TALES FROM THE BARSTOOL
By: Clint Lien

The Borg Factor

I'm thirty-nine years old. I've been drinking in bars for more than twenty of those years. I thought I'd seen the underbelly of society. I thought I was one of the few who could say they were equally comfortable crawling with the denizens of the night and mingling with the day walkers. I was wrong. I'd only seen shoddy pretenders. People like myself who had read their Hemingway and their Bukowski and had taken some perverse pride in calling themselves barflies. Recently circumstances delivered me into the kind of place whose gutter I imagine Poe to have died in - the real dark side.

I love a smoky saloon. I go to drink and write. I have conversations with people who see the world through a different glass. Mostly you get the drunken ramblings of fools, but now and then I find myself learning something about the world or myself.

Victoria has a good number of bars, but I always felt they lacked the character that some of the older L.A. joints had. Most of the Victoria pubs are carbon copies of each other, with names chosen to give the appearance of age and tradition - Christie's Carriage House, The Fox Tail, The Sticky Wicket and so on. They're fine pubs but I remember the opening of all three and after a beer or two you wouldn't know one from the other. I don't mind this, though. They're comfortable places to spend time.

For some ten years now, whenever I was in Victoria, I did most of my boozing at a bar called Yukon Jacks. It was a dingy little place - not much different than any other bar in Victoria, but the drinks were a little cheaper and it had NTN trivia, one of my favorite time killers. The bartender was Jack, a bearded happy man who looked like Santa Claus and was always busy, even if there were only three people in the whole joint. Sometimes you waited for your drink, but it always came.

Every Tuesday and every Friday, as sure as the sun would rise in the east, a group of eclectic intellectuals whom I've been happy to call friends would get together and match their minds against some nine thousand plus other bars around North America. More often than not we would do well. The bar offered prizes and we all looked forward to those two nights. One of the guys who had been at it even longer than I had, told me once that he kept coming because this was the one thing in his life that worked reasonably well. After all, what's the point of having a routine if you don't keep it?

So when the word came down that Yukon Jacks was going to be renovated none of us was too quick to say "It's about time." Caution was the word of the day. Our routine was being upset and we were skeptical to say the least. The bar was going to be closed for three weeks and in those three weeks the owners decided that they would move the trivia game around the corner to another bar they owned so we could keep playing. This is the part of the story where my education began.

In all the years I frequented Yukon Jacks I never had occasion to enter "The Dark Side." That's what it was called by the staff and anyone who was familiar with the place at all. It didn't have a name like the Pig and Whistle or The Jolly Friar. It simply had a faded sign that read: PUB. Beer, I had been told, was only $2.50 a sleeve - a full dollar cheaper than anywhere else in town and two dollars cheaper than most places. Still, I had never set foot in the place. There's no smoking in any of the bars in Victoria. One of the good things about that is you can get a look at their clientele without going in because they all gather outside the door to get their nicotine fix. One look at the clientele of the Dark Side and I knew I had no interest in that joint.

But old habits die hard and as a group we decided it probably wouldn't be so bad and we should give it a whirl. I headed up the yea side on the debate. After all, I was no mean amateur - I was a professional barfly. This place would have character. Ah, what stories I would gather.

Friday rolled around and I was actually looking forward to the change. I stepped through the doors. The first thing that hit me was the odor. It smelled of all the foulest fluids you can allow your imagination to conjure. It was dark but it didn't hide the stained floor, which is where I assumed most of the scents were emanating from. That carpet was laid when Hoffa was still reporting to work. The only thing missing were chalk lines. Maybe they actually took the time to scrub those out - but I doubted it. If you moved the occasional well-placed table, I suspect you would find the remnants of the police drawings.

As soon as I walked in it felt like every eye in the place fell on me. I wasn't being paranoid. Heads turned. An outsider had entered the lair. A mixture of curiosity and contempt drove their stares. I was a new face - a clean-shaven face with clothes that had been laundered since Hailey's Comet had last swung by. I was not fat nor was I rail thin. I wasn't wearing a greasy foam ball cap and my hair had seen a comb that very day. Quite simply, I didn't fit in.

My friends had arrived ahead of me and vigorously alerted me with waving arms to their position in the corner. They were relieved to see me, for the obvious "security in numbers" theory, but they weren't nearly as relieved to see me as I was to see them. I didn't look any of the locals in the eye as I made straight for the corner and my waiting chair. My cohorts had my beer waiting. I needed it. We talked a little about the place but most of us were too nervous about being overheard so we didn't say much. We just looked around and wondered what the hell we were doing there.

Within thirty minutes I'd been offered "bud" three times, one date and a nice wrist watch. On the plus side, the beer was cheap and very cold. I don't know why it was so much colder there, but it was - and I like my beer cold.

We were sitting across from the john and as I watched the steady parade of patrons coming and going I was struck by the fact that it seemed like many more were going in than coming out. Then the inevitable happened. Nature called. Cheap beer does that. I timed it until I was sure it was unoccupied and made my move. As luck would have it the room was empty, but I was stunned to find myself bathed in black light - felt like I was in my old bedroom back in 1977. The good thing about having a leak under black light is you can tell how your vitamin B levels are. Mine were fine. I asked the bartender, a big English guy, why the black light. Apparently it's nearly impossible to find a vein in black light. I took his word for it.

We played trivia while around us drug deals were openly negotiated, stolen goods were traded and toothless women tried to raise cash for the itch in their arms. Once in awhile one of "them" would come over. They'd stand before our table and stare. Then they'd turn around and leave. It was all very unnerving.

I made the comment that if we continued to come here eventually harm would come to one of us. They all agreed, but, after the game, we managed to leave with no blood loss. We marched down the street to a different bar and decompressed. It cost us two dollars more for each beer but they tasted better. The first item on the agenda was whether we would return to the dark side. We're a stubborn lot and no one wanted to admit they were scared, so we all agreed to return on Tuesday. We did, and there was little change. Again I pointed out that if we kept coming here it would eventually end badly.

I assumed that by invading the territory of the alien species we were assured some kind of retaliation. Now it's two months later and still there's been no bad business. I doubt there will be. I no longer wait for the bathroom to empty before going. I don't notice the smell anymore and the locals don't stare at us when we enter the place. What I'd failed to take into account was the Borg factor. Resistance was futile. We'd been assimilated.

On a completely different tangent - is anyone else bothered by the commercial where the carload of morons pulls up to the drive-through window at a burger joint and orders something they know isn't on the menu? After mocking the young man trying to take their order they drive off to the place where they know they can get what they want and ponder whether they made the burger guy cry.

I knew guys like that in high school. The fact they didn't get struck down by a severely disfiguring and horribly painful affliction proved to me that god did not exist. Now they're being used to push fast food. It's a funny world.

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