Which was exactly the ambiance the following night, says Danni, a petite and amiable woman who, alongside the other mid-age regulars, welcomes every new face at Ozzie's with a toast and an invitation to join the group, of whom she keeps pictures in her digital camera at her hip, ready to be slung when provoked. Except that the bar was only a quarter full—just four people—because the Monday night football game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and the New York Giants wasn't all that interesting.
"We're all football fans here," she says, her eyes large and treasure-filled. "See our shirts: Eddy over there is Raiders, Cal's the Giants. Laura's from San Diego, she's the Chargers. I'm the Steelers, but I'm from Philadelphia. You should wear your team's clothes whenever you come here.
"For some reason, not that many of us showed up last Monday, when the man rammed into that back wall there and died. It was about 8:30," Danni says, looking for a clock.
"That's exactly a week ago from right now."
She continues: "He was flying—ninety miles per hour. And they say he wasn't intoxicated. I heard he was talking on his cell phone. See, he hung a left onto Spring Mountain, from Decatur, and, you know, there's a lot of dips in the road: He must've hit one and lost control. He went right off the road and into that big cement block—"
"You weren't even there," says Laura, the bartender who was working on that unforgettable night.
"No one's ever said anything about cell phones. And he was coming straight up Spring Mountain, through Decatur. He ran a red, lost control, went airborne, over the curb in front of the Jack In The Box next to us, came down in our back lot—you can still see the divot in the ground from where he hit—and then crashed into our back wall. There were no skid marks. I'm just so thankful it wasn't the week before, when the Monday night game was good, and we had a packed bar.
"You know, I was less than 30 seconds away from getting hit," continues Laura, the radiant type of bartender whose gravitational pull is inescapable.
"Just before it happened, I was making my normal rounds. I went to check on Gary, who was sitting right here, facing that back wall ...
"Then I went to check on Cliff, who was sitting right there, just a few feet to the right of the wall ...
"And the thing is, usually, I watch Cliff play a few hands [on the video poker machine], but this time I didn't. I walked right past the ice machine—if had been 20 seconds later, the ice machine would have crushed me—and then I went over to the counter, right over there, just to the left of where you can see the hole in the wall was I went to grab a football ticket that I wanted to cash, and then BOOM, it sounded like a bomb went off, and the ice machine started moving forward and the liquor bottles started flying out of the cabinet, and the entire counter was coming toward me, and so I jumped back and went ‘ahh,' just like that."
Gary, a lean man with experienced eyes and a soft voice consistent with his age and stature, says: "Well, it didn't really sound like a bomb. Just like someone hit the wall. I heard Laura shout, ‘What the—(you know what)', but no, there wasn't chaos. Cliff was still playing his hand.
"I went outside and walked around to the back. There was a truck there. Had hit a big cylinder block—the light post—first, and then the bar. If it weren't for the cylinder block, he would have gone straight through the bar, through me, and into the front parking lot. Yep.
"I went back inside and Laura said it smelled like gas. The firefighters and police came right away, and they told us all to get out of the bar. Laura told them it smelled like gas."
According to the police's official statement—which is terse, and which is all the police will say about the event, and which thus leaves only witness accounts, accurate or not, as the source for what happened at Ozzie's on the night of Monday, November 20—it was a local man, just 27 years old, who struck the rear east wall with his 2003 Dodge Ram 1500. "The Dodge operator suffered fatal injuries and was pronounced dead at the scene," officials say.
"This is the 134th traffic-related fatality occurring in LVMPD jurisdiction for 2006."
And it was the third crash that day devastating enough to warrant an official police statement.
Early Monday morning, a woman rammed her Ford Expedition into three houses in the Peccole Ranch community.
On Monday afternoon, a woman died after the Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck she was riding in rammed into a car stopped at Tropicana Avenue and Lindell Road, the Silverado itself having just been rammed by an oncoming car.
The sister of the man who died at Ozzie's came to the bar the next day, and, according to witness accounts, she said her brother had just gotten off work, and was just trying to get home.