ROX-TV looks at strange nights out across America. Starting with the accidental discovery of Milwaukee’s secret bar and restaurant “SafeHouse” back in 2006.

Welcome back to the ROX-TV website. Tonight, I will be discussing some strange nights out that have occurred in my life throughout the years. Everything I talk about in this series happened to me personally, while burning down the road of my twenties. The only thing that I will change (if that) are the names. Beyond that, the dates maybe slightly fuzzy because during this time in my life I was a tornado of spontaneous action and alcoholism. I suppose you can take that any way you want. So, without further to do, I give you “ROX-TV’s Strange Nights Out” series opener. (Author’s Note: None of the photos shown below have anything to do with this particular story, I just thought they captured the spirit and added them because I could)

Milwaukee, Wisconsin 

Year: 2005ish (2 days and nights in the Summer)

Method of travel: Amtrak Train

Accidental discoveries: “SafeHouse” Bar and Restuarant 

Substance: Excessive Alcohol consumption

So there comes a time in every young man’s life, when things start to get a little crazy. It might be that point when you’ve finally come into your own. This could stem from a steady job, or a first apartment or house, maybe just with age. I would describe that time, when you’ve firmly set sail from the family home and strut out into the world to see what you can get up to. In my particular set of circumstances, I was in my early to mid-twenties when I had arrived. I had a house, a job with some money in my pocket (not much), a reliable car, and the wild manic energy of youth still holding tight. I was my own man, blooming alcoholic perhaps, but still pretty fun to be around most of the time. I ran with a group of wild cats who we dubbed the “Knob Hill Gang” after a local street that most of the guys lived on.

We were pretty far out when it came to getting rowdy and had a core group of ten or so participants who frequently stopped in for a party or two. The scene was pretty active and we drank a lot, among other things which I won’t go into here. The main culprit of this story was alcohol and it had become a driving factor in my life. Driving in the sense that I enjoyed drinking greatly and it often had severe influence over my choices. This was a bad recipe and the older I got, the wilder my days off got. Perhaps nothing had really changed, except that I had condensed my normal schedule of partying all week, into a couple nice and neat days on the weekend. This compression drove me to great heights in a relatively short amount of time and space, and made it nearly impossible to live a steady, smooth type of life.

I was on the go all the time, whether it was the tattoo shop or the nearest bar for proper dosing. When that wasn’t going down, I would run with the Knob Hill boys from down the way, and we would either destroy their party pad or bar hop the local area. It was a fast, chaotic, and extremely interesting time in my life. Things never seemed to stop. For a long time, I didn’t mind this way of life, and let the wind take me wherever it suited. Some nights I’d drift around the shitty bars in Flint and other nights I’d crash all the bars in the country. It didn’t really matter where I was as long as I was getting hammered (and there was a good juke box nearby). I knew I was an alcoholic before I was 21, perhaps as early as 17, but I didn’t pay it much attention. In the early years I could bounce back pretty fast. It wasn’t until later that drinking in the morning was desired or even necessary, but it would come eventually.

By the middle part of the decade (00’s) I found myself inching dangerously close to losing what control I did have over the matter, which wasn’t much at all. I bet if you stood forty or fifty feet back, you could see there was only one of two places I was taking the cruise ship. It was either complete sobriety, which I would never have agreed to, even though at times I did want it (usually when detox sick) or the suicide ride down the drain with alcohol. You can guess which one I chose…

There came a point in my life around 2006 when things became almost impossible to manage. I was calling into work a lot, due to the never-ending brown bottle war. I would enter rehab for the first time that year although sadly, it wouldn’t be my last…I say this all because I think it gives the reader the type of head space that I was in around the time of this particular story in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and how I could accidently find a bar that I had no idea existed.

2005-ish “A plan comes together”

So, towards the middle part of my roaring twenties, my friends and I had started taking trips to different cities in the Midwest and the east coast to travel to, with the sole intention of getting wasted the entire time and then returning home. It was our version of being “Vikings” although we didn’t do much except invade the space and drink our asses off. We never went looking for trouble, even when it did find us from time to time with the local cops or people in charge. We rolled into town and just lived out our “movie” in a place picked off the map that sounded interesting. Prior to this trip, there had been runs to Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, and about twenty towns in Michigan (give or take) with the sole purpose to party and then bail out.

We would sit around (me and others, which I will leave unnamed at this point) and look at the map. Because we all were working, we had a few bucks to get into trouble with. The Chicago trip had been a pretty sloshy affair and ended on a sour note due to my level of intoxication, Boston had brought on a shake down by city cops which almost ended badly, the Cleveland run had been another disaster run in with the police on the highway, and it seemed like we (me and the people who travelled with me) were just tempting the Gods to cut us down. We had a nightmare trip to Traverse City, which involved fire trucks and police, but that is for another time. This is the Milwaukee story, and the others can wait their turn.

So, we looked at this map and it was agreed upon that Milwaukee, Wisconsin might be a cool place to land and do our thing. On paper the downtown looked pretty cool and other than checking to see if Amtrak went to the city, we were done with planning. I secured some time off from work and a few of us brought some tickets. That was about as far as the planning ever went, other than having a pocket full of money, there never seemed to be much more to consider (only in your 20’s).

Train Depot: Durand Michigan

Time: Way to early

Destination: Milwaukee

Estimated travel time: 6 hours by train

I’m not sure if we didn’t check or didn’t care, but the fucking train launched at like 6:55am. Normally this would have been ok, maybe…but since we all had the night off before, we got drunk and when the buzzer went off at 6am, we were still drunk. This had all the trappings of a fast descent into trouble town and things were going to go from bad to worse within two hours. Amtrak, at least back then, allowed you to bring your own alcohol on the train. They didn’t care and didn’t say shit about it. I had a backpack with a case of beer crammed inside and there was also a snack car that sold drinks too (overpriced but available).

I had been in this type of scene before and would just drink through the hard hours and hope for the best. This normally caused an early nap around 4pm or no nap and black out drunk by like 9:30pm. Sometimes I could hold on and other times I couldn’t. I was curious as to what type of ride I was on, but because it was “vacation”, had no expectations either way. I didn’t have to go to work and that was all that mattered to me.

Before long, the constant drone of the train and the gentle rocking had settled in. I was popping tops with ease and that was all I needed to be happy. The train was pretty sparse as far as riders went, and I wondered how Amtrak could afford to stay in business. As more beers started to flow, my homeboy started to fall apart under the weight of the booze. He had a dreadfully lower tolerance to alcohol and could become difficult to work with after he crossed over into Valhalla. The earliest signs of a melt down were starting to form, and I knew that it was going to be a long ride.

Trouble near Gary, Indiana

Counter: 2 hours into the ride

Greatest Threat: The Amtrak employees and the Conductor

Minor Threat: The other passengers on board

So, there we were, cruising along the tracks at a moderate speed and my buddy Nate-Dog had finally come apart. Like a sweater that had slowly unraveled in a Weezer song, Nate-Dog had turned into that guy that made everything more difficult. Now, I’m not casting judgement really, my thought process was only slightly better at times, but I did have a general idea of when not to fuck up royally. One of those times, in my opinion, was on the train ride. The Amtrak scene was cool enough, a person just had to keep things a click below the trouble setting and no one would bother anyone. But Nate-Dog had other ideas, which included serenading women on the quiet-car, proposing marriages to total strangers (with some heart felt type emotion), swearing way to loudly when it was not the right time to do so, and smoking cigarettes on the train or in between cars (each car had doors at either end, that you had to walk through, then into an area between the next car, and enter another door).

At first the Amtrak people delighted in dealing my friend and even let him order some wine, if he promised to sit and relax, quietly. After the wine arrived, he drank it down in two gulps, and turned into the Nostro via warrior. Clamoring up and down the aisles, as nervous people smiled without making eye contact. Within a few minutes, the shit got serious. The Amtrak lady was like “if you don’t knock this off, I’m telling the conductor” and of course that didn’t set in. I was having trouble processing this slow descent into disaster and every so often, asked Nate-Dog to “chill” but I knew. It wasn’t going to matter because Nate-Dog did not chill, it wasn’t his style and I had never seen it happen as long as I knew him.

The biggest problem was, the Amtrak lady did actually go and find the Conductor of the entire train, and she came back with the guy, and there were no more smiles.

Conductor: “Look, if you don’t stop, we are going to literally stop the train and make you get off. I am not joking”.

Nate-Dog: “Why did you say those things, Nostro via ha ha ha, what? Don’t be a dick….

Conductor: “We are travelling through Gary in five minutes, sit down and be silent, or I’m hitting the brakes and the cops will arrest you”.

Nate-Dog: “Come on dude, what the fuck? I didn’t do nothing…burp….burp…fucking bunch of shit”

Conductor: “Whatever, we will be there in four minutes”.

Me: “Hey man, I tried to get him to calm down, I don’t want to get off in Gary and I don’t want to be arrested either. He won’t listen man”.

Conductor: “I don’t care, if this is still going on, I’m radioing ahead, it’s up to you but this is not a joke”.

Me: “Alright Nate-Dog, they seem pretty serious, I’m not getting off in Gary, Indiana, if you push it to the limit that’s up to you, but I’m staying on this fucking train man”.

Nate-Dog: “Bunch of fucking shit, ha ha ha, I need a smoke”.

I decided that I no longer wanted to be in the same car as my buddy. I was on vacation, and I hadn’t pushed it to the limit, I wasn’t getting stranded in Indiana because he was having a laugh. I bid him farewell and decided that sitting somewhere else might be a better move. I grabbed the beer and headed to the back of the train where the quiet car was. (A quiet car was exactly that, no talking, no noise, people trying to sleep) It seemed like a safe refuge from the tornado in the other car. At any moment I figured the train would be stopping. I closed my eyes and tried to relax, while sipping another beer of course. Forty-five seconds later, Nate-Dog had made his way into the quiet car and hadn’t seemed to really relax or turn the volume down. The energy was turning on us and I prayed to the party Gods, to let us at least get to Milwaukee before we encountered legal trouble.

Somehow or way, even though Nate-Dog never really calmed down, the conductor never stopped the train and we kept rolling. I left the quiet car, when my homie started getting worked up again and moved to the bar car/snack car. This bizarre game of one-sided hide and seek continued on until we rolled into the Chicago terminal. We had to change trains and had a bit of time to kill before we could do so.

Chicago Union Station

When we finally got to the Union Station in Chicago, a small sigh of relief was let out. I was pretty buzzed, so I stopped caring as much as I had near Gary. All I told Nate-Dog was that they didn’t play in Chicago and if he acted up, they’d probably throw the cuffs on. We had about one hour to kill, and I wasn’t babysitting anymore. My friend wasn’t a bad dude, but I wasn’t going to play the role. I didn’t have the energy or care to follow him around, preventing people from pounding the shit out of him or arresting him. On some level I think he understood, and with that, we walked up the long walkway between the trains towards the Station. I’ve always enjoyed checking out the trains coming in and going out, they are really cool to see up close and I enjoyed being one step closer to Milwaukee. I had been to the Union Station before, and I knew there was a bar inside with my name on it.

We found the bar, which I believe was called the Junction but that could be wrong. It was a dope little spot, near the mezzanine if my memory serves me. The joint looked real inviting, with a wood bar, high chairs, and lots of televisions playing ESPN or some kind of shit like that. I slumped into my chair, feeling the effects of some thirteen or so beers piled on top of a drunk from the night before. I didn’t mind that much, except the hangovers became double when I piled days up. I barely cared at that point, because I had at least three solid days of drinking ahead of me and I enjoyed that thought as I flagged the bartender down for a tall beer. Sanctuary…until Nate-Dog remembered that he was semi-out of control and decided he wasn’t buying any beer from the bar, he had a six pack of Heineken in his backpack. He managed to get one open and threw the bottle cap out into the main hallway area of the station.

I watched this and then turned back to my tall beer. “Fuck it” I thought and I really meant it. I had been where he was, many times, but it was getting boring. He was the master of his own fate and I had a beer to kill.

Bartender: “Uh, like you can’t bring your own beer in here”

Nate-Dog: “What the fuck are you talking about”

Bartender: “You brought a beer in, you have to buy ours if you want to drink in here…uh”

Nate-Doge: (Drunken smile, no comprehension as to what the girl was talking about)

Me: “Fuck man, she said you gotta buy their beer, if you’re going to be in here” (turning to the lady) “Is that right miss”

Bartender: “Uh, that’s the rules…(confusion by the situation)

Nate-Dog: (un-intelligible laughter)

Me: “Fuck it”

Bartender: “………..”

So, after some uncomfortable silence, the lady gave up trying to get through to Major Tom and we paid our bill. The hour was up and the next train to Milwaukee was waiting to take off. I don’t remember finding the right train but we must have because a short time later, we were on a train, slowly moving north out of the 2nd City.

END OF THIS SEGMENT, TO LEARN THE STUNNING CONCLUSION KEEP COMING BACK

Signing Off,

Mike Shepard

ROX-TV Head Writer

shepard2909@hotmail.com