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I went to Purgatory a few weeks ago. I mean the actual Purgatory, not some Goth club. True, it was a bar, but there was a portal activating the time/space continuum in the doorway, and I landed in honest to God Purgatory. Sure it looked like a regular bar, but upon further inspection, revealed itself as a desolate outpost where defeated, hollow, neutered souls find themselves after any semblance of real life has left them. I was there by accident. |
According to the regulars, a tight knit group of forty(a group, in fact, that the only guy without a union card was me), this was a great place to spend eternity. Dollar wells, dollar pool, dollar dates, and enough free Corn Nuts to replenish the Great Salt Lake seven times over and still have enough left over handle the happy hour crowd at every bar in Branson. A modern day incarnation of the Village People represented. There was the tweeker, the white gangster, the cheating spouse, the chubby slut, the black guy, and the gay construction worker, all glassy-eyed and complacent, but stoked that the D.J. was coming on at midnight, cause it'd been 22 hours since they last did the Electric Slide.
Purgatory comes equipped with a tractor beam, force field, and has super glue on it's floor. Various shades of black and institutional gray make up the color scheme; non-reflective mirrors advertise Falstaff Beer and Lucky Lager, there's even a fucking Black Label sign. Initials and suggestive comments have been scrawled into every available surface, including parts of the floor and walls. The felt on the pool tables , once a noble green, has turned a sickly black color in some places, faded and peeling like an infected scab in others. Haggard and haughty, the cocktail waitress knows she'll never leave, so why the fuck should she be in any hurry to take your order? I'm gonna wait at least 20 minutes before I get on a table, what's my god damn rush? After watching the guy with the soiled Guns n' Roses t-shirt and prison tats break a cue over the gay construction worker, I choked down the rest of what must have been an Early Times and Coke, slipped out of my shoes, and hopped on the scratched up perimeter bar. I spied a window at the opposite end of the portal door, and it looked to be both unguarded and noticeably free from aural spirals and dimensional gateways. I grabbed the nearest barstool, wobbly of leg and permanently indented by some yokel's 335 (and counting) pound ass and flung it through the window. The glass shattered into nearly as many pieces as the hope the patrons here used to have. Nobody tried to stop me. It's Purgatory, there pretty much O.K. with everything.
Sometimes I drive by Purgatory to remind myself that I'll never go back. On Karaoke Night you can smell the flop-sweat through sealed windows. At midnight you can hear the lost souls shuffle into formation for the Electric Slide in bovine passivity. There's an underground tunnel connecting the place to a bowling alley-the only artificial light these poor bastards ever see. It's almost enough to turn me into a Scientologist. But I don't make enough money and I'm not completely fucking retarded, so I guess I'm safe.
- Steve -
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