The sign outside said Club 449, but the sign just inside the door proclaimed, ABANDON ALL DOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE. Another, written in big red letters, said NO DRUGS. NO WEAPONS. NO GANG ATTIRE. NO EXCEPTIONS. Oh. That Club 449.
I guess I must have heard about Club 449 at an AA meeting somewhere, but before that evening with Alan Torvoldsen, I had never been there. It's owned and operated by a now-sober bartender who, once he stopped drinking, didn't have a comfortable place to socialize. He missed the bar scene so much that he started a joint that had all the right ambience for some displaced boozers, a place they could call home.
The number in the name, 449, refers to a page in Alcoholics Anonymous, known affectionately among AA members as "the Big Book." That page deals with acceptance. And looking around, I would have to say Club 449 was a pretty damn accepting place. Some of the customers were downright scary-looking, as were the ramshackle, dingy surroundings.
The room was furnished with a collection of battered cocktail tables and run-down chairs. The big dance floor was empty. The place was smoky and noisy, but it was nevertheless surprisingly familiar. It reminded me of all those places where I squandered large chunks of my misspent youth.
There were bursts of raucous laughter from a group of guys playing darts, while the sound of breaking pool balls crackled occasionally in the background. A guy with a stringy ponytail that ended below his belt fed a steady stream of quarters into a rumbling, sputtering video game. A compact-disc-playing jukebox shrieked out music that didn't at all match the mute MTV images gyrating on the TV set mounted above the bar. Next to the color screen and within easy view of the bartender was a small black-and-white monitor showing a series of interior views of the bar as seen through the watchful eye of a constantly scanning video camera.
Club 449 boasted all the things you'd naturally expect to find in a bar-with one notable exception. Booze. Instead, the hand-lettered blackboard menu offered a selection of seltzers. Happy hour there referred to all espresso drinks. A buck a shot.
Seltzers and espresso may sound trendy, but Club 449 bore not the vaguest resemblance to a yuppie "fern bar." Far from it. The no-nonsense message was clear. "If you're clean and sober, you're welcome."
As any reformed drunk can tell you, clean and sober doesn't come easy. Some of those folks look as if they had just stepped out of detox and were hanging on to sobriety one fingernail at a time, to say nothing of one day. And although they may have all been sober, they weren't necessarily all on the up-and-up.
On the wall above the nicked and battered bar, next to the menu, was a second hand-lettered sign. This one was entitled BAD CHECK LIST. I counted twenty-six names on the list in all. Three had been crossed out. That meant three out of the twenty-six must have come in to make their bad checks good. I guess 23-to-3 is measurably better than 26-to-0, but it doesn't make staying in business very easy.
The bartender looked like someone who belonged to one of those mondo Harleys parked outside. He wore faded Levi's, leather boots, and a black T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve. A line of complicated tattoos ran from his wrist up his arm until the pattern disappeared under the cloth of his shirt. He had a bulbous and much-flattened nose, but when he caught sight of Alan Torvoldsen, he grinned, and his eyes crinkled a friendly welcome.
"Hey, Al," he said. "How's it going? Whaddya want, the usual?"
Alan nodded. "And what about your pal there?" the barkeep continued. "What'll he have?"
The question was addressed to Alan as though I were some kind of nincompooop totally incapable of ordering for myself.
I'm a self-respecting Seattleite. When called upon to do so, I can speak espresso with the best of them. "I'll have an Americano," I told him.
The bartender nodded. "Coming right up," he said.
Instead of settling on a bar stool, Champagne Al threaded his way down the bar to a newspaper-cluttered table sitting just inside the front window. Behind us, in a locked display case, was a collection of AA tokens and memorabilia, all for sale.
Alan swept the papers aside, settled into a chair, and motioned me into another. He shook a Camel out of the package in his shirt pocket, then lit it, leaned back, and stared off into space. For a man who supposedly wanted to talk to me, he was having a hell of a time getting around to it.
"What's up, Alan?" I asked him, hoping to prime the pump. "You look like a man with something on his mind."
He squinted at me through the smoke. "I guess you know about my baby brother," he said.
"What about him?"
"Lars is dead," he said softly.
I remembered Lars Torvoldsen as a fuzzy-faced kid two years younger than I was. Lars tried like hell to live up to his big brother's reputation, but he never quite managed. Lars was neither a good enough athlete nor a fearless enough thug.
"I'm sorry to hear that," I said.
Alan nodded. "Five years ago, the Princess went down in the Gulf of Alaska. Guys from another boat hauled me out of the water, but Lars didn't make it. We never found him."
"I didn't know anything about it."
The bartender brought our coffees. I paid.
"I guess I'm not surprised you didn't know," Alan said. "Boats go down all the time. Other than the local Ballard paper, it rarely makes page one. As far as most reporters are concerned, what's one dead fisherman more or less?"
He was right. Commercial fishing boats do go down every season-salmon seiners, longliners, crabbers. Anyone who thinks fishing for a living isn't dangerous ought to stop by Fishermen's Terminal and check out the memorial they've built down there. It lists the names of all the members of the fishing fleet who have died each decade. There's a whole new set of names cast in bronze every single year. Often one surname will appear two or three times when fathers, sons, brothers, and cousins who worked together on the same vessel end up dying together as well.
"We were partners, you know," Alan continued. "From the time our dad died, we were equal partners, but mostly I was so drunked up that Lars had to carry me. And he never complained about it. Always passed it off like it was no big deal. Like, ‘He ain't heavy, he's my brother,' or something equally dumb."
Alan Torvoldsen blinked, shook his head, and ground out his half-smoked cigarette. "Shit!" he muttered. "I guess I still miss him."
"Alan…" I began, but he held up his hand and silenced me.
"Now that I've started, let me finish. Lars was always a good kid-a good man, I mean. When he went down, he had a nice wife-a pretty wife who loved him and who was seven months pregnant. He also had a three-year-old son. The previous year had been a pisser. We barely made enough for me to scrape by, and I didn't have a family to support. So when Lars ran short, he more or less stopped paying some of the bills, including insurance on the boat and his own life insurance."
The Torvoldsens' family boat-The Norwegian Princess — had been one of the graceful old two-masted schooners. Compared to it, Alan's One Day at a Time was little more than a sea-going scow.
"That's where the family boat went?"
Alan nodded. "But it was only a boat, you know? I should have been grateful just to be alive, but did I fall down on my knees and thank God? Hell no! I blamed Lars. Said it was his fault that we were ruined, and then I climbed on my pity-pot, got drunk, and stayed drunk. Finally, about a year ago, Aarnie Knudsen-you remember Button, don't you?"
"I remember Button."
"He tracked me down in a beat-out dive down in Astoria. He told me I'd better come home because my mother was dying. So I did. My mother was happy to see me, even after all that. It was just like the story in the Bible about the damn prodigal son. She died two days later. I haven't had a drink since."