Adrift in the Duluth Triangle

[Author’s note: This originally ran in the 2024 Boubville zine. My title does not refer to the “Bar-muda Triangle” promotions of the West Duluth bar scene. This story was intended to be the start of a novella, a roman-à-clef about a barfly surviving depression. Each chapter was going to take place in a different establishment and be based on actual events, a “hero’s journey” bar crawl through the underworld one night. But after writing this first chapter, it seemed complete in itself as a short story, so I am calling it done. Borges wrote, “It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books — setting out in 500 pages an idea that can be perfectly related in five minutes.” That said, this story of life before Covid could be a prequel to this essay about when Covid hit.]

2019. From Sir Benedict’s Tavern on the Lake, to Vikre Distillery, to the Pizza Lucé bar, then back to Sir Ben’s: This is the Duluth Triangle. Stranded in its vortex for five years, between myself and my hillside home lies a gauntlet of the finest distilleries, tap rooms, and bars in the world. It is a puzzle solved differently every night. Like the doctor in Nightwood said to Djuna Barnes: “The night is not premeditated.”

Perhaps after a cocktail at Vikre, I will have a pint at Hoops Brewing, then to Lucé for tacos (and beer), then the speakeasy at Duluth Coffee Company for a choice local tap. Or maybe instead of Hoops, I will hit Canal Park Brewing, and then go a little off-sides to Blush before it opens, catching my buddy Daniel for a private shot, then to Zeitgeist for a cocky. Or none of the above, everything in between. Maybe it will be quiet, but who knows who I’ll run into. It comes to a nightly head at Sir Ben’s, one of the city’s lodestars, a center of soft power where all scenes intersect. There, like tagging home base, I’ll be loose enough to slide uphill a few blocks to my actual house.

My five-year mission, as much as practicable, has been to stay away from the house. It’s only where I sleep. Home is failure and disaster. I can walk to work, but I will be damned if I have to go fucking home. So that, what — I can find another sliver of glass under the radiator, long assumed vacuumed up, but sown around like dragon’s teeth, sprouting skeletons? I’m supposed to conquer my kitchen sink’s abandoned pyramid of undone dishes, disassembling an ancient monument? At this point it’s a matter of principle not to touch it, the ruins a part of my culture like Roman aqueducts. Consider my sink an art installation. In my will, I shall stipulate the dishes must never be done.

2 p.m. I clock out at the Co-op and into freedom. Negative 20 degrees with driving snow, I am not going home.

I check my reflection in the door of the employee vestibule as I suit up. In dad jeans, I am not going home. As long as I keep moving I’ll be fine. Doc Martins with no traction — check. Aquaman T-shirt under black zipper jacket with white piping, X-Men chic. Gray hoodie over that, gray North Face jacket over that. Green gloves in another Aquaman nod. Fuzzy black scarf like a feather boa around my neck. Found it in the road years ago. Heart-shaped sunglasses? Check. I bought these at Ragstock specifically in case I run into she of the glass shards, because the lenses are light enough that I can wear them indoors. Since I have local celebrity status I can get away with being that pretentious. But there is no way I’m making eye contact with her under any circumstances. The heart lenses disguise the fact that they’re blast shields. My man-bun is tight, a few broken-off strands hanging loose. I check my earrings: both hoops still there. Black knit cap with white letter word “SECURITY” on it. When people ask if I’m Security, I tell them it refers to emotional security. Burgundy canvas-and-leather Duluth Pack man-purse: It holds my notebook, pens, a paperback copy of the Odyssey, and the zines I’ve been leaving around to express myself.

I exit the vestibule like an airlock to the surface of Ganymede. Crunching across snow and ice away from the unbelievable Co-op dramas, out the back door and across the alley, I cut diagonally through the St. Mary’s parking lot to Sixth Avenue East.

Passing Gloria Dei Lutheran Church downhill toward the lake, Vikre Distillery is my goal. The furthest vertex of the Duluth Triangle, Vikre lies where the Lakewalk ends, or begins. It is an excellent opening move that sets up other possibilities, a prime jumping-off point for a freefall through the Triangle.

Sixth Avenue doesn’t go all the way downhill, so it’s tricky to get directly to the Lakewalk once you pass Gloria Dei. But like Marlow going up the river, it must be done. You must cross the underground highway that pokes out here and there, uterine hum of its traffic in the air. I slide down the long stair rail in the stairway-alley by the parking garage where Sixth Avenue should be. Then I cross First Street, snow blowing sideways, and switchback to an alley overlooking Superior Street. It’s only lake effect snow, it won’t accumulate.

I can see the lake staring me down out there, no horizon. Smeared gray sun low on gray water of undulating frozen glop, dotted with ice chunks big as cars. I push on like a letter carrier. I am the message and the medium.

The one thing I always know is I am going out. Home stands for crash landings. There is no one at home for me to crash into. My troglodyte brother lives in the downstairs apartment but I haven’t spoken to him in a year, one of my ghosts.

I have two exes within a block of me, the abusive one down the street — glass shard woman — and another asshole down the avenue. If I develop one more ex who lives a block uphill, they will have me surrounded. I should throw out these condoms and my last boner pills, commit to this blossoming celibacy. That seems like a defeat, but what have love and sex ever done for me?

My morning work schedule means I’m up early but I have weekday afternoon-evenings off, making it worth the low pay. The money’s enough for my monastic expenses, besides eating out for every meal and drinking like a fish. Small town, large appetites. Why travel when I’m already on the horizon? I dated a hiker once who always wanted to charge up the North Shore to see views you can see inside city limits. It took my whole life to get here, I am staying put.

Ishtar called Babylon “My holy city, mountain of obsidian.” Joyce wrote, “If I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world.” Blake called London “infinite London” and never left it. Duluth lies at world’s edge, or the center of the continent as you prefer, battered by triplicate weather systems converging over the Duluth Triangle.

Everyone who lives by the sea understands Lake Superior contains Creation. Nights the black water reflects the void, these are facts. The lake will consume me into dilution or spit me out at her leisure. But I’m not swimming today no matter the myth of how hardcore I am. The public thinks I swim daily with my reputation as the screwball lake photographer Lake Superior Aquaman. More like “the artist formerly known as.” I’m barely in the water anymore, it became a huge production just going to the beach. The only thing I’m swimming in today is drinks. Water is a mytho-poetic fluid, so is alcohol. Beer started civilization, its divine intoxications are our inheritance. Through a strange syncretism my trident became a pitchfork, water became firewater, and I morphed from aquatic spirit to God of the Underworld. Dante’s Inferno begins on my birthday in 1300 AD, Satan frozen at the center of the world. Winter in Duluth.

In my fifties, not sure I want to live to 65 much less 75 or goddamn 80. Who has such endurance? I’ve already far outlived Dad, outlived Hugo Ball. Receding gums telegraph my destiny of becoming a skull, then dust, then black hole food at the end of time. These thoughts keep my heart rate down. Maybe I’ll luck out and get hit by a bus today. Take me Lord. Can’t balance the terror of life with an equal weight of wonder. At best it’s 51% terror to 49% wonder. And a lot of that wonder is of the what-the-fuck variety. Never got rich and famous but every now and then I get a bite on the line. Local notoriety in a small rock-n-roll town was always Plan A anyway. The lucky day of my death will find me in the Duluth News Tribune one last time.

I’m trying to stick to the deal I made with my self: to not unalive myself as long as I get to do whatever I want. No redeeming character arc is guaranteed. Doing everything on my own measly terms is easy since I don’t give a fuck, I’m single, and I hate money. I live like a king. Today’s weather has a harsh, clarifying beauty. Whether or not I’m marooned is a different question. Robinson Crusoe, like Sisyphus, defined his torment as salvation. Doom must be celebratory.

I have enough life to squander it, like the Hyperboreans of the Conan tale, idly suicidal over centuries of passive ennui. Mary told me years ago in Berkeley, “You don’t have ennui, you have anomie.” Eternity already has me, what’s a few more drinks. I just have to make it through tonight and I’ll consider it a victory. Every hour a succession of interminable seconds, but weeks feel like hours. Impressionist seasons rush past.

I have all but abandoned my junk-ass car in my driveway. Anything Jeff Bezos can’t send me, I can walk to. I keep no food or drink at home. Open the cupboards and you find my daughter’s old plastic groceries and wooden veggies on a play cutting board. Nothing grows at home. I’m barely functional enough to pay bills, what makes you think I can keep plants alive? Ever since wifey, who collected animals like she was building an ark, I religiously keep no pets.

The house awaits me like a creaking space station at the end of my slingshot orbits through the Triangle. It looks like I am walking, but in reality I am hurling myself toward the outer rim. There are no bars past Vikre.

The timing is a thing of art considering the amount of alcohol involved. Every stable orbit has a little chaos. Earth is one bad day from slinging out of the galaxy. But I keep it on the level. I am normally home by 10 p.m. so I can be at work by six the next morning. But depending on the adventures that unfold, getting home at two in the morning, even four cannot be ruled out. My perfect work attendance never suffers. A drink an hour is perfect buzz maintenance, that’s science. I never stumble, never pass out, never slur. No matter how hard I try. I hate being too drunk, I’m not depraved enough. But there’s time. If I play my cards right someone will smoke me out tonight.

I see a nearly whole cigarette in the snow, one puff taken. Seems a shame to waste it so I pick it up and pop it in my mouth. Take it out chastising myself. Who knows whose mouth it has been in, with what viruses? I’ve taken up smoking again after decades because I’m at the bottom anyway. Is this, right now, my lowest moment? I flick it away and the wind takes it. I’ll just buy a pack of Spirits later at the casino.

I come to a temporary shortcut at the end of the alley over Superior Street, by the giant corporate hospital megaplex expansion under construction. The building casts its shadow over Fitger’s mall, historic smokestack and brownstone dwarfed by the massive overgrowth of sleek glass modernisms. I walk into the hospital shadow. Here on the edge of the underground highway, a zig-zag path has opened up down a short incline formerly planted with hedges. This path will remain until the building site has consumed its fill of raw materials. It sets me at Superior Street, lift bridge visible beyond. Across the street I take the path to the right of Fitger’s parking garage, direct tributary to the Lakewalk.

I keep my eye on the bridge. Vikre lies at its feet, on the edge of the canal, only the dry beach neighborhood of Park Point beyond.

The scenic route is the Lakewalk, but I have trudged across the frozen lake to get to Vikre before. Conditions aren’t right today. The lake is more like the North Atlantic awash in icebergs, walkway guardrails entombed in a wall of thick white sideways icicles. The Lakewalk bends toward Vikre at the very tip of Lake Superior. A little pool has formed on the rock beach here from a pipe of hillside runoff and it is crammed with mallard ducks shoulder to shoulder. One of their number sits dead on a boulder, shellacked to it, emerald plumage under ice catching extra light.

Must have some slim shred of belief in love since there’s still that pair of condoms and boner pills in my satchel. I’m considering the entire exercise of going out is merely to meet another woman, but that can’t be true. That is beneath me. I am going out because life is art. Plus I’m not even attracted to myself with this pot belly and eye bags and cankles, “uglification” as Antifa Nick in Minneapolis put it. And my corresponding inner uglification. How could I inflict myself on anyone? I was lucky in love. My divorce almost killed me, I was one bad day away from jumping off the High Bridge. Years later, glass-shard woman almost killed me too with her bare hands and I have slept with one eye open since. Therapy got rid of most PTSD symptoms, except anxiety, before my therapist got sick of me. I shopped around but you must be functional to wade through therapists looking for The One. They all start to sound alike anyway.

I pass the hotels, Canal Park Brewing, and Uncle Harvey’s Mausoleum leaning out there in the water. Everyone I know on meds is trying to get off of them. Drugs and alcohol work fine. It’s a foolish plan but I am a foolish person. It’s too bad alcohol makes things easier but there you have it. Since I keep no booze at home, I must go out.

Bridge looming, I cross the Grandma’s Saloon & Grill parking lot, gingerly stepping between its dumpsters. I cross Lake Avenue. Approaching Vikre in the wind, I scan event posters in their frosty doorway glass … Trampled by Turtles at the DECC … Low at Sacred Heart … Maxi Marie at Lucé … The Brothers Burn Mountain at Sir Ben’s. It’s 2:30 in the afternoon. Sunset is in two hours.

Opening the door, warm light and music spill out. The night begins.

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An index of Jim Richardson’s writing may be found here.