RUBY ROOM
. . . which was my favorite bar on planet Earth, has closed forever on account of the owners of the world collectively deciding to make every city as sterile and flavorless as possible while simultaneously making them more expensive by orders of magnitude. And so I went one last time with my friends a few days before they shut off those red lights for good. It was weekday night, which were always the best nights to go to Ruby Room, and once inside, I got a beer and a shot of tequila with lime (which I think is the only thing I’ve ever gotten there). I sat down with world-famous game developer Brandon Sheffield and world-famous artist Alayna Boots at the little round table near the front door where I always sat every Wednesday with the Donut Farm girls, back when Ruby Room still had 80s Night . . . when you could get any mix drink with well liquor for 80 cents, rounded up to a buck with tax. And now ten years later I sat at the same dingy table in the same dingy chair with blackening circles around my eyes, waiting patiently for the nearby booth to finally open up—which was, sorry, My Booth, the Mob Boss Booth, a dark alcove with a wrap-around seat where I had holed up for hundreds of nights over the last decade . . . but on this final night I was thwarted by some yuppies on a date who had poached it. They sat there for remainder of the night, and so I never got to park my dumb ass there again. Such is my tale.
Of the three of us now seated together, I was really the only one with any true sentimentality for Ruby Room. I had been, God help me, a Regular. Still, I thought it was nice that my friends would sit there with me one last time, even if it was probably just any old bar to them. Alayna left after an hour or so, and young Emma appeared as if on cue to take her place, and Brandon went home soon after . . . and then came these two girls I had met in Berlin last summer through Nina from Chalk Talk, being Uma and Indie, and the four of us moved to the back pool room to sulk in the shadows with all the other creeps there just like me.
I was having a good ol time hootin and hollerin back there when my skull was suddenly split in half on account of seeing, you guessed it, A Girl I Used To Know waltz right through the front door and hand her ID to the doorman perched behind the ominous black lectern. Seeing as how it was the last time I would ever step foot inside Ruby Room—and being that I had absolutely nothing to lose anymore, here at the end of all things, and would be better off dead, and am also a huge idiot who nonetheless does not live in fear—I glided over to her like Count Dracula and said hello. She turned around and smiled. She hugged me. When she pulled back, I prefaced my lonely monologue by saying, “I am a huge idiot and I also don’t live in fear . . .” and proceeded to tell her that I’d always liked her, and that I regretted having not asked her out a long time ago. She squeezed my arm and said it was sweet of me to have said so, and leaned in to hug me again. She said she’d let me know if she were ever in Berlin, then vanished into the back room. Was she being sincere? Who knows, but she was nice about it just the same. Just then I decided to believe her. I stood there wondering what my life would look like now if I had expressed the same sentiment to her eight years ago, and decided it probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference. And anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore, because it’s too late to do anything about it, and now my memories of her and that time in my life collapse, and all that I am left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward Death.
Oops!
I gazed into the abyss of Ruby Room. The place was filled with my ghosts. When I had visited Ruby Room the week before, my penultimate visit, I’d seen a bartender there from a long time ago. This was a girl named Indigo, and I had ordered drinks from her once or twice a week for years . . . but like all the other Ruby Room bartenders from The Before Time, when the world could still be fun, she had disappeared seemingly for good once the bar reopened after the pandemic. I was surprised to see her there when I figured I’d probably go the rest of my life without seeing her again. You can’t miss her: she looks exactly like what my friends would roll their eyes and call a “Ryan Girl” . . . and there she was again, sure as hell, behind the bar with cat-eye makeup, one of my ancient crushes and the only girl I ever met called Indigo. I felt the utter finality of my seeing her, of her being there in person and a breath away from me in the final days of Ruby Room, and knew that this really was the last time I’d ever see her. I felt a sadness and approached the bar and sat down right in front of her.
I said: “Your name is Indigo, right? I haven’t seen you here in a long time.”
Indigo said: “Wow! That’s right. You’re the only person who has remembered that I used to work here.”
There was no way I was going to say something embarrassingly stupid like “How could someone possibly forget you?” even though I thought it sincerely . . . so instead I said: “You were always really nice to me whenever I came in, so thank you for that.”
Indigo asked me what my name was and reached out to shake my hand. I told her and shook her floating outstretched hand. I didn’t want to linger there with puppy dog eyes, so I said farewell and walked back to the table where McCune and Emma were sitting, the same table where I would sit at with Alayna and Brandon a week later. The back booth was taken on that night too. Perhaps everyone knew it was the hot spot. . . .
Back in the PRESENT, in the HERE and NOW, I returned to the Back Room, the only place I knew of in the Bay Area where you could smoke inside, where we were squeezed into the little table by the column bordering the pool table beneath two huge speakers, what with all the booths back there being taken. I had insisted we not sit at the table in the hall by the women’s restroom since it had smelled like vomit for literally ten years. Last time I sat there was in 2014 with this girl I once knew (who is now a mother and the proprietor of a bed and breakfast in upstate Michigan near the Great Lakes), and the two of us retched at the foulness of it, a foulness which never dissipated in all that time. That must have been some puke!
She had said: “Something here smells like puke!” I learned down and checked beneath the table with my phone to see that the floor was discolored with a sort of dark chunky fluid that looked like shredded watermelon. We shrugged and got on with it until the stench became truly unbearable, and then drove to my house in West Oakland, in Ghost Town, where we crawled beneath my comforter in my unheated bedroom one winter night and held each other to stay warm. (I found out later that we had both written about this night on our respective websites, but our interpretations of it had been quite different, which rules.)
Many years later, I now sat there with Emma and Uma and Indie and GAZED WISTFULLY at the empty bench across from us, the U-shaped one that surrounded the pool table. I remembered the night I turned and saw a tall goth girl in striped Beetlejuice pants sitting there alone. I made eye contact with her a few times and, after a few minutes, she stood up and approached me and asked if I wanted to play pool with her. Bewildered that she was even addressing me at all, I said, “You’re god damn right I do.” I remembered we weren’t able to play that night since the sign-up sheet was a mile long, all of them pool sharks with beards and flat-brimmed hats, the worst kind of East Bay Guy. . . .
And so at her behest we went to her station wagon parked just outside the front door and smoked a joint and listened to Boris. I had turned around to see that a twin mattress took up the entire back of the car, and she had said she’d moved to the Bay Area that very same day, to a garage in San Francisco right on Ocean Brach. (I knew the exact building . . . I’d marched by it one stormy night with my cousin, and the two of us had thrown potatoes into the Pacific Ocean with some strange girls from the internet.) She told me she’d just come from the desert and had gotten an abortion the week before, having been impregnated by some scumbag, a sort of cult leader, whom she hoped to be rid of forever. There was something touching to me about her telling me these intimate details about her life without an hour of knowing each other. Somehow we ended up making out in her car right there in front of Ruby Room. I gave her my phone number, but like most of the girls I’d met at Ruby Room over the last decade, I never saw her again. (Months later she appeared in some modeling photos with my friend Hannah and I felt a spooky feeling.)
Feeling hopelessly sentimental just then, and repulsed by my own sentimentality, I nonetheless turned to look at the round corner booth bordering the dance floor where my cousin Jack and I had sat brooding more times than I could remember, at least twice a week back in The Old Oakland Days. My skeleton ached for that time.
We’d gone there once with an eight-ball we’d bought from our upstairs housemate as a joke, and it was in that booth where I first tried the hateful stuff. And that was where we had sat with our next door neighbor from our house in Ghost Town, a guy who was a total psychopath, on the night we had to prowl around Oakland to find my kind-of girlfriend Emily, who had fled the bar and gone out into a dark rainy night on account of something her bandmate said to her during the 45 seconds I was in the bathroom washing my face. I had come back to the booth to find her missing, and since no one had bothered to try to stop or follow her, I hurried everyone to the Doomsmobile so we could track her down and take her home. That night Emily was wearing an outfit that I can only describe as “anime Marie Antoinette”— and I reckoned she may as well have had a fuckin missile reticle over her tiara’d head, walking alone at night in the pouring rain and crying near Lake Merritt in Oakland, which is still something even I am hesitant to do outside of absolute necessity.
And I remembered hours later, after a fruitless search, pulling up to her house in Ghost Town, a kind of punk house filled with jerks and creeps junkies, just a few blocks away from my fortified compound there, and her bandmate going inside and coming back out to say Emily had made it home and was crying in her bedroom and didn’t want to see anyone. Content that she had not succumbed to mortal danger, I backed out of the driveway in the pouring rain and never again returned to that house.
Afterwards, knowing it was too late to return to Ruby Room, and not yet wanting to return home, Jack and my psycho neighbor and I drove up to Grizzly Peak and then down through the fog in the Berkeley hills towards campus in that Halloween costume of a car, blasting music and smoking cigarettes . . . which was something we’d always end up doing to perpetuate the darkness of night once they flipped on the hot fluorescent lights at Ruby Room at last call to get everyone to leave. It was the perfect insecticide, because then you knew for sure with great horror of the filth you’d been sitting in for hours, which had been hidden by the black leather furniture and the dim glow of the red lights. Only tonight we’d skipped that part.
I remembered, finally, my favorite night at Ruby Room, the one with the Trader Joe’s cashier in Silver Lake whom I had befriended during my disastrous trip to Los Angeles to cover the Electronics Entertainment Expo . . . the tall redhead with the colorful butterfly tattoo on her arm whose checkout line I had got in on purpose, and me telling her I was in town on a bust assignment, and having no other purpose now, and dead broke, was now on my way to do mushrooms at Griffith Park Observatory with my cousin, and that I would need provisions to get us through the long dark trip. She had asked me where I’d come from, and when I said Oakland she told me she had not been since she was 13 and wanted to see it again. I said: “Well, if you ever end up there again, just say the word and I’ll come running . . .”
Two weeks later the cashier and I were in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco being acid-dosed by total strangers holding a large vial of clear liquid, and after I had paid the guys with a half pack of cigarettes and a five dollar bill, I said to my new friend: “We gotta get to Ruby Room before this stuff kicks in.” It felt like the safest and most fun place to be just then. As the sun set into the Pacific Ocean, she and I hopped into the Doomsmobile, her having total faith in me despite being a complete stranger, and I floored it to get back onto the highway and across the Bay Bridge all the way to my beloved Ruby Room by the lake before the big acid windup rendered me clownish behind the wheel.
There we found a Friday night crowd of beautiful freaks all living in perfect harmony in the dark. This girl and I sat down in the back with our tallboys, and a guy holding a chihuahua offered us each a banana, which we took gladly. We stayed till last call, then got back in the car and drove up to Grizzly Peak, which was completely shrouded in mist and fog, and where we were totally alone. We cracked about a hundred little glow sticks I had in the trunk and lined the windows and the inside of the car with them, then leaned the seats back and listened to music and talked for an hour with the heat on. And looking at her face dimly lit by glowing rainbow colors, I thought something embarrassing like, “You know, I could definitely love this girl. Maybe I already do . . .”
They called Ruby Room “Oakland’s living room” which was true enough for me. It just felt like a place that was always there when I needed it. How many people had I met there in the gloom, or had them meet me there? It must have been dozens upon dozens. I wondered if I would ever find a people-meeting nexus like that again. If such a place exists somewhere else, I’m sure I don’t know it. And for all the many stories I have told you of being there with old friends and new freaks, I had also spent many nights there alone when I had nowhere else to go. Ruby Room was reliably rundown and cheap and full of the same people. The bartenders always remembered me. And in all the many years I had gone there, it had not changed one iota. There was a comfort in that.
Of course none of the people I was with on that last night at Ruby Room in the final days of 2023 knew what I was thinking. It was their first time there and so they took it for what it was, having no past history there or any possible one in the future. Nonetheless, the whole bar was in a good mood and you wouldn’t think the place was standing on the crater rim of extinction. These fine Americans wanted to squeeze out the last bit of the thing before that day of doom came to pass, and so I attempted to live in this spirit as well, even if I was sadder than hell about it.
Round midnight I paid my tab and stepped out onto that particular stretch of 14th Street where I had stood many hundreds of nights smelling like lime and cigarettes, and now for the last time. I looked across the way at the twinkling lights ringed around dark Lake Merritt and wondered, in a grand sense, where I would go now that I had no place else to go. I had already left Oakland for the fourth and final time, so maybe it didn’t make much difference now that I was no longer a local . . . but I reckon I just liked knowing it was there is all, and that I could go back to it whenever I was in town. I liked knowing that the lights were on and that the ghouls were brooding and smoking cigarettes in the dark in the back room or doing key bumps in the bathroom, and on and on. Alas! The reptiles had triumphed once again. . . .
Renowned watering hole hangs on no more . . . Oakland’s own purgatory bites the dust! Ruby Room, good night! And if California slides into the ocean like the mystics and statistics say it will, then perhaps it is best that we knew of the exact moment of Ruby Room’s demise, that we had time to preemptively mourn, and that we were able to lay it to rest as a family. Time of death is midnight on January 1st, 2024. Boys, go ahead and tag it and bag it. I guess I’ll just have to find some other gross place to mope around in the dark. I just hope that, if nothing else, it is filled with friendly freaks and lit dimly by ruby-red lights.