Nobody said it would be pretty.

After a long and tiresome day at the joke I call a job, there's nothing I desire more than a blow job and a beer.

Since I can barely support myself with the pennies that I'm paid, it goes without saying the blow job is outta the question.

So all I have to look forward to at the end of a shift, a shift I've usually contemplated slicing my wrists with an envelope opener or proving human beings can't fly by jumping out the window of my office about seven different times, is that ice cold bottle of goodness.

I can hear the regular joint on the North side calling my name as I place the CTA pass into the slot to deduct its $2.25.

---Oh don’t worry my beautiful love, I’ll be there soon to see you.----

Sitting on those old train cars, with the drunks and the lost, I feel pretty comfortable. For I too, was once lost. Found direction in the bottle I like to claim. But anybody who knows anything about this, that or the other thing (whatever the fuck those things are) will gladly tell you of their expertise in the demoralizing effects of alcohol on the human psyche.

I, for one, would much rather drink seven pints of PBR and piss on an electric fence while standing in a pond than believe them.

The voice of my place of comfort and drunkenness becomes louder as I near.

---Still ten minutes away, I’m afraid, but I’ll be there quick my love.---

Most places on the North side cater to those with money. Well, those with mommy and daddy’s money anyway.

Filled from the bar to the walls with preppy douche bags with their collars popped and three-quarters bottle of whatever gel is cool that week in their hair. Wearing polo’s with their favorite car emblem embroidered on the left lapel. Drinking Vodka-Red Bull’s and chasing them with top shelf Tequila, all while trying to hit on the girl with the shortest skirt on.

They’re a real bunch too. Wear so much makeup it takes longer to put it on than the fuck session they’ll have with the guy who told her, with his collar popped of course, she was the prettiest girl in the bar. And when they do get back to the condo on LSD that mommy and daddy pay for, he’ll try to accomplish what he thinks sex is.

All the while this is going on, she’ll be wondering and worrying if she feels good to him? If she’s the best he’s ever had? If he will let her sleep in the bed he’s fucking her in because she has no money to get back home?

They’re all jokes. Every last one.

But at my spot, things like this don’t happen. Sure, people meet for the first time and they do go partake in the events of sex with each other, but it’s not like at the other places.

At my place, that dark, worn out, tired place....the attraction level of the opposite sex isn’t really what attracts. It’s the minds of the people who visit.

Please, I beg of you, don’ get me wrong, but we are not scientists, lawyers or doctors. We are not a people who can sit with only people of our background and discuss things all others in the conversation already know. We do not, will not and can not, do that. There is such beauty outside of the boxes those people dwell in. It’s just too damn bad they’ll never step outside to find it.

There are a plethora of small, round tables which seat anywhere from two to twenty. The tables for two get used, but nowhere as often as the giant table for twenty in the back does.

It’s an old gal, and she’s seen far too much to try and describe here. Most everybody who has been entangled in a talk, a discussion, an argument or the plan of attack on all cowardly authors/poets/musicians of the World have scribbled their names onto her. And she is covered.

Years ago, when the names started, there was plenty of room for more. Now though, that isn’t the case. The tables top, its edges, even the fucking bottom...covered with the names of all who’ve sat at her.

The original owner of the place tried to wash off the names back in the ‘50's. But he wasn’t successful. Sure, the names of many would vanish for a few days, but each time there was an opening, somebody put the names they could remember back on.

---I’m a block away baby, have one ready for me.---

When you step up from the sidewalk running passed the front door the first time, you feel as if your life is going to change. And for most of us, the first time did change our lives.

Those of us who’ve changed ourselves, our minds and our lives just from going into this place and realizing that it’s not at all what they told us it would be. That it all doesn’t have to be the way that they tell us it should. And the way we want it is, and always has been, the way that many, many more want it to be as well.

-The old, bearded, beat-up smoker who spit words out of a clammy, whiskey stained yapper named Ray rests just next to the East row of tables.

-The confused, about who they are not what they are, diluted women with nose rings and sleeves of tattoos move to the beat of their/our own drum as they swing lazily to the song on the dance floor.

-A 70-year old man’s birthday party, hosted by 20-somethings who all speak from their asses about wars, literacy and the government, held at the big table in the back, sing Happy Birthday William to the old cat in the chair. He’s smiling at them all. Not because he thinks it’s nice of them to do this for him, but because of their ideas on the topics they choose to speak about...wars, literacy and the government... are all fucking wrong.

-A picture of Bob Flannigan with no shirt on and clothes pins pinching his nipples, ears and arms hangs on the wall behind the bar collecting the lingering smoke from the butts we’re not supposed to burn inside of public places thanks to a new Illinois law.

-A photo of Bucky Sinister’s bottom lip with the word POEM tattooed on the inside of it hangs above the urinal in the upstairs shitter. I bet that lip was a pretty sweet spot to park a shaved pussy.

-A half naked, just her top, brunette getting her left nipple sucked by a bearded fella in a flower print button up adorn the South wall next to the juke box with the words, We Miss You Charles written on the wall under it.

-A very angry looking man, with a stars and stripes plastic hat atop his head, and a grizzly looking dark beard hangs next to the cooler that’s filled with bottles and bottles of beer and above the bowl of dog treats. A pint glass rests next to the bowl of dog treats with the name Allen etched into it.

-The man with the crazy hair, always wearing sunglasses, and holding a guitar or sitting at the piano hangs above the moldy floor and under the lights of the stage that we all will be atop at some point in the night, waiting for a Hurricane to blow in.

-And countless other photos hanging from the walls next to the cracked and dirty windows, under seiling fans covered with dust and dirt, above mouse traps in the corners of walls and under creeky stairwells. And nobody cared.

And then, after you’ve walked through the place, and maybe sipped back a pint or twelve and partook in discussions about whatever it was that you felt like having discussions about, before you leave, there hangs the one. The picture that pulls it all together for each and every one of us low-life, beer guzzling, truth telling, cock suckers that visit.

It’s black and white. With a man leaning against a brick wall. Taking a great, greedy drag from his cigarette. Watching and looking out over his city. Taking it all in. Looking for his next poem. Trying to write his next story in his head. Each time I leave, this picture reminds me, it reminds us, that nobody said it would be pretty, this thing called life.

They say Jack Kerouac did it that way. Wrote from his experiences. Just like all of us who visit someday hope to.