Dive Bar Odyssey

It was time to get going, but I wasn't sure where to start. We would need a representative sampling, but how many? There were hundreds of them and two of us. How would we ever distill them?

And how would we rate them?

By region?

By sight?

By smell?

The ratio of prostrates to supines? Of pickled patrons to pickled pig's feet?

Could we do it from memory? Mmm, not likely. Remember what Olin Miller said: Of all the liars, memory is the smoothest and most convincing.

I believe him. If Olin Miller says you can't think straight, try another tack.

After drinks and debate at The Saloon, the nicely appointed but strangely neglected tavern at Neonopolis, we decided we would. For this consuming quest to catalog the 10 best dive bars in Las Vegas, we would begin at the beginning.

A.

For Atomic.

That meant we'd have to walk east on Fremont Street from Las Vegas Boulevard.

"Are you insane? We'd be flouting conventional wisdom!"

"What would that be?"

"Don't walk east on Fremont Street from Las Vegas Boulevard."

Las Vegas Boulevard is the dividing line between the perceived good and bad Fremont Street. It's easy to see why. On one side you have Glitter Gulch and the world's largest sun screen. On the other, the city laid bare. Street walkers with STDs. Panhandlers with purpose. Egg salad on white at the Western.

We'd have to chance it for a new perspective on Atomic Liquor. The old one was typically from a fast-moving car. This time we'd sneak up and sniff its flanks. You can only do that on foot.

It is Thursday, November 12, 2003, approximately 6:30 p.m. Day 1 of a monthlong bar exam that will test our stamina and courage and challenge the .08.

It's raining as we leave The Saloon and head down Fremont Street. We quicken our pace and reach Las Vegas Boulevard in a few steps. We stop at a red light; we look out into the abyss.

"Are you afraid?" I ask.

"No, I'm not afraid."

I'm cautious. We've already spotted three Wan Denizens (and maybe a Juan Denison) loitering in front of the 7-Eleven across Las Vegas Boulevard. I'm sure they've seen us; they see everything.

The light turns green but they stay put. Why come to us when we'll come to them? We cross the street and look straight ahead, avoiding eye contact and any behavior that betrays weakness, like compassion.

It's only a matter of seconds before the obligatory request for change. We approach and pass them at a leisurely pace. And hear … nothing? Strange. Where's the plea for a couple of bucks to put in the car that ran out of gas two blocks from here? The appeal for nickel bus fare?

Maybe the sight of me talking into a tape recorder has produced a chilling effect. I'm not convinced. People talk to themselves all the time around here, what gives? We keep moving and blathering into the machine for playback at a later date.

"Well, here we are in the heart of the urban jungle and …"

"Hey, can you spare a little change? Please?"

From out of nowhere, another Wan Denizen! I ask Steve to hold the tape recorder while I dig into my pocket. I pull out a five. I'm gin euphoric and hand it over, which isn't easy when you're patting yourself on the back.

"That's very kind," he says.

"Thank you."

"Thank you very much."

He goes his way and we go ours, past a resort (the El Cortez) and a last resort (the Downtowner Motel) on the left; past a $99-a-week rooming house and a dead Mexican restaurant spewing mariachi on the right. Ahead is the Western Hotel. Beyond that, Atomic.

"It smells like wet cat fur," Steve says as we pass Jackie Gaughan's Ambassador East, where rooms rent for $18 a night. Impelled by the reference to cat fur, I remark on the dearth of hookers.

"It's a little sloppy out tonight for hookers."

We cross Eighth Street and are soon in the gravitational field of the Western, the last casino for two miles going east on Fremont. I feel it pulling me into its gaping orifice, whispering promises of pleasure and the best egg salad sandwich in town (a claim corroborated by my stepmother). I'm about to give in when Steve speaks the magic words.

"I see our destination."

The Western loses its strange hold; the egg salad will wait. (Someplace cold, I hope.)

The freestanding Atomic Liquor sign beckons us from a block away. It has a white sunburst crown, tiered red and ice-blue neon lettering and yellow blinking lights set in a directional arrow pointing inside. The colors are sharp in the crisp evening air.

The bar is up on the right, 917 Fremont. We cross Ninth Street and stop to survey the area. There is little transient activity. The side and rear parking lots are empty. We skirt along the north side of the white block building and make a left around back.

"Let's see if anyone's in this trash can," I say.

We lift the lid on the green receptacle.

"That would be negative."

Looking at the Atomic, I'm taken by its appearance. By its tidy brickwork, its moody glow behind smoky picture windows, its neon beer signs and alcohol ephemera in the window.

It's hard to believe that mere months before, it was infested with violent, drug-dealing vermin from the underbelly of lower Fremont Street. It got so bad that the bar, which has been operating at the same location for 50 years (59 if you count its origins as a café), began closing at 10 p.m. and reopening at 6 a.m.

Between the hours and a stepped-up police presence instigated by Metro and Joe Sobchik, the bar's 84-year-old owner, it appears the balace of power has swung back to the drinkers.

Now only double glass doors stand between us and a frozen-in-time bar with the oldest non-casino liquor license in Las Vegas. Oh, and a door buzzer. Many elements define a dive bar, but none better than a door buzzer.

I press the button.

The bartender presses another button, activating the mechanism. The lock retracts with a buzz.

We enter.

We drink two beers and leave. The highest compliment you can pay a dive bar is to come back. Walking up Fremont Street toward our respective parking garages, we agree that we will.

We've luxuriated in Atomic's retro coolness, been charmed by its naugahyde appointments and chalkboard proclamations ("Now selling fine wines and champagnes for your enjoyment").

More importantly, we've made communion with Rico, the swing bartender who buzzed us in, and struck up a conversation.

"You can tell if somebody's drunk," he says, explaining why he let us in, "and once you let them in and they're plastered, and they come up to the bar and you refuse service, then you've got a battle to get them out the door. I usually give people the benefit of the doubt."

The dozen or so patrons along the bar are behaving. They're drinking their drinks, feeding machines their money and chatting quietly. Then, something odd. We look up and they're gone. All of them, leaving only the two of us and Rico in the bar. A short time later, some of the ones who departed have come back.

Paying Atomic the highest compliment.

Question to self: How much alcohol did I consume in the course of this survey?

Answer: 25 beers, 11 martinis and two 7-7s.

How many times did I throw up?

Once. The morning after a two-martini, four-beer bender at Dino's and Pogo's respectively.

How many bars did I visit?

Twenty.

What did I learn?

Tipping is not a city in China. Beer has been helping ugly people have sex since 1862. A bartender is just like a pharmacist but with better tasting inventory.

You won't find this kind of information in a newspaper. You've got to go diving and read the walls. Until I went to Frankie's and saw the sign behind the bar, I always thought Tipping was a city in China.

How did we decide which bars to put on the list and which ones to leave off? With difficulty. First, we had to set aside a natural inclination to include our favorite bars without reexamining the reason for the attachment. It would have been easy to forego the research that could shatter long-held beliefs. But we are dive-bar scientists. We welcomed the opportunity to prove ourselves wrong.

So off we went, clutching our alphabetical method. The idea was to assign a letter to a bar with a corresponding initial and visit all 26 in order. For instance: A for Atomic, B for the Bond-Aire Club, C for Champagne's Café. We scrapped the plan after considering the driving logistics.

Unless we wanted to limit our survey to one bar a night (we didn't) or play cat and mouse with the cops (we didn't), it made more sense to tackle the project geographically: to make quick strikes in a contained area instead of great leaps across town.

We also uncovered a surplus of archetypal D bars (Davy's Locker, Decatur Liquor, the Dew Drop Inn, Dino's and the Double Down), any four of which could have made our Top 10 lists, and in fact did. Yes, I said lists. There are actually two, mine and Steve's. They reflect similar tastes refined over years of accumulated experience and subtle differences in sensibility. Steve's No. 1 choice suggests a fondness for the deep reds and ornate wallpaper that lend it the look and feel of, as he puts it, "a whorehouse."

Here then are the Top 10 lists, his and mine.

His:

• Champagne's Café

• Double Down

• Decatur Liquor

• Huntridge Liquor

• Rice Paddy

• Bond-Aire Club

• Trap House (closed Dec. 30, 2003)

• Atomic Liquor

• 4-Mile Bar

• Davy's Locker

Mine:

• Huntridge Liquor

• Decatur Liquor

• Pogo's

• Dino's

• Atomic Liquor

• Double Down

• Rice Paddy

• Bond-Aire Club

• Gabe's Bar

• Hank's Poo Bear Lounge

Later, at Decatur Liquor on free-hot-dog Friday (more than 28 tons served!), we concluded that two Top 10 lists was a cop-out. We would make just one, giving extra weight to the six bars common to both lists while allowing special dispensation for personal favorites. Champagne's Café was the obvious caveat. We couldn't arbitrarily move it to seventh place. It was first on one list for a reason; that had to count for something.

Here then is our revised list of Top 10 Las Vegas dive bars, in order:

• Huntridge Liquor

• Decatur Liquor

• Champagne's Café

• Double Down

• Pogo's

• Dino's

• Rice Paddy

• Atomic Liquor

• Bond-Air Club

• Gabe's Bar

Who are we? Just two guys who like their martinis straight up and our bars on the rocks.

Before we go any further, a word about the term "dive bar." The owners almost all use "neighborhood tavern" or "neighborhood bar" to describe their establishments. Calling their bars a dive is an insult to some and has no meaning to others. It is used here as a term of endearment.

"Some people pride themselves on having dive bars," says Kristin Bartolo, the 32-year-old owner of Dino's, a third-generation family-owned bar on Las Vegas Boulevard, near Oakey.

She isn't among them. A neon sign above the entrance proclaims Dino's "the last neighborhood bar in Las Vegas."

"It's always clean," Bartolo says, "and we don't let anybody loiter or slobber or sleep or puke."

"I don't even know what a dive bar is," says Buzz Holst, the 70-year-old proprietor of Huntridge Liquor and Decatur Liquor, in the Holst family since 1954 and 1964 respectively. "They're just a neighborhood bar, just a friendly little place. They're like home to a lot of people."

People with colorful names like Coca-Cola Bill at Gabe's Bar in North Las Vegas, Whiskey Linda and the Drunky Twins at Dino's, and Jimmy Hoo at Huntridge Liquor, where no one ever asks, Jimmy Who?

He's been at the end of the bar for as long as anyone can remember—even Jimmy himself. His last name is Hoover, but he's been coming up short here for years.

Jimmy's way up there, bald, bent and hollow-cheeked. He doesn't want to talk to me but points to someone who will—Joanie "You Can't Record My Last Name," a 34-year Huntridge regular who comes in every day but Sunday.

"Sunday, I go to church."

Today, Friday, December 12, she's here for a quick wine spritzer—"very little ice," she laughs—before heading to an afternoon appointment. Joanie, 71, is both a cosmetician and a licensed practical nurse. She's on her way to fluff the pillows and comb the hair of a bed-ridden octogenarian.

Joanie's resplendent in a red holiday sweater with snowbears, snowflakes and Christmas trees. She's wearing snowflake earrings.

She comes to Huntridge because of the camaraderie and cheap drinks.

"I will not go into bars that rip me off for $3.75 for this thing"—she holds up her wine spritzer, lisping through new dentures—"when I can get one here for a dollar and a quarter."

Huntridge Liquor has operated at its current location, on the corner of Charleston and Maryland Parkway, since 1963. The white tile floor has gouges in it and cigarette butts on it, and the bar is lined end to end with old guys and medium-old guys in baseball caps, flannel shirts (and polyester ones that look like flannel), blue jeans, white socks and tennis shoes.

"I've got people who have come in the bars since they opened, almost," says Holst. "The biggest problem we've got right now is a lot of our older customers have died."

Occasionally a younger older guy, such as 43-year-old Scott X, a beret-wearing, goatee-growing former musician from the neighborhood, will belly up to the bar.

"Why do I think it's the number one dive? Because it's been here so long. The people that come here all know each other. It's the best neighborhood pub in town. That's all there is to it." The fact that he can drink and stumble home is a bonus.

Huntridge Liquor and Decatur Liquor, in the shopping plaza next to Arizona Charlie's on Decatur and Alta, are smoky twin taverns connected to a drugstore and restaurant Holst also owns. It's the drugstores that may be the death of the bars.

"The drugstore business is horrible," says Holst, a jack Mormon from Utah whose family-run pharmacy has survived the Walgreen's expansion but been hurt by third-party prescription costs.

His Decatur Liquor lease expires on March 15, and if he can't negotiate a new lease that would allow him to operate the bar without the drugstore, he'll retire. That would leave the fate of Decatur Liquor up in the air.

He says there's probably a 50 percent chance it will remain open.

"I think that there's a gentleman interested in it," says Holst, whose lease at Huntridge Liquor runs out on February 15, 2005.

"(It's) almost breakin' me tryin' to stay open till the end of the lease, to tell you the truth."

No more free hot dog Friday? No more dollar drafts? No more oxygen tanks trailing old guys?

No more Huntridge and Decatur Liquor?

Say it ain't so.

Tuesday, December 9, 2003. 6:49 p.m.

We're leaving the Trap House with heavy hearts and heading to the Rice Paddy. We've just found out that the bar on Clarice Avenue, west of Jones and north of the 95, is closing December 30 after 38 years, a casualty of freeway expansion.

"Classic dive bar in every sense of the word," Steve says. "Too bad it's going under. Definitely a place I'd go back to."

There are older bars in Southern Nevada, but only the Trap House can claim it was the first to serve Miller Lite on tap. A plaque with a Miller Lite beer tap commemmorates the historic 1974 event.

I ask the bartender, Renee Rhee, if the Trap House still has a lot of original patrons. She points to the section of bar nearest the front door.

"We call that Geritol Row," she says. "All the old-timers sit there during the day."

When they learned the bar was closing, they asked Rhee what she was going to do.

"I said, 'I guess look for another job.' Then I asked them, 'More importantly, what are you going to do?'"

They didn't know.

Steve's comment that the Trap House is a classic dive bar got me to thinking. If you suspect you're in a dive bar but aren't sure, what are some clues? First, look at the walls. Are they wood paneled? Then look up. Does the ceiling resemble cottage cheese? Now look down. Is the floor linoleum tile? Look around. Are photo collages of patrons past and present hanging on the wall? Look behind the bar. Are tubs of pickled snacks (sausage, hard-boiled eggs or pig's feet) sitting on the counter?

Does it serve just two kinds of draft, Bud and Bud Light? Does it have a door buzzer? Do you see Christmas lights, party streamers, naugahyde booths, bar-sponsored team trophies, small television sets on either side of the bar, one or two pool tables, package liquor or a large beer cooler? Is the bar exuding a pleasant maple hue, neither too dark nor bright? Is it multicultural? Is it older than you are?

If you still aren't sure, feel your skin. Are you warm and tingly? Search yourself. Are you serene and happy? Sniff your clothes in a few days. Do you still smell smoke? Are there any questionable characters that send a tendril of apprehension up your spine and keep you on your toes?

Are there free hot dogs in lieu of a kitchen? Do bar regulars bring food from home and set it out for everyone to eat during Monday Night Football?

If you can answer yes to a majority of these questions, you're in a dive bar.

Of course, not every indicator is elemental to every bar. Most will have a minimum of three, the better ones a good half dozen.

Like the Rice Paddy, hiding in plain sight on West Charleston. Ever since the razing of the Red Rock Theatres, which the bar with the faux lamplight abutted and blended into seemlessly, even longtime patrons drive by without seeing it.

"So, you're a regular here?" I ask burly and bearded Charlie Brown, a retired carpenter in stars-and-stripes suspenders.

He is, he says, and has been for more than 20 years. I ask what keeps him coming back.

"Beautiful bartenders, for one thing. The owner, Mr. Dave Rice, is a perfect bar owner. He caters to his customers. He loves his customers. The man doesn't ever come in the door that he doesn't buy the whole house a drink."

Brown will typically come in for coffee in the morning, reminisce with friends, read the paper, watch the news, leave around noon to get lunch and run some errands, then return at 2 or 3 p.m.

He has been in three times today.

"I left and took one little girl home that was a little bit inebriated, helped my girlfriend take her home, and I just arrived back here again," he says, sipping a bourbon and Coke. "I'll probably be here another hour or so, and I'll go home."

He got here this morning around 9.

The 31-year-old Rice Paddy's future, like Decatur Liquor's, is tenuous. Rice's lease on the property expires in three years, and when it's up Brown suspects the bar will meet the fate of the theater. It's valuable property, he says.

"I don't want it to," he says. "I want it to stay here. This is a landmark."

Rhonda approaches me. She's suspicious, and wants to know what I'm doing. I tell her but sense she doesn't believe me. I think it's the tape recorder. She has never seen me in here before and thinks I'm a cop. That's what I'm guessing. She returns to her spot next to Charlie Brown around the corner of the bar.

Steve and I are chatting up the bartender. Seeing this, Rhonda loosens up. She's soon talking about dive bars herself, asking where we've been, lending opinions about this one and that one, sharing that her mother was the first woman to pour a mixed drink in a Las Vegas bar.

I mention Gabe's Bar because I know what she'll say. They all say it: rough place, tough characters, lots of arrests. But Rhonda goes one better. She tells me people have been murdered there, including Gabe.

That evening, I commence an Internet search and see that a double murder occurred there in 1987—a bartender and patron stabbed to death for $330. The bartender wasn't Gabe, and there is nothing on the net to indicate he was murdered. That doesn't' mean he wasn't. It just means I'll have to find out.

Sunday, November 16, 2003. 6:30 p.m.

We're driving to our deaths. It's been a good life, but it's over. We're going to Gabe's and we're going to die.

"I don't recall ever being in this place," Steve says as we head north on Las Vegas Boulevard, toward the heart of the homeless corridor. "This might be a new experience for me."

"And it might be your last."

We pass the cemetery with upright tombstones (foreshadowing?), cross Owens and make a right into Gabe's parking lot. It's darker than Dahmer's appetite and emptier than loveless fondling (if that's possible).

This doesn't mean there isn't anyone inside. If we learned one thing from the lesson of Atomic, it's that a bar in a poor neighborhood gives people a reason to take a walk.

But the dark is disconcerting. It's too dark.

"You think it's closed?" I ask.

"Let me check real fast."

Steve opens the passenger door and disappears around the corner. He'll be back in a matter of seconds; I lock the doors anyway.

He reappears and motions for me. This is it. Time to die.

I get out of the car and hang a left. The neon sign above the entrance at 1622 Las Vegas Boulevard North says GABE'S BAR and COCKTAILS. Only COCKTAILS is illuminated. This place knows it's not what's in a name but what's inside that counts.

The windows on either side of the door have bars, but strangely the door has no buzzer. We walk in. I half expect the music to stop and all activity to cease. The patrons will surely turn around and stare; they'll know instinctually we're not Mexican. Or homeless. Or from around here.

The patrons couldn't give a shit. They're jabbing buttons on bartop machines; watching Cowboys-Patriots on TV; calling corner pocket. Who are we to them? They don't even know we're here, that's who.

As Olin Miller said, you probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.

Yet a nagging, equal parts anxiety and exhilaration, persists. It reminds me of underage days when my friends and I would try to get served in a bar. We couldn't even sit down without bumping into each other, let alone order a drink with confidence.

It's now 21 years later and I'm 20 again, trying to locate a spot at the bar without looking conspicuous. I'm failing. Steve leaves me by the door and makes a beeline for the bar. I don't know whether to sit down or follow to help him with the beer. I do both, in that order. Why am I acting like this?

I grab my beer from him and we walk back toward the door, hanging a left at the bar and taking the last two seats next to the wall. From this vantage point we can survey the entire bar; our backs are to no one.

A homeless man enters, carrying two garbage bags of everything he owns in this world. He takes a seat nearby and orders a beer. He glances sidelong at us.

I know what he's thinking: They're not from around here.

Saturday, November 15, 2003. 11:20 p.m.

I'm with Kristin Bartolo at Dino's, inside the office once occupied by Chuck Bartolo, her father, and Rinaldo "Dino" Bartolo, her grandfather. Dino's has been the family business since 1963. Chuck tended bar here, then took over when Dino retired. Kristin tended bar here, then took over when Chuck died. There's some overlap in the chronology of who did what when, but that's essentially the story.

The bar means everything to her and she treats it as a family heirloom.

"I swear that it's not going to fail under me," says Bartolo, a pack of smokes sticking out of the breast pocket of her denim jacket.

To that end, she keeps things as they were, even maintaining Dino's traditional "99" card game begun by her grandfather. The only difference is now it's down from twice a week to every Friday—and women are allowed to play.

The object of the game is to count up to 99 without exceeding the limit. A king is an automatic 99, but a 10 subtracts 10, and a four reverses play. The last one standing wins.

About seven people show up each week.

"It's pretty exclusive. We don't ask too many people to play with us. You can't just walk in and say I wanna get in the game, because it's what we look forward to every week."

Lee Martin, at 15 years the game's longest continuing participant, is a holdover from the old days when the game was exclusively male.

"After Dean passed, Chuck took it over and he started letting the ladies play," says Martin, who owns the vacuum store next to Dino's. "Chuck was a little more progressive and open-minded. Then the older guys got to where they couldn't come around anymore, and the crowd changed. Now as many women as guys play."

When Bartolo calls Dino's a neighborhood bar, she means exactly that. Her daytime patrons, unlike her evening customers who typically drive to the bar, usually walk here.

"I could come in any time during the day and know every single person sitting at the bar," she says. "I know their families, I know where they live, I know where they work, I know how much money they make, I cash their check. What's kept us going is the people we have every day."

Like John Lyon, who lives and works at the Tod Motor Hotel half a block north.

"He hasn't been past White Cross Drugs [a block south of Dino's on Las Vegas Boulevard] in like 12 years," Bartolo says. "He comes to Dino's when he gets off, then he goes to White Cross and gets groceries and comes back. Twelve years and he's never walked past this square block."

Wednesday, December 10, 2003. Noon.

I ask the bartender if John Lyon is around.

"Next to the guy with red hair," she says.

He's sitting at the bar drinking bourbon and ginger ale out of a beer mug. He's been here since he got off work.

At 6:30 a.m.

I tap him lightly on the shoulder, ask if I can interview him for a story on dive bars. He thinks I'm a cop but agrees anyway. We walk to a table, John with a cane.

He's tall and thin and has a straggly sandy beard. He's wearing a taupe leather jacket, strawberry-and-white-striped shirt, blue tie with undulating yellow diamonds, red Wisconsin sweater and blue jeans. He smokes unfiltered generic cigarettes and has five teeth. He speaks slowly, as if he has a mouthful of molasses.

I find out things. He was a disc jockey most of his professional life, as recently as the late 1980s at the now-defunct KORK 920-AM in Las Vegas. He was a drummer in a rock band (Jack and the Beanstalks) that opened for the Beatles in Milwaukee in 1965. He sings karaoke Fridays and Saturdays at Dino's. He has two sons, one of whom called him out of the blue after more than 30 years. He has worked as the graveyard auditor at the Tod for 10 years and lived in the same room there almost as long.

"I've led a very full, rich life," he says. "I could die today and be very happy."

What I really want to know is why the extent of his world is roughly 200 yards. It isn't by choice.

"What happened, about 10 years ago, I got a nonmalignant brain tumor," says Lyon, 60. "It's still there and I've not had any feeling in my forearms or the lower half of my legs for all that time. It's a struggle for me to walk.

"Then, about the time I was turning 50 years old, I got osteoporosis. My world turned to hell. I got osteoporosis, the brain tumor and it's just going downhill. I'm decimated anymore."

He comes to Dino's after work to keep his sanity.

"I don't want to sit in my place all by myself and get cabin fever. So I come over here and burn a few hours. Then I'll go home, make something to eat or order something from Boston Pizza across the street. That is my life. That's my world, as exciting as it is."

Thursday, November 20, 2003. 5:32 p.m.

The Double Down defies classification. It's near UNLV but isn't a college bar. It's in the gay district but isn't a gay bar. It serves Pabst Blue Ribbon in a bottle but isn't an organic dive bar. It's too ambitious and visually stimulating to be that (although it's difficult to argue against a place that serves PBR).

It is beloved by many and inhabited by punks, professionals and children of the night. It is the youngest by far on our list of 10, but its high rank—No. 4 overall—indicates it has enough in common with its elders to warrant inclusion while effusing a certain indefinable something unique to itself.

I think that something is joy. The Double Down is the self-proclamed happiest place on Earth, and I'm happy here. I don't know the reason, but if I were to hazard a guess I'd say it's the punk rock jukebox. Or the signage.

• YOU PUKE, YOU CLEAN

• PUKE INSURANCE $20

• F--K YOU

• ASS JUICE $3 OR 3 FOR $11

• EXPERTS AGREE. YOU SUCK

I'm happy here, and it's becoming clear why.

It's the advertisement for Ass Juice with drips emanating from a cartoon buttocks. And because they dare to make Ass Juice, a secret combination of spirits known only to the bartender.

It's the disparate murals that somehow coalesce to form a cohesive whole.

It's seeing "Marina" on the wall and in the flesh simultaneously. She's immortalized in a mural not 10 feet from her location at the bar, where she's having a drink and talking camel toes with her boyfriend, Rich. She's a bartender in reality and a hula dancer with an Elvis lip in paint.

"How do I feel about it?" she asks when I ask how she feels about it.

"It's just a piece of artwork."

"Sure. Yeah," she says when I ask if she looks at it every time she comes in.

When I comment that the artist has caught her aspect, she says, "Well, yeah, whatever."

It's the visual oddities: bras and panties hanging from the ceiling; lurid bondage and slasher videos playing on TV; tourists from Delaware having a drink.

"Our Froemmer's guide literally said this is the coolest and hippest bar in Las Vegas, and from what I've seen, I don't disagree," says Bill Cain, vacationing with his wife, Tina.

"This is a place I would hang out," she says. "If I lived in this area, this is where I'd come."

But not, they agree, for the bacon martini.

Saturday, November 22, 2003. 8:30 p.m.

"First impression's everything," says Bob Mitchell, the new manager of Davy's Locker, on Desert Inn Road just west of Maryland Parkway.

Mine is Oh, f--k! I have seen this kind of thing before: dive bars aspiring to something better and becoming much worse. It happened at Peyton Place. It happened at the Marker Down. It happened at the Philly Pub.

And now Davy's Locker, a bar built the year I was born, is taking steps to look better at 41 than I do. That it's succeeding isn't the wonder; that it's taking two weeks is.

I'm trying to stay positive in front of Mitchell and bartender Rick Marianetti, who performed a lot of the surgery. It isn't easy; it never is when you're talking about the renovation of a dive bar where your mom bought wrestling tickets for you when you were 8.

Then Mitchell brings out his laptop and shows us photos of Davy's Locker just before the renovation, when it was closed for nine months prior to the new ownership group taking over.

Maybe sprucing it up isn't such a bad idea.

"When we walked in, it was condemned," says Marianetti, who calls the bar the Phoenix. "We took this place out of the ashes. Everything in here was beat. Everything had to be cleaned, painted, replaced, modernized and deodorized. The odor in here was atrocious."

He ripped out carpet and booths, put in a new tile floor, threw away old tables and chairs, and scraped 40 years of bar crud off the counters with razor blades.

"Over 40 years there must have been every bodily function available to humankind that took place in those booths," Marianetti says.

With the exception of the name, nautical theme, original porthole windows and the best neon bar sign in town (a big smiling fish with smaller smiling fishes in tow and waves), everything about the bar has changed. For the better.

"If it made it as a dive bar," Marianetti says, "it can make it as a nice place."

Thursday, November 27, 2003. Thanksgiving. 8:03 p.m.

I'm at Gabe's on a national holiday looking for depression and despair. I find Bobby Giocome and David Goshen.

From the looks of them they're neither depressed nor despairing. They are drinking: Giocome, 24-ounce beers, Goshen bottles of Bud and chasers of an unknown amber substance.

"This is my last-chance café," says Goshen, a pragmatist in black leathers. "I go out, have dinner, and when I get here I can drink as much as I f--king want 'cause I only got a block to go. If I have to, I can push my motorcycle back to my place."

Goshen rents an apartment at the Salvation Army campus on West Owens, where he ended up in a work program after getting out of jail and running a homeless shelter.

"One hundred and eighty guys a night, every night."

He has salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a ponytail, a matching mustache and hair dot in the crevice under his bottom lip.

The Salvation Army has been good for him, and for $350 a month (including cable), he's going to stay awhile.

Giocome admits he's out of place at Gabe's, but he has a bottom line tonight.

"I'm here to help somebody."

He could start by not singing over Tony Bennett on the jukebox.

Saturday, December 13, 2003. 11 a.m.

I park in the rear lot and walk into Gabe's through the back door. It's a squat, cement-block building painted white. Two men sitting in a booth against the north wall are drinking their brunch. The bar is cast in shadow and redolent of smoke. The sun's rays shine through the windows, revealing a living organism hanging in the air.

About a dozen people are seated at the bar. I tell the bartender I'm here to see Dottie Lamunyon. She goes to get her. Moments later a pleasingly abridged woman with beauty parlor hair, a black jacket and matching pants walks out of the office. A gold crucifix stands out like a struck match against the red of her sweater. She leads me into the office. Dottie sits at her desk, I sit on the couch.

"I hear you threw quite a big Thanksgiving party here for everyone."

Before you ask someone about murder, it's best to ask them about Thanksgiving.

"We had over 200 people," she says, adding that her sister and brother-in-law stayed up all night smoking six to eight turkeys and a ham and preparing all the fixings.

Lamunyon had for years made Thanksgiving dinner for her customers "just because," but let the tradition wane when it became too much for one person. Her sister convinced her to renew the tradition and said she'd help. This was the third year they've fed patrons and area residents.

"If people are in a bar on Thanksgiving," she says, "it's because they don't have family. And if they don't have family, then they haven't been invited to someone's house for dinner.

"I had one woman come here with a little boy about 5 years old, and she says, 'Can we eat?' I said, 'This is Thanksgiving. Everybody eats.' I don't care what the law says [about minors in bars]."

Gabe's Bar is ground zero for Las Vegas homeless population. A shelter stood for years across the street, and other shelters remain in the area. Over the years, Lamunyon has found herself advocating on behalf of the homeless, in her own way.

"They put all of this around me, and I said, 'Well, you know what? I'm just gonna go with it.' These people, they need just as bad as anyone else needs. So if they're gonna give 'em to me, I'm gonna take care of 'em.

"They're just poor people. But they're good people. I don't have any fights in here. The police department says we do a wonderful job. I guess they think because of where we're at, we should have problems. But we don't."

I attempt to steer the conversation toward Gabe's violent reputation, ineptly. She starts to answer but isn't sure what I'm asking. Neither am I. I suppose I'm trying to determine if Gabe's is a dangerous place without offending her, and am making a fumbling attempt to phrase the question obliquely. Why can't I just come out with, 'What are my chances of getting offed in this place?' I rephrase the question, poorly.

"In terms of being … how … how would you … how would you describe the … the bar at this point? At this point in its history?"

"It's a good bar. Like I say, we don't have fights, we don't have problems. These people in here, if anything, take care of problems. They won't let it come in because they don't wanna lose where they go. When I have my Thanksgiving, these people say to me, 'Thank God somebody cares.'

"That one tragedy that I had was the only tragedy, and I've been in business since '78."

This is my opening.

"A woman I was talking to at the Rice Paddy told me that Gabe had been murdered."

"Been what?"

"Had been murdered here."

Lamunyon laughs.

"No, Gabe died in a hospital. Of old age."

Thursday, December 18, 2003. 6 p.m.

I make one last swing past Atomic Liquor, and what to my wondering eyes should appear? A wide open front door, inviting me in for a beer.

I pay another compliment.