The Gas Lamp Inn & Saloon

Cincinnati, OH

I don’t think I have a friend who hasn’t almost killed me by accident at some point. I sometimes think male friendships are closer to a coordinated stunt-show than a real interpersonal relationship. When I announced to my then-fiancée which male friends of mine would be standing next to me as groomsmen at our wedding, she reflected on all the stories she had heard about each one and asked, “Hasn’t each of these people tried to kill you?”

“I wouldn’t say they were trying,” I assured her, “rather they reached a place in the evening where miscalculations happened.”

“I see,” she replied, “but, as a comparison, none of my bridesmaids caused an explosion that burned all the hair off my face.”

She was, of course, referring to my buddy Jeff who had once nearly killed me in what I’ve chosen to call a pyrotechnicality. But I don’t blame him. It wasn’t his fault. We were day drinking.

It was in Cincinnati. We had been on a bender for a few days. After waking late one morning, Jeff led us to a new bar, in a new neighborhood.

“This is a good, proper bar,” Jeff told me while opening the door. We quickly and happily began drinking.

Around 2 p.m.—with the sun still beaming outside—Jeff asked if I wanted to get food. “Not quite yet,” I answered. I am philosophically opposed to leaving dive bars in the afternoon, as I think both Nature and The Almighty want you to remain inside that bar until all the normal people—the folks traveling as part of commerce—go home. That’s why God blinds you with sunlight if you leave too early.

“But!” I told Jeff , “don’t let me go too long without food! Th is night could get ugly if we don’t eat.”
 

My next memory was the bartender slapping me awake while screaming, “IT’S LAST CALL! The both of you have to leave!”

I looked around.

Jeff was under the dartboard, dancing. We were the only two people in the bar.

I apologized and asked to close my tab.

“Where are we?” I asked Jeff.

“Same bar, my man,” he answered, while trying to do the splits.

The bill came: $40.

“I love this fucking state!”

The bartender looked at me, mystified.

I explained that I was from Ohio originally but had been in Chicago for a couple of years and that if my friend and I were to get equally drunk in Chicago, the tab would be ten times the amount.

However, I later learned from credit card statements that the bill I was celebrating as such a cheap triumph was actually the fourth tab I had opened and closed at that bar that day. Every time a new bartender clocked in, I settled my tab with the previous server, and, thinking that was my only bill for the day, would start telling everyone how affordable Ohio was, and buy a(nother) round for the house. I was spending money like an amnesiac lottery winner and didn’t realize it until the following month when my credit card statement informed me that I had emptied my checking account into a dive bar along the Ohio River.

Back then, reading my credit statements was like listening to the tapes from the black box recorder on a crashed airplane: however horrific, they were the only way to discover what really happened. Sometimes the amounts seemed impossible, given how cheap the bars and cities were: “$350 at RUMORS in Cedar Rapids, Iowa? Did I get drunk and purchase one of their ovens?”

Jeff and I stumbled out of the bar, and the fullness of how much time had elapsed hit us: it was now pitch black. The streets—bustling with activity when we entered—were now empty. The wind was howling around the corners, and, most noticeably, a wholly new shift of animals was working and caroling: a full chorus of owls and crickets and tree frogs where once was just the odd yelp from a bored dog.

We meandered away from the bar and turned a corner, whereupon we were stopped by the most arresting sight: an amber orb glowing brightly but a foot or two above our heads. It was beautiful, imbued with a strange, hypnotic-gravity, as if it were speaking to us from some ancient and ethereal plain.

“That streetlamp,” I said to Jeff, “it’s gorgeous. We should take it home.”

“How?” he asked.

“I think if you get on my shoulders, we can unscrew it.”

“Okay, but what would we do with it?”

“Easy,” I replied, “we turn it into a chandelier!”

Some people, when they become drunk, think they are sexy; others believe they are good at fighting; still others think they have somehow become incredibly witty, but my preferred delusion when inebriated is something that will get you in far more trouble: I think I am handy. I will carry home loose bits of abandoned wood believing I can turn them into a coffee table. I will begin projects that I would never consider sober, such as replacing the fuse in the dishwasher. And, on this night, I believed that I could convert a public street lamp into a chandelier, despite zero experience in either glass-working or electricity.

Unquestioning, Jeff clambered on to me, balanced himself against the light’s pole, and readied to unscrew the bulb.

He began twisting the glass to take it off, but paused after just a few revolutions, saying, “This glass is HOT.”

“These are old light bulbs,” I answered back, “we can’t expect them to be energy efficient.”

Which was an incorrect characterization as to why the orb was hot; an error likely caused by the fourteen hours of drinking. See, we were not merely unscrewing some ordinary lightbulb; we were removing the top of a gas street lamp. Some drunk people will put on their “beer goggles” and misidentify someone as being attractive when they are perhaps not. My and Jeff ’s beer goggles had caused us to misidentify fire.

Jeff was still struggling to free the unwieldy glass globe from its fixture, wincing from the pain of the hot surface.

“Lick your fingers!” I yelled up at him.

“What?”

“It will insulate you a bit from the heat!”

Jeff licked his fingers, turned the globe a bit, then licked again, turned again, and so on. Eventually we heard a distinct pop.

It was at this point I think we realized that what we had here was a gas streetlamp: the instant the bulb came off, wind and oxygen rushed in, and turned what had been a small flame into a giant ball of fire that exploded toward Jeff, instantly singeing his eyebrows clean off. He dropped from my shoulders as the flame leapt out above, igniting the leaves of a nearby tree.

We reacted the way any reasonable people would after discovering that they have ruined a street safety device and possibly caused a fire; we ran for a taxi.

There was a cab sitting at the end of the block, outside a different bar. I hurried Jeff and I over to it, opened the back door, threw Jeff in and screamed, “GO!”

This is one of the moments that you see all the time in old movies that does not work in real life, but you don’t realize it doesn’t work until you have the audacity to try it. In movies, the hero jumps into a taxi and barks “Go!” or “Follow the red car!” and the cabbie dutifully puts the car in drive, hits the gas, and says something like, “No problem, Mac. Who we following?”

But this is how it works in real life: “Go!” I yelled again.

“Where to?” the cabbie asked, confused.

“Just go!”

“I need an address!”

“This town is toast, amigo! We need to ROOOLLLL!!!”

The cabbie reached down into the glove compartment and pulled out a can of Mace.

“Address or get out of my cab!”

“Art Museum!!”

And with that, we were on our way to the Cincinnati Art Museum. At 3 a.m.

Whenever I visit a new city, I like to see their art museum, their zoo, and dive bars. I had not yet seen the art museum so, when an exact destination was demanded, that popped into my head.

After a few stoplights, we merged onto a highway.

“Ya know,” Jeff piped up as we climbed the on-ramp, “Cincinnati has a really gorgeous art museum.”

He had no eyebrows and appeared sunburnt.

“Jeff, I don’t think they’re gonna be open.”

Jeff put his hand through his hair and a bundle of charred, curly stubs fell upon the back seat of the cab.

“What the hell was that thing?” I fumed, after seeing how much of Jeff ’s scalp had burnt off, “I mean, it’s the 21st century! You can’t be surprising people with gas street lamps! Those are death traps! This town needs to put some warnings on those things!”

I was very much trying to make the case that we were the victims in this incident.

“We probably have grounds to sue this city,” Jeff concurred.

“It’s a real case!” I agreed, “I’m definitely going to sue that bar for not warning us!” As I railed against the perceived injustice, we were deposited outside a lightless art museum.

Weeks later, when I received the credit card statement and realized I had closed six tabs that day, I also learned the name of the bar that I intended to sue for not warning me about the possibility of life-threatening illuminations: The Gaslamp Inn & Saloon.

I spent fourteen hours inside a bar named after the gas streetlamps around us, yet still felt there was no realistic “warning.”

Hemingway once told a friend, “Always do sober what you said you would do drunk; that will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” Of all my drunk plans that were never carried out sober, suing the city of Cincinnati for not warning me of gas streetlamps is the one I regret most, as the trial would have been a great demonstration of how many facts you can miss when drinking. Realistically, the process of just finding a lawyer willing to take-on our case would probably be enough to make us rethink day drinking again:

“You want me to sue the city of Cincinnati because you guys were able to unscrew a gas bulb that was ten feet high and had a clear, burning flame inside it? And you did this after spending twelve hours in a bar named after these gas lamps?”

“I wouldn’t word it exactly that way, but, yes.”

The next day we woke up, Jeff missing his eyebrows and much of his hair, and me with no money; not only from the drinking but taxi rides to and from the Art Museum. Seeing all this, I offered a summation of the previous evening:

“I think last night might have been a milestone.” “How so?” Jeff asked.

“I think it’s the first time two people caused more damage to the neighborhood by walking home drunk, rather than driving home drunk.”

“Driving would have been a bad idea,” Jeff replied.

“Agreed. But I’m not sure walking was a ‘great’ idea, either. We nearly started a bush fire in Cincinnati!”

“Okay,” Jeff conceded, “what should our plan be for tonight?”

“Easy!” I answered. I begin all my bad plans with, “Easy!”

I continued: “We walk to the bar, right? Responsibly. But when we get there, we tell them we drove. We even show keys! Then when we get super drunk, they’ll say: ‘Hey fellas, let us call you a cab home; you can pick up the car tomorrow.’ They’ll even pay for it!”

“It’s bulletproof!” Jeff agreed.

That night, we walked to a bar ten blocks from Jeff ’s house, got hammered, claimed that we had driven there and, as planned, the bar ordered us a cab upon seeing how drunk we were, and even agreed to and pay for it “Isn’t it beautiful when a plan comes together?” I nudged Jeff as we entered the cab. We made it one turn in the cab before Jeff puked all over the back seat. The driver told us we owed him $200 or he and his cousin would break our arms.

It took us a while to get the payment together; in the end we offered him all that we could muster: $150. He agreed but not without griping, “You shouldn’t even be in my cab! Why the hell do you need a ride for a few blocks?”

“We’re working on a system,” I answered calmly. There was a pause, and I added, “It’s not going well.”