This bar is his bar. What he’s like matters less than the personality of the bar he conforms to. We enter by the restrooms off to the side. It smells like what you’d expect from a city bar. But they brew their own beer there too and just outside the restrooms are the brew kettles and fermentation tanks. So it smells like yeast and mashed grains, an intricate array of tubes and hoses and valves with pressure controls. This is the essence of the bar, a sweet, grainy smell mixed with urine. The smell triggers the parts of his brain where memory and emotion lie and the two are intertwined. In fact his memories of coming here run so deep he feels he’s intertwined with the bar too, the physical place. He knows each sticker and scrap of graffiti on the bathroom stalls. It’s like they’re there for him.

The bar is called Six Arms and they named it after a Hindu female deity that hangs on the southern wall. They found the massive bust and liked it so much they named the place after it. The deity is Shiva and yes she has six arms. Some versions have four but this one, six. The multiple arms represent great power and potential, different pastimes and futures. This one both creates and destroys. She is smiling but in battle pose.

And behind the bar a black and white photo of a guy on a motorcycle with a big beard all covered in leather. That’s Steve, a former bar manager who died a tragic death. Steve once gave him a Zippo with the Six Arms logo but he lost it and then heard from Steve’s girlfriend he’d died. She found a letter he’d written to Steve after he left town and she was crying on her voicemail, how did you know Steve?

It was good they kept him on the wall. Right beside that William Burroughs picture, the close up of his head when he was old that really accentuates the shape of his skull.

And there were other adornments you’d expect from a bar, like foreign bills and currency tacked to the rafters, a bumper sticker from Wall Drug. You could sit at the bar by the liquor bottles and taps and glasses and feel right at home, everything in its place. The people who worked there all knew him but they mattered less too. It was the physical place. If it was a game board they were all interchangeable pieces.

The deity on the southern wall seemed to acknowledge this by the way she smiled.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: Addiction, pacific northwest, prose, Seattle