a brief goodbye

It's no news to say that bars have their own identity. What makes a bar great, however, has always been challenging to describe. There's no way for me to explain to someone who hangs out in Old City why Doobie's is the best bar in Philadelphia, if not one of the best in country. Sure, it's the bartenders, the patrons, etc. But there's always something else.  There's an aura. There's something about the place that kept me coming back, even when it went through strange stages where nobody in the joint was friendly.

That's part of it, too, that can't be explained. Sure, when you know everyone there and everyone buys you a drink, it's easy to keep hanging out someplace. But what keeps you going when everything gets Ugly. When suddenly you don't know if the person next to you is going to try to hit on you or stab you for your change? Personally, I think it goes beyond some twisted concept of territory, but I could be wrong. To me, there's some perverse sense that, although I might die, at least I died where I belonged.

The Cloud Room was that bar for me when I was in Seattle. Located at the top of the dilapidated Camlin Hotel, it was the worst sort of piano bar, and to me, that made it the best. Every night, that greasy bastard would play the same damned songs and someone would make him play "Piano Man," and I'd want to shoot him, but I loved him for it all at the same time. I went to the Cloud Room for the first time pretty early in my travels around town because I wanted to check out the view. Frankly, it barely had one. The view of the Sound had been blocked off years earlier by skyscrapers, and the view opposite, where the balcony was, merely offered the slums of Capitol Hill and the drunken Indians outside of the Paramount Theater as entertainment. Nonetheless, I felt right at home.

For a while, I went there almost nightly, either before or after swinging by the Cha Cha Lounge (that's a bar for a later story, one I was drawn to purely for the constant risk of being brutally assaulted by psychotically drunken punks driven insane by the relentless blaring of the Murder City Devils and Judas Priest - but then again, maybe I said it all already...)

Like any good bar, the Cloud Room turned against me plenty of times. The drunken secretary who kept grabbing at my crotch until her boyfriend tried to take me outside to settle things (we eventually decided it wasn't worth the elevator trip), the countless renditions of "Piano Man" and "Sweet Caroline," the time I showed up fifteen minutes after Neil Young had played an impromptu set, the time some drunk and I got in a tussle after he drank my Manhattan - but not once did I ever consider not going back. The good times certainly outnumbered the bad, and after all, it was my first regular hang. The first place in that misery-drenched city that said to me, "come back here, it's worth it."

And it was. It didn't hurt that I had a terrible crush on one of the bartenders. She was (and I'm sure still is) a goddess, and she made a mean Manhattan. I still fondly remember the night when I set my personal record for manhattans consumed in one evening at 13, and I swear she only charged me for two of them. Although that may not be any good way to impress a girl, I didn't care, personally. We talked more that night than any other, and that somehow, combined with my mass consumption, made that night an event.

There was the night spent talking to the fill-in musician for hours about guitars, or when I sat with the piano player and we finally talked about the music he really wished he were playing. Or the night Tim and I were foolish enough to do shots of Clamato.

My first night of my return to Seattle, of course it had to be the first stop.

I took everyone who visited me there, including my mother. Maybe they liked it, maybe they didn't. There was and never will be any way for me to explain what I loved about it. If they didn't get it, they never would, and that's okay. That's just the way bars are, and the Cloud Room was like that and then some.

The Cloud Room served up its last drink this week, and the piano player played his last rendition of "Piano Man." The bar will be turned into penthouse apartments, where the cloying riche of Seattle can look down upon the slums of Capitol Hill and the Drunken Indians outside of the Paramount Theater.

There's one less safe haven in the world now, one that I've imagined visiting on countless nights since I left.

But no sadness here, just a raised glass for an old friend who passed into the night, but left me plenty of great memories. And Stacey, if you read this, you really did make great manhattans, and I really did have a huge crush on you.

And the piano player?  To be honest, he did a mean version of "Piano Man."

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