Cheers Tavern. Most of you jump right into a sitcom, but for locals of East York, Toronto, Cheers is their handy Moe’s Tavern on the Danforth. Unless you were there, and maybe even if you were, you wouldn’t know there was anything particularly special about it. It was a vast and yawning space, eerily vacant everywhere save the bar, where Joe served up the sauce to a small handful of faithful alcoholics.

Yes, I was for a time one of the regs, by chance of course. I do so love a dive, and this one happened to be near the little white house where I briefly lived.

Cheers and I were introduced at the exact intersection when my imbibing averages skyrocketed in the aftermath of losing Marko. As time gave some opiate and relief to some of the grief, so did I find myself having fewer nightcaps, more spaced out, getting back to normal. By natural turn of things, I moved into another home, and by chance the new dive is called The Black Swan. 

There are probably 129 bars along the Danforth that I have never been in, but I was part of the human history at Cheers, and witness to the fact that no strata of society is without story.  Cheers was the sprawling kingdom of a robust and fiery gentleman named Joe, who had previously owned a peeler bar, and had been at Cheers for many, many years. I am speculating to think that might be twenty years but I recall an impression that Joe and his brother had had it forever. He spoke often of the good old days when his brother was still alive. Two years before, the brother, Joe’s musical partner, died of cancer. Joe had been depressed ever since, but still sang Italian love songs on Saturday nights.

Briefly Joe opened a kitchen. A spitfire redhead, stick thin with boundless energy, served back-bacon sandwiches and Cheez Whiz. Bonnie was seventysomething with a hot younger boyfriend, a silverfox with a gentle and handsome face. Bonnie was recovering from breast cancer and had outlived three husbands.

The trailer-bacon sandwiches were a staple for my friend Zoe, and that’s what she called them, Zoe whose name means life, Zoe who died over Thanksgiving. Falling apart, and feeling alone, feeling empty and sad, I went back to our old stomping ground for some of Joe’s wisdom and the comfort of a few fast shots. The place was boarded up. Joe had moved on. I stood and cried. 

This is the kind of place that feels like an old Johnny Cash song. In fact, Joe attributed the decline in clientele to a fatal shooting that happened several years ago, and not to the gino music he let fly.  It happened near the pool table. Joe pointed, and I could picture the police chalk outline on the tiled floor, just like Law and Order. Except I just felt so totally safe there.

Cheers Tavern. During the construction and renovations with the new hopeful owners, it crumpled to the ground a few weeks back. Two cats were fatally injured and none of the 30 tenants upstairs were killed. The collapse occurred on Friday, January 11, 2008. Cheers, of all the places stretching along Danforth endlessly, it was my own private dank sanctuary that fell to the ground. I was there with my brother. There with my mom. With Zoe, whom I wish would return and take another chance on this thing called life. With a lover who shall remain nameless. With Donnarama, who braved bullets to do drag in the east end. With my oldest artist friend, and also with my oldest friend left living, who noticed immediately the smell of piss creeping faintly and insidiously from the basement. With A. my ally or once I so thought, who ‘went nuts’, yeah dude right, whom I loved, in error or not. With the mad and the sad and the crinkled old bat and the wildlife sketch artist and the hot local pool sharks with their arm muscles rippling as they paused thoughtfully with that cue in hand, with no one but my diary and my tears, with the fiercest team I have, that was Cheers.

So much has changed. But you can’t go back to a place that’s gone. We used to bring our own music in to avoid the saccharine shice that Joe had kicking around. Eminem. Confessions on a Dancefloor by Madonna. Zoe danced to Miss Chatelaine. All of us crooned That’s What Friends are For one night, like all good little girls do at drunken karaoke. Johnny Cash, of course, and Lucinda Williams.
Cheers Tavern isn’t there anymore, but somehow that made it all the more an unlikely and relevant place in my life. In Zoe’s favourite book, The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood said, “Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.”

You can access Lorette C. Luzajic’s blogs, Little Miss Chatterbox and The Literary Addict, plus her artwork, other articles, bio, poetry collection, and fan mail, at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.