It’s the place Lisa one-hand flat-punch knocked out that girl who tormented her in elementary school (happened so fast everyone just thought the girl fell down drunk). It’s where those douchebags playing fantasy football used to meet and interrupt us playing pool. That one guy brought his three-year-old son one night; when the bartender told him to leave, since you can’t have children in a bar, he called her a cunt. So me and Corey and his buddy told the seven of them we were going to kill them, and Corey’s buddy went and locked the door. The bartender didn’t call the cops. The three of us proceeded to call them every scathing insult a belligerently-inclined man can discern while they just sat there, all seven of them college boys, one an ex-student of mine who I told straight up to his face: You know who I am, you must then know what is going to happen here. But they refused to stand up. The most middle class white dude I have ever seen in my life said, It’s not worth getting arrested, to which Corey’s buddy replied, You can’t get arrested when you’re dead. Which cracked up me and Corey so bad we went back to playing pool, since the guy who started it all had slunk out the side door with his kid when we weren’t looking. No one bothered anyone after that, though every now and then we wondered what kind of grown ass men play a game like fantasy football when it looked like none of them had ever thrown a football. Corey beat me in pool three times, though, to this day, I think he cheated by moving his hooked cueball when I was holding my face in my hands. And his buddy whose name I think was Jeff, or maybe John, who worked there in the tiny kitchen? He cooked us up some wings, with that extra rust-colored sauce from his secret recipe. Then the college boys took their papers and pencils and fake stats and left, so it was just the three of us, still drinking long after close. The bartender and her girlfriend and her friends who worked till midnight at the casino were drinking White Russians and comparing each other’s nails. I had lost my face somewhere along the night. And you whose lives have never felt this desperate need to never rest. None of the night was left, except the ice melting slowly in the bottom of my glass. Just a tiny dash of water with the aftertaste of whiskey. Not enough to need a savior or a witness. Not nearly enough to drown in.