THE REGULAR CROWD SHUFFLES OUT

The light inside Billy O’s Pub appears as dim as the hopes of the regulars who line the U-shaped bar, totally focused it would seem on dissolving away their past, present and future. My wife Jane and I shuffle through a puddle of vacant gazes and seat ourselves in a burgundy-vinyl booth just beyond their misery. Gray, duct-tape patches hide drunken wounds and untold tales of conquest, real and imagined. It’s eight-thirty on a Saturday night and I’m feeling invigorated and strangely at ease as we join our world to the pub’s reality.

Neil Young warbles from the jukebox, “See the losers in the best bars, meet the winners in the dives,” and as I casually observe my fellow patrons I can feel the truth of his words flowing through my membranes. There’s no deceit here tonight, just the raw edge of being human and frail. Each secret that lingers needs only the right question to set it free, the burden of proof entrusted to the one brave enough to inquire. A woman obviously snake-bit by time and destiny rests her right elbow on the bar, her hand poised like some 1950’s matinee idol and cradling a smoldering cigarette. No one cares enough to ask her to extinguish the smoke.

A younger man approaches her, leans in close and says something. He waits for a few seconds, then leaves, brushing by us beneath a quick smirk of embarrassment. The woman takes a long drag and stalls before exhaling, automatic and despairing, as if she’s done, one way or another, with everything she set out to do in her life. I watch her rise, semi-amazed at whatever unknown motivation pushes her unsteadily after the younger man. As she wobbles past us I choose to see her closer to her beginning than to her ending. Without asking I know her deepest truth, that she is or once was someone’s daughter.

Jane and I have journeyed out this night to see our friend Chris perform with his band in the dingy yet comfy confines of Billy O’s. As the band straggles in and begins to set up I sense the first glimmers of change swirling through the pub and its crusty denizens. I know they’ve seen this before—-their “home away from home” is a frequent venue for bands who play music they don’t care to listen to-—but still, I sense a sadness pervading their world, that they are powerless to stop the temporary onslaught of tonight’s festivities. There’s no struggle looming on this horizon, just the simple dynamic of one world replacing the decline of another.

By nine-forty the band is ready, having robustly tuned-up for the ten o’clock start. Those lost souls who populated the premises when we first arrived have been replaced, save for the few too imbibed to move or even care, by a transient crowd of groupies and the mildly curious. A blush of possibility pervades this new crowd, though I detect in them the same underlying vulnerabilities already excavated and exposed among the pub’s more faithful clientele.

At ten o’clock the band begins their first set, too loud and perhaps too deep for this weary point in time. And Chris sings of things I’ve seen here tonight, of those other realms that are perhaps more genuine then that which we proclaim as our one, true certainty. Jane and I, now perched like aged voyeurs along the mirrored back wall, have witnessed the passing of the guard tonight, when the regular crowd shuffled out.

My head swims gently from the combined effects of several Newcastle beers and a certain spontaneity I can’t identify. I close my eyes, intent on absorbing the epiphany at hand. And suddenly I realize that maybe the regular crowd already knows something I’ve been chasing my whole life…that it isn’t about “this” or “that”…it simply is what it is.