Brinksmanship

In this one bar, you couldn’t set your beer bottle on the table or cockroaches would
climb up the label and drown themselves.

Anytime you set down a beer, you’d have a dead cockroach in your next mouth- ful. There were Filipino strippers who came out between their sets to shoot pool in string bikinis. For five dollars, they’d pull a plastic chair into the shadows between stacked cases of beer and lap dance you.
We used to go there because it was near Good Samaritan Hospital.

We’d visit Alan until his pain medication put him to sleep, then Geoff and I would go drink beer. Geoff, grinding his beer bottle on roach after roach as they ran across our table.

We’d talk to the strippers. We talked to guys at other tables. We were young, young-ish, late twenties, and one night a waitress asked us, “If you’re already watch- ing dancers in a dive like this, what will you be doing when you’re old men?”

At the next table was a doctor, an older man who explained a lot of things. He said how the stage was spotlighted with red and black lights because they hid the bruises and needle marks on the dancers. He showed how their fingernails, their hair and eyes told their childhood diseases. Their teeth and skin showed how well they ate. Their breath in your face, the smell of their sweat could tell you how they’d probably die.