Night One - Galway Bay

The first thing I see is a Dalmation sitting on a barstool, its large, mournful eyes fixed on a takeout container of Thai food. This makes me turn around to look back at the stairs we’ve just descended to be sure I didn’t make a wrong turn somewhere. I figure maybe I'll a sign reading “Thai Food for Grieving Dogs” or “Ye Olde Dog Sittery” or maybe “That Fever Dream You Had That One Time.”

But, no, I’m in the right place.

I eventually get used to the Dalmation, and the fact that he’s seated on a barstool instead of sitting on the floor like, you know, a dog would, and I even manage to get used to his doleful gaze that later settles on all the popcorn being thrown in our faces. But as prepared as I think I am, an hour later when a second dog viciously attacks my leg, I pretty much scream like a small, easily frightened girl.

Saturday Night

Galway Bay
500 W. Diversey Parkway
Chicago, IL

Time: 700pm
Cost: Notions of where Dogs do and do not belong

For my first foray into talking to strangers, I think it best to bring some back up. I met Chris in college and then randomly ran into him here in Chicago. We’ve worked together a few times in the past, haven’t really ever hung out, but he’s game for this, so there we go. I tell Chris that my biggest concern is being completely inappropriate, as in jarringly inappropriate, as in I need to leave now because you’re crying inappropriate. When he asks what I mean, I tell him the following story which marks but one instance of that sort of inappropriateness:

A co-worker once asked me whether I go by Andy and not Andrew. She mentions that she had a brother named Andy who had passed and that he only ever went by Andy. I tell her that I only go by Andy as well, and that the only people who have ever called me Andrew are my mother and a group of Jamaicans that I once worked with in Virginia. This leads us to a conversation about Jamaica, where she had been, and how everyone she encountered in Jamaica was very proper, and that she attributed this to the island’s history in English Colonialism. She says that when she was there, there were no Eds, only Edwards. No Steves, only Stephens. Now, right about here in this pleasant, interesting conversation is where it all goes wrong, and I want to point out that I didn’t mean any harm, that I just wasn’t thinking. And that I never figured out a way to apologize for this, and that I still feel awful about it.

Here’s how the conversation abruptly ended:

Her: That’s probably why they called you Andrew all the time.

Me: Interesting. I wonder if that’s universal. Did your brother ever go there?

Her: Once, yeah.

Me: Oh. Did they all call him Andrew?

Her: I didn’t ask him.

Me: Well then I guess we’ll never, ever know.

And that was the end of the conversation. We both realized I’d said something really, really wrong, but I couldn’t think of a way to apologize and she couldn’t think of a way to continue the conversation after I’d been such an outstanding asshole. So I mumbled a goodbye and, shockingly, we really haven’t talked much since.

This, I tell Chris, is what I’m afraid of. Also, I’m worried about making someone cry, or being punched somewhere in the course of events, or being attacked by a dog. (Fooooooreshaaaaadowing! Soooooort ooooof!)

Galway Bay is located underneath a classy, historic building with a proper name that I can’t remember. The Baxter House, or The Teabiscuit Building or Fancypants Manor (“We suffer not yon ruffian pants!”), or something like that. Even with the introductory Dalmatian, Galway Bar is immediately inviting with a sort of living room comfortableness. Off of the main bar room, there are two other small, open areas where some bike messenger types play pool, and a dart board goes unutilized. On one end of the main room there’s a cozy, slightly elevated section with a couch, some tables, a fireplace, and a haphazard pile of board games.

The clientele is relatively diverse. Two girls dressed for an evening that will take place elsewhere are currently chatting at the bar while their polo-shirted boyfriends silently watch a college football game playing on the TV across the room. There are two mild hipsters on the opposite side of the bar, speaking to what must be an Archaeologist or a serious Dungeons and Dragons aficionado, the kind who uses pewter figurines in each game. Seriously, those two types of people look exactly the same, and you wouldn't realize it until you saw this man. In the elevated games area, a group of about eight similarly dressed men (I peg them as an improv group because of this) are talking quietly. Chris and I sit at the bar between the quiet college football enthusiasts and a couple who are banging their plastic cups on the bar, laughing drunkenly.

It’s about this time, scanning the room, ready to enact my plan, that I fully realize that I don’t have a plan. At all. I had thought of what to do here in after-school special terms; “Be yourself!” or “They’d be lucky to have you as their friend!” or “Knowing is half the battle!” But when it comes down to it, I have no idea who I’m going to speak to or what I’m going to say. So, I stall by ordering a couple of beers and talking with Chris about how I hate the Saw movies (there’s an ad on one of the TVs about Saw VI, which is coming out next month). I tell him that I hate them, that they get worse with every incarnation, and that I’ve seen every single one. We also discuss the Archaeologist/Level 17 Elven Ranger and how being an Archaeologist would make all of this easier. If I were an Archaeologist (or at least dressed like one), I would just approach people and, without prompting, tell them that I couldn’t stay long because I had to make sure some artifact (The Cross of Coronado, say) got back to the museum. Fucking BAM! Conversation starter AND excuse to leave when the conversation dries up. Unfortunately, that would involve certain amounts of digging and being mistaken for someone who owns pewter figurines.

I consider asking one of the stoic football watchers next to me some generic question about the game, but then I worry that doing so might accidentally lead to a conversation about college football. The Archaeologist/Grolthax the Gigantinator exits (after that Cross!), I consider asking the couple who he was, but can’t think of a way to do so without seeming insulting, because, well, I’d probably just bring up the point about the pewter dragon and wizard set he must own. I even think about breaking out a board game and hoping that someone will join in, thinking to themself “Hey, that grown man is having a great time with that board game! Maybe if I rush over I can beat the crowd who are dying to Chute and or Ladder with him, respectively.”

So I go to the bathroom and try to think of a strategy while staring at a wall adorned with impeccably neat graffiti concerning games that the artists had been watching, or the bachelor party they’d been attending, or the frat that they belonged to, and on and on. That graffiti is rubbing it in my face, is what I think, showing off all of those good times past. 'Ryan’s Bachelor Party ’06 - You’re So Money!' didn’t have to try this hard. 'Duke Rules' didn’t have to break out a board game. And even 'Becky’s a Slut' found some level of companionship with the nearby 'Everybody Knows That' and 'So’s Your Mom', (and probably some actual companionship with someone named Becky). So I decide then and there that I’m going back out to that bar and talking to goddamn somebody. When I leave the bathroom and walk back toward the bar (I’m not talking to the pool-playing bike messengers, you can just forget that), I'm a new man, a man on a mission, but when I get back to the bar I see that fate has drunkenly intervened.

That couple that was sitting next to us, beating their plastic cup on the bar and being the last people you’d want to talk to in a bar, Chris is talking to them. It turns out that the girl part of the couple, Anna, had banged her head on Chris’ chair, apologized and then… just started talking. I say hello and meet Anna, a young, drunk, Puerto Rican medical student completing a residency in Chicago and she in turn introduces us to her boyfriend Carlos, who is also young, also drunk, and also a Puerto Rican medical student. Carlos takes a moment to shake our hand, but then quickly goes back to watching the game.

Chris and I ask Anna what anyone must ask anyone who mentions anything about being any part of the medical field, we ask which one. She tells us that she’s in pediatrics, specifically rehabilitation. I tell her that I used to have to go to a pediatric doctor when I was younger and that it mostly involved sitting in a whirlpool, which I thought was awesome. Anna is quick to tell me that her job is much more difficult than that. She tells us that the patients she encounters were in heartbreakingly bad shape and that most of them would stay in heartbreakingly bad shape no matter what she or any other doctor tried. But she doesn’t linger on details, and it becomes clear that there’s something has been on her mind for quite a while, that she's now seizing an opportunity to tell two people who don’t know her, seizing the opportunity to tell a stranger while she’s drunk. She tells us that she doesn’t feel bad for the children she’s seen, that while other doctors and nurses are moaning and wailing about such tragedies, she just goes to work. Chris or I, one of us make the point that what she's describing may be a better trait to have, on the whole, but she disagrees. What she's trying to say, Chris and I aren’t getting. She doesn’t feel anything for them, she says. She thinks that maybe someday she will, but for now, she just doesn’t feel it. She thinks not feeling as empathetic will make her a bad doctor. She tells us she doesn’t know what to do about it.

And somewhere in Chris and I prodding further, Anna tells us that she wishes all of the interviews she’s done while she was in America could be this easy. She says that maybe if she could have done those interviews drunk, maybe it would be less nerve-wracking, more personable, and in the end, more honest. Chris tells her that being drunk during and interview is generally considered inappropriate. Then suddenly Carlos is there, standing right next to us and saying, very loudly, “like masturbating on an airplane.” As if that weren't enough, he then makes a flowery masturbating gesture. I feel the need to relate the stylish, almost refined nature of Carlos’s gesticulation, here. It’s a graceful, almost artsy masturbatory imitation; one that an experienced, passionate dancer or perhaps one of the Four Tops during a slow song might use. While Anna is laughing, and Chris and I are not, Carlos tells us that he’s referring to Elvis Crespo.
For those people who have never heard of him (I’ll call those people 'America') Elvis Crespo is a Merengue singer who was quite popular in Puerto Rico, having scored a hit in 1998 with the song “Suavemente” and recently releasing the critically-acclaimed album Regreso el Jefe in 2007. Crespo has recently fallen out of favor recently, however, due to an alleged incident in March while on a flight from Houston to Miami. Officially, a 52-year-old Texas woman seated next to Crespo states that 15 minutes into the flight, she witnessed the singer masturbating underneath an airline issued blanket (15 minutes into the flight, I think, bears repeating), and that during the incident he exposed himself to her. According to Anna and Carlos, (I can’t find it in any of the articles I looked through) Crespo was approached by a flight attendant who asked him to stop masturbating, to which Crespo allegedly responded that he was almost finished and to give him a moment. According to the articles I've read, the only statement Crespo has given throughout the investigation is “I don’t remember doing that.” FBI and Miami police have investigated, though no arrest has been made. Crespo has now become a controversial figure in Puerto Rico, and his career is suffering.

We’re still discussing Elvis Crespo and masturbation in general when Mary enters the bar. I recognize Mary right away from having seen her once, briefly, in my building. She has a severe face covered with freckles and offset by black hair in small, tight curls. She has a tattoo of pink flowers against a green background on one upper arm, an unfinished seascape on the other, two nautical stars on the inside of each forearm and Sailor Jerry signature sparrows on either shoulder blade.

It’s Mary that later tells me that when I screamed at the dog attack, my scream was like a small, easily frightened girl. Amongst other comparisons.