Tinnitus hissed through the music, the laughter, the static. It wasn’t crowded in there, but it was loud. Two women at the bar, a few feet away, were engaged in a conversation that consisted of whooping and screeching at the top of their lungs in response to every exchange that passed between them, with no concern that others within such close proximity might not want to have their eardrums battered by gales of exaggerated merriment. In the middle of the room, standing around a small circular table, a group of beer-swilling men yelled at a ballgame that was broadcast on various TVs stationed around the walls, so that one’s gaze was never obliged to rest on anything motionless. Screaming screens, screaming people. It was six o’clock and they were letting off steam; it was their domain, and I was just a stranger—sitting, drinking, thinking, or trying not to—a silent island amid raucous camaraderie.

I didn’t know what else to do until it was time to walk back to the hotel and retire to my room—out of which many dead bodies must have been carried during the hotel’s storied 80-year history—with the vertical red neon GAMBLING sign flashing on and off directly outside the window.

The game ended, the young women left, the noise subsided, and I could hear the conversation to my immediate left.

“I was in California hunting for meteorites…” a hairy man in bib overalls was saying to his mostly silent companion. “On the way back, I stopped in at the Cherry Patch. Great place… the girls were wandering around topless in the parking lot…”

It was refreshing to be drinking in a bar for the first time in six months. Where I came from they were all closed, owing to COVID. I sat there, folding softly into medicinal warmth, savoring the increasingly perceptible glow.

A tall, slim middle-aged man with long silver hair walked in and took the seat directly to my right. He wore rings on his fingers, several cigars poked out of his breast pocket, and he carried a book. The prospect of somebody reading a book at the bar cheered me. He lit a cigar and ordered a cocktail.

A few minutes later, he was joined by a man with dyed jet-black hair, who wore a Black Flag T-shirt that exposed unusually muscular arms for somebody of his advanced age. He sat down on the other side of the Silver Fox, placed four books on the counter—all crime-related, with red-on-black lettering on their spines—lit a cigarette and ordered a cocktail.

Something that sounded like John Lee Hooker, ramped up and crassified almost beyond recognition, blasted out of the jukebox. The title of the song, “Hot For Teacher,” was familiar but I had never heard it before, and had no desire to ever hear it again.

Stray words, an occasional sentence, scraps of conversation drifted over in my direction. “… He was in a couple of Jarmusch movies,” said the Silver Fox in a gravelly accent, dragging out that cherished word, “Mooo-vies,” with salacious relish. “Overrated… coasting… he’s been sleepwalking for years… always the same role…” Clearly they were talking about Bill Murray.

His companion mostly just nodded or muttered in agreement while idly playing video poker in a manner that suggested it was merely a pleasant way to throw away disposable time and income. Looking at him more closely, I recognized him as a well-known director, one of the few American filmmakers whose work stirred interest on the strength of his name. A quick search on my phone confirmed this impression. What was he doing in such a nondescript watering hole? Enjoying some sort of friendly, alcoholic business meeting with a screenwriter, by the looks of things, hence the exchange of books.

“…You can get a decent lunch there,” the overalled dude to my left was saying. “It’s cheaper than a date and you know what you’re getting for your money.” In the bar mirror I took a closer look at the speaker. Gray hair sprouted from his sagging chin, beneath which a surgical mask dangled apathetically as he puffed on a generic cigarette.

Social distancing: forget it. Looking down the bar, one head after another was bent over the individual video poker screens that lay at slightly mounted angles on the counter, providing booze-weakened patrons with the convenient temptation of digitized games of chance. Inglorious clouds of smoke, released from potentially diseased lungs, floated through the airless room. This mob weren’t drinking the COVID Kool-Aid. Lockdown… mockdown… meltdown.

“Can’t you see me standing there with my back against the record machine…” Another blustering Van Halen song tore out of the jukebox—shrill, digitally distorted, disrupting the desired quietude. As David Lee Roth said, a jukebox was a “record machine.” It should contain a limited number of selections, preferably 45 rpm discs. That’s what gave each one its own character. Nobody would ever again remark that a “great jukebox” could be found in a particular place now that these ugly little wall-mounted contraptions had taken over, offering inexhaustible options and taking all the pleasure out of the experience.

“Nobody knows anything and I know as much as anybody else,” said the Silver Fox as he took a drag on his cigar, holding it between thumb and forefinger. It was a good line; I might use it. I looked over at them from time to time but not one glance was cast in my direction. Perhaps they had run out of curiosity; they didn’t need it anymore. Why would they? They had it made… they had made it. They didn’t give a fuck about some loser sitting in a bar.

Photo by John Tottenham

I ordered another tequila and soda. If I got drunk I could fall asleep immediately upon returning to the hotel, wake up early, breakfast sumptuously in the hotel restaurant and be comfortably situated in time for the first Belmont race at 10 in the morning, spend a pleasurable and profitable day betting in the sportsbook—making amends for today’s afternoon of crushing and wallet-airing near-misses that I was now trying to avoid analyzing and agonizing over—then walk a mile down the deserted streets that gently seethed with a seductively malevolent stillness, back to this unassuming neighborhood tavern situated in a semi-abandoned 1960s shopping center on a wide commercial boulevard.

These were the true boulevards of broken dreams, pulsating with a combustible menace, night and day. Broken dreams and broken people: broken-down gamblers, sore winners, ruined beauties, years of wretched excess scraped into their features— “beated and chopped with tanned antiquity,” as the Bard said; stripped by capitalism of their dignity and dumped onto the sidewalks and vacant lots of this city, among the undernourished and the electrified. There was always some lone figure skulking around in the distance across a vast expanse of empty parking lots and demolished motels. But the homeless were harmless. The people one had to worry about were secure in their gated communities. Yes, I could have a few drinks, and repeat the process tomorrow. It was a delightful routine.

“I showed up in the afternoon and there were only two girls in the lineup. Neither of them were hot. All the hot girls were still sleeping,” the bib-overalled whoremonger to my left was still rhapsodizing about the joys of the Cherry Patch.

Why leave? I had already gambled my mood away. Elsewhere, on the streets, in the casinos, or alone in a hotel room, ruinous brooding could easily become corrosive. Here, amid the fellowship of mostly silent strangers, warmed by the proximity of each other’s distance, it could be contained and transformed into something benign.

At eight o’clock the bartenders switched shifts. It was hard to distinguish between them: they were both blonde, generously proportioned and middle-aged, and unlike the patrons, they wore masks.

“There you go, dear,” said the new bartender, placing my cocktail in front of me. I was touched that she called me “dear.”

More digital bombast burst forth from the so-called jukebox. A metal version of “Where Have All The Good Times Gone.” It was a good question and Van Halen’s crass rendition of the old Kinks song, stripped of all subtlety, didn’t provide the answer.

“It’s great to have those memories,” the Silver Fox was saying, as he spluttered over his cigar. Naturally, I didn’t know what memories he was referring to, but I knew what he meant. He said something about “North Beach,” so I assumed that the memories in question took place in San Francisco, and judging by the looks of him now the halcyon days of his youth would have been the 1970s.

Yes, I knew what he meant. I also looked back wistfully on my incandescent youth. But I wondered if those days might be even richer in retrospect if I had done more with my life since then. It seemed that the sweetness of those times would be sharpened by contrast if one’s fortunes had shifted significantly during the intervening years.

These two men, secure in their status as successful artists, were able to cast a sentimental eye over their early struggles from the comfortable vantage point of subsequent worldly success. The heroic phase was long past, the mountains had been climbed and their legacies were secure; they could take it easy now, smoke a good cigar, sip fine liquor, and play video poker. They had earned it, and nobody could deny them the satisfactions of their reward. This much I presumptuously gleaned from a few minutes of mildly inebriated observation. For all I really knew, they could have led miserable existences of debt, divorce and creative frustration, but on a bigger scale than that with which I was overly familiar.

“It wasn’t the best blow-job I ever had but it was sensitive… she complained when I slapped her ass,” the whoremonger was saying.

Looking up, I saw Eddie Van Halen’s face flashing across one of the TV screens, cutting to a newscaster looking sad, and the penny dropped. The crash course in Van Halen suddenly made sense. Now that he was gone, I had a newfound appreciation of his music and felt guilty about my earlier abhorrence. The poor guy was probably younger than the men on my right, who were still freely smoking and drinking. Their books lay there unopened. They would be opened later and assessed for movie adaptation potential.

The door opened and a warm desert wind blew into the room…