The Marine Club on Chowderhead Bazoo
On the nights when Frank was still pulling ‘em in with his musical stylings on the organ, the place could look like something out of an Otto Dix painting. Punks and would-be beatniks bent elbows next to stocky tattooed stevedores while aging greasers whose names were probably Joe or Bob or Rusty rolled dice with old gents in suits. There were the over-the-hill jazz dames, pageboy-bobbed, some wearing vintage hats, like hard luck flappers frozen in time, but melting a little bit around the edges. Half-cut rookie night-lifers looking vaguely dazzled in the orangey gloom plied decidedly utilitarian cocktails and cold-ish bottles of beer, maybe even smoking a cigarette or two as if required to get that phase out of their system.
I miss you so damn much, Marine Club.
I had a couple fun times in that place.
My ex, Jerf, and my friend Barry (obvs you know them both well, Grimmer) were drinking there with the old bartender until 4 or 5am on the night they closed it down. An amazing time capsule in its day and a great old dive, one of many that has vanished from the Vancouver barscape in the last 20 years.
Prelympics, precollapse, predeflation.
