Sometimes life catches people off-guard and it still ends up working out.

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It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. At all. My girlfriend and I were living on the east side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’d moved there a few months prior with my roommate Paul after he’d convinced me that the east side was the happening area in Milwaukee. Paul and I had been sharing one side of a two-family home in Waukesha with our friend Kenny. Kenny went and got married and Paul and I were uninvited to live there anymore.

Paul’s assessment of Waukesha was that it was a bit of a cultural wasteland at the time, a safe place where nothing much ever happened and where suburbanites go to die. He frequently quoted a friend of his that said “What Waukesha needed was a good riot.” Something of substance. The same guy also said that the sign of a rich family in Waukesha was two cars up on blocks instead of just one. It wasn’t as bad as all that, but it was certainly not the east side of Milwaukee, either.

So we moved to the eclectic east side, just a stone’s throw from Lake Michigan. Within a couple of weeks I knew it was the right decision. The place was vibrant with young professionals, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee students, and a healthy population of taxpaying homeowners to form the residential base. Paul, who was six years older but still single, took me around to the hot nightspots around the area. There were a number of popular bars within walking distance of our place including, Hooligans, Jakesters and Von Triers.

One of the more renowned, albeit hard-to-find bars on the lower east side was Wolski’s Tavern. It is literally in the middle of a neighborhood, and if it weren’t for the neon signs in the window, you’d swear it was just another house. It has a longtime, cult-like following built in part by its popular bumper stickers that read, “I closed Wolskis.” At the time, the only way to get one was to actually close the place, a feat of physical endurance given the closing time of 2:30 AM. They had a host of other stickers with catchy slogans like, Wolskis: Eat before you come, or Adventure, Danger, Romance, Wolskis. If you’d ever been there, you’d agree that they were all spot on with their tongue-in-cheekness.

Wolski’s was a working class bar. I’ll never forget the first time Paul took me there, the last stop after a Friday fish fry and subsequent bar hopping. I was stupefied by the fact that the place was squeezed into a narrow street resembled more of an alley. There it sat amongst the aging apartment buildings and duplexes in all its blue collar glory. We walked in and the place was overwhelming in its humility. It certainly did not put on false pretenses, wearing proudly a décor of utilitarian average. Cigarette smoke hung thick in the air as the hits of the day from the Violent Femmes and REM thumped from the stereo. Tacked to the ceiling were flags from various countries, giving the place a warm, international feel. Behind the bar sat a heavy, ancient cash register that was still functional. Transactions required a show of force to just to push the keys down.

Perhaps the most unique quality of the bar was just outside the men’s room. There, within sight of the whole bar, was a sink with soap and paper towels for men to wash up with after using the restroom. Unintentionally, it served as a bit of a quality assurance checkpoint for those women looking to take a man home for the night. If a woman saw a guy go into the bathroom and come out without a stop at the sink outside, she should probably start looking for another man.

In the back part of the bar sat a pool table and a few dart boards that used real, steel tipped darts. These were the darts we grew up with, the kind that stuck in anything, including the occasional stray that hit your brother in the leg and stuck for just a short moment while he howled about the room. Old school darts for an old school tavern. The wall near the boards held a few plaques that Wolskis teams had won in past tournaments. The engraved plates on the plaques were pockmarked with dents from years of errant throws by less gifted or maybe, more inebriated patrons. A chalkboard hung on the wall for keeping score. Wolskis didn’t need any fancy auto-scoring electronic dart machines. Chalk was cheap.

My girlfriend, Donna and I had been there a time or two since she’d moved out to live with Paul and I during her summer internship at a local restaurant. She was as enamored and taken with the charm and old-school homeliness of Wolskis as I was. We’d both seen enough fern bars and run of the mill places that we just sort of adopted the place as our own. She was new to Wisconsin and I was determined to show her all of the unique, quirky and culturally rich nightspots of the area and this was one. Maybe the quirkiest of them all.

I had a few friends from work that lived on the hoppin’ east side, young guys who, like me, loved the area. One Thursday night in July, Donna and I arranged to meet my friend Bill for a couple beers and maybe a game of darts. Bill was the late eighties equivalent of a hipster and had become a casual friend I worked with at the computer mapping company in Waukesha. We’d hung out a few times on the east side and, being a Thursday night, there was reason to celebrate the coming weekend a day early.

Donna and I pulled up seats at the bar. The bartender came over, slid a basket of popcorn in front of us and asked, “What can I get you two?”

“Gin and tonic,” Donna answered.

“I’ll have a Point beer, please,” I chimed.

“Coming right up!”

We turned to each other and started talking about our day. I was waist deep in a big mapping project at Intelligraphics at the time. It was a private sector mapping company desperately trying to turn a profit from year to year, so employees were pushed to work efficiently with an eye for detail. I loved the work, but the salary was pathetic. Both Bill and I were ever on the watch for job opportunities and saw Intelligraphics as simply a launch-point to something better.

Donna was working nights at a restaurant in suburban Brookfield. She’d been hired as an intern at during the summer before her senior year at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her school in New York recognized her time as a waitress as partial credit toward her degree in hotel and resort management. Wages were low, but on a busy weekend night she did well with tips. She was clearly in the Midwest to be with me. The internship credit and her job helped justify a summer in Milwaukee. It was great to finally have a female companion in my Wisconsin home, so all of it was okay by me.

We finished our drinks and ordered another. “I wonder where Bill is?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Did he say he was coming for sure?”

“He said he may, whatever that means,” I replied.

We talked a little more about our families and our how it was nice being in a neutral place, away from both of them. I’d come to love living away in Wisconsin and was forging a new life for myself. Donna’s internship was like a bit of a paid summer vacation to a city she’d only seen briefly once before when she came to visit for a weekend. We were young lovers and Wolskis was living up to its bumper sticker that read, Adventure. Danger. Romance. Wolskis.

Customers came and went, most staying for a drink or two and then heading out. The bar had no kitchen so, other than the free popcorn, there wasn’t really a dining menu to speak of. It was a drinkers bar, a place to let off some steam and solve a few world problems.

After an hour and a half, I looked toward the window only to see there was still no sign of Bill. I turned to Donna and noticed her gazing at me fixedly. She had a broad smile on her face and a glint in her eye. There was a definite gin-tainted glow about her.

“What? Why are you smiling? What are you thinking?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m just thinking how much I just want to marry you and have babies together.”

I was caught off-guard, totally flat-footed by her statement. Knowing that her judgement might be a tad clouded, I clarified her request with my reply.

“Um. Okay. So…are you proposing to me at Wolskis Tavern?”

She grinned wider and said, “Yes. I guess I am!”

We both broke out laughing at the relative absurdity of the statement, and the reality that was just laid out before us.

“Well, alrighty then. No more drinks for you,” I said, jokingly.

“Well, it’s true. Is there anything wrong with that?”

“No. Nothing at all. It makes complete sense. I’m actually okay with it. It’s just that…well…we’re at Wolskis!”

Again we both laughed at the awkward sentiment present there in that moment. Of course, what she did not know was it was my intent to propose to her in a few months at Christmas. Being a bit more of a sentimentalist, I thought that method made more sense than a spontaneous proposal from a bar stool.

She leaned forward and gave me a kiss. There was no denying that we were in love. These past few months that we’d spent together in Milwaukee had affirmed the fact that we were compatible and that the trips to visit one another from our distant cities weren’t just loved filled vacations, but rather a connection of our beings that eventually served to bring us together here and now. Even if it was Wolskis.

The next day, we were on the road to St. Paul, Minnesota to visit my family for the weekend. As we thumped down the road, I turned to Donna and said, “Do you remember what you said last night?”

“Yes. And I remember what you answered, too,” she replied.

We both laughed, knowing the road before us would include a whole lot more of each other.

THE END

By Jim Landwehr

From: United States

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