Have A Nice Day Cafe

Cleveland, OH

In downtown Cleveland there’s a nightlife district called The Flats. Bars line both sides of the river and every summer some kid would drown attempting to swim from a tavern on the east bank to one on the west bank. The river is narrow here—only about 150 feet across—so it seems like an easy swim. Drunks dive in regularly and some even make it to the other side only to discover it’s a shipping lane with huge metal banks they can’t climb out of.

As a young man, this taught me an important lesson: drunkenly diving into a river is a lot like declaring war. You must have an exit strategy.

I have swum in many different bodies of water: Oceans; bays; rivers; a cove or two; all drunk. Once, I even broke into a hotel by swimming under a gate. Each time I made sure to identify my eventual exit point before entering the water. Back when I was drinking real hard, I would catch myself locating each exit inside land-based bars before I ordered my first drink—just in case. Drinking is a bit like being a very poorly trained Jason Bourne: you might need to leave suddenly, and you may not know exactly who you are, so it’s good to have your escape routes planned in advance.

Each time a young person drowned in The Flats, the Cleveland media would hyperventilate and wonder: “Does The Flats need to be fixed?” “Is this too dangerous a landscape for bars?” As though the notion of drinking by water was introduced by Cleveland, just a year or two before email was invented. Humans have been drinking near water since Mesopotamia. In the ancient world people were simultaneously so drunk and betrothed to the sea, it was generally assumed that at some point you’d probably wind up inside the belly of a whale for a few months. It was as common, back then, to wake up from a bender inside a cetacean’s gastric tract as it is for us to come-to on a plane to Vegas.

Only in modern America would a town, upon learning of a drunk’s death by drowning, debate relocating its entire nightlife district rather than admit drunk people are idiots who sometimes accidentally kill themselves. Plus: Moving bars inland will not save any lives! Any drownings you prevent will be offset by all the drunks now trying to cross electrified train tracks or falling off statues they’ve climbed. Believe me—and I always wished I could testify before City Councils as an expert witness in order to say as much—the kind of guy who wants to swim across the Cuyahoga River is going to find a way to kill himself in any landscape:

COUNCILWOMAN: “Can you provide an example of what you are talking about, Mr. Flannery?”

ME: “Sure, as just a for-instance, your proposed new location is next to a historic cemetery. That’s easily five impalings a year from drunks trying to scale the fence. And you’re not too far from the zoo. Never underestimate a drunk’s desire to do footraces, particularly against animals!”
 

I began drinking in The Flats in the 1990s and assumed this was how the area always was: littered with bars on each side and the occasional river/ beer-related death every five to ten years. It was only after I left Cleveland years later that I learned that period was an anomaly and that, prior to the 1980s, drownings were almost non-existent, and dropped off again after 2001. Cleveland officials are not sure why the numbers were so high during the period I was there, but, to me, it was obvious.

First, no one would have attempted to swim across that river prior to 1980. In 1880, the mayor of Cleveland, Rensselaer R. Herrick, called the river “an open sewer through the center of the city,” and it didn’t get any cleaner during the next century. It smelled terrible when I was growing up, and when people asked what “Cuyahoga” meant I always answered, “it’s an ancient Native American phrase that translates to ‘river of manure.’” It caught fire at least thirteen times, the worst infernos being in the 1950s and 1960s, making Cleveland a national joke but probably saving the lives of a few shit-faced iron workers who would have otherwise tried to doggy paddle home.

A drunk believes he can swim across any body of water if he sees a bar on the other end of it, but: light the river on fire and he starts having second thoughts. He wonders: “Even if I make it to the other side of this burning river, what if my wallet catches on fire and I can’t buy a beer?” Drunks started drowning in the Cuyahoga River in the 1980s because it was finally clear enough to jump into. This is the dark side of The Clean Water Act of 1972. Yes, it saved whole ecosystems and sanitized our drinking water, but it also decontaminated city waterways enough to cause a huge spike in moron drownings.

But! The morons did stop drowning, at least in Cleveland, in 2002. Cleveland officials are not exactly sure why there are less drownings in The Flats, but they believe it is due to more police on patrol, better management of bars, and (again, I want to testify before City Council as an expert on drunks to tell them the real reason) cell phones.

Drunk people today want to swim across rivers just as much as they did in 1997; they just don’t want to have to return for their phone. Over the last decade, smartphones have probably saved more drunks from drowning than life preservers. I despise smartphones—I hate them more than Republicans hated The Clean Water Act—but I do concede that this infernal device has at least one advantage: fewer drunks are drowning in industrial waterways.
 

On this particular night, I was drinking in The Flats, along the river, but it was winter; way too late in the year for drunk swimmers. But this is still a story about exit strategies. We were leaving some nameless bar, heading to a place called HAVE A NICE DAY CAFÉ. I had no business continuing to the next bar. I was owl-eyed drunk.

I started drinking about seven hours previously when my buddy, a successful accountant, asked if I wanted to meet them and their coworkers for happy hour. Happy hour, they pointed out, “was on the company’s dime; you will drink for free!” I had plans for later in the evening that I did not want to miss, but I thought: how drunk can I get with accountants?

What a miscalculation! Accountants drink like high beam steel workers that just saw a coworker die. There are the only people I have met who drink like they want a blackout that moves in two directions: one that eliminates both past and future memories. The first two accountants I met at the happy hour were drinking in Cleveland because they were “stuck here” after drunkenly boarding the wrong plane in Houston and flying half way across the world in the wrong direction.

“I was pretty fucking sure this ain’t Spokane,” one of them explained, “when there was no mountains on arrival!”

They both laughed uproariously and shot tequila. I joined them. After another hour or three of drinking, we were best friends and we all insisted none of us move to another bar without the others.

“I’m meeting friends at Have A Nice Day Café,” I said, sharing my own plans.

“Well, we’re with you!” the Texans pledged.

“Perfect! Follow me,” I announced and, after closing tabs, we all left together. As we moved past the first set of heavy doors in the bar’s vestibule—before we got to the main exit doors and hit the real weather—I turned to the Texans and cautioned them, “This is going to nip a bit more than home”.
 

WHAT THE HELL AM I READING HERE?

Hi. My name is Sean Bair-Flannery. I live in Oak Park, Illinois, with my wife Jessica and our three kids. I perform standup comedy at night and during the day I fix computers.

 

This is chapter from my book, “Places I Can’t Return To”.

 

Each week, I release a new chapter (the current one completes below). If you enjoy the stories, you can buy the full book below or, next week, you can come back and read the subsequent chapter.

 

Purchase Full Book:

    Digital                                 $4.99

    Paperback                   $14.99

    Audio                                     $19.99

 

This book is true stories, but it is not a memoir. It is a more an illustration — maybe a warning — of what your life will look like if you decide to live everyday like it’s your last. I actually followed that advice. I followed it for a good fifteen years.

 

I can’t re-enter most the places I visited in that time.

—S. B-F

It was five degrees outside. I later learned that Houston’s coldest recorded temperature, from January of 1930, was five degrees. Meaning these drunk accountants who walked five blocks with us to Have A Nice Day Café are probably the only Houstonians alive who can describe what it felt like on Houston’s coldest night; a sensation they learned bar hopping in Cleveland.

We reached the bar and there was a huge line to enter. My buddy who had invited me to happy hour turned and asked, “What do you think?”

“This could be a problem for Space City”, I say, pointing to the Houston people, only to see they had left us and were now talking to the bouncer.

They waved us forward and we got right in.

“What happened?” we asked.

“I paid the guy $200 to have us jump to the front of the line. I’m not waiting in that cold!!”

My buddy and I laughed so hard that, for a moment, it was louder than the DJ.

“We’re in Cleveland, you idiot!” my buddy yelled back. “You could have bought us to the front of line with a twenty!”

“I had to get my car out of tow-lot yesterday and it cost less than getting into this bar,” I added, laughing, “let me at least buy you all a round of beers after spending that to get us inside.”

I walked to the bar and noticed my other friends— the ones I planned to meet here—already at the bar, ordering drinks.

“Hey!” they yelled, noticing me too, “you made it!”

“Of course!”

“Let’s do shots!” one yelled.

“Aaah,” I hesitated, “I don’t think I can do shots. I’m pretty far in the bag.”

“Come on!” they screamed back in that whine men use when disappointed at a bar.

I used to think men whine when you refuse shots because they felt you were boring—that you were not participating in the group outing—but, as I’ve spent more time in bars, I’ve concluded that dudes are pushy about joining them for shots because that’s the only way they know how to express friendship. It’s not that you are being boring; it’s that you’ve taken away their only method for affirming emotional importance.

This is also why men tell their friends—when they are super drunk—“You know I’d take a bullet for you, right?” Men are so afraid to affirm each other that, rather than say, “I enjoy hanging out with you because you’re a nice dude,” it is easier to imagine the guy’s attempted murder and you intervening with your own chest, to take that bullet, and sharing that death-fantasy is a less weird way to announce we are friends.

“Come on Flannery, I’d take a bullet for you!”

“I know you would. But I’d rather you take a shot for me.”

“Come on!”

“OK, but,” I bargained, “it has to be an easy shot!” They ordered shots, we all put them down the hatch, and they started laughing uproariously. It was Bacardi 151.

I was going to vomit.

I turned from the bar and started running. I had to vomit. Always a river man, I knew my exit strategy. The bathrooms were too far away. I sprinted to the main doors, where we entered, not five minutes ago. The doors were heavy, so I brace to open them shoulder-first, running at top speed, but security had already noticed me and opened the doors for me (happy to see me leave), so, all that energy I was going to use to bust open the doors, propelled me head first through the doorway. I flew out into the Cleveland night. I am not going to claim that the distance I traveled is greater than what you see in Olympic long jumps. But, what I would say is: if you told Olympic long jumpers to leap into concrete, I’m not sure they would have reached my distance.

I crashed, head-first into a giant concrete block on the opposite end of the sidewalk. I hit it like a bird that didn’t see a window. My body crumpled to the sidewalk where I vomited. The concrete I flew into was part of a new beautification project, where potted trees and flowers were destined to one day live, but, at that current moment, it was barren and unfinished. There was a sign on it, just above the spot where I was presently quietly vomiting and bleeding:

“Your tax dollars at work! Coming soon: A NEW CLEVELAND.”

There was still a huge line to enter the bar and, in what was a great summary of how alcohol works, not a single person got out of line after witnessing me crash into the concrete and crack my head open. People were waiting in freezing-cold weather, wondering if this place would be worth the wait—if they would meet the right people there—and saw a guy shoot out of the bar like he was ejected from a cannon, straight into a rock wall, and said to themselves, “Yep, this looks like exactly the right place”.

That was my last memory: being surprised no one left the line. Then things got dark.
 

I woke up on the floor of a kitchen. There were a couple pots around me and this weird ash-like substance. I stood and recognized the apartment: it was my buddy’s, the one who invited me to drink with the accountants the day before. I didn’t hear anyone stirring—it was early—and I needed to leave. I debated about knocking on the bedroom door to announce I was leaving but it occurred to me: I was probably a very high maintenance house guest the previous night. Better to let my host sleep in, I thought, and left a note instead.

I went into the bathroom to look myself over before leaving. I had a huge black-and-purple welt on my forehead with dried blood around it. But at least my suit looked mostly free of both wrinkles and blood. “Thank God,” I sighed, “I’m late for a job interview.”

I stopped at a pharmacy and covered the worst of my wound in giant bandages then arrived at the office location about ten seconds before the interview was scheduled to begin. The first five people who met me at the company said, “Jesus, are you sure you are OK?” and “Do you want to reschedule this?” which is not what you want to hear as the first words in an interview.

I was pessimistic about getting this job back when I was planning to interview without a massive head wound, so, at this point, it felt like both parties were only going through the motions. So I started providing each group with a separate explanation for the cut on my forehead, just to crack myself up. I told the secretary I was in a car crash; the recruiter heard I hit my head on a low ceiling helping my friend move; and the network administrator was told about how I was fixing a computer and I forgot to disconnect the power supply, shocking me, which in turn bolted me upright, causing me to smack my head on the desk (which, actually, did really happen to me once).

But, by the end of the interview, I was so convinced I wouldn’t get the job, I told the new business director that a bird dropped a rock on me during a nature walk. He found this story spurious, but I told him it was more common than people believed and that even Plato had died that way.

“Are you serious?” he asked. “Plato?”

“Yeah, I mean I’m a philosophy major.” I explained. “It’s one of the first things you are taught.”

“I never knew that!” Now, I should make it clear: Plato did not die that way. But this was before Google and smart phones and it was much easier to be a liar back then, particularly about the ancient world. People were swallowed by whales back then! Who wouldn’t believe that a bird killed a person or two? Particularly some philosopher that seemed to spend most his life outdoors?

I got that job.

The note I left for my buddy back at the apartment where I had awoke on the kitchen floor, said:

“Thanks for hosting me! Sorry I got so drunk. Hope I didn’t ruin your evening. Would thank you in person, but I have to run- late for a job interview. Wish me luck!”
 

The company that hired me closed three days after I started work. That did not flabbergast me. A company eager to hire a guy who was bleeding from the head in his job interview might have additional, strategic problems.

“You’re really calm about this,” one of the other new hires said to me, after noticing me simply shrug my shoulders and begin walking to the door after hearing the news.

“Gotta have exit strategies in this town,” I answered, as I walked out.