The Death of our Cheers

Sullenly, I stared at my clear glass of water that I had been sipping on for the past few minutes. There wasn't any ice, thankfully, as I hate having ice in my drinks. Usually they fill the entire cup with ice so they can scheme their way into not having to pump out larger amounts of soda to the patrons. Of course, by they I mean those in the restaurant business and the restaurant in question is the Wingers restaurant, the white-trash mining community surrogate for Buffalo Wild Wings. This wasn't my first time here by any means, and that attributes to my sullen state of mind. Was my food not good? Was the service terrible? I don't have the answer to the first, because I chose not to eat anything besides the small bowl full of popcorn that they provide to their guests. The service was adequate; what you would expect from a restaurant of this magnitude.

Something was missing. I could feel it as soon as my roommate Jayce had asked me to go out to eat. At first glance it didn't feel the same. Were we celebrating something? Was it a special night? No, but that hadn't stopped us from making the same trips all those times a year prior to tonight. Wingers was a haven, our haven. Whenever we wanted to spice things up, Wingers was where we would head. Whenever there was an event that stirred us up, we would head to Wingers afterward to either wind down the night or to enhance our evening. If we had found ourselves to be jaded, bleary, we would look to spruce things up by going down to Wingers. This was our Oasis, the bar in Cheers, the coffee shop in Seinfeld, The Max in Saved by the Bell.

Usually, depending on who was in attendance, I would start by ordering myself a nice, tall glass of Bud Light. After I downed that, I would order another one. After those two, with the equivalent of about four bottles of beer in my stomach and feeling slightly intoxicated, I would move on to some harder liquor. Beer is great, but when it takes a twelve pack to get you drunk, and I mean drunk, you tend to feel a little too full and find yourself making one too many trips to the bathroom. Back in those days, Wingers had a special on drinks each and every night, and you'd be crazy to think I wouldn't take them up on their offer. Whether it be dollar shot night or two dollar beer night, in which I would break apart from taking the shots and just drink beer no matter how full I got, things always turned into an adventure. There was the time that my friend Riley and I had about five shots each, Jager bombs for me, bong water for him, coupled with at least five beers each of our own brands, all before 4 in the afternoon and before the night shift had even clocked in. As we proceeded to leave, Riley dropped his bottle of beer, shattering it on the floor and then fleeing the scene of the crime before anyone noticed. He then lost his sunglasses about three blocks down the road as he stuck his head out of the window to vomit. Oh, yeah, we also went back and had just as much to drink four hours later. Thank God for Jayce, who will always serve as our designated driver.

Or how about the time Riley and myself plowed through over a hundred and twenty shots combined of their 'One Dollar Shot Night' in addition to six Jager bombs for me, seven bong waters for him, and at least a few beers. We found our tab eleven dollars short of breaking the 200 mark. A week later they didn't have their special drink nights anymore. We like to credit ourselves. If drinking stories doesn't do it for you, how about some stories of a young Casanova, racking up waitress' cell phone numbers left and right until I had the entire place electronically stenciled down on my phone's contact list. If you think that's hyperbole then you should also think that me not being able to pull through in the clutch would be an over-exaggeration as well, but sadly, none of those numbers did me any good. At least I got them.

Drunken stories from barely legal drinkers womanizing and enjoying themselves. Every young kids dream it seems. But we didn't take this place for granted. We weren't your average college kids showing up to tear a place down. We respected Wingers. It was almost as if we were stockholders coming to the root of our investment to see how our money was being put to use. We frowned at those who treated her wrong, those who left a mess for the waitresses to clean, letting their napkins amble to the floor, sending their straw wrappers flying through the air, spilling condiments over the tables. We heckled the out of towners, those who came by for a quick bite, almost mocking the place as they knew they were in a hurry but couldn't succumb to ordering a burger from McDonalds. They never took the time to take in their surroundings, to let the scenery consume them, absorb them almost as if this restaurant had a long standing tradition. They used the place because they felt that they had "standards".

There were only a few people who truly appreciated this place. I can gladly say that I am one of those people. There was nothing like the excitement of proclaiming that "Tonight feels like a Wingers night!" Then letting the stimulating euphoria take over of knowing anything possible was now in play as we dolled ourselves up as if we were heading to a school dance. Throughout all of the chicken wings, alcohol, girls, jokes and laughter, what was held onto most was the memories. The way that we drove by the place and then just looked at each other, as we just knew all that encompassed that building. Friendships were groomed in there. Lady skills were matured in there. Maturation as a whole manifested itself in there, as we blossomed from, me anyway, drunk, unstable college kids to mature drunk collegiate ambassadors resembling well seasoned frat brothers. From rookies to veterans. It was almost tear-jerking the last time we went to Wingers last May as our semester had come to a close. You'd be foolish to think that we went because we were hungry. No, Wingers was our universal, symbolizing all the fun that we had had over the course of January through May of 2009. As hope for an even better time filled our hearts, we parted ways with Wingers last May looking forward to that first day when we would all rejoin in some form. Maybe it would just be Jayce and I. Maybe it would be a few new friends who had ventured to Elko to attend college. Maybe we would make new friends.

All of that optimism somehow dwindled away. Throughout the past four months our desires to go to Wingers had lessened. It seemed that we needed to start off the semester with a bang, and Wingers was the perfect destination. One problem was that we thought we needed to yield a huge ceremony, numbers in the tens at least. We couldn't start it off with just Jayce and me. We had to have a huge bash, and that didn't come until my birthday at the end of September. Our plans had never fully come to fruition. A handful of us attended the pseudo birthday bash, at least half of what we tried to expect for, but at least I was able to at least relive some of those old drinking days and we shared a few fun stories that we had had in the past. After that, timing was terrible. Basketball had consumed a decent amount of my time, and my money budget wasn't expandable enough to include $30-$50 weekly at Wingers like it had in the past.

The next time Jayce and I found ourselves at Wingers, I had asked a girl out with, and it was unsettling when one of the waitresses had been one of the lucky vixens whose number I was able to attain. Any previous fires had to be squashed instantly so it wouldn't appear that I was flirting with my waitress while I had a lovely girl sitting next to me. This was a good two months after the September bash.

That all lead to where we were at some odd hours ago. A cold nostalgia crept into my spidey-senses, but it wasn't the same. We opened the same doors that we had done hundreds of times before, but it just wasn't the same. None of the old friends we had made were there, and if they were either we didn't recognize them or they didn't recognize us. Funny how an elongated time period can do that. We had drifted away from our haven, the place that had tied everything up so smoothly and nicely in the past. Ironically enough, our waitress did remember us, well, Jayce anyway. She knew exactly what he wanted to drink, Root Beer, only because they didn't have Mountain Dew, and eat, the Sticky Fingers Salad. I was mistaken for our other friend Trevor, and felt out of place when she thought I wanted a strawberry lemonade. Me? A strawberry lemonade? The same person who got a funny look when I ordered a Coors Light, throwing off our waitress at the time and having her wonder out loud "I thought you always ordered Bud Lights?" with me giggling and replying that I wanted to see if she was on her toes that night? They didn't remember me?

It took me halfway through my first glass of water before I realized I was drinking it without a straw. I'm not a fan of drinking straight from the cup in restaurants, as I can't fully put my trust in the dish washers in the back to thoroughly rinse out each cup after it had been used. What's sad is that I thought the waitress didn't bring me a straw, but I forgot that it was placed in with my utensils wrapped inside a napkin. As Jayce consumed his dinner, I stared blankly into my glass of water as if it were a magical crystal ball showing me flashes of past adventures. To remind me of the better times we had had here. To show me how to have fun here, to show that this place wasn't as depressed as it had seemed. It started out promising, from a dispirited position anyway, when the place looked to be half-filled. Half of the room though was comprised of one big party, and when they left, the spirit of the night left. What was left was an overweight couple that didn't say much at all, a family of four with two young kids, and another family somewhere out of my peripheral vision that had a young child who cried in spurts, quieting down when the parents were able to stimulate the kid, sparking back up when the kid became restless.

Few words were shared between Jayce and I, as we did our best to forge an exciting evening. I thought about asking our waitress about an old acquaintance and if she still worked there. I contemplated between ordering a beer. The highlight of the night came when something was discovered in the men's bathroom that the waitresses found very exhilarating, but I couldn't come to picking myself up out of my cushioned booth to found out what it was, or ask anyone for that matter.

Our waitress brought our ticket after we declined desert. Normally this would be where I would claim it was my birthday to try to finagle us a free ice cream pie. I can't remember how many times waitresses fell for that before they started to either check my driver's license or flat out succumb to my mischief and bring us a pie as if it were on the house. There was no extra fifteen minutes of convo between us and our waitress, fifteen minutes of back and forth flirtatious rapport. No, instead Jayce scribbled down his John Hancock, we put on our coats and never looked back.