Boom-Boom’s Bar

by Cy Hill

As a tavern, The Lone Wolf was not much beyond cement floors that were easy to wash and heavy wooden fixtures difficult to break. The fare was tap beer and generic wine. It was the legendary history of the place, intertwined with his own youth, that made it special for Bob “Boom-Boom” Norris. Forty-two years of age, he put up all he had to buy it and still required two silent financial partners, nostalgic like him to not lose what had been. The lower bidders intended to tear the place down. Located in Seattle’s University district, the land was prime.

Boom-Boom kept bar every night and cleaned the place himself to trim costs. Fifteen minutes prior to closing on this particular week night, he sat exhausted on a stool behind the long bar, wondering how many of the half-dozen remaining patrons he would have to peel out of booths and dump out onto the sidewalk. That was when three men walked in with pantyhose over their heads. The small one pointed a .38 at him. The medium-sized one unveiled a sawed-off shotgun from beneath his jacket. The big one, the one bigger than Boom-Boom, was armed with only his laugh.

“What can I do for you?” Boom-Boom asked.

“What can he do for us?” the big one hooted. His short snappy movements were loose but extreme. He was on a laundry list of drugs and thrust his meshed face to within an inch of the barkeep’s.

“Put your hands on the bar where we can see them,” his brother with the shotgun directed, “and slide down here.”

“Are you robbing The Lone Wolf?” Gloria, a sometime substitute teacher and travel agent, called from the nearest booth. “Bad karma, man.”

“Are we getting robbed?” Skakey John, just off duty from driving his cab, called from a deeper booth.

The big one’s face was a lascivious creased smile through the pantyhose, antically mirroring Boom-Boom’s progress all the way down to the wooden hinged opening in the bar. He slammed it up and grabbed Boom-Boom by the arm, to jerk him forward. Boom-Boom did not move. He was a cross between a bear with his bulk, and a crab with his broad pincher shoulders and arms. Pulling him did not work, so the big one tried pushing him. Boom-Boom did not move.

What was wrong? The attacker did not understand. Confused, he turned to his brother with the shotgun.

“Out here,” the shotgun gestured.

“I’ll give you what’s in the till,” Boom-Boom offered while the smallest robber locked the front door. “That’s back over there,” he gestured with his head.

“We’re talking. You’re moving. In the back. Now.”

“Yeah we’re talking,” the big one snickered, “and now you’re moving.”

Boom-Boom did not recognize either of the two voices the other side of the pantyhose, but he suspected the third robber, the small one with the .38 who had not spoken, was Lone Wolf patron Pete Busher. He had not been around for a while. Pete loitered in the tavern’s deeper shadows, stuck his glass out when someone generously poured from a group pitcher of beer, and was accused by other patrons of stealing the change off their tables. He told incredible lies that he may or may not have believed himself.

“You don’t now the history of this place,” Gloria said as she arose from her booth with Sad Jack. “Biker Gangs met here in peace. You don’t rob The Wolf. It’s been tried. Twice.”

The big one kicked Sad Jack in the back, sending him sprawling across a table bolted to the floor.

“Jack Kerouac worked on his Mexico City Blues poems on that table.” She carried her and Sad Jack’s beer glasses towards the booths lined against the back wall.

Shakey John was already up and moving out of his booth, but the big one rushed ahead and flung him towards the back. Snores issued from a booth. Its occupant continued to snore, even as he was skipped and rolled across the cement.

“Why are you hurting these people?” Boom-Boom asked the big one.

“What happened in that booth?” the one with shotgun sarcastically asked.

Gloria replied, “Jimi Hendrix,” happy to continue with the tour. “Two hours he played there.”

For Boom-Boom that particular booth recalled learning French shanties from the crew of Jacques Cousteau’s ship. What a party that was, with every actress from the University of Washington Drama Department singing along.

“From Jimi Hendrix to a snoring drunk,” the leader sighed, shaking his shotgun as if it were his head. “What a dump.” With fresh, calm eyes he peered through his pantyhose and had terrible misgivings. This dive had fifty thousand dollars in an upstairs safe?

“The times come and go,” Boom-Boom said, defending his bar. “This place will be great again.” Interesting people were beginning to come back. One of his silent partners was trying to get poetry readings going, and a license for open-mic comedy nights. The Artistic Director of the Contemporary Art Theatre was a patron.

Boom-Boom defended The Lone Wolf because, if he did not, no one would. The Beat Generation was gone. No one was a hippie anymore. While many agreed with him as to the bar’s cultural significance and mystique, most had given up on trying to save it. The location fronting Forty-Fifth Street was valuable real estate. City Hall laughed at him when he petitioned to have it declared a historical monument. Every City of Seattle service, from the Police Department to the Health Department, hated The Lone Wolf. The irony was that Boom-Boom could not get through any of the novels of authors who had made the bar famous. And poetry confused him.

Not much had gone right in Boom-Boom’s life, from the failing of the small bakery business he had inherited to his failed marriage. He was not much of anything, and he knew that. But there had always been The Lone Wolf. Something interesting, something magical always happened at The Wolf, and even if he did not understand it, he had to keep it alive.

“This place gives me the creeps,” the leader said. “You can have it. Time to open—”

“Why,” the big thug tapped Boom-Boom’s forehead with his index finger, “do they call you Boom-Boom?”

An hour later, when she was giving her story to a reporter, Lone Wolf patron Gloria explained the nickname. “He does this thing where he hits his chest with both hands, and he does not even know he does it. You’d think he was Tarzan.”

The leader wished he had not brought his brother along. He was too high. “Enough,” he said to him, but his brother continued to leer, an inch from Boom-Boom’s face. “Move over.” He had to grab his arm to pull him back a step. “You and I,” he explained to Boom-Boom, leveling the shotgun’s barrel at his chest, “are going to go upstairs now and open that safe. And there had better be fifty thousand dollars in there.”

The barkeep shook his head. “What?” Yes, there was an upstairs safe, but there was only a few hundred dollars in it that he had to have to keep the bar open.

“Now!”

“Pete Busher,” Boom-Boom addressed the short silent robber with the .38, “what have you been telling these two?”

The leader knew then that they were in trouble. With Pete Busher recognized and named, it would be a short trip from arresting him to them.

“I’m not Pete,” Pete Busher tried to disguise his voice.

“I want the money!” the large brother cried. “Money!”

The leader agreed. Whatever money there was, they had to have it now, to get out of town. But Boom-Boom could not give them that money. If he did, it meant The Wolf’s death. He was broke and, after this, his partners would not risk any more of their cash. The bar would be torn down, the land sold. He abjectly glanced about himself, lost in time, the crisis of his life, who he was, at the end of it all. For what reason did he live? For what reason had he ever been? This place would die.

He did not question if others saw it, the mist arising from the cracked floor. Spirits of time past accompanied by music twisted and spun in desperation, hope, anger, wanting to survive and finding in Boom-Boom their vessel.

With both hands he struck his chest twice and cried out. He grabbed the big one and threw him at the one with the shotgun. The weapon went off. Half of the big man’s head hit the ceiling. Boom-Boom grabbed the other man and hurled him like a javelin, headfirst into the wall.

“Pete Busher,” his voice was deep and echoed as if from the bottom of a well, “Pete Busher, I’m coming for you.”

The little man with the pantyhose over his head turned and ran, firing a round over his shoulder. It missed. He sprayed another wild round, dashing to the front, hoping to escape out that door, but Boom-Boom beat him to it. The little man swerved and kept on running. He threw another shot over his shoulder. After nicking Boom-Boom’s shirt, it lodged in a wooden stanchion.

The pursuit rerouted to the back of the bar, and then in a grand circle around the circumference of the bar several times with Pete running and shooting and Boom-Boom undeterred in dogged pursuit. The last round fired penetrated the large front plate glass window that looked out on Forty-Fifth Street. It was a clean hole that quickly spiderwebbed. Pete stopped running and fired the empty clicking gun until Boom-Boom picked him up and threw him at the vortex in the ruined window. Glass crashed about Pete as he hit the sidewalk.

“And don’t come back!” Boom-Boom shouted.

The next day a part-time bartender had to be hired to cover the immediate increase in business.

The embedded bullets fired at the barkeep and the brain-splattered ceiling were never repaired or painted over. They were simply another chapter in the history and mystique of The Lone Wolf Tavern.