Volume 4, Issue 1
January 10 - January 23, 2002
by Alex Neth
308 E. Colfax
303-861-9875
There is no light in some bars, not because of a lack of sun or windows or lamps. The humans inside are fading, darkening. They've been in for a while. They've seen it before. They don't look curiously on the new, because the new is old. Just like before.
These are grey places. They are everywhere. They go under the radar, ignored by everyone except their patrons. They don't sell sexiness, or special martinis, or flash. They are the true heart of this disease, their cells the dimming lights on the stools. They are bars like the Congress Lounge at 308 East Colfax, where hope is gone and all that remains is the bleary drunk of Denver evening.
Afternoon, evening, the sky is blackening and the reddish interior of the Congress Lounge--which, according to sources, is supposedly a restaurant as well, but doubt on that count is high--is straight from 1975. The beer on tap is Budweiser, naturally, because all of these bars of fading men and women serve Budweiser. It is the drink of the hopeless, the false King of Beers, bearing the illusion of bare quality. Budweiser makes people feel better about their situation because it is familiar. Bad, but familiar.
The folks here are missing teeth, and slowly sliding into the bottle's grease trap, but their hearts are generous. They know each other well and bandy good-natured insults back and forth. They have the cocktails, they drink the Budweiser, they glow a shade of pink in the reflected lamplight. They might not see what this Denver night is, the filthy street outside, the slump of their friends' shoulders, the glaze on eyes that might once have shone. But then, they might.
They were young once. They had the world at their fingertips. How is it that those halcyon days pass unnoticed? They don't. The recollection of better times and places permeates the walls. No one wants to end up in a place like this, staring at the wall, mumbling. No one wants to give up and let the world pass by. It isn't what we are as humans. We strive for attention, even if we aren't willing to strive too hard. Being forgotten is, unmistakably, a tragedy.
But then, what the hell isn't? Forgotten, remembered, whatever.
You're still here, in this worn-down bar, drinking your Budweiser, trying to matter to yourself even if you don't to anyone else. Ask the people here if they think of themselves as tragic figures, worthy of pity. They'll laugh. Keeping your self-respect is the defense against the doubt and disgust of the world. It's often, curiously, the last thing to go. Even soaked in urine and lying in the gutter, no one wants to admit to being anyone's inferior. And why should they?
Blast the mores of our quasi-puritanical culture. The tendency, among the supposedly enlightened and nominally successful, is to look down on the guy staggering out of the bar at 3 in the afternoon. The tendency is to ignore him, to pass judgment, to walk quickly back to the comforting light of Clean World. That tendency, rooted in the assumed superiority of sobriety, offends the soul. What of the people who don't take the road to success because it just doesn't matter to them? Not everyone lurching out into the sunlight is insane, or lazy, or a victim of society. Some are just obeying their inner exhortations-- when poets and CEOs do so, they are lauded by their peers and society. When one of the masses does so, skating by under the radar of the Lords of Responsibility, they are vilified, called a cancer, a bum.
Unless you make money and are seen doing so, you will be disrespected and marginalized. Unless you pay obeisance at the altar of the Upright and Moral, you may as well not exist. You may as well spend your afternoon drinking. They don't care about you; they'd step over your cooling corpse with nary a thought. In America, productivity equals worth. The man with the ability to buy others is lauded, the man who seeks to please himself and his personal devil at no cost to another is shunned.
So it is no surprise here, the darkening night, the faded red glow. The outside world doesn't care about these people, huddled together for companionship a block from the seat of government. They have to care about each other. Which is more than the outside world can say about itself.
All Rights Reserved © 2002 Go Go Media, LLC, Denver, Colorado