David Murray

You don't need to duck your head upon entering the Inner Town Pub, but we do, because it feels right.

It's just before eight. It's Thursday night, one of two open-mic nights at the Inner Town. Nothing's happening yet; there aren't a dozen people in the bar.

I order beers and my pal Ed makes our place by the pool table. He drapes our coats over the stools by the table by the west wall, and puts his name on the chalkboard: Riggs. When I arrive with the beers, he asks me what name I'll go by tonight. I say, "Hootch." Then I decide I can't handle "Hootch" tonight; I'll be "Willie." Tonight we'll be Riggs and Willie. (We never use our real names in the Inner Town. We don't need aliases in here, but again, it feels right.)

We've got next game. We sit down, sip our beers, and contemplate the next six hours. We're here to play a zillion games of pool on the only free table either of us know of in Chicago, listen to alternately good and terrible live music, stay as sober as possible while drinking beer all night, and wonder whether it's our best instincts or our worst weaknesses that have drawn us back here Thursday after Thursday for almost three years.

The eight ball drops.

"You want to play partners? I'm Willie and this is Riggs."

The Inner Town Pub was a speak-easy during prohibition. In a sense, it still is.

Inner Town Pub regulars will cringe when they read this account. They will accuse me of trying to ruin one of the last great Bohemian hideouts left in the fast-yuppifying Ukrainian Village. But they must realize it's already too late.

In fact, it's yuppies we're playing right now, one with a nicely trimmed goatee and another with a baseball cap. They are sitting with a table of men and women that would fit perfectly into the Bar Louie on Damen in Bucktown. They're talking loudly on a cell phone with a speakerphone. They're more intent on the conversation than on the pool game; Ed and I and have to shoot them dirty looks to remind them it's their turn. At one point, the goatee guy runs to the bar and comes back to the table, screaming, "I told you! 'El' is short for 'elevated train'! I know my Chicago history!"

My other defense against those who would accuse me of gentrifying the Inner Town is the life-source that built this bar doesn't appear to be going anywhere. This is the immovable old owner, Mike.

Mike is a constant presence in the bar. He pushes his way around the place in a gruff, glowering gate. He's on endless unpleasant errands: adjusting a faulty exhaust fan that's failing to clear smoke out of the bar, turning down the volume in the makeshift sound room because some overzealous singer has forgotten that the place is located in the middle of a quiet neighborhood and announcing, finally, "Last call for alcohol."

Creepily clad in 1970s polyester western get-ups, Mike would come off as a loathsome character if he didn't have a twinkle in his eye that brightened to something approximating warmth, especially when he casts it on his favorites. (From what I can tell, Mike favors women, but he'll also tolerate men who don't get too drunk and who play good music.)

You might say the bar crowd keeps Mike young, if it wasn't obviously too late for that.

Dusty, musty and dark, the Inner Town is a winter bar, a cavern of a tavern. Much of its decor only makes it darker: the dark walls are covered by purple velvet canvases, ugly landscape paintings (one of them portraying a geologically impossible, almost disturbing mountain range), terrible Elvis Presley lamps and paintings, a dust-caked American flag and then there's the sour smell that gets stronger the closer you get to the bathrooms.

Yet Mike's bar gives off a real sense of warm cheer, too. A Santa in his sleigh hangs from the ceiling. So, year-round, do hundreds of multicolored Christmas lights, which provide much of the illumination. Built into the wall at the far end of the bar, where the pool table and the tiny stage and the sound room are located is a fake stained-glass window back-lit with fluorescent lights which you can see plainly through the colored panes. On the window it says, "Inner Town Pub."

Someday, a doctor will explain to me how a mere two or three beers can so thoroughly devastate a man's most basic sense of discretion.

Just before the open-mic night kicks off -- just before 10 -- I divulge to the two women I've been talking to that I'm doing a story for Newcity. Within two minutes, the women have passed this tidbit on to a regular who has joined them. Now he is looking at me askance. I implore them all not to tell Mike, and I ask what it will take.

"A few drinks," the regular replies with a cold smirk.

I tell him, "You got it." But as he continues to shoot me looks, I don't buy him any drinks, preferring to put up with the bad vibes.

The first act is also the emcee for the night. She makes everybody happier as she launches into a good cover of Rod Stewart's "Maggie." It's a happy song and she's got a sunny way about her.

Less simple is the Scandinavian trio that just walked in. Two giggling yet troubled-looking, ultra-thin, apparent high-fashion models set up shop at the table left of the stage -- Ed and I are right across from them, flanking the right-side of the stage. A fifty-something smoothie -- who Ed and I reason to be their agent -- accompanies them. Of course, we know nothing about these women, or about the modeling world they may or may not actually be a part of, but one must invent stories about people at whom one is going to stare at all night. Not to do so would be shallow. Ed and I assume cocaine, we assume eating disorders, we assume shallow, we assumed stupid. And we stare at these poor, tragic figures and wonder at their bravery. We begin referring to their grinning male companion as "the pimp."

We have nothing else to do. Though we whipped the yuppies, a muscular regular with a huge, intense Teutonic face and small Freud glasses has beaten us handily. Our name is at the bottom of the chalkboard:

TJ
Mike
Brett
Neil
Becky Kay
Willie

Next up is a really good guitar player who plays some good rock instrumentals but doesn't sing.

The third player begins a run of three awful acts in a row. This guy sings one song about "agony" and another "from a girl's perspective, ya dig it?" The next singer wears a dog's choke chain and wails about the sky, only he pronounces it with a screeching, "skyeeeeeeeeee!" And the third is a classic whiner who sounds like Neil Young on estrogen and whose central message is, "I say, wooo, doo doo doo doo doo."

Almost every bad performer at the Inner Town -- and the bad performers outnumber the good ones about three to one -- suffers from the same malady: self-pity and phony angst.

"When I drink, I always sing Depeche Mode," the whiner declares heavily.

When the music goes bad at the Inner Town, you focus on the pool table or on the people. Because Ed and I were still not on the table, we focused on the people. Happily, the frenetic comedian Richard Lewis has just walked in. Not nearly as calm and centered as the real Richard Lewis, this miraculous lookalike and act-alike explodes into the pool area with a glass of red wine in his hand and scribbles his name on the board. "Who's playing now?" he asks loudly to no one in particular; he doesn't wait for an answer before he disappears into the crowd by the bar. (I once remarked on Lewis' electricity to his pool partner. "You should see him on cocaine," he replied.)

It turns out Becky Kay, from the chalkboard, is one of the models. She's facing away from us as she tries to arrange the balls. After struggling for about half a minute with this jigsaw puzzle, she turns to Ed and inquires deliberately, "Are you a person who would know the correct way to rack?" He shows her how to rack the balls; I groan, knowing we're in for a marathon game. We are -- dozens of badly missed shots and helpless giggles.

The models lose in the end; they don't let it get to them. As Ed and I know, they've been through much worse in their lives.

At around midnight, the bar is packed and the music is back on a good streak. A shaggy-haired guy sings a very good version of "Rocky Raccoon," declaring at the end, "Not perfect, but I'm not the Beatles." He's followed by a really good woman player with a raspy voice who we've seen here before; she's as good on the pool table as on the stage.

I'm keeping score in my notebook. Ed and I have won six games and lost three, not a great record for this bar, which has its sharks but also lets models on the table. At any rate, Ed and I are starting to get more intense about pool, about everything.

And the emcee comes back for another couple of songs; I'm starting to get a huge crush on her. She's got such a good sense of humor. She introduces one of her originals by saying with a laugh, "I don't know where this song came from, but it's about... this guy is dying, and I don't really care about it." That strikes me as hilarious. It's 12:25, and I write in my notebook, "Great mood."

I must be in a great mood, because I find myself urging Ivana onto the stage. It's risky just talking to Ivana. She is a 50-ish aging beauty with a thick Polish accent and a domineering, severe nature. I once saw her fire a pool partner in the middle of a game for poor play; she recruited a stranger to replace him.

It was Ivana who created one of the strangest moments that I can remember at the Inner Town.

At around 2am one night -- maybe a year ago -- Ivana spontaneously took the stage and announced her intention to sing songs from a genre which she identified as "Polish jazz." She sang them a cappella, in Polish. They had no detectable rhythm, and the most dissonant melodies. She sang sadly and with her eyes closed. The entire bar went into a quiet trance for maybe four or five of the most eerie minutes. Mike put an abrupt end to the act by storming onto the stage mid-ballad, tearing the mic out of Ivana's hand and grunting his signature, "Last call for alcohol."

A cadre of musicians who had performed that night embraced Ivana as she made her bewildered way off the stage. That's the sort of thing that happens at the Inner Town on a good night.

I must admit it, though -- this night is not a good night at the Inner Town Pub. Ivana does eventually get on stage, but she's forced to wail to the conventional guitar riffing of a player who obviously doesn't know the first thing about Polish jazz.

The best musicians aren't here tonight: The British guy who plays an astonishingly fast and passionate and sweaty harmonica. The old burn-out who cries passionate lines from the 1960s: "Good God, there's shots bein' fired!" The friendly bald guy who does perfect covers of the best classic rock songs: "Everybody's talkin' at me. Can't hear a word they're sayin'... " And the young actor in the porkpie hat who plays great old country songs from Johnny Cash and Hank Williams Sr. All are missing in action.

Musically, the best thing that happens tonight is a boisterous sing-a-long, led by our charming emcee, of everything from a serious Led Zeppelin "Black Dog," to jokey versions of Bon Jovi's "Dead or Alive" and Skid Row's "I Remember You."

This is a lot of fun, but it's not the best kind of fun, it's not a unique kind of fun, it isn't the kind of fun we're used to at the Inner Town Pub.

Where are all the characters tonight?

Where is the brooding drunk who once caught me snickering at his ridiculous playing and called me out in front of the whole bar? "What's the matter with you, man? Are you lonely? Don't you like yourself? Come on, man, tell me your troubles." (I stayed away from the Inner Town for a couple of months after that humiliation.)

Or the strange cat with the bowling shirts who moves around the bar from one stranger to another, telling dirty jokes and screaming before the punch line can sink in, "That's gold, baby! That's gold!"

Or the hippie dude who sits at the bar with his legs crossed in a skirt.

Or the withered old lady in the Bing Crosby golf hat who sat every night, all night, cigarette dangling from her mouth in front of the video poker machine. (In fact, what happened to the video poker machine?)

Or the guy Ivana once fired as her pool partner, a middle-aged Mark Twain lookalike who never once came out of the bathroom without a cloud of marijuana smoke in tow.

Have these people fled forever, or is tonight just a one-off?

I stop Mike on his way to announcing an early last call, at just after 1:30am, and ask him to tell me the history of the bar. He says it's been a bar for 100 years. It was one of the neighborhood's many Polish bars when he took it over in 1983.

Mike has spent eighteen years accumulating the clutter that dominates the place today.

One day all this dust will be disturbed, this elaborate collection of junk art will be dismantled; this bar will be transformed again, or closed. These dark walls -- even the bathroom wall into which my name and Ed's are both carved (our real names) -- these will come down, sooner or later.

And really, who cares if it does? It's a stinky, smoky old bar, for crying out loud. These young punks and old hippies shouldn't need me to tell them that life goes on, things change. How significantly would my life be diminished if I never saw any of these weirdos again? How much would it hurt them if they lost touch with each other? A change would probably be good for all of us. It certainly wouldn't be the end of the world.

And yet, for my pal Ed and me, an important question remains unanswered: What will we do with our Thursday nights?

In the car on the way to Maxwell Street -- Ed is insisting on a Polish tonight -- I look at my notebook for the final score. For the record, we have won eleven games and lost only three.

At any rate, I hope the free pool table is the last thing to go.

(2001-02-22)

Also by David Murray

TRUE GRIT
This earthy exercise fad, which is sweeping the city and the rest of the urban nation, works on the well-worn premise that, in order to maintain discipline and motivation over an even moderately long haul, most people need social pressure, structure and strong leadership.
(2000-10-12)

Steam Heat
Who goes to a Russian bathhouse? Who goes to a Turkish bathhouse? Who goes to the Division Street Russian Turkish Baths?
(2000-06-15)

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