Yak-Zies

Chicago, IL

The word “Chicago” is thought to derive from a Native American term, “shikaakwa,” which means “smelly onion.” The land Chicago occupies is a natural swamp; it floods extensively in the spring, is a hazy, mosquito-filled sauna in the summer, and the winters—which are legendarily brutal—last for nine months. People have lived in America since before the pyramids were built, yet in all that time, none of them settled in Chicago. Then white people showed up, and— within two generations—would build what would at one point be the fifth biggest city in the world in the very area that everyone else had studiously avoided. I think it’s a pretty good insight into our priorities.

I imagine the first Swede, lost, sunburnt, and soaked in mud, emerging from a thicket of reeds and asking, “What’s this place called?”

“Chicago,” comes the answer. “Means smelly onion.”

“It’s PERFECT! All we have to do is dredge 5,000 cubic miles of swamp mud, reverse a river, raise the tableland about ten feet somehow, and then this will be the port city for the entire region.”

“Your children will die from illness.”

“Yeah, but think of the shareholders!”

 

Chicago is still a city of hilarious, reckless hustlers. One of the first bars I entered in Chicago had a bartender banning a regular “for a good six weeks” after the guy went around collecting money for his dad’s funeral, only for his dad to walk in and order a beer during the collection.

I was a bit of a grifter myself when I moved here. We would go to all-you-can-drink charity events (thirty dollars to enter, unlimited beer, all profits go to charity) but we drank so much at them, it felt like we were setting the cure for cancer back five years. I realized that when a bar offers an all-you-can-drink deal, they are playing the numbers. Most people probably won’t view it as a challenge to see how much they can drink; they just want to have a fun night—maybe drink two or three cocktails. Not I. Have you ever attended a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese? They have this big wind tunnel that the birthday kid enters and it blasts free tickets around and the kid has thirty seconds to spin around in this windy vortex and grab as many tickets as they can hold. That’s how I order drinks at an open bar. Like a kid in The Ticket Blaster.

On one particularly rainy night in Chicago, my roommates and I attended such an event —a $30 all-you-can-drink “fundraiser”—and, due to the inclement weather, many guests canceled, leaving my roommates and I to have the bar nearly to ourselves, on an open tab; a Chuck E. Cheese party where each invitee is thrown into The Ticket Blaster. We drank and drank and drank, until the event ended and we had to decide: stay here and pay for each new drink or try a new place?

“Let’s try a new place,” I suggested.

“HAVE YOU LOOKED OUTSIDE?” my roommates questioned.

It was a driving, monsoon-like rain and the few people we saw on the streets were sprinting to shelter.

“It’s perfect,” I answered, “let’s go.”

Everyone has a favorite kind of drinking; maybe day drinking or drinking at a ballgame. My favorite kind of drinking is disaster drinking. I like to drink in the kind of situations where you see a lot of local news vans parked on the streets: power outages, devastating blizzards, floods, and so on.

On New Year’s Eve, they will warn you: “Watch out; it’s amateur night at the bars!” Well, when you go out during a flood, it’s professional night. No one approaches the bartender and orders like, “Hmm, let’s see...what’s good here? What do I want?” at a bar three hours after the national guard was activated.

We were walking down Diversey Avenue in Chicago into a mighty rain. The news later called what we were walking into a “derecho” which is essentially a tornado that also dumps waves of rain; a once-in-a-decade, overachieving weather event that turned to its rain cloud buddies and proposed, “Ya know, I’m already going to Chicago—to destroy some old houses and what not—why don’t I take all your rain over there for you too? Save you a trip?”

I learned “derecho” the next morning, watching the news, when the weather forecaster confidently used the term like it was as common as “thunder”: “Good morning! And, wow, do we here at News Channel Four hope your basement is okay after that derecho we had last night!”

This is a consistent trick the news media plays upon us. They make you believe that a weird, scary story is not to be worried about because they have a word for it; a precise, scientific term that explains this exact situation, and they pretend we all know this word and because we know it and they know it, the event is normal. When a tornado arrives that is so angry that after it blows off all the roofs it sticks around to piss inside each house, you start to question why nothing like that has ever happened before in your family’s eighty years in the area. “Maybe it’s related to global warming?” you wonder. And maybe it’s something you need to be concerned about? Maybe it will become more common? But then the news says, “Nope; it’s a derecho. Standard ‘derecho.’ See? It’s so normal, we have a word for it. No need to worry.”

They did the same thing when Vice President Dick Cheney shot a guy in the face with a shotgun. In fact, it was about the same time as the derecho, and I remember the news reports all explaining the shooting with, “The Vice President was surprised by a covey of birds causing him to shoot one of the members of his hunting party” and I further remember my friends thinking I had lost my sanity:

“This is a conspiracy!” I’d yell, “The incident is far worse than they are admitting! Maybe Cheney was drunk!”

“No, Sean, you’re reading too much into it. You think everything is a conspiracy. It was just a ‘covey’ of birds,” they’d reassure me.

“Exactly! That’s my point! That’s the conspiracy! When did we all start to act like we know what the word ‘covey’ means? None of us have ever used that word before last week. Ever!”

After leaving the first bar, we walked for a block and the conditions were not good.

“This is a terrible idea!” one of my roommates screamed into the wind. “Let’s go into that motel; it has a bar!”

We were all new to the city and, given how unfamiliar we were with Chicago, my roommates were ready to enter the first place with shelter.

“No!” I dissented, “Trust me! There’s a basement bar not three blocks away. And it’s open late!”

They relented and we reached the bar, sopping wet. The bar was called Yak-Zies and as we passed through the doorway, it was as though we entered, not a bar, but the lower deck of a sinking pirate ship; a ship whose crew was so well stocked with rum and so tired of sailing they wanted to go down with her.

Water was emerging, splashing, leaking into the bar in every direction. Men were swimming, in the building, in about shin-deep water, to order new pitchers of beer. One guy was crab-walking through the water on all fours, singing, “UNDER DA SEA! UNDER DA SEA!”

Most amazing was the owner of the bar, the captain of the sinking ship, who had made no SOS calls. Not only was Yak-Zies staying open in over a foot of water; not only were they continuing to sell beer by the pitcher in over a foot of water; but they had also not disabled a single electrical device. Their popcorn machine was on. People were backstroking to the jukebox to play songs. We took this all in—absorbed all the chaos—as we entered. My roommate straightened his arm across my chest, to stop me from walking into the impromptu pool and said, “I’ve been to a lot of bars. And this...this is A BAR!” and he released me into the flood like I was being baptized in Chicago street water.

We drank and drank and the water rose and rose, and was now hitting our knees. My roommate finally noticed all the electrical gadgets still operating in a flooded room.

“Whoa! Shouldn’t they unplug all this? Couldn’t we be electrocuted?” he asked loudly.

“No, no need to unplug, friend,” a guy one table over answered. “Name’s Donut. Former master electrician,” he introduced his soaking-wet self, “there’s no reason to unplug.”

“Oh, nice,” my roommate responded, “so this isn’t an electrical hazard?”

“No, it’s a huge hazard,” Donut replied, while “Little Pink Houses” played on the jukebox, “it’s just that, once the water reaches the outlet, unplugging the appliances is actually more dangerous; it’s the water at the outlet that is bad so”—here he pointed at the air—“we might as well listen to some Cougar while we die!”

After Donut assured us we need not worry about the glowing lights, we drank even more and the water seemed to rise with each pitcher.

I started dancing with this gorgeous woman. We had a chemistry on the verses, then as the chorus hit I dipped her but I forgot we were standing in water and her head submerged for a second. I immediately pulled her up:

“We’re all going to die in here!” she yelled.

“I know! It’s the perfect way to go out,” I shouted back.

Imarried that woman.

That was seventeen years ago. We have three kids now and whenever I do something that nearly kills me at home, I hear Jess mutter to herself—but loud enough that I’m pretty sure the kids also hear it—“This is what I get for marrying someone I met in a bar.”

One of the better ways to summarize my wife’s confidence in me is that throughout the first seven years of our marriage, she increased the life insurance policy on me each year. Meaning, each year she saw some event— me trying to change lightbulbs on an office chair with wheels or me reaching into a fire to get a hotdog that just dropped—that made her think, “I need to prepare for a life without Sean.”

I am a stand-up comedian who mostly performs for drink tickets at bars and my wife has me insured like I run Wells Fargo. I always tell her she better hope I don’t die because there is no way the police won’t think she killed me, given the ludicrous insurance policies she’s opened on me.

“I’ll just explain the truth,” she’ll reply, “that you were a jackass and that’s why I insured you like that.”

“Yeah, well babe,” I’ll rejoin, “the problem with jackasses is: we die the same way murdered husbands do. Ya know, falling from penthouses. Poisoning. Antique sword accidents.”

When you make major changes to your life insurance policy, the insurance company sends a nurse to give you a physical and I was amazed at how cursory the examination was. The representative asked if I smoked, if I did drugs, then weighed me, measured my blood pressure and left. That was it! I was worried there would be more probing questions that would highlight risk-prone behavior, such as:

“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever drank?”

And I would have to answer that when my buddies and I were on Put-In-Bay Island, on Lake Erie, we opened the closet at the house we were renting and there was a two-liter plastic bottle of dark beer with a handwritten label that said “BEER?” To be clear, the question mark was on the label; even the container wasn’t sure what was in it. We opened it and tested it and confirmed it was beer and drank the whole thing even though it was probably eighty degrees warm.

And if this hypothetical medical examiner were to ask, “How old were you when you did this?” and I would have to be honest and say, “That was last summer.” At which point the examiner would probably turn to my wife and say, “No, we can’t insure this man.”

I have always been surprised that “jackass” is not a formal risk level in insurance products, listed some-where above healthy adults but below people with high blood pressure. Insurance companies could even tailor how the policy covers them (jackasses): flu shots are not covered but all hospitals become in-network during NFL home games. And the death benefits! Cancer, heart attack: zero payout. But, electrocuted in a basement bar during a derecho? Your wife would never have to work again. Drinking buddy shoots you after a covey of birds surprises him? No problem. You sustain an injury while repelling the local police from your self-declared trash town? No co-pay, no deductible.

I’m proposing the first ever insurance plan that caters exclusively to jackasses, one underwritten by the official insurance company of The United States District of Lake Michigan. Our motto is: “We don’t offer absolution, but we do cover electrocution.”