surmises. I’m gone.

If it weren’t for Canter’s restrooms tucked away in the far corner of the place, I would’ve never noticed the Kibitz Room way back here, furtively lolling like its own separate saggy buttock on the ass end of the restaurant. Dark, but not necessarily mysterious, it’s definitely got that lived-in look. And like all good booze-holes, that died-in look. Here’s where I should probably get all philosophical, but I don’t feel like it. The cycle of life and all that. The cycle of saggy buttock.

The room’s a thin faded ribbon that threads from the restrooms past a short bar rimmed with Mary Tyler Moore bucket seats, past a few tattered vinyl booths, a slim stage, some drunk people, and out the wood-paneled hallway onto Fairfax. Legendary Fairfax. Everything’s legendary in L.A. – must be all the showbiz - and like most of their product, a guaranteed letdown.

Late Saturday night and it’s staggering room only. We play musical chairs for a while without the chairs, scoping out the wrong would-be evacuees with laser imprecision every time until we finally score a booth along the wall that divides the bar from the restaurant. It’s a great seat, mainly because of the long windows cut into the wall that provide a greasy, blurry view of the restaurant interior on the other side. From this vantage point one has the choice of human landscapes; booze-hounds on one side, weirdo nighthawks at the diner on the other.

There’s a band playing and they don’t stink too bad. The smattering of dancers lurching about the bathmat-sized dance floor seem not so straight out of central casting – I’m pretty sure they stopped for a few drinks on the way. It’s the real La-La nightlife: misfits, losers, drunks, hard chicks, soft boys, punks, senior citizen rocker burn-outs. There’s even a couple of Nice Jewish Girls in the mix wearing unfashionable party dresses. They briefly fascinate me.

Now I’m checking out the trio in the booth next to us, some vaguely ethnic twenty-whatevers hitting the sauce with a peculiar vengeance. The chunky chick in the gravity-defying halter top is chugging every drink. Her boyfriend barely has time to sit down before he’s up again for another round – repeatedly. Between shuttling drinks and distractedly mauling chunky chugger, he’s on a cell phone. Like so many people in this town – he’s not there. And they’re both pretty much ignoring the third wheel, a woozy girl with a pained expression on her face that seems to say, “When did my life turn into this fucking nightmare?” as she watches her girlfriend turn into Albert Finney and the band sweats it out under the naked bulbs, straining to keep up the not stinking too bad.

The bartenders are surprisingly dithery; not typical of a hard-drinking drinking establishment. Even with beer orders, it’s as if they suddenly can’t find their car keys. Prices vary from round to round, which is, I’ve noted from experience, fairly typical, but I quickly blame my L.A. default culprit - cocaine. Anything goes even remotely sideways here, I’m fingering the nose candy. So to speak. The 70’s mustaches don’t help and suddenly it all seems like a horrible Eagles song. Like there's any other kind.

My urinal buddy strolls by and lets us know that his musical stylings will be up next. Of course. Quickly killing the last of my beer, I say, “Let’s go – I’ve heard this one.”

Dive-O-Rama: The Frolic Room

Los Angeles - The bartender's name is Reuben. "Like the sandwich," he says. And I can see it a little bit, especially around the eyes. It's ten o'clock on a Thursday night and not much is shaking at the Frolic Room. There's a shaggy old guy mumbling under his cowboy hat next to me and a neo-rockabilly couple parked by the jukebox soaking in the real gone sounds of "One Toke Over the Line." A couple regulars ply their watery drafts in silence. Swiveling around on my stool I can make out Marlene Dietrich, Wallace Beery, and Edward G. Robinson partying it up on the Hirschfeld mural adorning the wall. A dolled-up Joan Crawford glares back at me, looking none too impressed with her cartoon purgatory of permanent slumming. Or maybe she's more into reggae.

A couple rounds and it's getting late. I ask Reuben about someplace for eats. At first he's stumped. Apparently we're near Thai Town, which is also Little Armenia – I'm thinking the L.A. Chamber of Commerce is on the take - but Reuben's drawing a blank. I make the obligatory "Forget it, Jake, it's Thai Town" joke before he comes up with a Denny's. I might have been surprised if I hadn’t come to expect this kind of thing - the very heart of Hurray for Fucking Hollywood and all you get at eleven-thirty is a Denny's? Shrug. Figures. There was also a time that I actually bought the lie that Las Vegas was a crazy twenty-four hour free-for-all. Was I ever that young?

Hollywood and Vine ain't what it used to supposed to be either. Most of the landmarks like the Brown Derby and the prostitutes are gone. The Pantages theatre is still there and next to it crouches the diminutive Frolic Room, its gleeful neon facade unchanged for decades. Hollywood Boulevard itself stretches out endlessly like the flaccid wang of some worn-out porn star - debauched, dirty, and rather smelly. Tonight the Walk of Fame leads to a cluster of lit-up cop cars and the swooping searchlight of an LAPD helicopter overhead. Fame and infamy are practically the same thing here anyway. But oddly enough, it doesn't feel like a movie. With the loud throbbing of the helicopter, the towering palm trees dark against the murky brown sky, and everything blackened by car exhaust, it feels like the end of the world, like a strangely indolent apocalypse. It's Raymond Chandler's long goodbye with strip malls, graffiti, and gutted phone booths.

The Denny's doesn't serve booze but does graciously provide a couple of all-night drug dens for the local crack-heads and tweakers. I watch the conga-line to the restrooms as I tuck into my giant American burger. I'm trying hard not to be dazzled by all the glitz and glamour. And yet this is the belly of the beast, ground less-than-zero for all the brainless junk-culture crap that's shoveled into our heads on a daily basis. Where are the bounty hunters and millionaire bachelors? Where are the top models and extreme make-overs? Where's the reality, for Christ's sake?

Ironically - or perhaps not ironically at all – outside the window I can see a bus stop bench festooned with an ad for L.A. Ink, a new "reality" show starring tattoo artist superstar Kat Von D. She's everywhere here, sometimes four or five stories tall in all her Photoshopped, drug diet glory, literally the poster-girl for everything all style, no substance, everything fake edgy cool and disposable and dumbed-down in this New American Century. I've seen the show and she's a complete idiot. But, hey - she's got a bunch of rawkin' tats and a gift of the modern gab, an ability to speak solely in vapid catch-phrases, slogans, and buzz-words. "Go big or go home," she declares at one point and her co-stars all bray knowingly and high-five. How to explain her meteoric rise to stardom? How to explain any of this? As she describes her own job, "It's not rocket surgery." Indeed. It's not even brain science.

Los Angeles is a singularly weird entity. It never really gets dark here. People spend half their lives in their cars. Adults talk like twelve year-olds. They accept the fact that it’s probably all going to crumble into the ocean one day. And they’ve lived next to fame and its greasy machinery for so long that it seems easily attainable, almost a birthright. It’s a rapidly spreading disease and it was born here, the mindset that anybody can become an over-exposed superstar with just a little luck, the right gimmick, a scintillating hairstyle – whatever. Paying your dues counts for little when everybody just wants to be this month’s novelty act.

But in this narcissist's paradise the actual real people hanging out at the Frolic Room will probably never be on T.V. Beer Factor? I don’t think so. So You Think You Can Drink? No dice. Are You Smarter Than a Sandwich? Forget it. And if anyone threw down the bold yet equivocal challenge to "go big or go home," they'd probably choose the latter and with very little, if any, high-fiving.

Dive-O-Rama: The Side Bar

Vancouver - Was it the smoking? The over-serving? The highly illegal boozecan hours? Was it the Friday night nose-candy sessions in the bathrooms? Nope. It was the Muslims. Muslims killed the Side Bar. No one saw that coming. Earlier this year they bought Bosman's Hotel and that meant that they also bought the lease to the lounge and the coffee shop. Turns out they can put up with the coffee, but not the booze. Salaam Side Bar.

I first set foot in the joint some eighteen years ago when the National Film Board was across the street and we were shooting a cartoon there. The bar was called "Good Times" back then and somehow we sensed immediately that there was irony in the air, quickly confirmed by the presence of a solitary barmaid behind the cash register who was more interested in the television and her knitting than she was in her only customers - us. Exhausted and welcoming the low-key purgatory, we reveled in the dad's basement rec-room vibe - the low ceiling, the wood paneling, the pedestrian sports junk, the wonky TV. It was at once both depressingly familiar and ticklishly strange, but decidedly easy on our frazzled senses. Our pints were served up with the TV's remote control and the neighbourly instructions to "put on whatever you want." Good times don't get much gooder. We turned it off.

Over the next decade or so I was a very irregular regular, some years completely Good Times-free. So to speak. Moving back from Seattle however quickly propelled me back into its twilight interior where the subdued adult tone was a welcome respite from Vancouver's dismal array of fratboy storage bins, generic Olde Timey pubs, and places where the TV and/or stereo is either cranked up to distortion level or there's some crap band stuttering through a nerve-jangling sound check at six in the fucking evening. The last thing Good Times looked like was a beer commercial and no one ever called me "dude."

By now it was called the "Side Bar" and was run by Gino, an affable Albertan with a rambunctious jungle of black hair, magnificent gut, and cartoonish prairie accent. Perpetually sporting summer shorts and a lopsided grin, trundling through the joint like a hulking toddler, Gino made the place "Gino's" in our estimation; we never called it the Side Bar, which was a dull moniker meant to suck up to the small smattering of after-work law court people that hung out there. The province's attorney-general was even a regular back when he was just a judge. Other regulars had sprung up as well in the intervening years, easily identified by their clustering up at the small bar, basking in the aquarium-ish light of the circa 1962 Vancouver skyline, looking bored and vaguely subterranean.

It was also around this time, coinciding with the threat of a citywide smoking ban, that Gino's somehow got popular with the hipsters - a nebulous collection of punks, poets, pornographers, thrift store fashion plates, and budding beer toilets - taking up too much space, squawking too loud, and generally making a small festival of their postured youthful edginess and originality. A sense of ownership entailed, strength in numbers, etc. - effectively ruining many an evening, the weekends forever made grimly unbearable once the Side Bar became a smothering humidor as the ban went into vicious effect and Gino boldly turned nicotine-stained rebel. The place was never the same. And so what? Things change. Gino eventually lost his battle against the health police, but gained a new crowd.

(And I won't even get into the horrors of hockey season... Shudder...)

Our visits tapered off in later years, although it was still fine for an afternoon pint once in a while. It wasn't a secret oasis anymore, it was just a crummy bar. But in this watery town it was good to know that it was there. It seems like it should have always been there. I was there for the final night, even rating an invite to the "regulars only" party - Gino a giant gent to the end. But it wasn't sad, it wasn't anything - it wasn't even properly anti-climactic. I wouldn't have had it any other way.

Salaam Gino's.

Dive-O-Rama: The Sea of Happiness Lounge

Chicago - The punishing rain, straight down, not slanting, not fucking around. The neon of the grandfatherly downtown signs dancing like abstract monkey paintings in the rippling vertical smear. And aware - puzzled now - that the streets could seem so suddenly evacuated, as if everything was bordering on some decisive disaster. The wrong city, but Travis Bickle would have left his umbrella at home.

Speaking of disaster, here it is; the name too ironic-perfect, too idiot-funny - just asking for it. As a friend came to call it after too many nights spent as a hopeless regular: "The Ocean of Misery." That was years ago, but the stupidity of the name will live on, forever as fresh as a fart. Without ever stepping inside, I was in on the joke. Now here it is. Just asking for it.

Into the fluorescent foyer, a piece of Eastern Europe magically transported to the American Midwest. I'd been here before - in Poland, in Yugoslavia, in the Czech Republic. It felt like a hospital, both antiseptic and bacterial at the same time. Up the hard steps that could neatly crack your skull if your sea legs got too happy. Through the glass door that impolitely crashes loudly behind you, announcing your arrival with the violence of a small catastrophe. No bigger than a boxing ring, the portly little room takes me by surprise. Sucking up space against the far wall is a chubby little bar, behind which lurks the legendary proprietor Captain George. Did I say "legendary?" Yes I did. I speak of the legendary legend of the smallish Greek man in a fisherman's cap who just may be quite the character, possibly a Chicago landmark, maybe even a modern messiah with the ability to turn ordinary tap water into really lousy beer. Looks choose not to be so deceiving in this case. Turns out he's just some old guy. With a corpulent fatigue he takes the order, his blank Mediterranean face reflecting only vague suspicion and a practiced, professional indifference.

Chicago is tough - pig iron, warm metal, heavy ore. It's square jaw houses clenched teeth. Meat-hooks dangle, gut sticks out. But it doesn't have New York City's sense of humour, maybe because it's not as keenly intelligent, not even as smirky smart-ass, preferring to culture you up with its toddlin' fists. Then again, things are getting soft all over.

None of Chicago's ineffable girth squeezes into this crouching little den, this worn-out girdle. It's shabby and dull and cast adrift in time, but not nearly remarkably so - like a Legion Hall with less terrycloth. There's a half-assed Greek/nautical thing going on, but really more like quarter-assed; half a buttock of effort. Still, one can sense the dingy ghost of the Captain's pride in the moribund collection of faded photographs and in the charmless assemblage of placemats, maps, model boats, fishnets, and flags. Random snakes of exposed wires compete for decorative dominance, the promise of deadly electric shock coiled in every cranny.

It's a slow night, a few regulars talk quietly, a couple play a cramped game of beeping electro-darts. The rain lets up to a downpour. Captain George tells some guy at the bar about how he used to smoke four packs a day. I pause in my mental tracks and quickly conclude that if this isn't mathematically impossible, it's at least mathematically insane. Out of some kind of sullen boredom the living legend spots us a round but remains fairly taciturn, his restrained spurts of dazzling conversation aimed mostly at his chest or at a wall.

Time drags, goes backwards a little bit. I note that the Captain appears to be having a bit of an unscheduled snooze. Maybe he dreams of a different happy sea - the blue Aegean, the ancient Ionian - but he must wake up to this. For a moment he looks bewildered. We settle up and pick our way through the obstacle course of low formica tables toward the glass door. As we reach it, wary of its rude report, the Captain calls out with a reasonable facsimile of enthusiasm, "thanks now, come again!" Things are getting soft all over.

Dive-O-Rama: Dino's

Vegas is a place where you're supposed to get wacky, right? That's what I heard. One evening we decided that donning vintage cheap suits and walking from the Sahara on the strip to Fremont Street downtown would be pretty nutty. My suit was an eye-catching dark green 1962 JC Penny "Townliner". Enthusiastically shooting my cuffs and constantly fiddling with my shiny tie, I was ready to line the town. And if Vegas refused to be 1962, I guess we could be 1962 - the logic went something like that, I think.

About one giant Vegas block out of the hotel, we were beginning to suffer in the evening heat. The sun was down, but it hardly seemed to matter. Our nutty suits weren't breathing so good, in fact they were dying. The giant blocks continued, mostly large stretches of parking lots and medium stretches of nothing, then porn-y low-rise motels, cut-rate convenience stores, and ugly strip-malls that all seemed to really underline the lack of 1962. Here and there a few figures lurked about doing shadowy things in the shadows. By this time our suits were quite dead, heavy vintage carcasses that we were simply hauling around now.

Dino's came out of nowhere, its cheery retro neon sign winking away in the night like a flirty tart at a funeral. It was already a pleasant surprise - it was there. We knew it would have air conditioning and refreshing beverages, and could I deny that part of me hoped that maybe Dino and the boys were inside doing the limbo with Angie Dickinson? We settled for some cold Budweisers and a couple of stools. Ring-a-ding-ding.

We'd stumbled upon a real neighbourhood bar filled with real neighbours. Most wore cowboy hats and huge belts while some mixed it up with trucker caps and sweatpants, but not a single neighbour wore a lifeless vintage suit that doubled as a kiln. They gave us the ol' thermometer, but we were hardly enough to raise an eyebrow in this joint. The guys at the bar were all hunkered down over their video poker anyway, if we'd been trouserless and riding unicycles it probably wouldn't have made much of a difference. Maybe I'd save that for the next trip. The beer was dirt cheap, stinging cold, and fast-disappearing. We could have had Heinekens, but Bud always seems the right choice when you're not completely sure what the fancy threshold is with the locals and how they might take to fancy.

Aesthetically, Dino's was of the utilitarian school; its neon sign outside was easily and also sadly its coolest feature, and if you peeked through the small diamond-shaped window in the door you could almost see it. Really, the sign isn't all that great, but the let-down interior manages to elevate its stature considerably: sports bric-a-brac, dartboard, shuffleboard, video slots, cigarette machine, career drinkers - the usual junk. My friend was making tiny talk with the bartender, but my friend was also a bartender, so I stayed out of it, figuring it was secret bartender stuff. I noticed a Bea Arthur look-alike down the bar still giving me the squinty once-over and I squirmed a bit inside my Townliner. My friend scored us a free round of Coronas, which seemed to indicate a low to medium fancy limit.

Soon enough we settled up for the beer and braced ourselves for the continuation of our steamy journey - beer drained, cuffs shot, ties fiddled with - but we didn't make the door before someone behind us called out, " Hey, where you guys from, anyway?" We turned and everyone was looking at us now. Slightly hesitant, we answered and the place fairly erupted in a blend of moans and hoots and a fast exchange of money occurred between several of the patrons. It took us a second to figure it out. A surprising number of them got it right too.

Dive-O-Rama: Maenam Hardware

Koh Samui, Thailand

The town smelled like third-world death; swamp, jungle, unnameable disease. A skeletal dog got up on its hind legs to forage in an overflowing garbage bin, tearing bits of rancid meat out of the fly-infested soup of rotten vegetables, bones, fish bits, and other noxious waste. I watched from under the thatched roof of a cafe, my beer tasting like disinfected piss, my cheap cigarillo foul and redundant in the heat. The local action-boy was trying to stir up the ghost of Holiday Fun Time. The third time he asked my name and tried to make a game out of pronouncing it, I got up and paid the blank-eyed floozie who was clipping her nails over an open ice chest and shuffled out onto the street.

Dust from a passing tuk-tuk hit me in the face. It wasn't even noon and the heat was getting stupid. I followed the road out of town into unfamiliar territory, only vaguely aware of my actions - I had nothing else to do. Thick foliage, palm trees, and the typical jumble of huts and cinderblock sheds went on for a couple of miles. There had to be another town ahead. A tourist on a motorcycle sped past me then piled hard into the ditch trying to turn onto a side road. I kept walking.

Maenam - a complete sham as far as towns go, a one-street wonder thick with dust and the stink of gasoline. They even had a comical sign - "City Limits." I stood sweating and squinting in front of what appeared to be a post office, a garage stall with a single desk and a light scattering of slumbering postal workers. Half-naked children stood in neighbouring doorways probing their nostrils, looking profoundly bored. The lack of discos was refreshing, and the place seemed to be about as far away from the clip-joint tourist ghettos as you could get on such a small island. I could feel the dust in my throat now. I walked on, dodging badly parked trucks, festering mutts, and the odd chicken salesmen until I found the best bar in town.

Actually, it was a hardware store, but it had a couple of tables and a cooler full of beer on ice. Stepping out of the afternoon furnace into the relatively cool interior, I popped a beer and sat down to survey the joint. A pair of fans spun noisily on their wobbly wall brackets while a sad-looking bird in a filthy cage tried to squawk over the rattle. Lopsided racks of tools and dented boxes were piled up behind a haphazard display of Japanese electric fans that seemed to tease me with their promise of efficiency. A couple of women peeked out from the shadowy back room now and then, watching me suck down the Singha. I gave them a hammy peek-a-boo wave and they disappeared in a trail of coughs and giggles. There was a motorcycle repair shed across the road, a complete grease-pit with countless bits of machine parts strewn about and a few chickens scratching around in the oily dirt. A wiry old geezer came over and took a hack-saw without paying. He gave me a look that could have meant anything and I went back to admiring the Japanese fans.

By the time I'd drained my second beer the heat had penetrated the room, closing in like an invisible pea-soup fog. I left some money on the table and left, careful to avoid a terrifying glance into my anorexic wallet; I was getting it down to an art form. Not much further on, the dirt road ended in a solid wall of jungle. I stood there briefly at its edge, listening to it breathe, feeling that strange primal lump in the gut. I wondered what would happen if I just kept going.

Dive-O-Rama: The Nitelite

Seattle - Somewhere in the netherworld between Belltown and Downtown Seattle, between hip and hip-to-be-square, the time-barnacle known as the Nitelite clings obstinately to the city, its retro, rusty signage the only clue as to what might exist behind its mundane facade. Inside it's 1963. The only thing ruining the vibe is the generous application of cheap Budweiser promo paraphernalia - partially deflated Bud zeppelins, cardboard Bud mobiles commanding you to "go for it" and "get in the game", Bud pin-up girls with their Bud airbrushing and Bud implants. But peek through the loud red and white eyesores and you can still make out the naugahyde, the dark wood paneling, the boomerang pattern formica, and the guys who look like they've maybe been sitting at the bar since 1963.

There are googie-shape cut-outs in the ceiling, a baffling diorama set into the back wall depicting San Francisco's mining heyday, and a tiny train looping around on a tiny track under the glass top of the kidney-shaped bar. Seafoam green, charcoal black, and salmon pink provide the colour scheme, the dark wood paneling adding warmth and a hint of rec-room. I almost insist on a hint of rec-room. The Bud-crud may be sabotaging the effect, but the effect, in fact, is fake. The whole thing is basically a movie set. It's a scene from the 1991 movie "Dogfight" starring River Phoenix and Lili Taylor. And what do you know - the film is set in 1963! And the Nitelite is actually some old dive that was pretty much gutted then refurbished in the style of the times - or at least the stylized style of the times. I'd been living in Seattle for over a year before I was informed of this niggling factoid. I felt duped. Then I got over it.

Somehow the joint adapted to its cinematic makeover and managed to pull the whole thing off; certainly the worn-out bits seemed real enough and the hard-drinking undertone helped blur the fantasy/reality line further, although I guess a few doubles will smear things up a bit as well. But the most authentic touch were the hard-boiled bartender broads who, through no fault of their own, were pure Central Casting. Short of sporting anchor tattoos on their lunch-lady arms, they were cartoon characters in the flesh. There were three of them on the roster, all with upswept cotton-candy hair - not quite a beehive, but crazier than Don King - often clad in giant Reno t-shirts and stirrup pants, and calling everyone "darlin" and "honey". Idly admiring one of their impressive hairdos, a friend once said, "I bet it would be as soft as a possum's stomach". Of this there could be little doubt, but possums are also ornery little fuckers, and if you were smart you kept your distance. World-weary brusque is one thing, sassy-brassy is another, but their performances of "pissed right off" were solid Oscar-bait. One of them had a death-stare so devastating that Kirk Douglas would envy the intensity. Indeed, many an overstepping bit-player got a one-way ticket to Eighty-sixville via a verbal rousting so fierce and robust that they probably never worked in that town again. Even asking for some fancy micro-brew was not such a good idea.

Any good, big-shouldered American bar can give you the sensation of walking into a noir-ish movie, it's part of the Big Shrug - going along for the ride, surrendering to the tide for a little while, taking in the show. The Nitelite's show was one of the best in town; part David Lynch, part Nicholas Ray, and more than a little bit Looney Tunes. Peering out over my bottle of anything but Budweiser, settling into the farting naugahyde, and adjusting the focus, I would often be tempted to call out, "Action!"

Or maybe just, "Fade to beer."

Dive-O-Rama: Manolo's

Gaucin, Spain.

Like most places in the small towns and villages, the place had no sign, no number, no door. Bonni and I called it Manolo's after the proprietor Manolo Joe, a small wiry man of indeterminate age who spoke no English whatsoever but was easily the most gregarious Spaniard we'd met so far. The interior was typically tiled from stem to stern, which always gave me the feeling that I was drinking in an oversized shower stall. Also typical were the dangling fly strips, the faded bullfighting posters, and the skimpy display of bottles behind the high bar. But it was inviting and cool. We'd stopped in to escape the mid-day heat before walking up to the old Moorish castle that capped the town.

Sitting listlessly behind the bar, Manolo was the only one in the place. He perked up considerably upon our arrival, practically rubbing his hands together in exaggerated glee. At first he seemed disappointed that we spoke very little Spanish, but quickly decided to remedy the problem with a crash course in Andalusian, putting us through our linguistic paces so rigorously that I could barely get the bottle of San Miguel to my mouth. I was almost immediately weary of the exercise, silently cursing my pathetic inability to wrap my idiot tongue around any kind of foreign language. Of course, even my careful parroting of Manolo's dictated phrases was all wrong and he showed his displeasure in a showy manner, but still stuck diligently to his curriculum. My head seemed full of tiny Spanish men running around on hamster wheels and nattering away in crazy helium voices. It became evident much later that he was trying to teach me something along the lines of, "Hey, Manolo Joe - how are you? You are my friend. I want to buy all your beer." Eventually the Spanish lesson ended with Manolo pouring himself a sherry, setting up another round, and proposing a heartfelt and overacted toast to something - to his guests, maybe the fly strips - I couldn't be sure.

This is where the trouble started. Well refreshed after three drinks we were ready to settle up and move along. Manolo wouldn't hear of it. The next round was on the house and he proposed another mysterious toast. He would continue not to hear of it through the next several rounds. Finally begging him to take my money, I explained that I was in serious danger of getting "borracho". Again, his ears repelled at the notion, explaining to me that I was "contento", which I took to mean "happy drunk". "Drunk" drunk was apparently a different beast altogether, Manolo expertly miming a slobbering, loose-cannon lush-face to illustrate the wide gulf between the two. He had a point. We don't seem to really differentiate between the two here, but then again most North Americans think that party-hearty beer commercials are an accurate depiction of a fun-loving lifestyle. Manolo was certainly quite contento himself, using my trips to the bathroom as an opportunity to show his love of foreigners by molesting my girlfriend Bonni, shooting out from behind the bar the minute he heard the door close and practically humping her leg. It seems that Bonni's Spanish lesson was a little more personalized than mine.

As the afternoon waned, so did we. In the course of our "conversation", which actually became less clunky with every drink, Manolo was shocked to discover that Canada had no bullfighting whatsoever, blankly repeating in utter disbelief, "Nunca? Nunca??" We were convinced that he didn't believe us, and our description of hockey - mostly mimed, me stick-handling wobbily around the room - probably only reinforced his suspicions. Ice? Helmets? Sticks? Little rubber things? What the fuego are you trying to sell me here? It was during this period of deflation and confusion that we were able to make our escape. The castle was off, the bed was on.

The rest of that day and evening is lost in a contento fuzz. The next day we ran into the British guy who ran the town's internet cafe and he asked what we'd been up to. I quickly replied, "We got Manolo-ed." Perhaps not too surprisingly, he knew exactly what I meant. "A dangerous man", he said with only a small trace of embarrassment, already walking away.