When life hungers for more than what your wallet permits, the only food fast enough to keep you full ‘til morning is the cheapest drink at your nearest dive bar. In Logan Square, there are plenty of local joints ready to hold onto your worries, smile at you under a dim hanging light, and lean in close to whisper that cold old classic,
“Yeah uh, that one declined. Do you have another card I can take?”
One option is SmallBar, whose population size has surged with millennials since they’ve begun the cursed Instagram reel marketing that marks the end of authenticity for all “hidden gems.” Living on the corner of Albany and Wellington, SmallBar offers relief with their $8 smashburgers ($10 after tax+tip). Their “Classic” is the type of burger that you wolf down without chewing; and, when chased with a swig of their $4 Old Style on tap, you’ll be tender enough to bond with a stranger over how you both need more. However, the booths are packed with people that only dabble in grime, and in the light of the purple neon “Small Bar” sign, everyone’s clean faces and metal credit cards glow ripe for the pickings of envy.
For a little less dollar signs (and a little less shame), you can hit Cole’s — a hippo pond of image-conscious Zoomers who order $6 combos of Old Styles and whiskey shots to save money for their music careers and tattoo funds. While you won’t find any authentic conversation with someone that isn’t networking or trying to sleep with you, Cole’s is the perfect place to go if you’re looking to feel invisible in a crowd of people who won’t remember your name from the week before.
But it was a Tuesday. And there’s only one place worth running to on a Tuesday:
Reed’s Local.
Reed’s.
Reed’s.
Reed’s.
You can tell a lot about a dive from the quality of its patron’s tattoos, generally my rule is: the shittier the ink, the cheaper the drink. God, do my stick-and-pokes feel comfortable at Reed’s, where a can of Hamm’s is only $2 and you can get a side of Old Crow for just two more. No one tries to impress one another with a Pinterest-curated outfit that screams “Alternative”; no one talks to you just to talk about themselves; and, every one — without a doubt — has a shitty tattoo hidden somewhere on their body. The cherry on top of it all: Tuesday is karaoke night.
That particular Tuesday begged at me for redemption like a man on death row. I woke up to a “break up text” (as my roommate called it) from my mother and read it on the toilet while on hold with the EBT office.
“I had so much trust in you and believed you would succeed,” the message began, “You let me down.”
My bank accounts were barren except for the one with next month’s rent; the last time I told a friend that I loved them was after a bump of a stranger’s coke; and, for a second, I was troubled by the prospect of spending another holiday season alone. Karaoke floated into my mind as an opportunity for saving grace.
I opened my notes app, wrote down the names of every friend I owed money to, and used my rent to Zelle them back for IOU meals and borrowed bar tabs. I felt better. At the very least, I still had that “chosen family” queer media loves to go on-and-on about. And at the very very least, I could spare ten of my rent dollars for Reed’s.
“Hello, is anybody there?” the EBT office spoke muffled through the phone.
I Wiped.
I Flushed.
I Smiled.
and I Unmuted.
“Yes, I’m still here,” I responded wondering if I sounded as tired as I felt.
Once the call ended, I texted one of the only people I knew who would understand the humble charm of creaking wooden floors, cigarette-generous butch lesbians, and baby boomed men belting out sad country music — my old roommate and pseudo-sister Marley.
“I’m so fucking tired of this city,” she ranted just days prior, “I’m tired of going to the same bars and seeing the same people — everyone’s dressed the same. Alt-bitches. What’s the point? All they want is to talk about themselves.”
Marley was always a bit too authentic for people our age: she was kind (but not too kind); sexy (but not too sexy); polite (but not too polite); and funny (but way too funny). She was real, and — while most people our age only seemed to be interested in you if you were “the most” something — being “the most real” rarely won any awards from people who weren’t troubled or old enough to realize it was the only characteristic that lasted.
She and I were the only survivors of my first apartment in Chicago. We lived with two others straight out of our art school dormitory and, in the chaotic harem that was our first home, developed a sibling-like bond. We watched movies in bed together, cried together, kissed the same people, made the same mistakes, and worked the same job. As roommates, we carried the weight of each others’ emotions when misery tried to anchor us down. And — with an absurd knack for making senseless noise, rehearsing improv bits for an audience of simply ourselves, and doom-scrolling through our most difficult days — together, we coped.
To others, we seemed to have morphed into eerie gender-bent versions of the same person, and once — while she was in bed with a boy I used to like — he pulled away mid-kiss and said to her,
“You know, you’ve got a lot of Tyler in you.”
Needless to say, we were close. I loved her in the way the movies say you’re supposed to love your family.
That afternoon we decided to hang at her job before going to Reed’s. We sat in the back-room drinking wine and, after some casual catching-up and ranting, she dropped news that rang through me like a flashbang.
“My mom and I have been talking…” she said as she leaned back in her chair. She had never graduated from the art school we met at and was a year away from finishing her bachelors. “She said that I can move in with her while I finish up school...” she took a long drag from her vape, “I just feel so stuck here.”
While the decision to finish school was not particularly jarring, the news was made destructive by the fact that her mother lived one-thousand-one-hundred-and five miles away in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“In Santa Fe, people are weird. Like really weird. But they’re weird in a real way,” Marley described them with a glimmer of grandeur in her eyes. I imagined her in Santa Fe, stood all macho with her hands on her hips: a cowboy hat, a red-leather vest, and speckled with turquoise jewelry. Much better than the tired graphic tees and Doc Martens that littered the bodies of Chicago. I imagined her hiking a mountain in a city surrounded by desert and expansive skies. “The people are cool. Really cool. They’re not trying to convince you they’re weird like bitches out here. They don’t try to convince you of anything.”
While I couldn’t stand the thought of her leaving, her words resonated. I missed real people too. We were living in a city where creatives enjoyed having their egos stroked more than their cocks. Being an “artist” was less of a practice and more of a nametag.
Marley’s hair, which always used to be a saturated box-dye red, wisped out into a tired brown nowadays. In the beginning of our friendship, even when entrenched in our respective miseries, we always spoke with a sanguine view of the future.
“Life is hard now,” we’d go, “but I can’t wait ‘til we’re _____”
Whether we were impatient for riches, or comfort, hotness, or happiness, we were hopeful.
Over the years, as the box dye faded and Chicago worked its novelty to death, our sentences seemed to trail into silence after “Life is hard now…”
It wasn’t until she spoke of New Mexico, that I heard optimism in her voice again. While her body seemed to pulse with anxiety at the mention of a new life, her voice trembled with hopefulness. Yet, I was afraid.
As pungent as the odor of Chicago had gotten, I had nowhere to go. Unlike her, I hadn’t regained the ability to end my sentences with “but I can’t wait ‘til…” I could barely afford breakfast, let alone a new life. Perhaps most frightening of all was that, without Marley, I wouldn’t have many people left in the city who knew me well enough for “I love you”s to feel believable. So I prayed that Reed’s could change her mind. After all, it was the realest place I knew.
Reed’s was split into two sections. The first half contained the actual bar, where the bartender stood in front of a wall littered by knick knacks, towers of orderable cans, and a primary-colored stained-glass mosaic. Over it hung a ceiling-light whose lampshade was transparent and hollow, it spun in circles with little horses inside that pulled a carriage marked ‘Budweiser’. Marley and I squeezed between older bodies sat at the bar to order two combos. I took both the whiskey shots and let the burn settle into me as we walked over to the back.
We sat at a table directly in front of the karaoke “stage” — a corner sectioned off by two floorset speakers, a back wall lined with silver streamers, and a disco ball hung above two mic stands. This second section of Reed’s was empty. I brought up Santa Fe.
“I just have this momentum right now and I’m scared that if I don't leave, I might lose it,” Marley shook her head as her eyes dashed around
“But why leave now? It just seems so… rushed. When did you even come up with this?”
A man that looked exactly like the memory of my father crawled up to a microphone and caught both of our attention. A Lynyrd Skynyrd instrumental followed him.
“I’ve wanted to leave for a while. You know that,” she shouted over the music.
“What about Keanu?” I asked in defense of her boyfriend that I despised. He was one of those mediocre men that fed on the life-force of beautiful women. “I’m not just saying this out of wanting you to stay. I just think it might be a rash decision.”
We watched my father step off the stage to be replaced by some other oldhead and Marley went to the restroom. Right then, my phone buzzed with an email headline reading “Your ‘After Hours’ Submission.” My heart dropped. It was an email back from a literary journal that I forgot I applied to months ago. My heart dropped even further when the email opened with the line “We are pleased to inform you…” The poem they decided to publish was one I had written about my mother. When I told Marley, she was more excited for me three times over, and offered to buy us shots.
The fervor of Reed’s carried us through a couple more beers and a couple more shots and — after a few hours of chatting with strangers, singing songs I can’t remember, and periodic trips outside to hit the vape — the night grew somber as it began to settle. As we sat at the bar, Marley brought up the text that had attempted to murder my Tuesday in its crib.
“Don’t give up on her,” she said.
“She broke up with me, remember?” I joked, hoping for the subject to die with a giggle.
“I know, but all I’m saying is, just don’t give up. I just don’t want you to regret having not tried to repair things.” Her grandfather’s funeral was only weeks prior. Death in the family was something that seemed to be lingering in the air, and she seemed to want to remind me that even if my family wasn’t warm, they were alive.
“Yeah… I know…” I said. There was silence. “I’m afraid of you leaving.”
“I know.”
“Everybody’s got someplace to go, some family to…” I chugged my beer to soothe the cracks in my voice, “...but you are my family. I wanna get outta here too y’know, but I don’t know where else to go.”
“You should come to New Mexico,” she offered. “I really think you’d be happy there.” Maybe she was right. Maybe she wasn’t. All I knew was that she’d be happy there. So there we sat — as Tuesday night stumbled into Wednesday morning — we were as full as we could possibly be.
We left Reed’s as soon as it did last call and walked the five minute journey to my apartment. I swayed on the couch as Marley waited for her Uber. The “big light” of the living room kept us uncomfortable and alive. It was only just past midnight and I remembered the way it used to be impossible for us to yawn until 3. Perhaps that’s why we grew so exhausted. I didn’t know how many nights like this were left for us but — as I watched Marley slip deeper into my living room couch — I knew that one more would be far too many.
“You should go to Santa Fe.” I started, “Do it now if it feels right. Don’t lose momentum. Fuck Keanu. And fuck me. You do what you need to do.”
She smiled.
“Thank you.” She stood in a slow, drunken haze and started to put on her shoes. “My Uber’s gonna be here soon. I love you dude. I’ll see you.”
As she opened the door I thought about saying ‘I love you too,’ but for some reason the words couldn’t leave my mouth; I thought about our friendship over the years, the way it rocked through the trials of tragedy; I thought about all the bars we discovered together before I showed her Reed’s; I thought about how I never wanted to go to Reed’s again.
I tried to say “I love you too.” It came out as, “Get home safe.”
The door shut behind her and I sat alone, letting the buzz of the A/C lull me to sleep. I wondered if I sounded as tired as I felt. It was Wednesday morning. I was starving. The birds began to chirp.
“Life is hard now,” I thought, “but I can’t wait ‘til I leave Chicago too.”
This writing is incredible.
I love you Tyler, you are so talented and have beautiful voice