I live in downtown Denver, so it is really, really convenient to bar crawl every weekend. As I started winding down again, I abandoned the bustle of Market Street in exchange for the dive bar next-door to my apartment, Cafe Netherworld. The name is 100% befitting if you drop the cafe part. I'll never understand that part. Although, the food really is good bar food. The baristas are small, sassy women with lip piercings and buff arms, the intellectuals are all wearing leather and look depressed, and instead of a cappuccino machine, there's a fish bowl that wins you a free shot of their choice when you sink a quarter.
The walls are painted black and strewn with life-size mannequins: skeletons, vampires, and one gigantic sarcophagus in the pool room. It's not a clever pool table, just a coffin hanging on the wall between the Family Guy and Sopranos pinball machines.
Netherworld is a kick. I've had some really fun conversations and also very serious conversations on that patio. People leave you alone, and the few that don't turn out to be insane professors and Scottish cliff-divers. Great bar for talking and shooting free pool on Saturdays. I like a place where I can hear myself think.
But those party animals sure do open their throats when they get outside, and it generates a considerable amount of activity outside my window while I'm trying to sleep. The drunken singing is amusing, but the rest of it is dark, break-ups and blood-curdling screams. I've almost called the cops before; women sound like they're being fucking raped when they argue.
One time my friends and I went to Netherworld, I think after a Rockies game or something, and we waited for our beer with such flushed, confounded faces, we were disarrayed:
The bar was swarming with half-naked roller derby girls. I didn't know there were forty-five players on a roller derby team. I accidentally grabbed so much inner thigh that night, you couldn't move! but I think my three male friends had their hands above their heads the whole time.
All the regulars looked so dejected. They were betrayed to the bone, what little slivers of them I could discern through the sea of women pulling their shirts over their heads. Cafe Netherworld is, for most of us, a chill space to grab a cheap drink; for others, it's a haven to escape the girls going wild and the pretty boys in sweater vests.
As the derby girls kissed and played pool by clenching the cues with their ass cheeks, my friends and I huddled together and sang The Police very passionately. I don't think we could have done that under normal circumstances without the goths ejecting us. Hot girls bring party.
There is one bartender at Cafe Netherworld that I have a hard time looking in the eye. He happens to live a few doors down from me, and I run into him on occasion in the hallway, or outside our building hunched over the street and throwing up profusely.
He is never sober, which is fine with me, I don't care if you get your life together or not: but he stumbles into me and it's time-consuming. He just walks right into me, stumbles back, and stumbles into the wall. Since we're going to the same place, home, I have to time my dash around him, anticipate his drunk maneuvers. I used to do that annoying football shuffle that people like to do when you get tangled up in passing. I'm not scared of him, I just can't trust somebody with those dead, glazed eyes.
He's had an escort lately, usually a woman who looks at me in a way that I interpret to be apologetic. I also heard that one night he was very drunk, and somebody at the bar shouted, "Better get a couple people to carry him home this time!" Then everyone laughed. They're coping really well with his disease.
Cafe Netherworld recently relinquished its ownership. I don't know when the switch is going to happen. And though I'm glad it's turning into a pub and not a Walgreens, I will miss that gothy little hell hole. PBRs are $2.
I wonder if my drunk neighbor will continue to work there. I don't know if he could throw back as much Guinness as he does Coors Light without imploding like a star, and I definitely don't know if he could abide by any sort of dress code. I've never seen him out of the same exact blue flannel shirt, I swear I haven't. Been here two years, folks.
