An arctic blast, a shot and a beer - the way the Lord intended it OR Way past midnight at the Oasis

So it’s 10:30 on a Sunday morning, and I am sitting here in my red union suit, like a beardless, slacker Santa, writing this down before my long winter’s nap.

I am just home about a half hour and have about 3 hours of sleep in me. I crashed on some friends’ couch, with the Weather Channel on as a night light. I find weather reports reassuring while resting in unfamiliar places during (or in this case after) arctic blasts.

A guy I talked to last night in a very smoky bar said that he believes everything happens for a divine reason. Hitler? the Taliban? Bush? American Idol? Come on!

But, last night at least, I’m willing to give him benefit of the doubt Why? Because it was just one of those days made for a writer.

First, in late afternoon, there was the sunset. A guy who actually reads the paper I work for sent an e-mail about how two times a year, from his huge ass home in the boonies at least 40 miles from downtown Chicago, the Sears Tower and other buildings blaze in the distant horizon like the brass bottom of a new frying pan.

So I call him about this on Saturday, and he invites me over (Not before apparently inadvertently outing his brother, who is a TV news producer in Los Angeles. This all just by asking how his brother is doing: he’s considering retiring but he’s helping support the family of some guy he used to date. I kid you not.)

The poor guy’s wife has Alzheimer’s, which is another story. Anyway, I look out his back window through his binoculars and you can indeed see the buildings.
Once the sunset comes, just like he said, all of a sudden there are these gleaming objects, flacks on the horizon, shining like souvenir shop trinkets.

It is beautiful.

Blissed out by mother nature (or maybe one of those Listerine breath strips), I make my way to the city.

Once through the place in hell known as the Illinois Tollway System and in on the North Side, things start innocuous enough. My buddy and his girlfriend and I head out for dinner at a mostly empty Thai and sushi, BYOB place, that for some reason has a motorcycle parked inside.

Oh, there were some Mexican guys sitting in their car on the coldest night of the year, in a garage off an alley, listening to norteno music, there on our way to and from the place. And someone left a frozen cake on a back porch. (Wasn’t that a song?)

Anyway, my buddy’s girlfriend tuckers out and stays behind while we go to meet my buddy’s brother, who is a professor of social work in town from Detroit for a conference.

Hailing a cab on the “don’t French kiss a light pole” cold night, a black man carrying a radio and preaching about the end of days to anyone who will listen bustles by the corner of Foster and Kedzie. He busts into a near rhyme of Jesus and penis. something to the effect he’d rather get down with Jesus than Janet Jackson.

Well, whatever your persuasion, I gotta go with Jackson on this one. Plus I’m thinking she’d pay me off big time to keep out of the press that her career has sunk so low that she’s doing some bald, husky guy from the suburbs.

Jesus, he’d be a nag, and would probably want to cuddle and save my soul. Too much work.

So we head to the promised land - I mean bar - a place near Loyola called the Oasis, which I vaguely remember for some reason. Maybe its the package goods store in the front. Or that its like any other no-heirs bar near a big city college.

All is regular dive bar drinking until this chubby bald guy sits down at the corner of the bar. I notice that he had the bartender drop a tall glass of ice water into his pitcher of beer to keep it cold and point this out to my friends.


Eventually, maybe because of all the beer he drank, while my pals are video bowling, he comes up and introduces himself to me. He’s one of those people who stands really close, like he knows you. Or wants to dance with you.

And he loves to talk.

During the course of the next hour or so I learn the following: he worked for a time on a barge in St. Louis; worked as a TV cameraman in Arkansas, a job at which he had a life-changing experience; decided to study theology, first at St. Louis University, now at Loyola, pretty much dedicating his life to being a perpetual student; is going for a masters and his research involves translations, unpublished books of the Bible, and a thesis on the Samaritans role in the text; claims to have a redheaded girlfriend who might have been with someone else last night while he was drinking; is Romanian and Eastern Orthodox, but is angry at the church, especially for how they treated a brilliant but apparently fragile friend; fears the end of days is near; and loves Hank Williams songs to the point of knowing all the lyrics.

No tears in his beers that I notice, but maybe long gone lonesome blue.

I don’t know this much about Playboy centerfolds, my representatives in government, or most of the people I’ve worked with for the last eight years. Of course it very well could all be bullshit.

I get the guy’s e-mail address before he leaves, because if it is bunk, my what a fantasy world he’s created. If it’s true, either way, he’s my ticket to Oprah.

Once he leaves, a buddy of his starts up a discussion about religion, which is not a good beer goggles topic for most. However, since I am part Golden Retriever and part Bill Clinton when I drink I try to build a bridge between Mr. Debate Club and my increasingly drunk and defensive buddy.

Scrawny built, scrawny hair, scrawny beard, dressed in black, the master debater is and always will be a grad student at heart, even if he now works fixing computers and not in the biology lab of his dreams.

Grad man can’t help himself from goading the drunkest of my two buds into more God talk. (The other bud had the good sense to go play pool). He goes so far to call my friend an idiot and tells him to Google “STFU” when he gets home.

Well, that’s not very nice, even for an admitted atheist bordering on nihilist (who later claims to be a humanist). And who likes human label guns, anyway?

So, a little late, to mess with him I start asking him about his big lug friend who left earlier. They did hug, so I thought they might have been more than just drinking buddies.

I tell him I thought his friend was cute and would go out with him if he were gay. He said he couldn’t remember his buddy ever talking about a girlfriend or women and, of course, only knows the other guy from the bar. Of course.

Grad man, of course. is progressively straight, but asks why men don’t hit on him and told me about a dream he had about a less-than-lipstick lesbian.

Hey, I had about four pints of Guinness in me. Plus some beer before dinner, plus a couple glasses of wine after, and maybe a shot, and...OK, stop judging me. I’m a big boy and can handle my liquor.

Thus, my walk on the wild side of the secular humanist seemed funny at the time. My friends thought so when I told them. And it beat talking about religion.

Well, I go take a pee, and Grad Man disappears into the frigid night, assured of his superiority, if not his sexuality (since I am so damn hot myself) I am a sure.

By 4:30 the placed closed. We cabbed back to my friend’s house in a taxi driven by a guy from Nigeria who has family in Ireland, who blared a King Sunny Ade afro-beat tape (and seemed impressed I knew the music).

Who needs church, when you can frolic with faith on the town?