ROADHOUSE!

There comes a time in a man's life when he has to make a split-second decision. Fight or flight. Go hard or go home. Skate or die.

Can I get both for a dollar extra?

Travel back in time with me once again to those halcyon days of yore, bartending at Les's Lounge in Urbana. The amber light from recessed ceiling cans glinting off spotless glassware on burgundy foam mats. Ice crystals shimmering on a chiller full of 10-ounce beer mugs. David Allan Coe warming cockles from the jukebox.

Pull up a stool, weary traveler. Rest your elbows on the fine pleather. Can I pour you a drink? Can it contain some Galliano? We've been trying to get rid of that stuff ever since people stopped drinking it in 1982. Maybe later we'll shoot a few rounds of pool on the custom red felt tables. First game's on the house.

Back in 2002, the Chicago Bears were without a home base while aliens and bureaucrats began renovations on their mighty fortress, Soldier Field. They needed a new place to wage football war, and through some series of events that likely involved mafia hits and dark arcane rituals, the University of Illinois' Memorial Stadium won the honor. For an entire season, the Bears would climb aboard their jewel-encrusted buses and head down to Champaign, an armada of pierogi-scented Bears fans in their wake. Local business rejoiced, local hotels stocked up on polish sausage, and local bars played host to a whole new crowd of Chicagoland hooligans.

Ditka said knock you out.

It was on one of these game nights (dark and stormy, for our purposes) that I found myself once again dutifully slinging brew at the Lounge. The place was packed with refugees from the overcrowded Lincoln Motel down the road, and the kegs of Heileman's Old Style were draining faster than I could tap them.

For the most part, it was a manageable crowd. Large, loud and mustachioed, as these mighty Northmen often were, but of a generally agreeable disposition.

Except for one guy. Oh man, this guy. He sat at the head of the bar, angrily sucking down Jack and Cokes as though they were incrementally adding up to some heinous violent crime he wasn't quite tanked enough to commit. He looked as though someone had taken a dump in his very best shoes. Different liquors have different effects on the brain of your average bar patron; wine drinkers don't leave the bar alone, tequila drinkers are very loud singers, and Jack Daniels drinkers usually end up participating in a complex economy of supply and demand for black eyes and loose teeth. So as each Jack and Coke disappeared into his angry gullet, I added an extra layer of gird to my loins.

Seriously, Jack Daniel. Dentists owe you everything.

Eventually the inevitable happened. Someone brushed up against him, or maybe accidentally caught his eye. Maybe a butterfly flapped its wings in Tokyo and the resulting air currents called his mom unclean names. Either way, he tossed back the remaining half of whatever glass of evil he'd been working on, and began making mistakes. Names were called. Threats were issued. Tensions began to climb.

Enter the bartender. "Hey, buddy. Take it easy." In the language of my people, this is a traditional greeting which roughly translates to "Hello, friend. This is your first warning." Normally, these words are enough to interrupt whatever unpleaant momentum has been building, and inject enough embarassment into the situation to awkwardly defuse any further disturbance.

But not this guy. Oh man, this guy. He responds with an up-and-down sizing glance, the universal sign language for "can I totally take this guy?" At this point, time freezes. The bartender must make a split second decision - am I backing down and taking this guy's crap all night long, including the eventual call to the police, or am I going to put all my chips on the table and rise to the challenge? It's a bluff - the law has very clear things to say about bar staff laying hands on the the clientele despite what movies might tell you - but it's a strong bluff, and I'm an excellent poker player.

I interrupt his assessment of me by quickly leaning into the whisper zone. "Hey pal," I quietly intone, "you see any bouncers in here?"

He swings his whiskey-soaked head from side to side. I'm the only staff in the building.

"No," he wheezes, a brown skull-shaped cloud of whiskey fumes issuing forth from his mouth.

"What does that tell you about me?" Silence. Sustained eye contact.

He slumps back in his stool. I keep up the eye contact for a few seconds more, as a victory lap, and then return to washing the glasses. By the time I've turned around again, he's gone, a $20 bill tucked under his empty rocks glass.

Patrick Swayze, may you rest in peace. We continue your work down here on Terra Firma. This ain't one body's Tell, it's the Tell of us all. Listen it and member.

Ghost Chess

Once upon a time in the early 2000's, I was bartending at Les's Lounge in Urbana, Illinois. Those of you who know Les's can pause now to wipe a nostalgic tear from your eye. Those who don't will have to accept my condolences for the gaping absence in your lives thus far, a sizeable hole shaped conspicuously like the world's strangest hybrid between a country music train-tracks roadhouse and a miles-past-its-prime 70's swinger nest.

The bar was lined with the finest padded red pleather, to protect the precious elbows of the discerning clientele. The jukebox was loaded with David Allan Coe and Faith Hill, but also (confoundingly) Depeche Mode's Violator.

As you read that last sentence and took a break to muse on the nature of Violator as one of the best albums of all times, know that I was right here, doing it too. Spooky.

Seriously.

The Lounge opened at 9am, an important attribute that distinguished it from most of the other boozemongers in town. Business was the opposite of brisk during the mornings, but I always assumed it was mostly a public service meant to keep those people off the roads during the traffic-heavy workday morning commute.

I wasn't typically a daytime bartender; I worked a couple night shifts a week, but when the day-shift slinger took a week's vacation one summer, I jumped at the chance to pick up the extra (easy) hours. Push a mop around, wipe down the bar, pop something interesting on the big-screen and kick back. If I was lucky, I'd pour maybe ten drinks in the entire 8-hour shift. It was the very definition of a ghost bar.

How appropriate it was, then, the day that a strange figure I'd never seen before came in the front door around 9:30am. He was tall and wiry, with glasses and a long, graying beard. I'd place him in his late 50s, but in that sun-dried leathery way that makes it impossible to accurately guess a man's age. He was dressed in an old-timey railroad worker's outfit. I'm not kidding around here; he had a neckerchief. I don't remember if he was accompanied by an eerie white mist, but in all probability it was there.

Like this, except not a kid's costume. Note that they really only MAKE these clothes as cute kid's costumes these days.

He sat down at the bar and ordered a Budweiser in a bottle. After quietly drinking about half of the beer, he spied a chessboard sitting on a shelf beside the TV. A few of our evening regular patrons enjoyed playing a few rounds over drinks, and had decided to just leave a dedicated board at the bar for convenience.

"Do you play?" he asked, pointing at the board with a moderately grimy, oil-stained finger.

"I'm no pro, but I can play", I responded.

We set up the pieces, laid out our opening gambits, and I was promptly annihilated by the fourth or fifth move. He laughed and pointed out what I'd done wrong, and what I could have done to avoid defeat. Any twinge of defiant resentment I might have normally felt when receiving hindsight advice from a triumphant conqueror was wholly overridden by a lingering uneasiness that this man was in all probability here to collect me for passage to the netherworld on his spectral locomotive, likely parked semi-transparently just outside the door. I needed to listen carefully to his advice, because movies had taught me that the unspoken stakes of the games of chess I was playing almost certainly involved my soul.

Over the course of the next five or six games, I learned some things. I learned that the man's name was Lazarus, but that friends called him Lazar - pronounced like the ray gun. I learned from Lazar's advice that the only defense is a good offense, and that playing chess reactively was only prolonging the inevitable. I learned that Lazar hadn't played chess and enjoyed beers in "a very long time". I of course inferred that to mean at least a century. By game seven I actually beat Lazar - and for the first time that day, felt as though my immortal soul was secure. At least, as secure as it had been when I'd woken up that morning.

Seven games and three beers after walking into the lounge, Lazar gathered his things, shook my hand, and walked out the door. I assume he climbed aboard his phantom train and chugged away into the mist - I wasn't brave enough to confirm it, for fear that I might be spontaneously converted into fuel, human coal for Lazar's wailing engine rocketing along the railroad of the damned.

m.o.a.r...p.e.a.n.u.t.s...!

The next day I attempted to ask the morning regulars about Lazar - these people had been sitting in the same bar stools for ten years, surely they'd seen this guy before. Surely they'd at least remember the neckerchief. They looked at me blankly before shuffling off to the video slot machines in the other room. Nobody had seen a skinny beardy railroad man or heard the name Lazar ever before.

So when the Ankerhaus opens, know this: we will have chess sets available. We will pour you fine brews while you challenge your friends to a test of strategic mettle. You can even challenge me, but stand warned: I have been trained in the game by the restless dead. In the movies, this type of schooling leaves a man marked, and consequently the Ankerhaus Pub makes no guarantees as to the safety of your soul should you lose to me.