Shakin’ in the car
and the car won’t go.
That’s the way you spell
Chicago.

Those are the opening lyrics to a song by Bobby Rush called “Bowlegged Woman.” It’s always been that way for Chicagoans, rough luck and worse weather. Still, we find ourselves in such circumstances. What I mean by that is we find each other. People say these days that Americans don’t know their neighbors. You wouldn’t know it from living here. I’ve been in Chicago a decade plus and I still keep finding myself over and over again in the people just around the corner. And just around the corner is a bar called Archie’s.

Crossing Augusta Boulevard walking north past Puerto Rico Food & Liquors, I look to my right towards the horizon. The John Hancock Center splits the sky in two, even from this distance on Rockwell Street in Ukrainian Village. I’ve got a buzz on and the sun is setting in the west, creating a mixture of colors both bright and dark behind the tower to the east as it looms over us all. I sense, for the first time, what truly brings me to the dive just south of my apartment on a nondescript corner of Iowa Street.

It’s not the $2 Hamm’s during happy hour during the week. It’s not the shot of Evan Williams I’ve come to always order along with said beer after my days of remote working. It’s not even the comped shot after that first one that the bearded bartender inevitably pours for me to my begrudging acceptance. He and I both know the coy act of reluctant gratitude is simply that, an act. I always take the shot. Still, it’s not the alcohol that draws me to this place.

It’s the silver tooth shining back at me in one of my friend’s upper jaw when she smiles and laughs. It’s the tattoos on her husband’s arms and knuckles, the capitalized word “CASH” forever emblazoned across his left hand’s fingers as they grip a Twisted Tea. It’s the stories they tell me, day over day and week over week. How to break horses in Michigan. How to paint a house in the hot summer heat three stories up a scaffold. It’s in the toughened hands of another regular, who passes her time at a fabrication shop, molding metal into whatever shape she desires.

It’s the people in this place. In the bar with a free pool table and a marlin hanging above the rows of tequila, bison grass vodka, and budget-friendly bourbon, I’ve come to enjoy not the taste of alcohol but the touch of community. We all feel the need to belong, to connect. We all have felt that pain of loneliness during a cold winter night or the idleness of a beautiful sunny Sunday morning where plans are at a premium. Thankfully, I know I always have a place to go when such is the case. And go I do. Just to find myself.