The Dead Zone

        Tuesday: 7:45 pm. I begin my bar shift with the ritual: count my bank, turn on the swamp cooler, check the beer and booze stock, string a bar towel into my belt loop, and pour a fat coffee. Next I survey the customers: How many are there? What's their deal? Who is most likely to become a murderous lunatic?
After all, this is The Dead Zone, you have to educate yourself
The Dead Zone usually occurs between 6 and 9pm -- right around the time of the bartender shift switch -- when the last stragglers of the day make their final stand against the setting of the sun.
After six hours of hard boozing in a cave -- six hours of squirming and farting on the same rancid bar stool, six hours of sun deprivation, six long hours of cable news images flashing on the television like an Al-Qaeda music video marathon - some sort of ghastly fiend is created.
8:00 pm. Thankfully, tonight, there are only two Dead Zoners. The first guy, orders a Coors Light. "Is it going to get busy tonight?" he asks as I deliver the beer.
"It will get busier than this," I respond, "though it won't be packed. It's hard to get people out on Tuesdays."
He talks reaaaal slow and his face is blustery red from a head that is saturated with the toxic sludge of a full day of day-bar-drinking. This sludge is the lifeblood of the Dead Zone. It gathers in the brainpan - a murky ocean of whiskey, ale, nicotine, backed-up semen, and the gray matter cells that leapt off his shipwrecked brain and into those eerie murky waters.
The one or two hours that comprise the Dead Zone is a notoriously volatile window of time for the bar industry. Second only to Last Call Zone because, well - that's when madness rules. The Dead Zone, like Last Call, is the ultra-saturation point, the black out. The fact is, some of these people go nuts and sometimes you have to drag them out by their tongues.
8:05 pm. I check on the other customer who orders a Budweiser. "Fuck Westerfield," he suddenly blurts - as though we'd been chewing the van Dam fat all afternoon. "That guy is freaking guilty."
"Looks that way," I say. "But Steven Feldman, hasn't even presented his defense yet."
"Screw him," he blares. "Westerfield doesn't deserve a defense. He deserves having his dick ripped off.
The man's anger is swelling. Obviously, he'd been watching the trial all day and now images of the Westerfield smirk and the Feldman sneer are swimming around his brain -- splashing and stirring in his toxic sludge like two evil brothers horse-playing in the backyard pool.
The guy drinking Coors Light tries to rolls his eyes at the other guy, as if to say, "Man - you're sloshed." But he can't roll his eyes because his own toxic sludge has reached his eyeballs.
"Do you think it'll get busy tonight?" he asks again.
"Maybe" I answer again."
From behind I hear Budweiser guy shouting, "I'd kill Westerfield right now if I could."
"This is payback," I think. "Lord only knows how many bartenders I've tyrannized as I sautéed my own brain in a toxic sludge of booze and beer and lust and weed. It's my turn now. I just have to remember the first rules of Dead Zone: Never let them drag you into their tarpit. Ignore them and they will go away.
But I can't ignore.
"Do you want to hear what the defense has to say?" I ask "or would you just kill him right now?"
"Just kill him," he answers, followed by a rant that begins with him saying how we must kill others to protect ourselves, and ends with him saying something about having the right to shoot a Girl Scout if she accidentally wanders into his house while selling cookies.
Ignore, ignore, ignore. . .
And then, if all that wasn't enough to send me over the edge, the other guy mumbles, for the fourth time -- "Is it going to be busy tonight?"
"Don't you remember asking that already - three times?" I bark.
"But I was just wondering blah if blah busy murmer mumble tonight blah."
"Yeah dude, it's going to be sick busy. Any minute now the bus from Hot Babe U. will arrive, and drinks are only a dollar, and oh yeah, it turns out John Bonham isn't dead, yeah, he was just kidding, so Led Zeppelin is going to play a reunion show here tonight."
9:30 pm. Uh-oh.
There is a particularly volatile window of time during the Dead Zone, when the unstable-dayidrinker-guy stays out too long, and the disco-happy-fun-girl comes out too early.
That's when worlds collide.
If she comes out this early than she is probably a rookie -- she's not prepared to deal with his ravings.
I watch the door, praying a disco-happy-fun-girl doesn't walk in. Not yet anyway. Good God, not yet.
9:50 pm. Suddenly, consecutively, without fanfare, each man gulps the last of his beer, and serpentines out the door. The Gods are looking after me tonight. No fights, no tongue drags, no spitting, no vomiting, no disrobing, no tantrums, no charges filed, no paramedics, no fires, no lawsuits. We were lucky I guess . . . This time.

EJD 7/02