My brother, Mike, and I decided to go on an impromptu adventure and find a bar we’d never seen nor heard of before. As we drive around the countless strip malls on the west side of town, it occurs to me that the last time my brother and I went on an impromptu adventure, neither of us were old enough to drink.
Before he arrived in Vegas last month, my younger sibling and I often went years without speaking. After high school, he went one way, eventually becoming a freelance carpenter in Carbondale, Colorado, and I went another, and wound up becoming a freelance journalist here. I work at a desk; he makes them. I like the heat; he prefers the cold. He’s contemplating joining the Army; I’m a pacifist. The one thing we have in common is that we’re equally lousy correspondents.
We pull into the crowded parking lot of the Durango Lodge and stroll into the winter-cabin-themed watering hole. Sitting under one of many chandeliers covered with deer antlers, I order us a round (Coronoas for me, Heinekins for him), and Mike launches into anecdotes about the many brawls he got into in high school. Half way through a story about jocks versus skaters, and a fight he got into with a black kid, I’m compelled to interrupt.
“Wait a second,” I say. “What high school did you go to?”
“Reno High.”
“Yeah, I know. So did I. There were no fights like that at Reno High. And there were no clique wars between jocks and skaters. Come to think of it, there weren’t even any black kids at Reno High. That school consisted almost entirely of spoiled, rich white kids.” He tries to convince me that in the two years after I graduated, the school disintegrated into the kind of ghetto cesspool that Morgan Freeman cleaned up in Lean on Me. I listen dubiously as my eyes explore the bar. Portraits of fish are scattered about the room, a moose head hangs to our left and at the center of the bar ...
“What the hell is that?” I ask.
Mike shifts his barstool to get a better look at the stuffed creature.
“It’s not a wolf,” he says. “I think it’s a bear.”
“A bear?” I say, incredulous.
“Well, like a bear cub.”
“No way. People aren’t allowed to hunt bear cubs, are they?” I signal one of the bartenders. “Excuse me, what is that animal there?”
“Bear,” he replies. “Bear cub.”
My brother smiles.
“Okay, okay,” I concede, “but I’m right about the Reno High thing.”
Dead teddy bear notwithstanding, the Lodge is a nice, spacious place, with a dining area off to one side and a sports lounge with a wall of five TV screens off to the other.
“How’s this joint compare to what you had in Carbondale?” I ask.
“Are you kidding? This place has what? Eight TVs around the bar? Three pool tables? I think there was only one pool table in all of Carbondale. There were only, like, five bars in the whole town, and none of them would be open right now.”
“Yeah, we’ve got it pretty good. Even late on a Sunday night, you can always find a nice bar with a lot of people, no shortage of video poker and a really hot bartender serving drinks.”
“Yeah,” Mike says, nodding enthusiastically toward the second bartender, who is blond and curvy in key places. “She is pretty hot.”
Okay, so we have two things in common.
Durango Lodge
Where: 3399 S. Durango Dr., Suite 103.
Info: 242-5533.
At long last, Matthew Scott Hunter has a valid reason to drink. You can e-mail him at [email protected].