Harry’s Bar in Ranesville is situated at the intersection of Mountain View and Ocean on the ground floor beneath Dave Prescott’s attorney’s office. It’s in a two-storey, frame building with weathered cedar siding and a convenient stairway out back that Dave Prescott uses to join the rest of us in the bar for happy hour.

Four of us meet at Harry’s each Tuesday during happy hour for the two-dollar well drinks and beers. That’s Dave, me, Henry Isaacs and Des. Actually, every day is happy hour for us regulars but Tuesdays is the slow time for the bar because all the tourists have gone home and the bar stools would be empty. So we meet to keep Joe company.

The bar window looks down on the only intersection in town that sports traffic signals. Ninety percent of all the fender benders happen right there because the locals ignore the red lights and the out-of-towners hesitate too long before taking a chance on the green ones. Dave keeps the score of collisions with his plastic martini sticks. The record is three, so far.

Joe Persky owns Harry’s Bar. He got laid off from the fish cannery a year ago. There are few jobs at the beach for a sixty-year-old, overweight refrigeration mechanic. And he was not about to go to the Community College to learn how to operate a computer when there were fewer jobs for computer operators than mechanics. So he went on unemployment for a while and sat around the house. Until Doris decided that they would spend his severance pay on a trip. That’s how a guy named Joe wound up owning Harry’s Bar. Joe explained how it came about as he leaned over the bar.

At breakfast one dull, grey morning Doris said she wanted a vacation.

"Where dya wanta go?"

"Rome."

"Where’s that?" asked Joe over his coffee mug. "Georgia? What the hell do you want to go to Georgia for?"

"Not Georgia. Italy."

"Oh. That Rome."

Seems that Doris had watched a program about the Colosseum on The Discovery Channel and wanted to see where the lions ate people.

They signed up with a tour company and arrived in Rome in the blistering heat of an Italian summer. Doris immediately plunged into an exhausting daily schedule of sightseeing while Joe set out to find a cold beer in the sidewalk cafes.

Around lunchtime, after Joe had had enough window-shopping along the Via Veneto, he walked into the cool interior of a high-ceilinged, brass and polished-wood bar. He ordered a Heineken and a ham sandwich. The little piece of paper he got as a receipt confused him for a while. The total of Italian liras seemed to have endless zeros attached to it. He mentally converted them to U.S. dollars and with a grunt of surprise, figured he’d just paid the price of a case of Bud Light back home for one beer.

Joe looked up at the white neon sign over the mirror. "Harry’s Bar". Funny name for an Italian boozer. With a "what the hell!" gesture he called for another Heineken. A germ of an idea was forming in his head. A "Harry’s Bar" in Ranesville would sound better than "Joe’s Place".

During the flight back home, Doris complained about her feet while Joe doodled numbers in the margin of the flight magazine. A month later, he had negotiated a loan with the bank and started to clean out the junk from the old hardware store and build his dream.

That’s how it started. The four of us meet each week and bring whatever gossip we can. Des sips her white wine and checks out all the single guys. Henry tells lies about his service career and drinks cans of lager which he then scrunches up and irritates Joe. I listen a lot and watch that Dave is sober enough to negotiate the back stairs.

About five, the customers getting off work start to fill the bar and we vacate our bar stools. Until the next time.

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