You think about the pack of smokes sitting on the little table on your porch at home. Down the phone lines, the bong rips again, and you know this story isn’t getting any shorter.

– This dingleberry, he lives in the place, but you can tell by the way the bartender doesn’t give him the nod and the way the boozehounds turn their stools away from him a little that they all wish he would fucking move out. Right now he can’t believe his luck, a new fucking face in this place he can chew the ear off of. He starts right in with, Hey my name’s so and so and I do such and such and ain’t it hotter than a bitch out there and this bartender he can’t make a good margarita to save his life and here’s the secret to a good margarita. And the questions. What’s your name anyway? Ain’t seen you here before, you from around here? You never been here before, you don’t know about this place? Everybody knows about this place, how can you be from around here and not know about the old M Bar, the old Murder Bar?

You stop worrying about the cigarettes.

– Yeah, the dingleberry calls the place the Murder Bar. It’s that place, you know the one. They had it closed for a couple years? Well, now it’s open again. So he tells this story about the place, how it’s not really named the Murder Bar or even the M Bar, that’s just what people from the neighborhood, people in the know, call it ’cause they were living here when it happened. He tells you, Feel around under the ledge of the bar, the wood there, you can feel the holes that are still there from when they shot the place up and killed all those people in here. And he’s right, the holes are there. They sanded them down so you don’t get any splinters, but the holes are there, man.

You hear the guy on the phone take a quick drink of something and you know exactly what it is. You can almost smell it, the warm bite of Tullamore Dew.

– Now the dingleberry starts telling you about it, how a guy that used to work in this place, when it was the bar before this one, got in some kind of money trouble or something and came in the place one night to rob his own boss and he went haywire and ended up blowing away everybody in the place, like twenty people in cold blood.