There's a turning point in a night where you see the opportunity to do the right thing: Stop drinking and go home heroically, at the time you said you would. Or not.
You'd think a veteran would know that fork in the road, but I still can't always see it coming. I can't pinpoint which drink knocked me off course, which person was responsible for it, or what the occasion was. One minute, we're toasting the final days of the Algiers bar and I'm looking at my watch, thinking, If I leave right now, I can see the baby before she goes to bed. I even stand up. The next minute, I'm just down the Strip at the Peppermill, a giant Scorpion has been set in front of me and I'm sucking the life out of it through one of its 2-foot straws.
It's a three-hour fast-forward that I would regret the next morning, not only because I had to work, but because I was committed to writing about the final days of the Algiers. Instead of witty dialogue and thoughtful meditations, I have sentences like "The Hives rock!" and "I love boys!" on my notepad—not written by me, I can (almost) assure you. Then I realized that, guess what, this is one of the hazards of the job when you're the Bar Examiner.
Besides, I'd seen enough.
No, I don't mean it that way. I love the Algier's little bar. I love that you can see the motel swimming pool outside and you can sit and imagine the ghosts of auto-lodges past. I love the safari prints on the walls, the aging Googie ceiling and the smoked-glass mirrors. I love the how a guy walks in, and before he even makes it to the bar stool, a bottle of Genuine Draft has been cracked open and set where he's about to sit. I love that when we ask for a martini (hey, maybe that was the fork in that night's road), the bartender alerts us highbrows to the fact that they only have Smirnoff (my notes say: "Good martini!").
And I love that, somewhere in the night, one of the regulars turns to our henhouse of a group and interrupts the clucking to ask, "Excuse me, are you guys from here?"
Why, yes, we are. And sorry we haven't been around more.
Obviously, the Algiers hasn't seen crowds like this much over recent years. Otherwise, the watering hole at the 50-year-old motel would still be a thriving place, with an even mix of locals and out-of-towners taking the edge off the long drive to Las Vegas. Instead, it's a mix of regulars clinging to a dying routine, gaggles of farewell fans like us, and potential condo buyers looking to own their own "piece of the Strip!"
Yes, out in the motel's historic lobby, right before you walk into the bar, you're greeted by the future: brochures, renderings and a sales rep for the "Luxury High Rise Condo" that will soon invade this holy site, where drinking and dreaming once must have fit together like "real" and "estate" do now. That's why I'd seen enough. The drinking could go on, but the dreaming didn't feel right—unless I had six figures for a down payment.
The more I looked at the brochure (somehow it made it home with me), the more I wondered who I was kidding. We couldn't have saved this place. Time doesn't fast-forward past old haunts in Las Vegas, the mother of reinvention; it records right over them. Maybe if the city matures someday, Old can live with New along the Strip, and Small can coexist with Mega. But not now.
We're about to enter an era when the outsider's misconception of Las Vegas becomes true: We essentially will live in hotels on the Strip. Well, some of us. Nonetheless, it'll be interesting to see how the little pocket communities beneath the many new high-rises emerge among the resorts and flavor our city's culture. Will there be coffee shops, newsstands and small bars where all of these residents gather to talk about the weather, politics or the Rebels—conversations like the ones I've heard in the Algiers bar before?
If not, fine. The fittest will always do what they have to to survive here, and the rest will orbit around them, always finding other places to commune.
Like the Peppermill, where I distinctly remember one thing: a man at the next table staring at our rowdy bunch as we yapped into the night, sucking creamy alcohol from a fishbowl. I couldn't tell if he was disapproving or just curious, but I'm pretty sure he was thinking we were some tourists living for the moment, with no thoughts of turning back.
Phil Hagen studies bars the way other men study the law, but with tastier results. E-mail him at
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