All the while, between each line of his monologue on the ideal drinking establishment, JimBob BroHeem had a rapt audience, in the form of a wide-eyed black boy of perhaps 11, who had the window half of the seat occupied by JimBob, as we spoke to each other across the aisle.
"Now Hamden, I lived there for a while in the late eighties—worked a couple of bars, drank them all. Learned the three beer rule; that I'm an asshole after three beers and have to move to the next bar, because I'm going to get kicked out in any case. Never been into the violence aspect of bar life. So my favorite place was the Hamden Grill; a good place to land when the violence was becoming inevitable.
"So you have your stupid white men getting off work with their pay check. No brothers allowed—not back then. A paycheck and an idiot—soon to be a drunken idiot. The perfect date. The purpose of the bar is to separate the one from the other. Rather than make that the job of the bar maid or bar back the poker machine does the trick. There was this one dude who would put his entire paycheck into the poker machine. Once, after he did that, and began drinking his last beer, an old man sat down at the poker machine and hit! The guy got up and charged at the old man—charging around the bar. I didn't say anything, just headed to the Hamden Grill as the night wore on and the friction between the small minds and increasingly empty pockets caused things to heat up.
"The Hamden Grill, oasis of madness. This was the set up:
"No furniture; a veritable arsenal waiting to happen at great expense, none—you get tired, go the fuck home.
"No tap, because that requires a walk in cooler—fuck that, too expensive.
"No bottled beer, because those are weapons.
"Just coolers packed with cans and top-loaded with ice as you pull the cans out of the bottom. All they needed was an ice machine, and they had that figured out, low maintenance.
"No dart board—missile weapons, could even take out the barkeep.
"No pool tables—hence no deadly cue balls or clubbed pool cues.
"And, with none of that shit, no reason to hire a bouncer!
"That's my kind of drinking experience, come on in, get fucked up, and get the fuck out."
JimBob's pint-sized audience, hands braced wide behind him so that he could peer up at the lecturer without turning his head, looked up at his craggy visage with the batting eyes of one who has discovered a lost world and is simply attempting to catalogue the wonders—Marco Polo like—as the strange white man who used the folded and dog eared newspaper like a mnemonic aide to jar his rusty foghorn voice with a tap to his forehead, rambled on about yet another dive bar lost to inebriated posterity...
