Night Danking at Oakwood 83

We pile in around ten-thirty. There’s fifteen of us and we fill the bar except for a tiny bend that curves around behind the bottles, almost out of view of the bartender, Amy. We take over immediately, dropping old school on TouchTunes so it’s all Pixies and Bowie and Taj Mahal. Levy drops You Make me Feel Like Dancing and Jive Talking back-to-back eleven times because he saw that one John Mullaney bit. It’s like a palette cleanser and thank God the TouchTunes algorithm is hip to such juvie bullshit or Amy would kill him with a bar spoon.

I’m late so I get shoved around to the far side of the bar, back against the wall with Hogan and Rea. Amy pours me a mezcal with a half-salt rim. Hogan and Rea are on their second Old Fashioneds. It’s all whiskey neats and G&Ts and beer and the conviviality rises and fills the bar with a warm flood of bon homme but the conversation slips away from me and I’m left in a dim shadow of chatter, a kind of white noise that enchants me and draws me into barstool solitude, my safe place, and my attention wanders and I see this bar like I’m in a painting. Like it’s 1943. Like Edward Hopper is laying it all down, stroke by stroke, a flat monochromatic noir panel but instead of Hopper’s bleak loneliness, his take on the solitude of a city, I see the room slapped together by an impressionist, a master of capturing the moment.

My crew suit-and-tied around the bar, leaning into each other’s terrible jokes, or their brows folded together like the hands of a priest, or like Tony, who is looking off into nothing, lost in a Tom Waits song, or Amy, temporarily still, not smoking a cigarette because this is 2024, but it’s like she’s smoking, it’s like she’s in a personal moment amid the maelstrom of maundering madmen, leaned back against the whiskey eyes turned inward to study the architecture of an enchantment. The scene shifts into argent and obsidian, the bottle glass light morphing into a silver cascade, lighting the faces shoved against the oak like nickels on a sidewalk at night.

And maybe this is the other thing, we’re there on a Monday. I’ve never been to Oakwood on a Friday or a Saturday night. Every time I show up it’s empty and weird. The adjoined restaurant dining room is absolutely deserted except for the ghosts of long-dead waitresses named Shirley and Diane and a suspicion of waffles in the air. Theoretically, Oakwood is a Greek Restaurant and to prove it, on cue, the cook lights a saganaki order on fire, a fat column of bright orange flame shooting up to the ceiling which is surely and of course-it-isly flammable as hell but he squeezes a lemon half and the Ouzo flames rattle out. However, you can also get wings and loaded potato skins and essentially what we’re looking at, menu wise, is the kind of cheap pinewood walls dive bar food favored by the usual suspects who will pile in around 2:15am just as my crew has flamed out like the souvlaki to just me and Franky and Ray cause Ray’s industry and Franky is…well, Franky is. The people piling on the tail end of our drunk are local bartenders and cocktail waitresses and barbacks. Just a handful at first, but they keep coming. The bar fills up. Tables fill up. Pretty soon I can’t hear my carefully cultivated playlist for the deafening chatter of people who bust their ass for a living to bring us food.

And I could complain. I could bitch about the dank. Cause dank is there. Way back in the shadows behind the bar where I’m throwing my ancient back out on a shitty barstool, the dank crouches, ready to pounce. And I get it. I understand. They have a staff of two and the damn chef/owner/cleaning crew works thirty-seven hours a day and so does Amy and this is in a neighborhood bejeweled with iconic bars and beerhalls and restaurants. Competition is fierce and there are factions, there are people who don’t appreciate drinking cheap highballs in the wood paneled corpse of a Chicago landmark gone to ruin. There are people who don’t appreciate the dank, and though I am one of those people, I am also someone who respects tradition. I respect history. Like Oakwood 83, I am also old and dilapidated and empty and full of ghosts. I shake hands with the dank. I order more mezcal. I pay my respects to the dead.