The Quagmire
Joe Couture
Everyone in town knows about this place. Sometime in the 1980s, while many locals were struggling with the closure of the mine, and more were dreading the imminent shutdown of the steel mill, some businessmen began discussing the prospect of building a bar atop the town’s centrally located swamp. The mill closed in 1992, as the local cod fishery was forever collapsing; meanwhile, for the first time in a year, the saws and hammers that had drowned the swamp song of spring peepers ceased singing. As if in response to the region’s primary revenue streams for one-hundred years abruptly drying, the bar emerged from the mire, providing superficial respite with cheap drinks and a roomful of obnoxious blinking and bonking machines. Since that time, the grey sheet-metal building has occupied patrons and entertained those who will never enter through the windowless steel doors.
For thirty-three years, this place has churned out scandals that occupy the town’s grocery aisles, family dinner tables, and workplace lunchrooms. Many stabbings, nearly as many armed robberies, an axe attack, and at least one hate crime have entered the rotation of small-town news with the help of local media. However, most are unaware of the countless beatings, overdoses, overt drug dealing; violent outbursts; prostitutes who wander table to table, advertising themselves for “ten bucks and two smokes”; public nudity; relatively frequent scream-crying fits; and otherwise socially abhorrent behaviours, like the gamblers who defecate in their yellowing jeans but remain seated on cotton-upholstered stools, continuing to play blinding VLTs in the tiny blue-lit “Gamer’s Lounge.” The lounge is always too warm from the frenetic energy of a dozen machines, and each one is usually occupied by someone too in thrall to stop smacking buttons and excuse themselves when the confined air grows leaden with a gagging stench.
Once buzzed inside, one steps into a narrow hallway with a black carpeted floor runner covering mustard-colored vinyl tiles. To the immediate left of the entrance is a closet-sized bathroom featuring a toilet that is always sticky with smeared Vaseline, enough floor space to stand and turn but not enough to avoid stepping in piss, and a small, chipped white compressed-wood vanity with water-swelled edges and a broken mirror. The hallway permanently smells of stale urine that has tracked from the bathroom and soaked into the runner, which is duct-taped to the floor on its rubber edges. There is also a lingering smell of smoke from bagged cigarettes that are habitually lit before a discount-tobacco connoisseur exits, as well as a faint mildew smell from the once-white drop ceiling tiles that, after absorbing years of slow leaks, are yellowed and fuzzy with spots of blackening mold. The visual and olfactory senses are not alone in their initiation of this place: your auditory system will be met with the combined sounds of classic rock music, thieving VLTs ringing and whirring inanely in a fashion reminiscent of the Gravitron, and the animated voices of at least several drunken baby-boomers.
If you don’t turn away, you have three options: you can continue straight for about six paces past the squalid water closet and then turn left to the Dutch-door bar, you can pass the bar and go straight ahead to the large community hall with plastic chairs, folding tables, and abrasive overheard tube lighting, or you can turn right at the bar and enter the drinking area and Gamer’s Lounge. The drinking area consists of four small square wooden tables pushed flush to the wall, and each is accompanied by three mis-matched wooden seats with split cushions spilling foam. Beyond these, an archway of white plastic lattice work— like something from the Prom of ‘89— divides the alcoholics and the gambling addicts. Through the archway, people slap their machines and curse, then cheer in delight as they win fractions of their losses. On one occasion, a woman rushed in, dragging the tiny hand of a young misty-eyed boy, pulling him along behind her, then she pointed to a machine and yelled, “That’s where Santa is! He’s in there! Just ask your Daddy!” The beige walls of both rooms are stained from filthy palms, uneven from decades of drywall patching, and feature a variety of head and fist sized holes from fights and falls of bygone days, weeks, months.
It's the kind of place where, during your orientation shift, the manager tells you that if, in the event you bludgeon someone unconscious with the hickory axe handle behind the bar, “Don’t call the cops! Call me, bud. Anytime,” followed by the reassurance, “You don’t gotta worry ‘bout eatin’ ‘ny charges workin’ here, bud. Just call me, ‘nd I’ll get ridda the tapes.” It’s the kind of place where such talk is considered at least normal and probably admirable, and where “eatin’ charges” is a common concern, rather than the climax of an anecdote. Next, he shows you where the cameras are and points you to the security monitor, at which you will spend countless hours staring. He tells you to park in view of the cameras, and on one of the rare days that you don’t, a disgruntled couple who you turn away reach behind your tires and slash your CV boots. It’s also a place where a man takes twenty shots of Captain Morgan Dark and insists—in a series of barely coherent stammers—that he’s good to drive. It’s the middle of the afternoon, and no one objects to his intentions, even though the streets are busy with kids returning from school. When you call the police, the customers become uncharacteristically quiet and remain so for months. The word “rat” is whispered as you walk by to empty lottery machines and collect bottles. An unsurprising reaction, once you learn that almost everyone in this place has spent considerable time in penitentiaries. The braggarts among them drop names like “Renous,” causing the county-jail guys to grow sullen and cease telling stories.
It's a place where a detective from the major crimes unit calls to ask the bartender details about the murdered woman who was last seen alive with a squirrelly looking man during one of his weekend shifts. The same day, another man calls him incessantly, screaming that he’s on his way, and he’s going to kill him. The two incidents are unrelated, and the latter is not especially atypical. It’s a place where most regulars refer to cheque day as “pay-day”; where social workers from Community Services call looking for clients, who use the bar as their primary contact number; where missing teeth is a sign of masculinity; men pee on the floor intentionally; blackened fingers featuring stubborn flecks of fingernail polish swirl dirty coins around the sticky Formica bar, as a woman counts under her raspy breath, hoping to cover a draught; a place where currency is discussed in terms of twenty-three dollar beer buckets, as in, “My girl [referring to a caseworker] rigged the numbers for me, now I get five more buckets a month!” or, “I worked at Johnny’s all goddamn day, and he only paid me one bucket!”; it’s a place where the patrons divide themselves in two groups, “eaters,” meaning those who drink everyday while continuing to feed themselves, and “drinkers,” who consume no food and only drink.
The building, its filthy fixtures, chrome taps, and loud appliances are bereft of character, this place simply answers the call of destitution. The people make this place what it is, and the people love it. Gamblers work for two weeks so that they can show up for several hours and incrementally feed their entire paycheck into a machine, twenty dollars at a time, two-fifty per spin, all the while, anxiously hoping they won’t walk out sobbing, as they often do. The eaters drink all night, then balk at the bartender as he calls “last call,” while their habitually neglected wives are home sleeping. The drinkers cherish this place most, and collectively they understand that, when they die, this is where they will be remembered. Sometimes, the eaters even splurge and buy a tiny metal placard for their deceased drinker friends. Meanwhile, the townsfolk, who won’t consider getting married in a dive bar or burning their wallet in the sometimes-stinking room, love this place, too. They yearn for gothic tales, like the one in which a group of middle-aged men wearing flat-billed ball caps and sterling silver chains follow an old man home after his lottery win and beat him to death with a folding chair. Such stories emit sparks of interest most people won’t find elsewhere.
Like the people, the story of this place has never changed, and likely never will. Drinks will be poured, money will be lost, and, if they’re well-liked, the regulars now will soon be dusty metal plaques on an oil-smeared wall with fresh bumps and holes. In the meantime, the civilized townsfolk unconsciously await to hear about the next indictable offense to occur inside this corrugated steel precursor to unwanted conception and untimely death.
